Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

As former Labor minister Barry Jones has wisely noted, the Voice referendum feels like 2016 all over again.

The shock from the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in June of that year set the stage for what came next: the off-the-charts upheaval of the Donald Trump earthquake in the US presidential election. The only consolation was that Trump did not win a majority of votes in the United States. He won the presidency through the arcane, undemocratic workings of the Electoral College.

Maybe the Voice will prevail, as Senator Pat Dodson says:

I believe Australians are better than this. I believe Australians will look at this on the day and say, ‘Well this is a decent, honourable, good thing for us to do’.

But given current projections, the best outcome on the referendum may well be a majority vote for “yes” nationally, but constitutional recognition of First Nations peoples and establishment of the Voice denied by the requirement that the measure be approved by a majority of the states. That can be a moral victory – that Australia’s heart did not go cold on its Indigenous peoples.

But we may not even get there. As with the Trump shock, it is hard to process how support for a benign, straightforward measure that opens the Constitution to Indigenous Australians and establishes an advisory committee on issues and policies crucial to their welfare could dissipate from 65% a year ago to just 43% today.

And how a proposal that enjoys unprecedented backing from the most powerful and influential institutions in the country, including those in business, labour, sport and culture, could be devoid of uplift and land with a thud.

A campaign defined by fear-mongering

US President Franklin D Roosevelt famously said when he first took office 90 years ago, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Which is exactly how the prime minister has framed the Voice. Anthony Albanese has said there is “nothing scary, nothing to be fearful of here”.

You can’t change a country for the better through fear. You can only change it for the better through hope and optimism and being positive.

But it is fear that is prevailing at this moment. The Advance Australia and Fair Australia telephone banks and their TikTok algorithms are infused with it. Fair Australia callers are telling undecided voters they have “heard” the Voice will mean monetary compensation to Aboriginal people, that the Voice will lead to the abolition of Australia Day, and that Voice proponents will push for a treaty.

The poison is spreading across the political landscape. Liberal Party politicians have been warned that those who support the Voice will lose their pre-selection for seats in parliament. Former ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell has said

This has been politicised to the point that people aren’t comfortable to campaign for what they believe in because of the politics.

Perhaps this is baked in for the Liberal Party from its opposition to the Voice from the last three prime ministers: Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. (Turnbull has since fully converted.) They never presented a referendum even on just constitutional recognition.

Read more:
To shut down far-right extremism in Australia, we must confront the ecosystem of hate

How Trump’s messages seep into Australia

In “Trump’s Australia”, my study of what could happen to Australia’s democracy and society if Trump returns to the presidency in 2024, I argue that approval of the Voice would help insulate Australia’s political culture from the corrosive effects of Trumpist messages from the news and social media.

Trump was the most divisive president America has ever had. In addition to his core values of “America First” nationalism, protectionism and isolationism, he also promoted nativism – fear of “the other.”

Australia, with its historically pervasive atmosphere of fear around Indigenous aspirations, is fertile territory for Trump and his rhetoric on race.

Trump knows how to push the fear buttons on race. He does not dog whistle. Take, for instance, his public demand in 1989 that New York reinstate the death penalty to punish the “Central Park Five” – the Black and Latino youths wrongly convicted of raping a woman in Central Park. Trump shouts his views from the podium. And we hear it here.

What could Australia’s democracy and society look like if Trump wins? What we are already hearing today from those leading the “no” campaign is an echo chamber of Trumpist sentiments for his supporters and acolytes here.

If he returns to power, Australia will undoubtedly see a steady flood of these messages via his social media posts and pronouncements from the Oval Office. His racially tinged views will only further harden the divisive sentiments on issues of racial equity here.

Trump is especially vocal in siding with police when acts of brutality have occured and when violent crime has broken out in major cities. “Law and order” will be a recurrent theme in the 2024 presidential election, should Trump be the Republican candidate again. Trump supporters in Australia, including some who hold or aspire to public office, will pick up those messages and propagate them here.

We have already seen a dry run of these themes by his Australian allies at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney in August – an offshoot of Trump’s CPAC base in the US.

The core message from the Sydney event: the Voice is racially divisive and is being foisted on the country by “the elites”.

Right on cue, neo-Nazis then marched in the streets of Melbourne last weekend under a banner that read “Voice = Anti White.” It had the same look and feel as the infamous white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which Trump said included some “very fine people”.

Read more:
‘Alt-right white extremism’ or conservative mobilising: what are CPAC’s aims in Australia?

Why the Voice could insulate Australia from Trumpism

These messages are designed to kill the hope and buttress the fear expressed by Professor Marcia Langton, co-chair of the senior design group on the Voice:

A ‘yes’ vote delivers recognition through a voice and all the hope and healing it represents […] or a ‘no’ vote which binds us all closely – all of us – to a broken status quo.

If the Voice is approved, it will be able to call out policies that are not truly responsive to the needs of Indigenous Australians, including programs that do not get to the heart of, or try to resolve, the disparity between First Nations people and their fellow Australians. This can help shape more effective responses to issues where no progress has been made for decades.

The existence of the Voice will mean that Trumpism is unlikely to derail what the body is intended to achieve. If the Voice is defeated, however, change for the better is severely compromised.

If most Australians vote “no” the country will be reeling. The victorious opponents of the Voice, with their echoes of Trumpism, will be poised to keep advancing their agenda. The default position of the political culture on race, reconciliation and equity will have gone backwards, making it harder to redress historical issues of racial disparities.

The world is watching. As George Megalogenis recently concluded, “A ‘no’ vote would revive both the colonial ghost of dispossession and the federation ghost of the White Australia policy.”

That would be a victory for Trumpism in Australia, even before Trump’s fate is decided next year by voters in America.

Bruce Wolpe is a non resident Senior Fellow at the United States Studes Centre at the University of Sydney. He has worked with the Democrats in the US Congress and served on the staff of former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He is not a member of any political party.

– ref. Why the Voice could be a bulwark against Trumpism gaining a stronger foothold in Australia – https://theconversation.com/why-the-voice-could-be-a-bulwark-against-trumpism-gaining-a-stronger-foothold-in-australia-213856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shidan Tosif, Honorary Clinical Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

While COVID in children has generally been milder than in adults, there are concerns long COVID may be a major consequence for children and young people arising from the pandemic.

Long COVID, also known as “post-COVID condition” is an umbrella term for a range of symptoms that can persist for months after the initial acute phase of COVID. Long COVID may include fatigue, post-exertional malaise, disordered sleep, cognitive difficulties, pain, anxiety and depression. These symptoms can impact people of any age, including children.

Recognition and support from health-care professionals is important in recovering from long COVID. Identifying it early and implementing management strategies can prevent symptoms becoming entrenched, and prevent more significant problems in the future.

Read more:
COVID-19 in babies – here’s what to expect

What does long COVID in kids look like?

Defining long COVID has been difficult due to varied symptoms and time frames that make it difficult to consistently characterise and compare the condition.

A review of long COVID research in children found mood symptoms, fatigue and sleep disorders were the symptoms most commonly reported. In total, more than 40 symptoms were included, ranging from mental health, gastrointestinal, cardiac and respiratory symptoms.

However many studies on long COVID have lacked a control group (meaning comparisons with children who didn’t have COVID), making it difficult to separate the symptoms of long COVID from the indirect impacts of the pandemic on children.

For example, high rates of depression and anxiety have been observed in children, likely related to the effects of lockdowns, school closures and social isolation. These conditions share many features with long COVID and complicate the interpretation of research into the condition.

More recent studies that have included a control group identified only a very small increase in long-COVID symptoms following mild COVID infection, compared with those who tested negative for COVID. This potentially means long COVID in kids is quite rare.

What we see in our COVID clinic for kids

Our COVID follow-up clinic at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne was running from mid-2020 to mid-2023. We saw more than 600 children throughout that time.

In our experience, most children recover fully after COVID in a similar way to other viruses.

A small proportion experience prolonged symptoms including fatigue, post-exertional malaise, concentration difficulties and pain. These symptoms are similar to other post-viral syndromes such as chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalitis), for which viruses are a common precursor. Some patients we saw fulfilled the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome following their COVID infection.

Another group of children in our clinic developed physical complaints, such as headache and chest pain. But most of these children had normal test results, which is reassuring. However the symptoms can still have an impact on day-to-day functioning such as participation in school and other activities.

Read more:
More than 100 Australian kids have had multisystem inflammatory syndrome after COVID. What should parents watch for?

How long does it last?

Recognition and support of children with long COVID symptoms is often delayed. Children and families report that they don’t feel heard or are misunderstood by others, including health-care providers.

It’s hard to live with the uncertainty of not knowing how long symptoms will last.

In our experience with long COVID, most children experience complete recovery or significant improvement from three to six months after infection.

There has typically been minimal impact on functioning. However there have been rare severe cases, with more debilitating fatigue impacting attendance at school and activities. These patients generally receive a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and are managed accordingly.

How is long COVID in kids managed?

Children and families feel frustrated because there is no specific treatment or cure.

While there are trials underway in adults, there is no medication or cure available for long COVID.

The Australian government has announced $50 million for research into long COVID, which will provide further avenues of support and treatment.

The current recommended approach for managing long COVID in children is based on the recognised management of chronic fatigue syndrome.

This approach may involve a range of health professionals including GPs, paediatricians, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists and psychologists, according to the needs of the child. They support the patient to build up to managing daily tasks such as going to school, exercising, or participating in activities, taking into consideration how much energy they have at each stage to prevent burnouts.

Symptoms such as trouble sleeping, dizziness and cognitive difficulties may be managed through lifestyle modifications such as sleep hygiene practices (going to bed at the same time, no screens before bedtime), or medication.

It’s important activities continue, at a level that’s appropriate for the patient’s stage of recovery. This includes school and social outings.

While a cure for long COVID is not yet available, self-management and attempting to minimise secondary impacts such as missed school are crucial to preventing mental health issues and physical deconditioning (the body becoming accustomed to doing less).

Read more:
Curious Kids: how does a virus stop?

I think my child has long COVID, what should I do?

It’s important to seek medical attention if COVID-related symptoms such as fatigue persist for more than four weeks. A review with your GP or paediatrician is a good place to start if you have concerns for your child.

This article was co-authored by Colette Reveley and Eva Sudbury, paediatricians in the Department of Adolescent Medicine and General Medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne.

Shidan Tosif is supported by a Murdoch Childrens’ Research Institute Clinician Scientist Fellowship.

– ref. What do we know about long COVID in kids? And what do I do if I think my child has it? – https://theconversation.com/what-do-we-know-about-long-covid-in-kids-and-what-do-i-do-if-i-think-my-child-has-it-205027

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olaf Meynecke, Research Fellow in Marine Science, Griffith University

If you’re a whale, there’s often not too much to see out in deeper water. Perhaps that’s why so many whales get playful with kelp and other seaweed.

Once might have been chance. But we’ve collected over 100 examples on social media of whales playing with seaweed, known as “kelping”. It’s not just one species –  gray whales, southern and northern right whales, and humpback whales all do it.

To date, there’s far more social media and news reports on whale play with seaweed than scientific literature. A 2011 study in New South Wales described these interactions as playful behaviour. Other researchers have documented instances of whales moving logs through the water in Colombia or interacting with jellyfish on the United States east coast.

Our new research compiles data from over 100 kelping events captured on social media. From this, we deduced two things. First, it is playful. And second, it’s likely to have a useful component, such as using the seaweed to scratch an itch (hard without hands), brush off baby barnacles, or flick away whale lice – parasites that drive the whales mad.

How do whales find kelp – and what do they do with it?

Sightings of this behaviour tend to occur in regions where kelp is abundant. That’s no surprise. Kelp is a very strong seaweed and can take the punishment a whale can dish out.

Most videos and photos capturing this behaviour are of humpback whales as they migrate. That’s also not surprising. Humpback whales are one of the most common species. They tend to migrate closer to shore. And they do more activities at the surface compared to other baleen whales, which is why beach goers and whale-watching boats most often see humpback whales.

Until now, kelp play has been documented in Australia, the United States and Canada. But this is likely due to the fact these regions have a larger number of people who do whale-watching and who use social media platforms to share their observations.

Drones have given us a new way of studying this behaviour. In several drone videos, we can see humpback whales actively seeking out seaweed. These interactions aren’t just fleeting – whales can play with it or use it for up to an hour.

Read more:
Whale of a tale? The stories about whales helping tackle climate change are overblown

During kelping, whales tend to lift the seaweed up and balance it on their rostrum, their flat upper head.

They also seem willing to share their kelp patches with other whales, engaging in cooperative behaviours such as rolling, lifting and balancing the seaweed together.

So is it play? In part, yes. When animal researchers look at a behaviour, it has to meet three criteria to be play. First, it seems voluntary and enjoyable. Second, it’s different to more serious behaviours. It can be exaggerated or deliberately incomplete. And third, the animals don’t seem stressed or hungry, suggesting they’re in good health. Kelping meets all three of these.

For animals, play has long-term benefits such as boosting their coordination and movement skills. Balancing seaweed may also be stimulating for the whales, as their rostrums have fine hair follicles. It could even be ticklish.

Kelping might be more than just play

Toying with seaweed might have benefits other than just being fun. Some of us enjoy seaweed wraps at a spa or as a facial mask.

It might be the same for whales. Some seaweed species have been found to reduce bacterial growth, which could be useful for whales, as their skin hosts a range of viruses and bacteria. Whales have to constantly shed their skin to keep on top of bacterial growth.

There are other possibilities. Pushing through seaweed again and again could also help whales rid themselves of unwanted guests, such as the early life stages of barnacles and sea lice. Because whales are so large, many species of invertebrates hitch a lift or spend their lives on these creatures – and often to the whale’s annoyance. Grey whales off the coast of Mexico have repeatedly approached humans for help in keeping down numbers of itchy whale lice, which are actually more closely related to a shrimp or small crab than to lice.

Similar self-medication behaviour has been reported in other marine mammals, such as when Red Sea dolphins rub over sponges and soft corals to, scientists believe, help skin conditions. Even green sea turtles use corals and rocks to clean their carapace.

As more of us use drones and better cameras, we’re likely to see more whale kelping caught on camera and shared in the coming years.

Kelping shows us how much we still have to learn even about well-studied whale species such as the humpback whale. The gentle and inquisitive nature of these whales shines through when we see them play or use seaweed. Even now, there are many mysteries yet to be uncovered in nature.

Read more:
Humpback whales have been spotted ‘bubble-net feeding’ for the first time in Australia (and we have it on camera)

Olaf Meynecke receives funding from a private charitable trust as part of the Whales & Climate Research Program and is the CEO of Humpbacks & High-rises Inc

– ref. Playful whales can use seaweed as a hat – or exfoliant. This “kelping” behaviour is more common than we realised – https://theconversation.com/playful-whales-can-use-seaweed-as-a-hat-or-exfoliant-this-kelping-behaviour-is-more-common-than-we-realised-214269

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priya Kurian, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Waikato

The Green Party has run a strong campaign. With a 14.2% share in the latest Newshub-Reid Research poll, up by 1.9 percentage points since the previous poll, that is more than half the Labour Party’s 26.5%.

The gain seems to have come from voters unimpressed by Labour’s centrist shift under leader Chris Hipkins, which leaves the Greens to fill a wider void on the left.

The party can claim policy success in several areas – environment and climate, housing quality, family and sexual violence prevention. But has it achieved the social and economic changes required for the climate resilient society it campaigns for? The answer has to be a categorical no.

One reason is that the party continues to battle internal tensions between idealism and pragmatism.

The Greens have been a continuous presence in parliament since the start of the MMP era in 1996. But the party’s policies appear too radical for some members, and not radical enough for those who want to see fewer compromises on issues such as climate action and social justice.

Distinctive party rules

These internal tensions spilled over last year when James Shaw initially failed to get the required 75% support to be reelected as co-leader before being reinstated.

Changes to the party constitution in May last year scrapped the requirement for a male co-leader. Instead, there is now a requirement to have a Māori co-leader of any gender, along with a woman co-leader.

The Greens’ 2023 party list reflects both new talent and greater ethnic diversity than in the past.

Far more than any other political party (save Te Pāti Māori), the distinctive leadership structure and decision-making rules allow the Greens to give effect to their commitments to te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi, gender equity and grassroots democracy.

Their processes may look messy to those looking in from the outside, but it works. They keep leaders accountable and ensure they stay connected, with a driven and committed membership.

Read more:
From ‘pebble in the shoe’ to future power broker – the rise and rise of te Pāti Māori

Policy success

If getting the policy architecture in place to facilitate implementation is one measure of political success, then the Greens have achieved credible action on many fronts.

Getting the 2019 Zero Carbon Act across the line with cross-party support, with the subsequent setting up of the Climate Change Commission, was certainly a success. So were the ban on new oil and gas exploration and the establishment of Ara Ake, the “future energy centre” in New Plymouth.

Read more:
The end of offshore oil and gas exploration in NZ was hard won – but it remains politically fragile

These and many other initiatives, reflect much required movement. But despite ambition, implementation has fallen short.

For some party insiders, the Greens’ climate agenda has been hamstrung by the ministerial responsibilities they have had under a Labour government. As critics pointed out after the 2021 UN climate summit in Glasgow, the climate change ministerial portfolio headed by a Green MP failed to reform the emissions-heavy agribusiness sector, instead focusing on reducing carbon emissions through offshore carbon credits.

Ultimately, the Greens’ policy positions on a range of issues are more radical than the outcomes that have been achieved under the Labour government.

Even many of the gains made by the Greens in forging cross-party consensus on climate action are showing signs of shrivelling away during this election campaign, with a National-ACT coalition promising to reverse most climate policy measures.

Ending poverty and tax reform

Working within the market-led political system has been a disappointment for some party supporters loyal to core Green principles. However, there is no question the Greens have shifted the terms of the debate on poverty in Aotearoa.

Reminiscent of the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen’s powerful argument that famines were caused not by natural disasters but by the absence of a functioning democracy, the Greens have positioned poverty as a political choice that no country needs to make.

The party’s Ending Poverty Together policy proposes an income guarantee that would ensure everyone, including students, receives at least NZ$385 a week after tax. Its reconfigured tax structure claims to benefit an estimated 95% of all tax payers, a much broader group than National’s proposed tax cuts would affect.

To pay for these changes, the Greens want to introduce a wealth tax of 2.5% a year on assets above $2 million per individual.

While the details of the Greens’ tax policy would undoubtedly need refining, the potential to eliminate poverty and ensure free dental care for all offers a glimpse of what truly transformational policy can look like.

The reluctance of New Zealand (the only wealthy country without any form of wealth tax) to impose fairer taxes has led to deep inequality, with devastating consequences for the poorest. As social commentator Max Rashbrooke points out in his latest book Too Much Money:

The wealthiest tenth own one quarter of the country’s assets, while the poorest half of the country has just 2%.

This situation did not just happen; it is the direct consequence of political decisions. Just as government policies previously kept inequality in check through taxes, regulations and a shared commitment to a well-funded welfare state, policy changes allowed the inequality we see now. And it is policy reform that can remedy it.

Future direction

The Green Party’s core voter base appears to be solid, ensuring it will continue its presence in parliament.

At 14.2% in the polls, the party is closing in on its highest ever level of 15%, reached in 2017 in a TVNZ poll. This was taken before then co-leader Metiria Turei’s revelations of misleading WINZ as a solo parent, though, and the party only achieved 6.3% in that year’s election.

If current polling holds up and translates into a significantly expanded caucus, it may allow the Greens to more actively pursue their ideals.

Even if they end up on the opposition benches, they can still remain the loudest voices on climate change and social justice. They can get issues on the parliamentary agenda, ask questions of ministers and introduce members’ bills.

They can also effectively shape public debate on unchecked economic growth – the default position of the major parties – and its resulting environmental degradation and social inequality.

The beating heart of the Green Party is their Green Charter, with its four principles of ecological wisdom, social responsibility, appropriate decision making and non-violence. This underpins the moral voice the Greens bring to a wide range of issues.

Currently, both centrist parties are showing signs of moving towards the right – away from social justice and environmental issues, for example – although in varying degrees. This leaves a void on the left for the Greens to fill, while further eroding Labour’s base.

Priya Kurian has received funding from The Deep South National Science Challenge for research on climate adaptation, The Rockefeller Foundation for research on climate justice, and the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Grant.

– ref. NZ’s Green Party is ‘filling the void on the left’ as voters grow frustrated with Labour’s centrist shift – https://theconversation.com/nzs-green-party-is-filling-the-void-on-the-left-as-voters-grow-frustrated-with-labours-centrist-shift-213061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Strangio, Professor of Politics, Monash University

Daniel Andrews, who has announced he will step down after nearly nine years as premier, leaves office as a titan of Victorian politics. An activist premier, a gifted political communicator and a hard man of politics, he has been an enormously consequential leader and one of national significance. He is the fourth-longest serving premier in Victorian history, and the longest-serving Labor premier.

While his government has had more than its share of controversies, such as the so called “red shirts” scandal and, more recently, the debacle of the cancelled 2026 Commonwealth Games, Andrews will nonetheless be remembered as a progressive premier whose social reforms and massive infrastructure program have transformed the state.

And he was enormously successful with it, winning three elections, most recently another landslide victory in November 2022. Over that time, he has dominated his party and the state. And even after nine years in office, recent opinion polls have still shown his government enjoying a commanding lead over the opposition.

Read more:
Dan Andrews quits after nine years as premier of Victoria

The hard man rises

From the time he entered office, Andrews was an activist and was assertive with power. There were at least two aspects at play here. The first that it’s his natural style – Andrews is a classic strong leader, command and control is his modus operandi. When he encounters an obstacle his instinct is to barge through it, and when he is criticised he doubles down, denying there is any case to answer.

The second aspect is that during his time as opposition leader between 2010 and 2014 he witnessed a becalmed Victorian government, led by Liberals Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine. By 2014 when Andrews won power, it was evident the public was yearning for activity. Victoria’s infrastructure was run down and no longer fit for purpose, unable to cope with its booming population.

During his first term, Andrews unleashed a gargantuan infrastructure program, including railway level crossing removals, the metro rail link, the suburban rail loop and an array of road extensions and upgrades.

But his government wasn’t solely focussed on changing the physicality of the state. Andrews understood that in Victoria, perhaps more than anywhere else in Australia, there was leeway to pursue a progressive social agenda. He did this successfully, too, despite the inevitable controversy the reforms engendered, leading the way on the Safe Schools program, Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation, and a Treaty with Indigenous Victorians, among other issues.

In doing so, he made Victoria an incubator for social reform, providing a catalyst for other states to follow its lead on these issues.

Read more:
‘A political force of nature’: despite scandals and a polarising style, can ‘Dan’ do it again in Victoria?

A democratic deficit

However, Andrews was not progressive on every issue. On law and order, for example, his instincts were conservative. For example, on his watch discriminatory bail laws contributed to Indigenous Australians being incarcerated in disproportionate numbers.

He has also chafed at being accountable, leading to a democratic deficit on his watch. His approach when under pressure – most recently demonstrated in the Commonwealth Games cancellation – is to double down and refuse to budge, taking a “nothing to see here” approach.

Under Andrews, power has become highly centralised in his private office, and there have been troubling signs of the politicisation of the public service.

His dominance has been reinforced by the dysfunction of the Liberal Party. Indeed, so supreme has Labor been that Victoria has effectively turned into a one-party state, an unhealthy state of affairs that should be of concern to all Victorians.

#IstandwithDan v #DictatorDan

It was during the COVID pandemic that Andrews became a leader of national prominence. His daily press conferences during the darkest days of the crisis were eagerly watched across the nation.

With the harshest and longest lockdowns in the country, social media gave the impression of a deeply polarised state: those who said #IstandwithDan and those who were enraged by #DictatorDan.

In truth, the polarisation was mostly a myth. Certainly, there were partisans at both ends of the spectrum, but the “Dictator Dan” group was only ever a noisy rump, egged on by the strident opposition to Andrews by conservative commentators at the Herald Sun and Sky News.

Indeed, one of the notable aspects of Andrews as a public figure is that his combination of progressive boldness, political effectiveness and forceful leadership has driven conservatives to distraction. They are hyperbolic about him – they characterised him as something akin to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, a supreme leader grown democratically untouchable.

Why? Because he was so effective – here was a socialist left premier leading one of the largest states in the country, and bucking political shibboleths such as that governments ought not go into substantial debt and deficit.

And he kept winning elections, and handsomely, making his conservative critics look foolish.

Read more:
Strong political leaders are electoral gold – but the trick is in them knowing when to stand down

The Dan vacuum

Andrews kept winning because he was an activist, assertive, and got things done. Victorians didn’t necessarily love him, but they respected him. In more recent times his forcefulness had morphed into something darker. As I have written, his leadership had grown oppressive. He rarely smiled; he looked and sounded tired. His going in that sense is a healthy thing: it will disturb the power relations that have centred on him.

So what now? Deputy Premier Jacinta Allan has effectively been the heir apparent since Andrews anointed her as his successor last year during a major exit of ministers.

He will leave an enormous vacuum, both in the party he has led for 13 years and the government he’s led for nine. It was once said that another political titan, Robert Menzies, was the banyan tree under which nothing would grow, and there is an element of that about Andrews.

Whoever becomes premier will have to tackle some significant economic challenges, including ballooning infrastructure spending, and the fallout from massive COVID spending. Moreover, by the time of the next state election in 2026, Labor will have been in power for 12 years, and no matter how dominant and activist a government might be, an “it’s time” factor will inevitably kick in.

“Glass cliff” is a term used in political science for situations in which women inherit a leadership position when things are falling apart. Will this be Allan’s lot?

Paul Strangio 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. Dan Andrews leaves office as a titan of Victorian politics – who drove conservatives to distraction – https://theconversation.com/dan-andrews-leaves-office-as-a-titan-of-victorian-politics-who-drove-conservatives-to-distraction-214373

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the federal government’s employment white paper is “ambitious”. I’m not convinced.

A clearly ambitious statement would have specified a target for unemployment, ideally one that was a bit of a stretch.

The Keating Labor government’s Working Nation statement did that in 1994. Released at a time when unemployment was almost 10%, it specified a target unemployment rate of 5% – an ambition that served as a beacon for decades.

That target certainly needs to be updated. Unemployment is now well below 5%, meaning “full employment” is now much less than 5%. Yet the Albanese government has passed up a historic opportunity to say how much less, which it could have done by setting its own target.

Setting our sights below 5%

The white paper released on Monday defines full employment as a state in which “everyone who wants a job should be able to find one without searching for too long”. That means our unemployment target ought to be somewhere between zero and 5%.

Of course, the unemployment rate can never be zero.

There will always be people out of work while they are moving between jobs, what the white paper calls “frictional” unemployment. That will also be true when Australia’s mix of employers changes – what the paper calls “structural” unemployment, as new industries requiring one sort of training replace old industries that required another.

The white paper says what matters in addition to unemployment (539,700 Australians) is “underemployment” in which people work fewer hours than they want (1 million) and “potential workers” who would like work but aren’t actively looking and so aren’t counted as unemployed (1.3 million).

I get that these things matter. I get that we need, in the words of the white paper, “a higher level of ambition than is implied by statistical measures”.

What gets measured gets done

But that higher level of ambition ought not replace targets.

If a target isn’t specific, it isn’t a target at all (or at best it’s a fuzzy target). That means it’s less likely to be aimed at and less likely to be hit.

That’s how it’s been with full employment itself. In 1996 Treasurer Peter Costello and the man he appointed Reserve Bank governor, Ian Macfarlane, signed what became the first Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, an agreement that’s been updated six times.

As with all of the agreements since, that first statement set out an inflation target (“between 2% and 3%, on average, over the cycle”) but not an employment target – even though both are meant to be objectives under the Reserve Bank Act.

As a result, Governor Macfarlane was able to step down ten years later, secure in the knowledge that on average he had hit the middle of the target band: 2.5% inflation. His successor Glenn Stevens stepped down ten years further on, quietly boasting the same thing.

But neither could make any boast about hitting the employment target – because there wasn’t one.

How failing to set a target costs jobs

The governor who has just retired, Philip Lowe, looks like he’ll hit an inflation average of 2.8%, which is pretty low given how high inflation has been lately.

But an estimate by former Reserve Bank staffer Isaac Gross, prepared using the Reserve Bank’s own economic model, suggests that in doing so he kept unemployment a good deal higher than it needed to be between 2016 and 2019 – the equivalent of 270,000 people being out of work for one year.

Read more:
The RBA’s failure to cut rates faster may have cost 270,000 jobs

Lowe wasn’t held to account for the extra unemployed in the same way as he is being held to account for his performance on inflation. Why? Because he was never actually given an unemployment target.

I am quite prepared to acknowledge that other measures of employment matter, underemployment among them. But here’s the thing: they move in line with unemployment.

When Australia’s unemployment rate falls, Australia’s underemployment rate falls, almost in tandem.

It’s easy to see why. As employers find it hard to hire new workers, they get existing workers to put in more hours. And retirees and others who haven’t been looking for work begin putting themselves out there.

Australia’s participation rate measures the proportion of the population making itself available for work. As unemployment has fallen, it has climbed to an all-time high.

Our unemployment rate is a proxy for what matters

This makes the unemployment rate just about the perfect proxy for everything else about the labour market that matters, and just about the perfect number to target.

The Albanese government could have recognised that this week – setting a stretch target of 3% (or even 4%) as an aspiration. Even that would have been less “ambitious” than Keating choosing 5%, when the rate was twice as high.

Treasurer Chalmers says the government didn’t set a target because apparently the unemployment rate doesn’t capture “the full extent of spare capacity in our economy or the full potential of our workforce”.

The saving grace is this government has a second chance at this. Chalmers is about to update the Reserve Bank’s statement of expectations, the one that until now hasn’t included a target for unemployment.

It would be open to him to put a specific target in there – making the RBA as accountable as it is now on inflation.

At the moment, it looks more likely Chalmers will adopt a recommendation of the independent review of the bank, which reported in March.

That review recommended the bank be required to produce its own “best assessment of full employment at any point time”, including its estimate of the lowest rate of unemployment that can be sustained without accelerating inflation.

It would be a small step forward. That full employment estimate would become a number to watch, in the same way as the bank’s performance on inflation is at the moment.

But it still won’t be an official government target. The Albanese government had an opportunity to live up to its ambitious rhetoric – and it passed.

Read more:
1 in 5 Australian workers is either underemployed or out of work: white paper

Peter Martin 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. The Albanese government blew its shot at setting a historic new unemployment target – https://theconversation.com/the-albanese-government-blew-its-shot-at-setting-a-historic-new-unemployment-target-214357

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

Dan Andrews has announced he is quitting, after nine years as premier and three election wins.

Andrews’ surprise announcement came early Tuesday afternoon. He said his resignation would take effect at 5pm Wednesday.

He told a news conference it was not an easy decision “because as much as we have achieved together, there’s so much more to do. But when it’s time, it’s time”.

He said recently, in talking to his family, “thoughts of what life will be like after this job has started to creep in.

“I have always known that the moment that happens it is time to go and to give this privilege, this amazing responsibility, to someone else.”

Andrews, 51, who became premier in December 2014, has been a highly controversial state leader, instigating the toughest lockdowns in the country during COVID. But despite criticisms of that, he won the November 2022 election handsomely. Andrews said he had never been focused on being “100 per cent popular”.

He said he came to his decision fairly recently. But it was right to “go when they are asking you to stay”.

“I am worse than a workaholic,” he said, with every waking moment consumed with the work. He did not know what he would do next. He wouldn’t do much for a while.

Andrews said when he had previously declared he would stay for the duration of this parliamentary term, “it was true then”. He had since changed his mind.

The state caucus will meet on Wednesday to anoint a new premier, with Deputy Premier Jacinta Allen widely favoured. Andrews said if there was a ballot he would be voting.

He had spoken to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who was “a bit shocked”. “I thanked him for the partnership.”

Earlier this year another longstanding Labor premier, Mark McGowan in Western Australia, resigned unexpectedly.

Michelle Grattan 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. Dan Andrews quits after nine years as premier of Victoria – https://theconversation.com/dan-andrews-quits-after-nine-years-as-premier-of-victoria-214372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pi-Shen Seet, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Edith Cowan University

As part of the new employment white paper, the federal government has announced it is thinking seriously about a national skills passport.

It has set aside A$9.1 million to prepare a business case for the passport to “help workers promote their qualifications and businesses find more skilled workers”.

What might this involve? And is it a good idea? As our research shows, skills passports can build trust between employers and employees.

Read more:
1 in 5 Australian workers is either underemployed or out of work: white paper

What is the government proposing?

At this stage, the national skills passport is just a proposal and the government says it still needs to consult with businesses and state governments.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the government wants to develop a business case to “define the scope, outcomes and benefits” of a skills passport.

It would apply to anyone undertaking post-school vocational education and training or higher education. The idea is it would make it easier for employees to demonstrate their skills and for employers to hire candidates possessing the specific skills and qualifications they require.

Similar to other personal data on other government systems (such as My Health Record), it will create a one-stop, secure online repository where you can view and manage your skills, certificates and training. There would also be a digital certification system that would allow for information to be verified.

Where did the idea come from?

The idea of a skills “passport” (also known as a skills portfolio, learning passport, human capital account, life work portfolio, career passport and cumulative record of learning achievement) emerged at the end of the 1990s.

In recent years, skills passports have gained more attention due to the changing nature of work and education. This includes rapid changes in technology, combined with improved transport and communication systems and globalisation. This means workers are much less likely to stay in one job for a significant length of time.

Instead, they will have to retrain and learn new skills regularly to keep up with these changes. They may have different careers in multiple locations in different phases of life.

A skills passport should not just include transcripts (or results), but also other evidence of an individual’s skills and qualifications. This could include microcredentials, digital badges, portfolios, resumes and references.

Read more:
Explainer: what is credentialism and is a degree more than just a piece of paper?

Our research shows skills passports are important

Our 2023 research has shown digital initiatives that improve transparency – such as skills passports – help overcome information and trust gaps between employers and employees.

Besides showing relevant information about potential candidates in a standardised, unbiased manner, skills passports verify qualifications.

This reduces the problem of fake certificates and wrong information. Further, by showing all the skills on one platform, skills passports can help individuals, employers and educational institutions recognise more easily the skills individuals have developed at school, work and through life experiences.

Not only does it help people get jobs, it helps them plan how to further their skills.

What happens in other countries?

In 2004, the European Union launched the Europass initiative – a set of documents that help individuals communicate their skills and qualifications and make skills and qualifications more transparent and comparable across the EU. The Europass includes a CV, language passport, mobility document and qualifications supplement.

In 2019, Singapore introduced a digital skills passport. This is a digital record of an individual’s skills and qualifications, issued by accredited schools, polytechnics, universities and other training providers.

In the United States, large companies are taking the lead. In 2019 financial services firm JP Morgan created its own skills passport. This helps employees assess their skills and provides learning suggestions based on their current skills and role requirements.

What about Australia?

Australia’s national training authority started consulting on a skills passport as far back as the late 1990s. But progress has been slow. This is largely because of the complexities of the skills, training, education and employment systems in Australia.

Since 2015, Australia has had a “unique student identifier” for all vocational students. This is a unique reference number made up of ten numbers and letters and tracks students’ learning and qualifications. Since 2021, this has also applied to all new university students.

Would it work here?

In many ways, the national skills passport is a natural extension of the unique student identifier.

But it may be difficult to gain consensus quickly on why there is a need to extend the current unique student identifier to a skills passport.

This is because it will involve different education sectors, different employment sectors, different levels of governments, and different states, territories as well as professional bodies and industries.

But as a way to make getting a job, hiring and planning career development easier, this is an important idea to pursue.

Read more:
The National Skills Agreement needs time in the policy spotlight and it must include these 3 things

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. Is it time for Australia to introduce a national skills passport? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-australia-to-introduce-a-national-skills-passport-214267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christiane Gerblinger, Visiting Fellow, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

Australia’s public service is no stranger to reform. In the past nine years, it has undergone three significant reviews of its policy advising capabilities, all of which broadly agreed that its policy advice tends towards reticence and needs to be strengthened.

While these reviews triggered reform processes to improve how policy advice is built, a glaring gap remains largely unexplored: the language of policy advice itself. How public servant policy advisers articulate arguments, communicate ideas and influence decision-makers has profound implications for how their policy recommendations land and whether the public interest is served. It’s an area urgently in need of reform.

Read more:
After robodebt, here’s how Australia can have a truly ‘frank and fearless’ public service again

Policy advice needs the right language

Policy advice is not just about data and analyses – it’s about conveying arguments, views and a compelling narrative that resonates with decision-makers and serves the broader public.

This means language wields immense power. It shapes perceptions, frames issues and influences decisions. Yet reviews of the Australian Public Service (APS) have not explicitly focused on the language used in policy advice.

Language can stymie policy. A convoluted, risk-averse document that avoids uncomfortable knowledge in case it is controversial or requested under Freedom of Information laws almost always obscures the proposal’s merits. This in turn can make it difficult for people to gauge if it is in their interest.

Policy advice serves a dual audience: government decision-makers and the public. The language used to communicate policy directions must understand the needs of these audiences. And advisers must remember that policies are not only shaped by those in power, but are made in the public interest.

Moreover, the public’s ability to access and scrutinise policy advice has expanded dramatically. If policy language remains inaccessible and opaque, public trust erodes – not just in governments but within departments.

A language that shows context, addresses dissent, and provides clear directions fosters understanding and trust. This enables everyday citizens to make informed judgments about whether their interest has been served. Addressing the language used in policy advice is not a surface concern – it is a crucial factor in strengthening democratic participation and accountability.

Rectifying the challenge posed by policy language is not a straightforward undertaking. However, several potential avenues could lead the public service towards resolution.

Read more:
Pezzullo story points to serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service

How it can be fixed

As a first step, the importance of language to policy success must be explicitly acknowledged. This might spark a cultural transformation, where language becomes a cornerstone of policy advising rather than the afterthought it so often is. The public service also needs to explore why its language is as weak and ambiguous as it is.

From here, professional development focused on finding and distilling complex ideas into accessible language is also key. However, simply providing resources for plain language writing or increasing the amount of communication misses the mark. As has been observed, the answer to better policy-advising is not to produce more rigorous, more relevant, less ambiguous, more timely or more appealingly presented evidence. Rather, it is for policymakers to develop a better awareness of how to communicate their ideas.

Finally, interdisciplinary and lateral collaboration could revolutionise policy advising as a fully robust form of knowledge communication. As former Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott has noted, policymakers need to “get better at engaging in policy discussions with civil society to ensure a full understanding”.

Following this thinking, collaborations between science communicators, social scientists, citizen experts, organisational linguists and policy advisers could yield innovative approaches to framing and conveying policy ideas.

The public service’s effectiveness hinges on its willingness to stare into the abyss of policy language. The language used in policy advice is not an inconsequential detail, but a pivotal determinant of success.

If it does not address this problem, the public service risks becoming an unwitting participant in its own decline. The path forward demands not just a cursory nod to the issue but a profound shift in policy advisers’ perception and prioritisation of policy language, as well as the culture in which it exists.

Only then can the public service empower its policy advisers to communicate with impact, cultivate public trust and navigate the complex landscape of policy-making in the 21st century.

Christiane Gerblinger 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. The many reviews of the public service miss one vital problem – the language used to communicate ideas – https://theconversation.com/the-many-reviews-of-the-public-service-miss-one-vital-problem-the-language-used-to-communicate-ideas-213654

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Conor, ARC Future Fellow, La Trobe University

In 2022, the burning of fossil fuels provided 82% of the world’s energy. In 2000, it was 87%. Even as renewables have undergone tremendous growth, they’ve been offset by increased demand for energy.

That’s why the United Nations earlier this month released a global stocktake – an assessment on how the world is going in weaning itself off these energy-dense but dangerously polluting fuels. Short answer: progress, but nowhere near enough, soon enough.

If we consult history, we find that energy transitions are not new. To farm fields and build cities, we’ve gone from relying on human or animal muscle to wind and water to power sailboats and mill grain. Then we began switching to the energy dense hydrocarbons, coal, gas and oil. But this can’t last. We were first warned in 1859 that when burned, these fuels add to the Earth’s warming blanket of greenhouse gases and threatening our liveable climate.

It’s time for another energy transition. We’ve done it before. The problem is time – and resistance from the old energy regime, fossil fuel companies. Energy historian Vaclav Smil calculates past energy transitions have taken 50–75 years to ripple through societies. And we no longer have that kind of time, as climate change accelerates. This year is likely the hottest in 120,000 years.

So can we learn anything from past energy transitions? As it happens, we can.

Energy shifts happen in fits and starts

Until around 1880, the world ran on wood, charcoal, crop residue, manure, water and wind. In fact, some countries relied on wood and charcoal throughout the 20th century – even as others were shifting from coal to oil.

The English had used coal for domestic heating from the time of the Romans because it burned longer and had nearly double the energy intensity of wood.

So what drove the shift? Deforestation was a part. The reliance on wood worked while there were trees. In the pre-industrial era, cities of 500,000 or more needed huge areas of forests around them.

In some locales wood seemed boundless, free and expendable. The costs to biodiversity would become apparent only later.

Britain was once carpeted in forest. Endemic deforestation drove the change to coal in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most English coal pits opened between 1540 and 1640.

When the English figured out how to use coal to make steam and push a piston, it made even more possible – pumping water from deepening mining pits, the invention of locomotives, and transporting produce, including the feed needed by working animals.

Yet for all this, coal had only reached 5% of the global market by 1840.

In North America, coal didn’t overtake wood until as late as 1884 – even as crude oil became more important.

Why did America first start exploiting oil reserves? In part to replace expensive oil from the heads of sperm whales. Before hydrocarbon oil was widely available, whaling was depended upon for lubricants and some lighting. In 1846, the US had 700 whaling vessels scouring the oceans for this source of oil.

Crude oil was struck first in Pennsylvania in 1859. To extract it required drilling down 21 metres. The drill was powered by a steam engine –  which may have been fired by wood.

Steam and muscle

The 19th century energy transition took decades. It wasn’t a revolution so much as a steady shift. By the end of that century, global energy supply had doubled and half of it was from coal.

When they were first invented in 1712, steam engines converted just 2% of coal into useful energy. Almost 150 years later they were still highly inefficient at just 15%. (Petrol-powered cars still waste about 66% of the energy in their fuel).

Even so, steam sped up early proto-industries such as textiles, print production and traditional manufacturing.

But the engines did not free us from the yoke. In fact, early coal mining actually increased demand for human labour. Boys as young as six worked at lighter tasks. Conditions were generally horrific. Alongside human muscle was animal strength. Coal was often raised from pits by draft horses.

Read more:
A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why

In 1850s New England, steam was three times more expensive than water flows powering textile mills. Vaclav Smil has shown industrial waterwheels and turbines “competed successfully with steam engines for decades”. The energy of flowing water was free. Digging up coal was labor-intensive.

Why did steam win? Human ecologist Andreas Malm argues what really drove the shift to steam-powered mills was capital. Locating steam engines in urban centres made it easier to concentrate and control workers, as well as overcoming worker walk-outs and machine breaking.

The question of who does the work is often overlooked. When energy historians refer vaguely to human muscle, we should ask: whose muscles? Was the work done by slaves or forced labourers?

Even in the current energy transition there can be gross disparities between employer and worker. As heat intensifies, some employers are giving ice vests to their migrant workers so they can keep working. That’s reminiscent of coal shovelers in the furnace-like stokeholes of steam ships being immersed in ice-baths on collapse, as historian On Barak has shown.

What does this mean for us?

As Vaclav Smil points out, “every transition to a new energy supply has to be powered by the intensive deployment of existing energies and prime movers”. In fact, Smil argues the idea of the “industrial revolution” is misleading. It was not sudden. Rather, it was “gradual, often uneven”.

History may seem like it unfolds neatly. But it doesn’t at all. In earlier transitions, we see overlaps. Hesitation. Sometimes, more intense use of earlier energy sources. They start as highly localised shifts, depending on available resources, before new technologies spreads along trade routes. Ultimately market forces have driven – or hindered – adoption.

Time is short. But on the plus side, there are market forces now driving the shift to clean energy. Once solar panels and wind turbines are built, sunlight and wind are free. It is the resistance of the old guard – fossil fuel corporations – that is holding us back.

Read more:
Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind

Liz Conor receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. Muscle, wood, coal, oil: what earlier energy transitions tell us about renewables – https://theconversation.com/muscle-wood-coal-oil-what-earlier-energy-transitions-tell-us-about-renewables-213550

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Fulcher, Senior Lecturer, School of Physics, University of Sydney

Complexity is all around us, from the daily fluctuations of financial markets to the intricate web of neurons in our brains.

Understanding how the different components of these systems interact with each other is a fundamental challenge for scientists trying to predict their behaviour. Piecing together these interactions is like deciphering a code from an intricate set of clues.

Scientists have developed hundreds of different methods for doing this, from engineers studying noisy radio channels to neuroscientists studying firing patterns in networks of interacting neurons. Each method captures a unique aspect of the interactions within a complex system – but how do we know which method is right for any given system sitting right in front of us?

In new research published in Nature Computational Science, we have developed a unified way to look at hundreds of different methods for measuring interaction patterns in complex systems – and working out which ones are most useful for understanding a given system.

A scientific orchestra

The science of complex systems can be, well, complex. And the science of comparing and combining different ways of studying these systems even more so.

But one way to think about what we’ve done is to imagine each scientific method is a different musical instrument playing in a scientific orchestra. Different instruments are playing different melodies with different tones and in different styles.

Read more:
Fireflies, brain cells, dancers: new synchronisation research shows nature’s perfect timing is all about connections

We wanted to understand which of our scientific instruments are best suited to solving which types of problems. We also wanted to know whether we could conduct all of the instruments to form a harmonious whole.

By presenting these methods as a full orchestra for the first time, we hoped we would find new ways of deciphering patterns in the world around us.

Hundreds of methods, more than 1,000 datasets

To develop our orchestra, we undertook the mammoth task of analysing more than 200 methods for computing interactions from as many datasets as we could get our hands on. These covered a huge range of subjects, from stock markets and climate to brain activity and earthquakes to river flow and heart beats.

In total, we applied our 237 methods to more than 1,000 datasets. By analysing how these methods behave when applied to such diverse scientific systems, we found a way for them to “play in harmony” for the first time.

In the same way that instruments in an orchestra are usually organised as strings, brass, woodwind and percussion, scientific methods from areas like engineering, statistics and biophysics also have their traditional groupings.

But when we organised our scientific orchestra, we found that the scientific instruments grouped together in a strikingly different way to this traditional organisation. Some very different methods behaved in surprisingly similar ways to one another.

This was a bit like discovering that the tuba player’s melody was surprisingly similar to that of the flute, but no one had noticed it before.

Our weird and wonderful new orchestral layout (which sometimes places cello and trumpet players next to the piccolo player), represents a more “natural” way of grouping methods from all across science. This opens exciting new avenues for cross-disciplinary research.

The orchestra in the real world

We also put our full scientific orchestra to work on some real-world problems to see how it would work. One of these problems was using motion data from a smartwatch to classify activities like “badminton playing” and “running”; another was distinguishing different activities from brain-scan data.

Properly orchestrated, the full ensemble of scientific methods demonstrated improved performance over any single method on its own.

To put it another way, virtuosic solos are not always the best approach! You can get better results when different scientific methods work cooperatively as an ensemble.

Read more:
Electricity flow in the human brain can be predicted using the simple maths of networks, new study reveals

The scientific ensemble introduced in this work provides a deeper understanding of the interacting systems that shape our complex world. And its implications are widespread – from understanding how brain communication patterns break down in disease, to developing improved detection algorithms for smartwatch sensor data.

Time will tell what new music scientists will make as they step up to conduct our new scientific orchestra that simultaneously incorporates diverse ways of thinking about the world.

Ben Fulcher receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

– ref. From stock markets to brain scans, new research harmonises hundreds of scientific methods to understand complex systems – https://theconversation.com/from-stock-markets-to-brain-scans-new-research-harmonises-hundreds-of-scientific-methods-to-understand-complex-systems-214261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melinda Jackson, Associate Professor at Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University

You’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep but the racing thoughts won’t stop. Instead, your brain is busy making detailed plans for the next day, replaying embarrassing moments (“why did I say that?”), or producing seemingly random thoughts (“where is my birth certificate?”).

Many social media users have shared videos on how to fall asleep faster by conjuring up “fake scenarios”, such as a romance storyline where you’re the main character.

But what does the research say? Does what we think about before bed influence how we sleep?

Read more:
How do I stop my mind racing and get some sleep?

How you think in bed affects how you sleep

It turns out people who sleep well and those who sleep poorly have different kinds of thoughts before bed.

Good sleepers report experiencing mostly visual sensory images as they drift to sleep – seeing people and objects, and having dream-like experiences.

They may have less ordered thoughts and more hallucinatory experiences, such as imagining you’re participating in events in the real world.

For people with insomnia, pre-sleep thoughts tend to be less visual and more focused on planning and problem-solving. These thoughts are also generally more unpleasant and less random than those of good sleepers.

People with insomnia are also more likely to stress about sleep as they’re trying to sleep, leading to a vicious cycle; putting effort into sleep actually wakes you up more.

People with insomnia often report worrying, planning, or thinking about important things at bedtime, or focusing on problems or noises in the environment and having a general preoccupation with not sleeping.

Unfortunately, all this pre-sleep mental activity can prevent you drifting off.

One study found even people who are normally good sleepers can have sleep problems if they’re stressed about something at bedtime (such as the prospect of having to give a speech when they wake up). Even moderate levels of stress at bedtime could affect sleep that night.

Another study of 400 young adults looked at how binge viewing might affect sleep. The researchers found higher levels of binge viewing were associated with poorer sleep quality, more fatigue, and increased insomnia symptoms. “Cognitive arousal”, or mental activation, caused by an interesting narrative and identifying with characters, could play a role.

The good news is there are techniques you can use to change the style and content of your pre-sleep thoughts. They could help reduce nighttime cognitive arousal or to replace unwanted thoughts with more pleasant ones. These techniques are called “cognitive refocusing”.

What is cognitive refocusing?

Cognitive refocusing, developed by US psychology researcher Les Gellis, involves distracting yourself with pleasant thoughts before bed. It’s like the “fake scenarios” social media users post about – but the trick is to think of a scenario that’s not too interesting.

Decide before you go to bed what you’ll focus on as you lie there waiting for sleep to come.

Pick an engaging cognitive task with enough scope and breadth to maintain your interest and attention – without causing emotional or physical arousal. So, nothing too scary, thrilling or stressful.

For example, if you like interior decorating, you might imagine redesigning a room in your house.

If you’re a football fan, you might mentally replay a passage of play or imagine a game plan.

A music fan might mentally recite lyrics from their favourite album. A knitter might imagine knitting a blanket.

Whatever you choose, make sure it’s suited to you and your interests. The task needs to feel pleasant, without being overstimulating.

Cognitive refocusing is not a silver bullet, but it can help.

One study of people with insomnia found those who tried cognitive refocusing had significant improvements in insomnia symptoms compared to a control group.

How ancient wisdom can help us sleep

Another age-old technique is mindfulness meditation.

Meditation practice can increase our self-awareness and make us more aware of our thoughts. This can be useful for helping with rumination; often when we try to block or stop thoughts, it can make matters worse.

Mindfulness training can help us recognise when we’re getting into a rumination spiral and allow us to sit back, almost like a passive observer.

Try just watching the thoughts, without judgement. You might even like to say “hello” to your thoughts and just let them come and go. Allow them to be there and see them for what they are: just thoughts, nothing more.

Research from our group has shown mindfulness-based therapies can help people with insomnia. It may also help people with psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia get more sleep.

What can help ease your pre-sleep thoughts?

Good sleep starts the moment you wake up. To give yourself your best shot at a good night’s sleep, start by getting up at the same time each day and getting some morning light exposure (regardless of how much sleep you had the night before).

Have a consistent bedtime, reduce technology use in the evening, and do regular exercise during the day.

If your mind is busy at bedtime, try cognitive refocusing. Pick a “fake scenario” that will hold your attention but not be too scary or exciting. Rehearse this scenario in your mind at bedtime and enjoy the experience.

You might also like to try:

• keeping a consistent bedtime routine, so your brain can wind down

• writing down worries earlier in the day (so you don’t think about them at bedtime)

• adopting a more self-compassionate mindset (don’t beat yourself up at bedtime over your imagined shortcomings!).

Read more:
Why do we wake around 3am and dwell on our fears and shortcomings?

Melinda Jackson receives funding from NHMRC, Brain Foundation and Dementia Australia.

Hailey Meaklim is the founder of My Better Sleep.

– ref. What do people think about when they go to sleep? – https://theconversation.com/what-do-people-think-about-when-they-go-to-sleep-207406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Mitchell, Lecturer in Law, University of the Sunshine Coast

From Elle Woods in Legally Blonde to Jennifer Walters in She-Hulk, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird to Denny Crane in Boston Legal, our popular culture is often where we first see and witness legal practice.

Sometimes this comes via the silver screen, other times television. But it would be wrong to think that all we see on legal television shows is accurate – even when it claims to capture reality.

Most legal dramas are terrible at capturing the realities of law.

Not accurate: Law(less) and (dis)Order

Law and Order (1990-) innovated television drama by showcasing both the investigation of a crime by police, and then its prosecution in court. With its multiple spin-offs, including Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-) and the shortlived Law and Order: Trial by Jury (2005-2006) (which had the best theme song of all the series), the Law and Order franchise is a televisual legal juggernaut.

As with most serials, Law and Order presents the criminal justice system as moving quicker than you can say dun dun. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The mean duration of criminal law matters in Australian higher courts was almost one year (50 weeks) across 2021-22.

While procedural rules in civil matters require courts to facilitate the “just and efficient resolution of disputes at minimum expense”, in criminal law, speed and efficiency must not be prioritised over accuracy: a person’s liberty is at stake.

Most criminal matters do not proceed to a full trial as an accused will often plead guilty to the charges. As a result, the matter proceeds to sentencing without prosecutors needing to prove the offence. The rates of this occurring are quite alarming. Data across 2021-22 reveals over 75% of defendants in Australian courts entered a guilty plea, and almost four in five criminal convictions (79%) resulted from a guilty plea.

Research suggests defendants plead guilty for a variety of reasons, including to avoid the cost of a trial and to receive a lesser sentence. Data from the United States suggests the pressures of the pandemic led to innocent people pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.

Read more:
Pandemic pushed defendants to plead guilty more often, including innocent people pleading to crimes they didn’t commit

If Law and Order was a more accurate reflection of criminal law, matters would proceed immediately to sentencing due to guilty pleas. And should an accused be found guilty, a chunk of their sentence would be reduced by time served awaiting trial.

Not accurate: Suits

Suits (2011-19) centres around law firm partner Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and his mentorship of Mike Ross (Patrick Adams) – the “lawyer” who never graduated law school and provides legal advice thanks to his photographic memory.

This is, obviously, a brutal ethical breach for all involved, and clearly fraud. In Australia, law students who present themselves to be lawyers are subject to sanctions by the Legal Services Commission. They can cause harm to clients who have hired their services. And the Legal Admissions Board may deny their entry into the profession.

(Spoilers) Ross is eventually sentenced to two years in prison for this fraud, a similar sentence to a recent case in the United States, but he only serves three months before solving a crime and earning early release. More unrealistic than this early release is that Ross does fairly quickly thereafter gain admission to the profession, which seems unlikely to occur so soon after such an act of fraud.

While Suits has left its mark(le) on the popular imagination of law, it fails to address one of the primary duties of civil litigation: the duty of disclosure.

The MacGuffin-ing of law is common in TV serials. It’s the “smoking gun” found on the day of the trial, or for the lawyers in Suits, the random document which shows up during the trial to turn the case – dramatically presented by our protagonists as they flail into court armed with this data sans ethics.

This is not quite accurate.

In adversarial legal systems like Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, civil litigation rules require parties to disclose to one another all documents in their possession or control which are directly relevant to a matter in dispute.

This is a continuing duty, so if you discover such a document at any time during the case, it must be disclosed. While exceptions based on various privileges may apply, this essentially means civil litigation must be run in an “all cards on the table” manner. Randomly producing undisclosed material at trial requires the leave of the court and may result in orders of contempt and cost penalties.

It’s not like the lawyers of Suits have ever really been concerned about ethics, though.

Not accurate: How to Get Away with Murder(ing rules of evidence)

While most lawyers would support making it a criminal offence to critique Viola Davis, How to Get Away with Murder (2014-20) presents one of the most common offences within legal dramas: the haphazard approach to rules of evidence.

Annalise Keating (Davis) and her ragtag team of morally illiterate law students (although I never see them studying?!?!) manipulate people to obtain evidence and then dramatically prompt witnesses on the stand to read this information into the record, or otherwise “sneak” it into the trial.

This is not accurate. And it ignores the basic reality that so much of legal practice is about not just obtaining evidence, but ensuring that evidence is admissible in court.

One of the most important rules of evidence deals with hearsay evidence. A court cannot allow evidence to be considered if its reliability is unable to be interrogated. Witnesses can only present evidence that they saw, heard or perceived themselves. Unless an exception to the hearsay rule applies, such evidence would be inadmissible.

Like in Suits, these approaches to presenting evidence may have serious implications. This poor trial management results in delays to criminal trials..

Accurate: Fisk

Fisk (2021-) follows Helen Tudor-Fisk (Kitty Flanagan), an established contract lawyer whose personal dramas lead her to move to the boutique Melbourne probate law firm of Gruber and Gruber (played by Marty Sheargold and Julia Zamero).

Fisk excels in showing the importance of lawyer-client relations and the word-of-mouth that sustains much of small legal practice. It’s the anti-Suits, and Fisk is more powerful for it.

The discussions of wills and estates and most basic legal principles in Fisk are mostly sound – and the show doesn’t need to get into “legalese” as matters are resolved out-of-court.

This is a distinct reality of law: litigation is a last resort. Forms of alternative dispute resolution, including mediation, negotiation and conciliation, have become the primary way of resolving legal disputes.

Fuelled by legislative changes which require the exhaustion of alternative dispute resolution measures before proceeding to litigation, and a pursuit of reduced costs, the drama of trial is not something anyone should yearn for.

Accurate: Rake

Cleaver Greene, a character said to be loosely based on the career of a Sydney barrister, shows us the absolute madness of work as a “silk”. Rake excels at showing the reality of law. The show raises interesting and accurate questions of law (yes, it is true there is no explicit offence of cannibalism in New South Wales) and presents Australian court process accurately.

Thankfully, there’s not a gavel in sight. Australian courts do not use gavels, and their presence in legal dramas in Australian and UK courts shows a lack of attention to detail. The presence of the gavel as a symbol of justice is an entirely American invention.

Rake is accurate, in part, because the site of drama is rarely the courtroom, but rather Greene’s personal life. The accuracy of that element for law I will leave up to the jury. But with a 2014 study finding 35% of lawyers engaged in hazardous or harmful drinking and another showing high rates of anxiety and depression in the legal profession, the evidence is compelling.

Dale Mitchell 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. No gavels, no hearsay and lots of drinking: a law expert ranks legal dramas by their accuracy – https://theconversation.com/no-gavels-no-hearsay-and-lots-of-drinking-a-law-expert-ranks-legal-dramas-by-their-accuracy-212880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eleanor K. Sansom, Research Associate, Curtin University

After a journey of billions of kilometres, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has culminated in a small black capsule blazing through the sky before touching down in the Utah desert.

Inside is likely to be the largest ever sample of dust and rock returned from an asteroid. Extracted and brought back with great technical ingenuity from an asteroid called Bennu, scientists will now study in search of clues about the origins of the Solar System and life itself.

The seven-year mission took OSIRIS-REx to a near-Earth carbon-rich asteroid, which it orbited for two and a half years, mapping its surface and measuring properties such as its density and spin. This “rubble pile” asteroid also has a (very) small chance of one day impacting Earth, so getting intricate measurements of its orbit and other dynamics was also a mission goal.

The origins of the Solar System – and life

Most asteroids are the rocky leftovers of failed planets and destructive collisions in the early Solar System, orbiting in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. They vary drastically in size, shape and composition, and finding out what they are made of can help us learn more about how the planets formed.

These primitive bodies – some more than 4.5 billion years old – can also shed light on the origins of life, because they tell us about the distribution of water, minerals and other elements such as carbon.

There is also an element of self-interest in studying these asteroids, to understand the risk they may pose if they are heading Earth’s way.

Read more:
Our Solar System is filled with asteroids that are particularly hard to destroy, new study finds

Using telescopes on Earth, we can get a rough idea of what an asteroid’s surface is made of. However, to do an in-depth chemical analysis we need to get hold of some actual samples.

Most of the asteroid samples we have are meteorites – lumps of space rock that have crashed into Earth. There are more than 70,000 meteorites in collections around the world, but we know the origins of less than 0.1% of them.

Read more:
A pristine chunk of space rock found within hours of hitting Earth can tell us about the birth of the Solar System

What’s more, we know the samples we have are not very representative of the kinds of asteroids in space. Part of the reason for this is that some kinds of asteroids are better than others at surviving the fiery descent through the atmosphere.

But some meteorites don’t appear to correspond to any known type of asteroid. So where do they come from?

Using dedicated camera networks such as Australia’s Desert Fireball Network we can observe incoming asteroids, recover meteorite samples and track their paths back through space to determine their origins. This process can deliver relatively uncontaminated samples to the lab.

Even still, linking a meteorite to a known parent asteroid, or even a type of asteroid observed via telescope, is very difficult.

Bringing pieces of space back to Earth

Sample return missions are the gold standard for analysing the makeup of extraterrestrial bodies. They can bring pieces from a different planet or asteroid back to Earth to study.

The first such mission was to the Moon, bringing back lunar samples for analysis. We learned the Moon was made from the same material as the Earth, and that it likely formed from the orbiting debris after a giant impact.

Sample return missions are technically very challenging. Not only does a spacecraft have to travel hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, but it has to match speed with the target (not just zoom past), find a safe landing site, touch down to collect a sample (without crashing), stow the sample in a sealed capsule, take off again, and return to Earth. Much of this process needs to be autonomous, as the time delay for communications with Earth is too long for remote control.

Other than the lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions, OSIRIS-REx is the fourth mission to return extraterrestrial material back to Earth.

NASA’s Stardust mission, launched in 1999, returned microscopic samples from the trail of comet Wild-2. The Hayabusa mission, launched in 2003 by the Japanese space agency, JAXA, returned less than 1 milligram from asteroid Itokawa. JAXA’s Hayabusa2 (launched 2014) returned 5.4 grams of sample from asteroid Ryugu.

NASA estimates OSIRIS-REx has brought back around 250 grams from asteroid Bennu, by far the largest sample yet recovered. We will know for sure once the sample is carefully examined at Johnson Space Centre over the coming days.

The sound of fireballs

We and our colleagues at Curtin University are heavily involved in the global effort to find out what asteroids are really made of, having participated in or analysed samples from all of these sample return missions and leading the Global Fireball Observatory.

There are six OSIRIS-REx mission scientists from Curtin (including one of us – Nick Timms), and they will be among those receiving the first wave of samples in the coming weeks.

The re-entry of the capsule also had its own incredible science value. It was essentially a human-made fireball.

Read more:
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is about to drop a chunk of asteroid in the Australian outback

Fireballs, or really bright shooting stars from large space rocks, are quite rare and impossible to predict. This is why we use dedicated camera networks to observe large areas of sky (The Desert Fireball Network observes nearly three million square kilometres of Australian skies every night).

When objects from outer space enter the atmosphere, travelling much faster than the speed of sound, they ignite the air to create a fireball and also trigger other less-studied phenomena such as shockwaves – which can be hazardous.

A sample return is a great opportunity to set out seismic sensors and other instruments to analyse the shockwave, which can tell us more about the physics of re-entry and why some meteorites survive while others don’t make it. This was done for the Hayabusa2 sample return in 2020, and researchers from Sandia Labs and the University of Southern Queensland had detectors set up in Utah for the OSIRIS-REx return.

What’s next?

Like Hayabusa2, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself isn’t finished yet. Both of these spacecraft dropped their precious samples to Earth and have continued on with the aim of future asteroid fly-bys.

The mission, now renamed “OSIRIS-APEX”, has already begun to redirect itself towards an asteroid called Apophis, which it will intercept not long after the asteroid zooms past Earth in April 2029.

Eleanor K. Sansom receives funding from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and is supported by the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University and the Australian Research Council (DP230100301).

Nick Timms received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities (LIEF) scheme and is supported by the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University.

– ref. 7 years, billions of kilometres, a handful of dust: NASA just brought back the largest-ever asteroid sample – https://theconversation.com/7-years-billions-of-kilometres-a-handful-of-dust-nasa-just-brought-back-the-largest-ever-asteroid-sample-214151

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erica Mealy, Lecturer in Computer Science, University of the Sunshine Coast

In 2018-19, identity crime directly and indirectly cost Australia an estimated A$3.1 billion.

To address such costs, the federal government is proposing a national digital identity scheme that will let people prove their identity without having to share documents such as their passport, drivers licence or Medicare card.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher opened consultations for the draft bill last week, with plans to introduce the legislation to parliament by the end of the year.

Let’s look at what it proposes, and what it could mean for you.

What would change?

The digital ID scheme would initially be regulated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Information Commissioner, with a view to eventually establish a new governing body.

The draft bill package includes strong updates to security requirements for how organisations store people’s IDs, as well as the reporting of data breaches and suspected identity fraud.

In her speech to the Australian Information Industry Association, Gallagher outlined a four-phase rollout.

• Phase one: establishing the legislation and accreditation of private and public providers.
• Phase two: adding state- and territory-issued IDs to the scheme for use with federal government services.
• Phase three: bringing recognition of the digital ID into the private sector. This would, for instance, allow you to use your digital ID to apply for a bank loan without having to provide your identity documents or copies.
• Phase four: allowing accredited private sector digital IDs to help verify you when accessing certain government services.

How would it work?

For the general public, the voluntary scheme would come in the form of a smartphone app, requiring biometric information (such as a face print) to be unlocked.

To prove your identity to a participating organisation, you would log into the organisation’s website and select MyGovID as your verification method.

You would then log into your MyGovID app and give consent for your identity to be verified with that organisation. In this way, you could verify your identity to the organisation without needing to share your drivers licence, passport or similar.

Gone will be the days of 100 points of ID and copies of documents stored all over the internet.

The upside of the proposal

The Medibank, Optus and Latitude data breaches of 2022-23 have demonstrated the lack of regulation and enforcement of identity protection legislation in Australia.

A welcome part of the draft bill is the increased power given to the Australian Information Commissioner, as well as restrictions on how organisations request, store and disclose people’s personal identifying information.

The bill also outlines minimum cybersecurity standards, and requires regular review of organisations dealing with identity data.

Unresolved MyGovID security flaws

In releasing the draft bill, the government has highlighted a voluntary national digital identity – the MyGovID – which is already being used by more than 6 million Australians and 1.3 million businesses.

MyGovID is a government-issued authenticator app which verifies your identity using one of three factors: something you know (such as a password), something you are (such as a biometric scan), or something you have (such as a verified phone number, where you can receive one-time codes). Adding additional factors makes verification more secure.

In 2020, security researchers warned the public against using MyGovID due to security flaws in its design. It’s unclear if these have been addressed. The Australian Tax Office declined to fix the issue when raised.

Governments in Australia also have a poor track record of securing our information.

According to Webber Insurance, 14 of the 44 recorded data breaches between January to June this year were reported by government authorities. These included the Department of Home Affairs, and the Northern Territory, Tasmania, ACT and NSW governments.

This is on top of data breaches involving the Australian Tax Office, National Disability Insurance Scheme and MyGov, as reported by the ABC last year.

More worryingly, the privacy act has a loophole which allows state and government authorities to remain exempt from compulsory data breach reporting. As such, we don’t know just how many government data breaches have occurred.

The draft bill explicitly maintains these loopholes, stating entities are exempt from data reporting if “the entity is a department or authority of a State or Territory”.

Read more:
The government wants to expand the ‘digital identity’ system that lets Australians access services. There are many potential pitfalls

A honey trap for hackers

Even if the government carries out its end of the bargain securely, the proposed scheme would still only be as secure as your phone. Having a weak password, losing your phone, or having your phone hacked could lead to data being compromised.

Also, streamlining distributed identification systems in this way will create an irresistible target for hackers. In cybersecurity this is called a honeypot, or honey trap.

Just as honey is irresistible to bears, these data lures are irresistible to hackers. Failure to secure the data would make it a one-stop-shop for identity theft and extortion.

Perhaps most concerning is how closely the proposed scheme resembles government surveillance. By linking all our personal identification data across federal and state jurisdictions, as well as private entities, we would be giving the federal government complete oversight of our lives.

Small changes to the law, such as those quietly made in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Distrupt) Act in 2021, could mean our locations could be tracked, and all our interactions with public and private organisations recorded.

What can you do?

It’s clear the draft bill has a number of issues. That said, all hope is not lost.

The government has committed to genuine consultation on its proposal. However, you don’t have much time to have your say: public submissions are being sought until October 10.

This extremely short consultation period doesn’t provide much confidence a fit-for-purpose solution will be created.

While protecting our digital identities is a welcome and well-overdue part of this proposed bill, getting it wrong could lead to harm at an even larger scale.

Read more:
Australia’s National Digital ID is here, but the government’s not talking about it

Erica Mealy is member of the Australian Computer Society, the Australian Information Security Association, and the International Association for Public participation (IAP2). Erica is not a member of nor affiliated with any political organisations.

– ref. A national digital ID scheme is being proposed. An expert weighs the pros and (many more) cons – https://theconversation.com/a-national-digital-id-scheme-is-being-proposed-an-expert-weighs-the-pros-and-many-more-cons-214144

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

With early voting set to open next week for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, this is a critical time for campaigners to win over voters.

If the 2022 federal election is anything to go by, Australians have developed a taste for early voting, with fewer than half of all voters actually going to a polling station on election day.

If the same voting patterns apply to the referendum, this means more than half of Australians, particularly older voters, may have cast a vote before voting day on October 14.

What’s happening in the polls?

Public polls indicate support for the “yes” campaign continues to decline, despite, as we’ve shown below, huge spending on advertising and extensive media coverage of its message.

According to Professor Simon Jackman’s averaging of the polls, “no” currently leads “yes” by 58% to 42% nationally. If this lead holds, the result would be even more lopsided than the 1999 republic referendum defeat, where the nationwide vote was 55% “no” to 45% “yes”.

The rate of decline in support for “yes” continues to be about 0.75 of a percentage point a week. If this trend continues, the “yes” vote would sit at 39.6% on October 14, 5.5 percentage points below the “yes” vote in the republic referendum.

If “yes” were to prevail on October 14, it would take a colossal reversal in public sentiment, or it would indicate there’s been a stupendously large, collective polling error. Or perhaps both.

What’s happening in the news and social media?

Using Meltwater data, we have seen a massive spike in Voice media coverage since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum date at the end of August.

In the most recent week we analysed, from September 14-21, we saw a huge jump of mentions of the Voice to Parliament (2.86 million) in print media, radio, TV and social media. This compares to about a quarter million mentions in the first week of the “yes” and “no” campaigns, which we documented in our last report of this series monitoring both campaigns.

Read more:
The ‘no’ campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here’s why

Voice coverage now constitutes 6.7% of all Australian media reporting, up from 4.2% in week one. To put that in perspective, mentions of Hugh Jackman’s marriage split from Deborra-Lee Furness comprised 1.5% of total weekly coverage, while mentions of the AFL and NRL amounted to 4.1% and 1.7%, respectively.

Media coverage of the Voice peaked on September 17 with 38,000 mentions, thanks to widespread coverage of the “yes” rallies that day around the country.

This was followed closely by 35,000 Voice mentions the next day, led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim on Sky News that a Voice to parliament would see lawyers in Sydney and Melbourne “get richer” through billions of dollars worth of treaty negotiations.

Our analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data provides further insight to these trends, showing the nationwide “yes” rallies on September 17 received the most public engagement about the Voice during the week we analysed.

Who is advertising online?

This week, we specifically turned our attention to the online advertising spending of the campaigns. We also examined the types of disinformation campaigns appearing on social media, some of which are aimed at the Australian Electoral Commission, similar to the anti-democratic disinformation campaigns that have roiled the US.

The main online advertising spend is on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. We have real-time visibility of this spending thanks to the ad libraries of Meta and Google.

The Yes23 campaign has far outspent any other Voice campaigner on these platforms. In the last three months, its advertising expenditure exceeds $1.1 million, compared to just under $100,000 for Fair Australia, the leading “no” campaign organisation.

Yes23 has also released a far greater number of new ads in September (in excess of 3,200) on both platforms, compared to Fair Australia’s 52 new ads. The top five spenders from both sides are listed below.

As early voting nears, this graph shows Yes23 ad spending outpaced Fair Australia on both Google and Meta platforms in week three, as well.

The advertising spending data shows how drastically different the strategies of the two main campaigns are. Yes23’s approach is an ad blitz, blanketing the nation with hundreds of ads and experimenting with scores of different messages.

In contrast, the “no” side has released far fewer ads with no experimentation. The central message is about “division”, mostly delivered by the lead “no” campaigner, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. All but eight of the ads released by the “no” side in September feature a personal message by Price arguing that the referendum is “divisive” and “the Voice threatens Aussie unity.”

To win, “yes” requires a majority of voters nationwide, as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states. The “no” side is strategically targeting its ads to the two states it believes are most likely in play – South Australia and Tasmania. It only needs to win one of these states to ensure the “yes” side fails.

Referendum disinformation

The Meltwater data also reveal a surge in misinformation and disinformation targeting of the AEC with American-style attacks on the voting process.

Studies show disinformation surrounding the referendum has been prevalent on X since at least March. To mitigate the harms, the AEC has established a disinformation register to inform citizens about the referendum process and call out falsehoods.

We’ve identified three types of disinformation campaigns in the campaign so far.

The first includes attempts to redefine the issue agenda. Examples range from the false claims that First Nations people do not overwhelmingly support the Voice to conspiracy myths about the Voice being a globalist land grab.

These falsehoods aim to influence vote choice. This disinformation type is not covered in the AEC’s register, as the organisation has no provisions to enforce truth in political advertising.

Read more:
Why is it legal to tell lies during the Voice referendum campaign?

The register does cover a second type of disinformation. This includes spurious claims about the voting process, such as that the referendum is voluntary. This false claim aims to depress voter turnout in yet another attempt to influence the outcome.

Finally, a distinct set of messages targets the AEC directly. The aim is to undermine trust in the integrity of the vote.

A most prominent example was Dutton’s suggestion the voting process was “rigged” due to the established rule of counting a tick on the ballot as a vote for “yes”, while a cross will not be accepted as a formal vote for “no”. Sky News host Andrew Bolt echoed this claim in his podcast, which was repeated on social media, reaching 29,800 viewers in one post.

Attention to the tick/cross issue spiked on August 25 when the AEC refuted the claim (as can be seen in the chart below). Daily Telegraph columnist and climate change denialist Maurice Newman then linked the issue to potential voter fraud, mimicking US-style attacks on the integrity of voting systems.

The volume of mentions of obvious disinformation on media and social media may not be high compared to other mentions of the Voice. However, studies show disinformation disproportionately grabs people’s attention due to the cognitive attraction of pervasive negativity, the focus on threats or arousal of disgust.

All three types of disinformation campaigns attacking this referendum should concern us deeply because they threaten trust in our political institutions, which undermines our vibrant democracy.

Andrea Carson receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project and from the ARC for a Discovery project on media and political trust.

Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP220100050; DP230101777). He is an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board.

Rebecca Strating receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project. She is a recipient of external grant funding, including from the governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Simon Jackman is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and a past recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation (USA) and was one of the principal investigators of the Australian Election Survey (funded by the Australian Research Council).

– ref. The ‘yes’ Voice campaign is far outspending ‘no’ in online advertising, but is the message getting through? – https://theconversation.com/the-yes-voice-campaign-is-far-outspending-no-in-online-advertising-but-is-the-message-getting-through-213749

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greig de Zubicaray, Professor of Neuropsychology, Queensland University of Technology

We’ve all experienced that moment mid-sentence when we just can’t find the word we want to use, even though we’re certain we know it.

Why does this universal problem among speakers happen?

And when can word-finding difficulties indicate something serious?

Everyone will experience an occasional word-finding difficulty, but if they happen very often with a broad range of words, names and numbers, this could be a sign of a neurological disorder.

The steps involved in speaking

Producing spoken words involves several stages of processing.

These include:

1. identifying the intended meaning

2. selecting the right word from the “mental lexicon” (a mental dictionary of the speaker’s vocabulary)

3. retrieving its sound pattern (called its “form”)

4. executing the movements of the speech organs for articulating it.

Word-finding difficulties can potentially arise at each of these stages of processing.

When a healthy speaker can’t retrieve a word from their lexicon despite the feeling of knowing it, this is called a “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon by language scientists.

Often, the frustrated speaker will try to give a bit of information about their intended word’s meaning, “you know, that thing you hit a nail with”, or its spelling, “it starts with an H!”.

Tip-of-the-tongue states are relatively common and are a type of speech error that occurs primarily during retrieval of the sound pattern of a word (step three above).

What can affect word finding?

Word-finding difficulties occur at all ages but they do happen more often as we get older. In older adults, they can cause frustration and anxiety about the possibility of developing dementia. But they’re not always a cause for concern.

One way researchers investigate word-finding difficulties is to ask people to keep a diary to record how often and in what context they occur. Diary studies have shown that some word types, such as names of people and places, concrete nouns (things, such as “dog” or “building”) and abstract nouns (concepts, such as “beauty” or “truth”), are more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states compared with verbs and adjectives.

Less frequently used words are also more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states. It’s thought this is because they have weaker connections between their meanings and their sound patterns than more frequently used words.

Laboratory studies have also shown tip-of-the-tongue states are more likely to occur under socially stressful conditions when speakers are told they are being evaluated, regardless of their age. Many people report having experienced tip-of-the-tongue problems during job interviews.

When could it spell more serious issues?

More frequent failures with a broader range of words, names and numbers are likely to indicate more serious issues.

When this happens, language scientists use the terms “anomia” or “anomic aphasia” to describe the condition, which can be associated with brain damage due to stroke, tumours, head injury or dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Recently, the actor Bruce Willis’s family revealed he has been diagnosed with a degenerative disorder known as primary progressive aphasia, for which one of the earliest symptoms is word-finding difficulties rather than memory loss.

Primary progressive aphasia is typically associated with frontotemporal or Alzheimer’s dementias, although it can be associated with other pathologies.

Anomic aphasia can arise due to problems occurring at different stages of speech production. An assessment by a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist can help clarify which processing stage is affected and how serious the problem might be.

For example, if a person is unable to name a picture of a common object such as a hammer, a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist will ask them to describe what the object is used for (the individual might then say “it’s something you hit things with” or “it’s a tool”).

If they can’t, they will be asked to gesture or mime how it’s used. They might also be provided with a cue or prompt, such as the first letter (h) or syllable (ham).

Most people with anomic aphasia benefit greatly from being prompted, indicating they are mostly experiencing problems with later stages of retrieving word forms and motor aspects of speech.

But if they’re unable to describe or mime the object’s use, and cueing does not help, this is likely to indicate an actual loss of word knowledge or meaning. This is typically a sign of a more serious issue such as primary progressive aphasia.

Imaging studies in healthy adults and people with anomic aphasia have shown different areas of the brain are responsible for their word-finding difficulties.

In healthy adults, occasional failures to name a picture of a common object are linked with changes in activity in brain regions that control motor aspects of speech, suggesting a spontaneous problem with articulation rather than a loss of word knowledge.

In anomia due to primary progressive aphasia, brain regions that process word meanings show a loss of nerve cells and connections or atrophy.

Although anomic aphasia is common after strokes to the left hemisphere of the brain, the associated word-finding difficulties do not appear to be distinguishable by specific areas.

Read more:
What is aphasia, the condition Bruce Willis lives with?

There are treatments available for anomic aphasia. These will often involve speech pathologists training the individual on naming tasks using different kinds of cues or prompts to help retrieve words. The cues can be various meaningful features of objects and ideas, or sound features of words, or a combination of both. Smart tablet and phone apps also show promise when used to complement therapy with home-based practice.

The type of cue used for treatment is determined by the nature of the person’s impairment. Successful treatment is associated with changes in activity in brain regions known to support speech production. Unfortunately, there is no effective treatment for primary progressive aphasia, although some studies have suggested speech therapy can produce temporary benefits.

If you’re concerned about your word-finding difficulties or those of a loved one, you can consult your GP for a referral to a clinical neuropsychologist or a speech pathologist.

Read more:
In a chatty world, losing your speech can be alienating. But there’s help

Greig de Zubicaray receives funding from the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Foundation.

– ref. Is it normal to forget words while speaking? And when can it spell a problem? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-normal-to-forget-words-while-speaking-and-when-can-it-spell-a-problem-212852

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kay Critchell, Lecturer in Oceanography, Deakin University

Our beaches are in trouble. Limited recycling programs and a society that throws away so much have resulted in more than 3 million tonnes of plastic polluting the oceans. An estimated 1.5–1.9% of this rubbish ends up on beaches.

So can waste-management strategies such as container deposit schemes make a difference to this 50,000–60,000 tonnes of beach rubbish?

The Queensland government started a container deposit scheme in 2019. We wanted to know if it reduced the rubbish that washed up on beaches in a tourist hotspot, the Whitsundays region.

To find out, our study, the first of its kind, used data from a community volunteer group through the Australian Marine Debris Initiative Database.

It turned out that for the types of rubbish included in the scheme – plastic bottles and aluminium cans – the answer was an emphatic yes.

Read more:
Spotting plastic waste from space and counting the fish in the seas: here’s how AI can help protect the oceans

Container deposit schemes work

After the scheme began, there were fewer plastic bottles and aluminium cans on Whitsundays beaches. Volunteer clean-up workers collected an average of about 120 containers per beach visit before the scheme began in 2019. This number fell to 77 in 2020.

Not only that, but those numbers stayed down year after year. This means people continued to take part in the scheme for years.

Rubbish that wasn’t part of the scheme still found its way to the beaches.

However, more types of rubbish such as larger glass bottles are being added to the four-year-old Queensland scheme. Other states and territories have had schemes like this for many years, the oldest in South Australia since 1971.

But we didn’t have access to beach data from before and after those schemes started. So our findings are great news, especially as some of these other schemes are set to expand too. The evidence also supports the creation of new schemes in Victoria this November and Tasmania next year.

These developments give reason to hope we will see further reductions in beach litter.

Read more:
Spin the bottle: the fraught politics of container deposit schemes

The data came from the community

To find out whether the scheme has reduced specific sorts of rubbish on beaches we needed a large amount of data from before and after it began.

The unsung heroes of this study are the diligent volunteers who provided us with these data. They have been recording the types and amounts of rubbish found during their cleanups at Whitsundays beaches for years.

Eco Barge Clean Seas Inc has been doing this work since 2009. In taking that extra step of counting and sorting the rubbish, they may not have known it at the time, but they were creating a data gold mine. We would eventually use their data to prove the container deposit scheme works.

The rubbish clean-ups are continuing. This means we’ll be able to see how adding more rubbish types to the scheme will further reduce rubbish on beaches.

The long-term perspective we can gain from such data is testament to this sustained community effort.

Read more:
Local efforts have cut plastic waste on Australia’s beaches by almost 30% in 6 years

There’s still more work to do

So if we recycle our plastics, why do we still get beaches covered in rubbish? The reality is that most plastics aren’t recycled. This is mainly due to two problems:

• technological limitations on the sorting needed to avoid contamination of waste streams
• inadequate incentives for people to reduce contamination by properly sorting their waste, and ultimately to use products made from recycled waste.

Our findings show we can create more sustainable practices and a cleaner environment when individuals are given incentives to recycle.

However, container deposit schemes don’t just provide a financial reward. Getting people directly involved in recycling fosters a sense of responsibility for the environment. This connection between people’s actions and outcomes is a key to such schemes’ success.

Read more:
The new 100% recyclable packaging target is no use if our waste isn’t actually recycled

Our study also shows how invaluable community-driven clean-up projects are. Not only do they reduce environmental harm and improve our experiences on beaches, but they can also provide scientists like us with the data we need to show how waste-management policies affect the environment.

Waste management is a concern for communities, policymakers and environmentalists around the world. The lessons from our study apply not only in Australia but anywhere that communities can work with scientists and governments to solve environmental problems.

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. Container deposit schemes reduce rubbish on our beaches. Here’s how we proved it – https://theconversation.com/container-deposit-schemes-reduce-rubbish-on-our-beaches-heres-how-we-proved-it-213562

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Inga Smith, Associate Professor in Physics, University of Otago

After two seasons of record-breaking lows, Antarctica’s sea ice remains in dramatic decline, tracking well below any winter maximum levels observed since satellite monitoring began during the late 1970s.

A layer of frozen seawater that surrounds the Antarctic continent, sea ice cycles from maximum coverage in September to a minimum in February. The summer minimum has also continued to diminish, with three record low summers in the past seven years.

Some scientists have suggested this year could mark a regime shift for Antarctic sea ice. The consequences could be far-reaching for Earth’s climate, because sea ice keeps the planet cooler by reflecting solar energy back into the atmosphere and insulating the ocean. Its formation also generates cold, salty water masses that drive global ocean currents.

The annual freeze-thaw cycle of Antarctic sea ice is one of Earth’s largest seasonal changes, but is a major challenge for climate models to predict accurately.

Since the 1970s, satellites have been tracking a quantity known as “sea ice extent”, which is the total surface area where at least 15% is covered by sea ice.

This September, it reached a satellite-era record low for this time of year. The previous year, after tracking much lower than the median all winter, Antarctic sea ice extent made a late rally and was 18.3 million square kilometres at its maximum by September 2022, around 2% below the 1981-2010 median.

Although 2% might not sound like much, the following summer biologists reported devastating effects on Emperor penguins. No chicks survived in four out of five breeding sites in one region of sea ice loss.

In 2023, Antarctic sea ice extent started the winter even lower than in 2022, and by the end of July was almost 13% below the 1981-2010 median for that time of year. It reached its maximum extent on September 7, at just under 17 million square kilometres, which is nearly 9% below the 1981-2010 median.

Why we couldn’t predict this

Antarctica has bucked the trend of vanishing sea ice observed in the Arctic for decades. Satellite records show a small increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent from 2007 to 2016, but this was followed by a decrease since then.

A recent study shows that almost all models in the current collection of simulations used for the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to reproduce the trend in Antarctic sea ice area observed between 1979 and 2018.

Global climate models predicted that Antarctic sea ice extent should have been diminishing for all of that period, which is at odds with the observations.

Read more:
Devastatingly low Antarctic sea ice may be the ‘new abnormal’, study warns

These models remain our best tools for forecasting future climate. They have been developed since the 1960s to represent the wide range of physical processes of importance to the climate system as realistically as possible.

They are made up of individual component models for the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans, the transfer of solar energy through the atmosphere, land surface properties and the evolution of sea ice.

While these models have generally done well at forecasting ocean and land surface warming over the past few decades, they have struggled to simulate Antarctic sea ice.

Many research groups around the world have investigated the reasons why models have failed to accurately simulate Antarctic sea ice. Changes in wind and wave patterns, natural variability, stratospheric ozone and melt water from the Antarctic ice sheet entering the Southern Ocean have all been proposed as potential explanations.

So far, none of these have proved to be the definitive answer.

Changes in sea ice thickness

The thickness, or depth, of sea ice cannot be measured directly by satellites because it is thin, salty and hidden below a layer of snow of unknown thickness.

Unlike the Arctic, where we have extensive data from submarines and other sources, information about Antarctic sea ice thickness is very sparse. The data we have mainly come from holes drilled in the sea ice, sea ice monitoring stations, and electromagnetic induction measurements from sleds, helicopters or planes.

The data are mostly from land-fast sea ice, which is the sea ice attached to land or ice shelves.

Read more:
Fractured foundations: how Antarctica’s ‘landfast’ ice is dwindling and why that’s bad news

We have only a few airborne thickness measurements over freely moving pack ice, which makes up most of Antarctic sea ice. We need both sea ice area and thickness to determine sea ice volume, which is important for knowing the overall impact of climate change on sea ice.

Antarctic storms

McMurdo Sound is a region of the Antarctic coastline in the Ross Sea where both New Zealand (Scott Base) and the USA (McMurdo Station) have Antarctic bases. The sea ice in McMurdo Sound was dramatically thinner than usual in 2022, but not in 2023.

In 2022, multiple storms kept blowing out McMurdo Sound sea ice during winter. Sea ice that would normally be about two metres thick was around 1-1.3 m thick because it was not able to stay in place and grow thicker over the winter season.

Snow was thicker than usual in places, which slowed down the growth of sea ice by insulating it from the cold air above. The weather was not warmer, and the ice had not melted; it had been blown out by strong winds.

This thinner-than-usual sea ice caused major disruptions in Antarctic operations for New Zealand and other countries in 2022. The University of Otago’s automated sea ice monitoring system is installed each year to measure sea ice thickness, temperature and snow depth. In 2022, Scott Base staff had to take the equipment onto the sea ice on foot for the first time because the sea ice was deemed unsafe to drive vehicles on.

Seeing open water in front of McMurdo Station in the middle of winter in 2022 was shocking for us. However, despite the extremely low winter sea ice extent around most of Antarctica in 2023, sea ice in McMurdo Sound formed in a similar way to most years.

It is not yet clear how much climate change has driven the huge anomalies in Antarctic sea ice extent or thickness, but events like these could be a harbinger of things to come.

To have a chance of predicting these changes, we will need dramatically improved modelling capabilities, more measurements of crucial factors driving sea ice change, and new ways of making those measurements.

We have received research funding from the Deep South National Science Challenge, the Antarctic Science Platform and the Marsden Fund. We received logistical support for Antarctic field work from Antarctica New Zealand, and high performance computing resources through NeSI.

Pat Langhorne has worked on sea ice for 35 years, receiving research funding from the Deep South National Science Challenge and the Marsden Fund, among others. Logistical support for Antarctic field work has been provided by Antarctica New Zealand and the Australian Antarctic Division.

– ref. As Antarctic sea ice continues its dramatic decline, we need more measurements and much better models to predict its future – https://theconversation.com/as-antarctic-sea-ice-continues-its-dramatic-decline-we-need-more-measurements-and-much-better-models-to-predict-its-future-213747

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Zouwer, Visual Artist and Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of Canberra

As a visual artist and educator, I know how important it is to encourage your child to think and behave like an artist. But this is not necessarily about drawing or painting in a particular way.

The habits of an artist include the ability to generate ideas, trust in creative processes, be comfortable with ambiguity, take risks and embrace failure.

All this helps children embrace “failures” as a learning experience. In doing so, you are building their resilience.

These are all transferable skills kids can use in other areas of learning and life. As the late UK education expert Ken Robinson said:

If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original.

How to think and behave like an artist

You can encourage children to develop the habits of an artist by providing opportunities for them to take creative risks and use problem finding skills. Problem finding skills are identifying unforeseen problems using critical and analytic thinking.

Here are three art activities to try in the holidays – or any time – to build these skills.

These activities work for kids from five and up. Some children will need help but parents should try to be the “guide on the side”. This means helping children make their own discoveries and not jumping in and taking over.

Read more:
Holiday help! An art expert suggests screen-free things to do in every room of the house

1. Blind contour drawing

In blind contour drawing you don’t look at the paper while you draw and once your drawing implement touches the paper, you don’t lift it off until you are done.

You can draw anything, but portraits are a lot of fun. Look closely at your subject and slowly draw what you see, looking for lines and contours to draw in and around them.

This is a gentle way of extending creative potential of drawing. It also stops your inner critic telling you you “can’t draw” (because you can’t see what you’re doing, so you can’t criticise yourself). It also connects your hand to your brain and allows you to draw what you see, not what you think you see.

The lines are always lovely. They are free flowing and fluid as opposed to what I call “furry lines” that show all insecurities, second thoughts and apprehensions.

Read more:
How to set up a kids’ art studio at home (and learn to love the mess)

2. Make your own brushes

In a previous article, I talked about how to make paint.

Another similar activity is making brushes or “mark-making tools” as I like to call them. You can use a range of materials from outside or even the recycling bin: a few sticks, masking tape and some string. Tie a bunch of twigs and leaves or feathers together and bind them to the top of a stick.

Why use not the bottom of the stick to make a double-ended tool? Or cut up an old sponge and tie it to a stick.

Try really long sticks or short stubby sticks. The size and shape of the stick will change the way you use it and affect the marks you will make.

Dip your tools in ink and try them out on reams of butcher’s paper rolled out in a space where children feel free to move around and put their body into it. You can use paint too, though you might want to add water to make it runnier.

This encourages becoming comfortable with uncertainty (who knows what marks these new tools will make?).

In this context “failure” might look like the tool not making the mark the child had in their mind. This forces the child to either go with the mark it makes or go back and redesign their tool.

This helps children to become comfortable with that idea of testing, experimenting and creating your way through an issue.

3. Change your medium and your size

Willow charcoal – made from burnt willow branches – is an excellent medium for experimenting with and enables children to “draw big”.

It can be crumbly and smudges easily (it’s also extremely messy) so it can make some unexpected marks and children can explore a range of tones from black to light grey.

Children can use the tip of it to draw lines, or use the side of the stick to create wide shapes and shades.

Get some large pieces of paper and encourage your child to draw as big as they can to create huge gestural drawings with the charcoal. This encourages kids to move out of their comfort zone (and beyond A4 paper).

Challenge them to upscale what they see, such as flowers or their favourite object. Or put on some music and suggest to your child they draw what they hear and feel.

If you don’t have charcoal, you could also use jumbo chalk and draw on the footpath.

Another approach is to sit on a piece of paper and get them to trace their bodies, move, trace themselves and again, like Australian artist Julie Rrap.

If the page gets covered in charcoal just keep going, cover the paper completely with charcoal and then use a eraser to draw “in reverse”.

As I have said before, try not to worry about the mess. This is also part of being an artist – and learning to think like one, too.

Read more:
Stand back and avoid saying ‘be careful!’: how to help your child take risks at the park

Naomi Zouwer 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. Take risks, embrace failure and be comfortable with uncertainty: 3 activities to help your child think like an artist – https://theconversation.com/take-risks-embrace-failure-and-be-comfortable-with-uncertainty-3-activities-to-help-your-child-think-like-an-artist-214142

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shea X. Fan, Senior Lecturer in International Business, School of Management, RMIT University

Loneliness is a much discussed social issue, but it is rarely considered to be a workplace problem that needs to be managed like other health issues at work.

The Social Connection in Australia 2023 report acknowledges loneliness hurts businesses, as it causes employee absenteeism and reduced productivity.

However, people are often unaware particular work roles, environments, responsibilities and work-related relocation is often what causes loneliness.

These work conditions may cause social isolation, distort interpersonal relationships, and prevent employees from developing or maintaining social connections – all of which are a catalyst for loneliness.

The expression “it is lonely at the top” suggests senior managers or chief executives are especially likely to suffer from loneliness.

Their position and associated power makes authentic workplace relationships rare because they are socially and psychologically distanced from most people in their organisation.

As leaders, they are held responsible for making significant decisions. Having nobody to share the risks and responsibilities with is an implicit social deficiency that increases workplace loneliness.

Similarly, loneliness is also a classic occupational hazard for business entrepreneurs who are prepared to take risks in pursuit of goals developing their own businesses. In 2019 and 2022, we surveyed 363 entrepreneurs in Indonesia and the United Kingdom, and found 50% reported they sometimes or always experienced loneliness.

This rate was consistent with an article published in Harvard Business Review in 1984 written by D. E. Gumpert and D. P. Boyd titled, The loneliness of the small-business owner. Their research found 52% of the business owners researched frequently experienced loneliness.

It appears that loneliness experienced by entrepreneurs has not changed over 40 years. Entrepreneurs’ responsibilities for running and developing their businesses substantially reduce the time they can share with families and friends.

Read more:
Can Australian employers stop you working from home? Here’s what the law says

Entrepreneurs may also have to withhold negative information about the business and pose a strong and positive image to others in order to retain resources and support for their companies. The nature of this line of work turns them into “lone wolves”.

Loneliness is also found among employees relocated overseas by their multinational corporations. It is common among expatriates separated from their social networks, to find it difficult to develop new connections because of cultural differences, language barriers or insufficient social resources.

Remote work accelerated by the COVID pandemic has given people the flexibility to work from home but it has also worsened social isolation as a result of fewer opportunities for informal chats and face-to-face bonding with colleagues and managers.

Although most companies are keen to see workers return to offices, the continuation of hybrid forms of working creates challenges in addressing work-related loneliness as many people continue to work partly from home.

Similarly, digital technology has created another modern work phenomenon, gig work. While gig workers may enjoy flexible schedules, the nature of their work provides few opportunities to develop deep relationships with colleagues.

Given the pervasiveness of workplace loneliness and the challenges it poses, it is surprising that there is little public awareness of how to deal with it.

To stimulate more interest in this topic and to help ease this modern pandemic, our research, soon to be released，proposes resource-based solutions to combat loneliness. We also identify strategies for both individuals and organisations to deal with loneliness:

Strategies for individuals

• Understand your desired level of social goals.

Loneliness arises when desired social relations are not satisfied by actual relations. People need to be clear about their social needs at work. Some may be happy with a few strong relationships, some may prefer broad but weak social connections. Understanding personal social goals helps employees notice when they might need to develop appropriate strategies to battle loneliness.

• Evaluate personal resources that make developing social connections difficult.
Employees need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of personal factors and change them if they are preventing social connections. For instance, is the lack of contact caused by our personality, lack of social skills, or low social motivation? As individuals, we cultivate our social connections, so we are the key to shaping them.

• Do not waste daily resources. Time, energy and mood are also resources, but they fluctuate daily. They can also be used to achieve social goals. We all have regular feelings of being time-poor, tired, not wanting to talk to people or to be social. This causes daily opportunities to develop connections to be wasted. Desired social relations are developed gradually, and we need work on this regularly to achieve our desired level of connection.

Strategies for companies

• Audit work practices and identify what causes social isolation. Organisations need to acknowledge that work practices can cause loneliness for employees and find creative solutions. For example, they could reduce work intensity and give employees time to socialise; they could help expatriates maintain old social bonds and develop new connections in their new work location.

• Remove social barriers for employees by cultivating an inclusive work environment. An inclusive environment is especially beneficial for demographically diverse employees. Organisations have the power to promote and normalise inclusion, shape employees’ social behaviours and help minority groups to develop desired social ties in the workplace.

• Provide opportunities for employees to have occasional and repeated face-to-face interactions. Organisations can offer a variety of socialising opportunities. These might include mentoring and support programs, social events, holiday celebrations, coffee breaks and team-building activities.

Of course, employees must be proactive and take charge of overcoming their loneliness. They can begin this by developing or expanding their repertoire of personal resources and by taking up opportunities offered by their employer.

These investments in alleviating workplace loneliness will result in employees having a stronger sense of belonging to organisations and being more productive.

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. Workplace loneliness is the modern pandemic damaging lives and hurting businesses – https://theconversation.com/workplace-loneliness-is-the-modern-pandemic-damaging-lives-and-hurting-businesses-213873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miles Pattenden, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

The medieval is part of the mosaic of modern Australia. Our nation’s heritage on this island continent is full of it: in aesthetics, institutions, laws, languages, identities, moralities. Indeed, the very idea of a university is medieval – a concept developed by the Catholic Church around the year 1100.

We have a crown and common law because of old-time kings called Henry. Sydney suburbs called St Ives, St Clair, St Leonards, St Marys reflect medieval England’s big-name saints.

Melbourne’s Luna Park has a giant gaping mouth you walk through to the amusements. Why? Because a medieval design mediated over centuries showed the gates of Hell this way.

All this is part of why the Australian Catholic University’s recent decision to axe dozens of humanities jobs, with the medieval and early modern studies program entirely disbanded, is so controversial.

People sometimes say the Middle Ages don’t matter in this bright new modern age. They were a time of backwardness, violence, racism, homophobia, witch-burnings and so on. Nothing like modern Australia!

There’s no point in taxpayer dollars being spent studying a bunch of lords and peasants and weird men in dresses. If we want to know about that, why not just watch Game of Thrones?

Getting medieval

Medievalists interpret and explain the many meanings imbued in cultural forms and structures we navigate daily. You think the Middle Ages was just a parade of kings and queens – “one damn thing after another” to quote Alan Bennett’s The History Boys? You couldn’t be more wrong.

One “medieval” project at ACU today shows how old religious institutions responded to the problems of housing precarity and homelessness. (Anyone complaining about rent or mortgage payments lately?) Another, shows how contemporary conspiracy theories derive from medieval models. A third, how the solace of medieval spirituality was a key resource for men dying of AIDS in 1980s New South Wales.

You think we have a problem with antisemites now? Let me tell you about Norwich 1144. Islamophobia? You might be interested in the Crusades! Homophobia? What about the medieval legend of “sodomite Christmas”. (Jesus was born and all the gays died?)

Even those Game of Thrones producers have to get their ideas and aesthetics from somewhere. Usually, it’s from what medievalists have told them life was like back then. They talk to us, we consult for them. Industry partnership.

In fact, and paradoxical as it might seem, medieval history has always moved with the times. The fantastic success of the medieval on film courses (and the like) reflects this.

Medievalists just don’t ask the same questions today that the great beardy Bishop Stubbs did when he wrote his Constitutional History of England (the first book I remember mentioned in my first undergrad lecture). We’re concerned with many of the same questions and problems that other boffins study in social sciences, sometimes even hard sciences, law, economics, business and philosophy.

What does it mean to have an emotion, for instance? Neuroscientists can give you one idea. But they can’t help you describe the feeling. A medieval mystic like Margery Kempe can. And the fact that Kempe describes it differently to us is itself important self-knowledge.

It reminds us that the meanings of words change. So many stoushes in Australian public life would be resolved if people could just get a grip on that.

Protecting the narrative around our heritage

For those of us of a liberal disposition there’s another compelling reason to keep the medieval close. We surrender it to less liberal people if we don’t.

My colleague at Deakin, Helen Young, has just won an ARC Future Fellowship to study (among other things) how neo-Nazis and other hate groups use the Middle Ages as a setting for their sick fantasies of white supremacism.

Read more:
The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists

The Catholic Church, an organisation which cops a lot of criticism in Australia, deserves credit for its efforts to preserve an unsanitised, objectively studied medieval past for everyone – giving us resources to counter those who would use it as propaganda against us. The Vatican Library, in the heart of Rome, for instance, isn’t just a setting for Dan Brown page-turners. It is a great treasure of the modern cultural world.

Notorious nonsense that the medieval is “ornamental” to the modern – a silliness once espoused by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education minister in Britain – needs to be countered all the time. Such sentiments never lie quietly for long.

Just last year, then-Minister Stuart Robert said studying Elizabethan theatre – Shakespeare! – is only important to Great Britain (a political formation that did not exist in Elizabeth’s time).

We need to protect our cultural heritage from efforts to erase them. Especially at a time when we’re debating profound questions about our own society – how we recognise First Nations peoples in Australia, what it means to be Australian – we should make sure we retain a good understanding of the ongoing impacts of the European heritages that are common to many of us.

It’s a necessary resource for our civic debates.

Miles Pattenden has received funding from the UK Government, the Spanish Government, and the European Commission.

– ref. From Luna Park to neo-Nazis – why the Middle Ages still matters to middle Australia – https://theconversation.com/from-luna-park-to-neo-nazis-why-the-middle-ages-still-matters-to-middle-australia-214246

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

Mike Pezzullo, one of Canberra’s most powerful and certainly most controversial public servants, cannot survive the revelation of the trove of text messages showing him blatantly inserting himself into the political process.

Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, has been stood aside while his extraordinary behaviour, exposed by Nine Entertainment, is scrutinised by a former public service commissioner, Lynelle Briggs. But the end of the story is predictable.

In the tsunami of encrypted texts, running over five years and sent to Scott Briggs (no relation to Lynelle Briggs), a Liberal insider and confidant of prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, Pezzullo repeatedly lobbied for his departmental interests and his views.

He dissed ministers in the way of these interests or those (and other people) he didn’t rate. He used Briggs to seek leverage with the then PMs, asking for his opinions to be passed on. Briggs was happy to comply.

Nine says it learned of the messages “via a third party who obtained lawful access to them”.

Pezzullo is a one-off in the today’s public service. He can perhaps be partly understood by referring back to the so-called bureaucratic “mandarins” of decades ago. They ran their departments with iron grips, and in some cases were, or tried to be, as powerful as ministers, or more so. They gave no quarter in bureaucratic battles.

The mandarins were “players”. Pezzullo is a “player”.

He’s tough and polarising, with supporters and bitter enemies. Critics have long questioned his judgement. On security matters, he’s the hawks’ hawk. While at first blush his texts appear highly partisan, that is too simplistic an interpretation. He fights bureaucratic and policy/ideological battles, rather than being directly party-political.

His addiction to texting is certainly bipartisan. Within the Albanese government they joke about it starting first thing in the morning and running well into the night.

As a public servant, Pezzullo has served both sides of politics. When in the defence department, he was lead author of the Rudd government’s 2009 defence white paper, which raised the hackles of China. Earlier, he was a senior staffer to Kim Beazley when Beazley was opposition leader. His primary interest is defence – he would have liked nothing better than to head the defence department.

When Anthony Albanese won government, some in Labor wanted Pezzullo gone. He survived not least because the new home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, in charge of this huge, sprawling empire, needed an experienced hand.

In some ways, Pezzullo is a stickler for process – as we saw when Morrison was trying to make political use of a boat headed for Australia on election day – which makes these texts all the more shocking. But he portrayed himself as acting in broader interests, telling Briggs at one point during the 2018 battle over the prime ministership, “I say that from a policy perspective and not from a Liberal leadership perspective”.

Pezzullo lobbied relentlessly for the creation of the home affairs “super” department, which Turnbull set up in December 2017 to placate the ambitious Peter Dutton.

Those who resisted its establishment, particularly then attorney-general George Brandis, became Pezzullo’s targets. He accused Brandis of “lawyering” public servants “into a state of befuddlement”.

Pezzullo is particularly fond of military imagery. During the struggle to get home affairs up, he texted Briggs, “I am running deep and silent. Won’t come up to periscope depth for a while”. In another message he said the attorney-general’s department needed to be “put to the sword” on a matter, then “we can break out of the Normandy beachhead”. (In a 2021 Anzac Day message to staff Pezzullo caused a public ruckus when he wrote of “the drums of war” beating.)

Moderates were an all-round worry in the Pezzullo texts. Marise Payne, in the defence portfolio, was “completely ineffectual”, “a problem” and “doesn’t have a clear view of the national interest”. Julie Bishop received short shrift; he “almost had a heart attack” when she put her hand up as a candidate in the 2018 upheaval. He was sarcastically relieved when Briggs assured him she had few numbers.

In that battle, in which Dutton (Pezzullo’s minister) challenged Turnbull and Morrison ultimately emerged as prime minister, Pezzullo was concerned about who would end up his minister.

“You need a right winger in there – people smugglers will be watching”, he texted Briggs.

“Any suggestion of a moderate going in would be potentially lethal viz” for Operation Sovereign Borders, he said.

Pezzullo had little time for the head of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson: he was not up to the job and “entirely lacking in self awareness”. In one of those nice ironies of politics, Parkinson was commissioned by the Labor government to lead O’Neil’s migration review.

Pezzullo, whose tug-of-war appearances at Senate estimates hearings are often compulsory viewing, complained to Briggs in 2020, after enduring a particularly long session, that the hearings were “actually a concern for our democracy”. But he boasted that “in batting terms we are 0-400”.

Free speech came well behind security in Pezzullo’s priorities. After an awkward story by reporter Annika Smethurst, who was subjected to a police raid, Pezzullo reportedly argued for a revival of the D-notice system, under which editors were requested not to publish certain information affecting defence or national security. It didn’t happen.

Pezzullo in one text asked Briggs, “Please keep our conversations confidential. Tricky tight rope for me”. Tricky indeed. The player obsessed by security has been undone by some unidentified power play that has left him totally exposed.

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. View from The Hill: ‘Player’ Mike Pezzullo undone by power play – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-player-mike-pezzullo-undone-by-power-play-214262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Podger, Honorary Professor of Public Policy, Australian National University

The revelations in the Nine newspapers that Mike Pezzullo, secretary of the powerful Home Affairs department, shared with Liberal Party powerbroker Scott Briggs are certainly extraordinary. But, just like the revelations about Robodebt from the royal commission, they must not be treated as an isolated case but as evidence of serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service (APS).

So what is expected from public servants in terms of their relationship with government? The answer is in the Public Service Act, which states secretaries – those at the very top of each department – must uphold and promote the APS Values and Employment Principles. One of those values is impartiality:

The APS is apolitical and provides the government with advice that is frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence.

The conduct of the public service is overseen by the public service commissioner, who issues legal directions about how bureaucrats must conduct themselves consistent with each APS Value.

Regarding being impartial, this means, among other things:

• serving the government of the day with high quality professional support, irrespective of which political party is in power and of personal political beliefs

• ensuring the individual’s actions do not provide grounds for a reasonable person to conclude the individual could not serve the government of the day impartially

• ensuring management and staffing decisions are made on a basis that is independent of the political party system, free from political bias and not influenced by the individual’s political beliefs

• implementing government policies in a way that is free from bias, and in accordance with the law.

The APS Code of Conduct requires public servants

at all times to behave in a way that upholds the APS Values and Employment Principles, and the integrity and good reputation of the employee’s Agency and the APS.

In the event the head of an agency (including a departmental secretary) is alleged to have breached the code, the commissioner is responsible for inquiring into the allegation and reporting to the prime minister. Penalties for breaches include dismissal.

Read more:
View from The Hill: A soft reprimand from one hard man to another

From the details in the article, it is understandable Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has referred the matter to the commissioner. By implication, the article alleges breaches of the code for not upholding the APS value of impartiality: Pezzullo’s alleged actions not only suggest partisanship, but also lack of objectivity and allowing his personal political beliefs to affect his professional support for the government. It’s extremely difficult to see how the messages Pezzullo allegedly sent to Briggs could be seen to be consistent with upholding the values, let alone promoting them as he is required to do.

Pezzullo may claim the material revealed in the article was private, as demonstrated by its encryption. He may also highlight the references the article said he included about his own neutrality. But it would be hard to suggest he was not trying to influence decisions by the government, or that the alleged messages were not highly political.

Moreover, when a person is as senior as Pezzullo, trying to distinguish between public and private behaviour is problematic. I recall telling Max Moore-Wilton, former secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet under John Howard, that his presence at Howard’s election night function in 2001 was inconsistent with his obligation to uphold and promote non-partisanship, despite his claims this was a private matter in his private time. I noted that, had Kim Beazley won that election, Moore-Wilton would have needed to be able to demonstrate his capacity to serve the new prime minister professionally and impartially.

Trust is the critical ingredient of a secretary’s relationship with their minister. And a secretary does not know who their minister will be tomorrow or next year, whether within the current government or under a new government.

So trust has to be achieved across the parliament and with the Australian public. It’s hard to see that Pezzullo’s messages are in any way consistent with such trust. A host of Liberal ministers, had they known of the messages, would have had no trust in Pezzullo, let alone a Labor minister.

At a different time, Pezzullo was on Beazley’s staff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does raise the question of whether he has behaved, to use the late professor of public administration Peter Aucoin’s term, in a “promiscuously partisan” way. That is, crossing the boundary between the public service and politics.

Read more:
After robodebt, here’s how Australia can have a truly ‘frank and fearless’ public service again

A central issue in the Robodebt case was whether senior public servants were being overly responsive to their ministers and ignoring their obligations to uphold and promote the values (and the law). Public service failures in the sports rorts and Morrison multiple-ministries cases have raised a similar question. Aucoin drew attention to this problem in Australia and other Anglophone countries over a decade ago. Clearly, it has become a lot worse in Australia since then.

My own view is that the contract system for secretaries, which means they are constantly under an implicit threat of losing their jobs, is contributing to excessive willingness to please. There is evidence of some sensible actions by the current APS commissioner and the secretary of prime minister and cabinet to place more emphasis on merit in the appointment process.

But more needs to be done, including in the legislation, if we are to rebuild the trust that is essential between the public service and all sides of politics, the parliament and the Australian public.

Another possible measure, but one not directly relevant in the Pezzullo case, is to prohibit any senior public servant from being a member of any political party. That might put some meat on the requirement to promote, as well as uphold, the value of impartiality.

Andrew Podger 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. Pezzullo story points to serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service – https://theconversation.com/pezzullo-story-points-to-serious-systemic-problems-in-the-australian-public-service-214253

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Fujak, Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

The Wallabies have suffered a record-breaking defeat to Wales at the Rugby World Cup. This represents Australia’s worst result in a World Cup match and its biggest-ever losing margin to Wales. And it will almost certainly end Australia’s 2023 World Cup campaign at the group stage for the first time.

Given pundits had suggested a strong World Cup performance was vital for the health of the game domestically, the horror result heaps further pressure onto a sport shrinking out of the mainstream and facing numerous challenges.

Sport Management 101: Investing in grassroots and junior development

A notable feature of the Australian sport system is that while organisations such as the Australian Football League, National Rugby League and Rugby Australia oversee professional football leagues and generate millions of dollars in commercial revenue, they are also tasked with looking after their sports at the community level.

The AFL understands this investment in the grassroots level is not only vital to producing the next batch of superstar players, but also key to ensuring the sport remains embedded within local communities.

Rugby Australia has not valued this necessity, with World Cup results illustrating the deleterious impact of falling behind competitors when it comes to grassroots investment.

My colleagues and I have performed a study of Rugby Australia’s financial performance since 1980. We discovered the code’s professionalisation in the mid-1990s resulted in a drastic shift in how the organisation spent its money. A clear implication from the analysis was a significant divestment from grassroots development in the past 20 years.

In 2001, 13.76% of Rugby Australia expenditure (A$7.06 million) related to community rugby. By 2015, this had hit a record low of 2.65% ($2.37 million).

And while Rugby Australia spent $4.3 million (3.59%) on community rugby in 2019, this paled in comparison to how much the AFL spent on game development ($58.8 million, or 13.7% of its overall expenditure), as well as the NRL ($43.3 million, or 8.2% of its overall expenditure).

This lack of resourcing for community rugby prompted former Wallaby Brett Papworth to quip:

[Rugby Australia has] chopped all the trees down and been a fantastic logging business and they’ve built massive timber mills, but they’ve forgotten to plant any new trees.

This lack of new tree growth appears to now be biting the code in 2023.

Fighting a losing battle for talent

Contributing further to the Wallabies’ struggles has been the somewhat unique situation whereby a significant proportion of the code’s elite juniors ‘defect’ to another sport upon turning professional.

Many rugby-playing junior athletes developed in the private school system – think Cameron Murray, Angus Crighton, Patrick Carrigan or Kalyn Ponga – instead choose the NRL and have become household names in the competing code.

Certainly, the NRL has benefited from becoming the destination code for many union-trained athletes, a phenomenon Melbourne Storm captain Christian Welch astutely described in economic terms as a “free rider problem” for Rugby Australia.

Read more:
Are the Wallabies’ struggles a sign of rugby union’s decline in Australia?

Rugby’s challenge here is two-fold.

First, with 16 Australian NRL clubs to Super Rugby’s five, there are simply more professional opportunities available to aspiring young players – and they are far more lucrative, too.

The pragmatic reality for aspiring athletes is that the lure of a professional contract is often far more important than the rugby code they play. This is particularly the case for Pasifika rugby players, for whom maximising professional incomes is tied to familial and cultural priorities.

Second has been the growing financial superiority of the NRL compared to Australian rugby.

The salary caps (the total value a team can spend on player salaries) of the codes are instructive. Both the NRL and Super Rugby salary caps were around $4.4 million in 2012. Since then, however, the NRL cap has grown 275% to $12.1 million in 2023, while Super Rugby’s cap has lifted by only 25% to $5.5 million.

Rugby Australia has taken a more bullish public tone in recent times, suggesting the allure of participating in international competition will entice NRL stars to rugby union via the Wallabies.

Thus far, however, the code has secured only one such emerging star in Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii – and it required one of the largest contracts in Australian sport to do so. Poor Wallaby performances will only drive up the cost of buying established talent.

Where to next for rugby union in Australia?

Rugby Australia is in an increasingly perilous market position, with declining on-field performance only adding to a vicious spiral of downward pressures.

It was announced in recent days that Rugby Australia has disengaged from private equity discussions on account of disappointing valuations. This low commercial valuation was said to stem from the extension of its existing broadcast deal with Channel Nine to 2025, originally valued at $30 million per year.

By contrast, the AFL’s broadcast deal commencing in 2025 will generate $643 million in annual revenue, illustrative of the gulf between the “rich” and “poor” in Australian sport.

This gulf is only widening. In 1996, rugby union’s overall revenue ($21 million) was a quarter of the AFL’s ($85 million). By 2022, Rugby Australia’s revenue ($129 million) was just 14% of the AFL’s ($944 million).

Of particular concern is that Rugby Australia has historically focused its efforts on the men’s national team, which has now failed to yield a dividend. This focus prompted sharp criticism recently from athletes in the women’s national team, who called out perceived broken promises and gender inequalities by Rugby Australia.

Rugby Australia’s semi-professional women’s rugby program is now firmly behind both other national rugby unions, as well as the many vibrant domestic women’s leagues such as the Women’s Big Bash League, AFLW and NRLW.

Rugby Australia seems to thus be stuck with a wicked problem. The code appears underfunded at the community level, the domestic professional level and in the women’s game, yet it is not generating the revenue required to make improvements in these areas.

Meanwhile, the code’s largest competitors continue to get stronger, making it ever more difficult to cultivate the new fans required to generate higher revenues.

With a highly anticipated Lions tour in 2025 and the home World Cup in 2027 both on the horizon, the question now is whether Australian rugby will be in a position to capitalise on these opportunities.

Prior to the Wallabies’ final loss at the World Cup, Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan offered some curious advice: “For all the Wallaby detractors, don’t watch the game.” McLennan well may have this request granted.

Read more:
The Barassi Line: a globally unique divider splitting Australia’s footy fans

Hunter Fujak 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. Australian rugby has reached its lowest point. How did it get here? – https://theconversation.com/australian-rugby-has-reached-its-lowest-point-how-did-it-get-here-214255

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

Today’s employment white paper has adopted the broadest-ever definition of what “full employment” means for Australia.

The new paper says closer to 2.8 million Australians are either underemployed or out of work – equivalent to one-fifth of the current workforce. That new estimate is much higher than the official unemployment total of 539,700.

Going further than any of the previous employment white papers over the past 80 years, the new report defines full employment as meaning

everyone who wants a job should be able to find one without searching for too long

While it commits the government to keeping employment as close as possible to the current maximum sustainable level “consistent with low and stable inflation”, it goes further, noting that this measure – the so-called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) – has been falling and is hard to estimate.

The white paper still cautions that “full employment” does not mean zero unemployment.

There will always be some “frictional unemployment” (as people change jobs) and “structural unemployment” (as industries decline or skills do not match needs). But it commits the government to minimise “cyclical unemployment”: unemployment caused by the state of the economy.

It incorporates into its definition of full employment “underemployment”, which happens when people who do have jobs are unable to get the number of hours they want.

Underemployment and unemployment approach 2.8 million

While 539,700 Australians are unemployed, there are another 1 million who are employed but want to work more. And there are another 1.3 million “potential workers” who are interested in working, but not currently actively looking.

This lifts the total number of Australians who are in some way unemployed to 2.8 million, according to the white paper.

The white paper also talks of “inclusive full employment”, by which it means “broadening labour market opportunities” to encourage more people to seek jobs.

Economists refer to this as further increasing the participation rate, which is already near a record high.

Enhanced support for childcare (already announced in Labor’s first budget) is one of the sorts of measures that would help, reducing barriers to work for parents.

Another, announced in this white paper, is a permanent extension of the A$11,800 work bonus for pensioners over age pension age and eligible veterans, which was temporarily lifted from $7,800 to $11,800 in the October 2022 budget.

Read more:
Employment white paper to deliver more highly qualified workers in net zero, care and digitisation

Employment white papers date back to WWII

This isn’t the first Australian government employment white paper.

The very first was released by the wartime Curtin government in 1945, entitled Full Employment in Australia.

Curtin wanted to ensure that post-war unemployment would not return to the extraordinarily high levels experienced in the 1930s.

That 1945 white paper was inspired by the British white paper released in 1944, which set out an ambitious plan to carry forward the high employment achieved during wartime into peacetime.

A large team of economists and other experts, led by HC “Nugget” Coombs, spent almost a year preparing the white paper, producing eight drafts.

No specific target for our unemployment rate

As with today’s white paper, the 1945 full employment white paper didn’t put a number on the unemployment rate which corresponds to “full employment” – although early drafts of the 1945 paper included numbers ranging from 2% to 5%.

The 1965 Vernon Report on the economy was more optimistic, defining full employment as an unemployment rate of 1 to 1.5%.

The Keating government’s Working Nation paper – released in 1994 when unemployment was almost 10% – adopted a target of 5% by 2000. That wasn’t quite met – unemployment remained above 6% in 2000, but fell to 5% by 2004.

By 2010, many economists regarded 5% as effectively “full employment”.

In June this year, the present Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, defined full employment as

the point at which there is a balance between demand and supply in the labour market (and in the markets for goods and services) with inflation at the inflation target

She nominated an unemployment rate of around 4.5%.

Australian economists surveyed by The Conversation and the Economic Society of Australia last month nominated 4%. Curiously, that’s the same rate nominated by the Department of Postwar Reconstruction’s Chief Economist, Trevor Swan, in work for the full employment white paper in 1945.

The words, but not the numbers, in today’s employment white paper are consistent with an unemployment rate of 4% or lower.

Read more:
We can and should keep unemployment below 4%, say top economists

Few ideas for lifting productivity

The white paper identifies labour productivity (output per hour worked) as crucial to increasing the purchasing power of wages, yet details few ideas for increasing it.

Labour productivity has slowed over recent decades, and in recent years has actually fallen. The causes are not obvious. Some of it may be a temporary reflection of the very desirable reductions in unemployment.

Workers who have been out of work for a while are, at first, likely to produce less than workers already in work.

Declining labour productivity is also likely to reflect the gradual shift from manufacturing to services.

The white paper says the services sector now accounts for more than 80% of employment, compared to around 50% at the turn of the 20th century.

Productivity in many services is hard to increase. A haircut or a live performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by a string quartet takes about as many hours of labour now as it did a century ago.

Read more:
Government’s employment white paper commits to jobs for all who want them – and help to get them

But weak productivity probably also reflects other things. The white paper refers to evidence that dynamism and innovation have declined in Australia. This is not easy to address. The government’s two-year competition review will help.

And low investment is another problem. Companies might not be moving fast enough to equip workers with the tools they need to help them produce more.

A more robust economy might encourage them to invest, as could tax changes – but they were beyond the scope of this white paper.

John Hawkins was formerly a senior economist in the Australian Treasury.

Selwyn Cornish 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. 1 in 5 Australian workers are either underemployed or out of work: white paper – https://theconversation.com/1-in-5-australian-workers-are-either-underemployed-or-out-of-work-white-paper-210967

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Isakhan, Professor of International Politics, Deakin University

Almost a decade ago, the Sunni jihadist network known as the Islamic State (IS) declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate after they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.

In response, tens of thousands of Shia men joined a complex patchwork of militias to fight against IS. Many of these militias are notoriously violent and directly loyal to Iran’s theocratic state.

But very little is known about how these Shia militias were so quickly and so effectively mobilised. In our research, we have taken a novel approach, examining the many popular music videos produced by these militias.

These music videos drew on a complex cocktail of historical myths and contemporary clergymen to mobilise Iraq’s Shia population to fight the IS.

Read more:
Understanding Islamic State: where does it come from and what does it want?

Foundational myths, historical grievances

The popular music videos explicitly reference a deeply held set of religious myths and symbols that have informed Shia politics since its inception.

One video shows images of militiamen driving towards the front-lines and firing from a bunker at IS targets.

The singer extols the religious virtues of fighting the IS by comparing those killed today with the Shia martyrs at the Battle of Karbala:

We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are supporters of Hussein.

The divide between the Sunni and Shia sects dates back to the early years of Islam.

A debate emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death about who should lead the Islamic community. The majority accepted the authority of the Prophet’s senior companion, Abu Bakr. A minority, later identified as Shiites, believed only a blood relative of the Prophet – in particular, his cousin Ali – had the right to lead.

In the year 680, the division between the two sects escalated at the Battle of Karbala, where Ali’s son Hussein and many of his followers were defeated and executed by Sunni forces.

The legend of the Battle of Karbala has come to symbolise the historical injustice of the Shia faithful at the hands of the Sunni majority. It is commemorated at the annual Ashura festival in which Shiites reenact the battle, including by self-flagellation.

The emotive lyrics and tone of the song are specifically designed to resonate with this history of suffering.

Read more:
What is the Shia-Sunni divide?

The Shia jihad against the IS

The popular music videos produced by different Shia militias also draw on fatwas (religious edicts) issued by several prominent Shia clerics in response to the violence of the IS.

In 2014, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS.

He called for a mass Shia mobilisation, arguing

It is the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to take up arms to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.

Some popular music videos explicitly cite the fatwas of Sistani and other clerics, encouraging their young supporters to heed these calls. A short clip shows armed members of one militia chanting: “Al-Sistani is like a crown on our heads. Your wish is our command.”

One very slickly produced music video refers to both historical grievances over the failure to recognise Ali as the legitimate heir of the Prophet Muhammad and to the centrality of Sistani’s fatwa to their decision to fight the IS:

We are the Turkmen [of Iraq]

We follow Ali’s path

Iraq must live in peace and happiness

When Sistani orders us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS

We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities, and we defend our holy sites.

As the singer recites each verse, the footage shows heavily armed Shia men posing in front of a tank. It also features live action footage from various battles against the IS, including advancing on key targets, firing machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mobilising young men

These videos serve as a unique archive of the war against the IS, demonstrating the ways in which these militias found novel ways to mobilise young men to fight by drawing on a rich catalogue of Shia religious symbolism as well as the fatwas of clerics like Sistani.

Slick popular music videos draw on a rich catalogue of historical motifs of suffering as well as the contemporary edicts of key clergymen, produced by different Shia militias and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

These evocative and poignant songs played an underappreciated and under-examined part in mobilising young men to fight back against the horrors of the IS, indicating the powerful role popular culture plays in contemporary warfare.

Read more:
The Islamic State flag hijacks Muslim words of faith. Banning it could cause confusion and unfair targeting of Muslims

Benjamin Isakhan receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Department of Defence.

Ali Akbar 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. How popular music videos drove the fight against the Islamic State – https://theconversation.com/how-popular-music-videos-drove-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state-213148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeffrey McNeill, Senior Lecturer in Resource & Environmental Planning, Massey University

RMA – three letters that have struck fear into a generation of farmers, developers, politicians and anyone building a house. Or so legend would have it.

Whatever its original goal of promoting sustainable management of natural and physical resources, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has long been dogged by claims of unnecessary and inefficient rules that strangle innovation and progress.

The subject of any number of reviews since its inception in 1991, the act was finally replaced in August this year with the Natural and Built Environments Act (NBEA).

This new law established a framework that replaces the RMA’s plethora of regional, city and district plans with a single, unified system. At the centre of it sits te Oranga o te Taiao, a concept taken from te ao Māori that is described in the official literature as:

[…] an intergenerational ethic that speaks to the health and wellbeing of the natural environment, and the essential relationship between a healthy environment and its capacity to sustain all life.

For the Labour government that introduced the NBEA, it is mission accomplished. But with the election campaign into its final weeks, there is still great uncertainty about what will happen if there’s a change of government. In short, is the RMA really gone?

Town and country

Labour’s main potential coalition partner, the Green Party, appears committed to the new legislation. But the centre-right and right parties have other ideas. National, ACT and NZ First all want the NBEA gone.

National and NZ First both want to resurrect the RMA as an interim measure while new legislation is developed. National promises to repeal the NBEA with some urgency, before its new regional planning panels are established.

One of National’s proposals is to split the management of built and natural environments into different laws. There is logic to this – the former is about improving quality of life for individuals and communities, while the latter addresses the sustainability of underlying biophysical systems within which we live.

Read more:
Incremental environmental change can be as hazardous as a sudden shock – managing these ‘slow-burning’ risks is vital

Put another way, one enables us to live, the other makes life worth living. For example, long commute times and poorly designed dwellings degrade the quality of life for the people affected. But they don’t directly affect biodiversity or natural water quality. The two are related, but the goals are separate.

For its part, NZ First wants to “temporarily reinstate the RMA before replacing that with a Town and Country Planning Act modelled on legislation used by the Republic of Ireland”. This harks back to 1977 legislation of the same name, which created many of the problems the RMA was designed to address.

In fact, the Irish model quoted by NZ First is not dissimilar to Labour’s NBEA. Both avoid market-led decision making by developing national and regional planning frameworks. But “Project Ireland 2040” is far more ambitious, incorporating the United Nations sustainable development goals and seeking to integrate economic development and education within the planning mix.

Back to court

The NBEA and Irish policies represent a far more planned economy than we’ve become used to since the mid-1980s. Perhaps because of that, ACT simply promises to repeal the NBEA without resuscitating the RMA.

The party proposes separating urban development from environmental protection, and wants to focus environmental management on property rights. Changes to property should be allowed unless they directly affect others in some way.

Read more:
Trees, rivers and mountains are gaining legal status – but it’s not been a quick fix for environmental problems

The policy is reminiscent of 19th century laws and the reliance on a “tort of nuisance” for dispute resolution. Don’t like what the neighbours are doing? Take them to court – more specifically, a planning tribunal established to settle disputes and determine compensation when negotiations break down.

Theoretically elegant, this solution inevitably involves significant legal costs and would potentially pit individuals with limited resources against large corporations or city councils. (It’s also unclear who would speak for the trees and fish, who will struggle to get to the planning tribunal.)

In practice, such a policy could see some very upset property owners who find their neighbours building medium-density units or social housing. And in theory, without environmental laws and some rules in a city plan, it would still be a property dispute even if they planned a “harmless” waste dump.

Read more:
Freshwater quality is one of New Zealanders’ biggest concerns – water-trading ‘clubs’ could be part of the solution

The once and future RMA

If there is a change of government, then, what might we expect? Firstly, it is worth remembering the bipartisan origins of the RMA. While it was instigated by a Labour government in the 1980s, it was National that saw the bill into law – with very little substantive change to the draft legislation.

Indeed, Shane Jones, now number two on NZ First’s list, was an architect of the original RMA during the law reform process at the time.

National in 2024 might also decide that unpicking the NBEA could achieve little other than to scratch healing scabs. If a National-led government opted to simply make changes at the margins, these might include re-configuring the composition of the regional planning committees to meet any concerns about co-governance from coalition partners.

But much of what is now in place under the RMA will keep ticking over anyway. The NBEA has a long transition period, with the Ministry for the Environment advising it will be ten years before it becomes fully functional.

Any new government will need time to develop new legislation if it wants to make significant change. In the meantime, environmental management will be business as usual under the RMA system, regardless of the election result. Complaining about it may well be the other constant.

Jeffrey McNeill 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. The RMA is dead, long live the RMA: why NZ’s resource laws won’t change overnight after this election – https://theconversation.com/the-rma-is-dead-long-live-the-rma-why-nzs-resource-laws-wont-change-overnight-after-this-election-214247

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

The employment white paper, released on Monday, has outlined multiple measures the Albanese government will implement to assist the about three million people who want jobs or more hours of work.

They include making permanent a temporary measure allowing pensioners to earn more, smoothing the transition to work for people on welfare, and alleviating the disadvantage many of the unemployed face.

In the white paper, prepared by Treasury, the government commits to full employment, which it defines as “everyone who wants a job [being] able to find one without having to search for too long”.

It does not put a number on the unemployment rate this represents.

The government will make permanent the current work bonus measure for older pensioners and eligible veterans so they can work more without reducing their pension.

It will double the period during which many income support recipients can receive no payment, thus allowing them to keep access to social security benefits such as concession cards for longer when they first get back into work.

Social enterprises will be backed to address persistent labour market disadvantage. TAFE will be boosted, and the take up of “higher apprenticeships” in the priority areas of net zero, the care and digitisation will be accelerated.

In addition to nine immediate measures the paper looks to longer term policies to enhance people’s access to the labour market.

“The government’s vision is for a dynamic and inclusive labour market in which everyone has the opportunity for secure, fairly paid work and people, businesses and communities can be beneficiaries of change and thrive. We are working to create more opportunities for more people in more places,” the paper says.

The paper comes as the unemployment rate is at 3.7%, which is expected to tick up as the economy slows. This is very low for modern times but the white paper highlights constraints to higher employment.

“Inclusive full employment is about broadening opportunities, lowering barriers to work including discrimination, and reducing structural underutilisation over time to increase the level of employment in our economy.”

Structural underutilisation is a mismatch between potential workers and available work. Reasons include workers’ skills not matching what the jobs need, workers and jobs being geographically apart, and barriers presented by disadvantage or discrimination.

“The government will take a broad approach to achieving sustained and inclusive full employment. This includes sound macroeconomic management to help keep employment as close as possible to its current maximum sustainable level in the short term. We are also committed to addressing the structural sources of underutilisation to increase the level of full employment that can be sustained over time without adding to inflationary pressures,” the paper says.

“We are taking comprehensive action, including improved education, migration and regional planning systems, and setting out reform directions to improve key enablers such as employment services, affordable and accessible child care, and housing. We are equipping the workforce with the skills needed for the jobs of the future, and enhancing the ability of individuals and businesses to adapt to the modern labour market”.

The report says increasing participation in work promotes social inclusion as well as boosting the country’s economic potential.

It notes the five regions with the highest long term unemployment make up 12% of all the country’s long term unemployed, although they have only 5% of the working age population.

Disadvantage can led to “intergenerational cycles of joblessness”, the paper says. Complex personal circumstances and discrimination compound local factors.

“Many people face multiple, interconnected barriers to employment such as a lack of access to services or secure and affordable housing.”

Unemployment particularly affects certain cohorts, including Indigenous people, people with disabilities and the young.

The paper points to the major forces that will shape the economy over coming decades. They are the ageing population, a rising demand for care and support services, the growing use of digital and advanced technologies, the global net zero transformation, and increasing geopolitical risk and fragmentation disrupting supply chains and making resilience more important.

“These forces are changing the composition of our industries, workforce needs, and the nature of work itself.”

The paper looks to renewable energy and digital technologies to improve productivity and says boosting productivity in industries such as care and support services will be increasingly important. “Rather than repeating previous waves of reforms, Australia’s productivity agenda needs to respond to current economic circumstances and identify modern strategies to advance enduring policy goals.”

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. Government’s employment white paper commits to jobs for all who want them – and help to get them – https://theconversation.com/governments-employment-white-paper-commits-to-jobs-for-all-who-want-them-and-help-to-get-them-214256

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Downie, Associate Professor in Optometry and Vision Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Blue-light glasses are said to reduce eye strain when using computers, improve your sleep and protect your eye health. You can buy them yourself or your optometrist can prescribe them.

But do they work? Or could they do you harm?

We reviewed the evidence. Here’s what we found.

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What are they?

Blue-light glasses, blue light-filtering lenses or blue-blocking lenses are different terms used to describe lenses that reduce the amount of short-wavelength visible (blue) light reaching the eyes.

Most of these lenses prescribed by an optometrist decrease blue light transmission by 10-25%. Standard (clear) lenses do not filter blue light.

A wide variety of lens products are available. A filter can be added to prescription or non-prescription lenses. They are widely marketed and are becoming increasingly popular.

There’s often an added cost, which depends on the specific product. So, is the extra expense worth it?

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Blue light is all around us

Outdoors, sunlight is the main source of blue light. Indoors, light sources – such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and the screens of digital devices – emit varying degrees of blue light.

The amount of blue light emitted from artificial light sources is much lower than from the Sun. Nevertheless, artificial light sources are all around us, at home and at work, and we can spend a lot of our time inside.

Our research team at the University of Melbourne, along with collaborators from Monash University and City, University London, sought to see if the best available evidence supports using blue light-filtering glasses, or if they could do you any harm. So we conducted a systematic review to bring together and evaluate all the relevant studies.

We included all randomised controlled trials (clinical studies designed to test the effects of interventions) that evaluated blue light-filtering lenses in adults. We identified 17 eligible trials from six countries, involving a total of 619 adults.

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Do they reduce eye strain?

We found no benefit of using blue light-filtering lenses, over standard (clear) lenses, to reduce eye strain with computer use.

This conclusion was based on consistent findings from three studies that evaluated effects on eye strain over time periods ranging from two hours to five days.

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Do they help you sleep?

Possible effects on sleep were uncertain. Six studies evaluated whether wearing blue-light filtering lenses before bedtime could improve sleep quality, and the findings were mixed.

These studies involved people with a diverse range of medical conditions, including insomnia and bipolar disorder. Healthy adults were not included in the studies. So we do not yet know whether these lenses affect sleep quality in the general population.

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Do they boost your eye health?

We did not find any clinical evidence to support using blue-light filtering lenses to protect the macula (the region of the retina that controls high-detailed, central vision).

None of the studies evaluated this.

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Could they do harm? How about causing headaches?

We could not draw clear conclusions on whether there might be harms from wearing blue light-filtering lenses, compared with standard (non blue-light filtering) lenses.

Some studies described how study participants had headaches, lowered mood and discomfort from wearing the glasses. However, people using glasses with standard lenses reported similar effects.

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What about other benefits or harms?

There are some important general considerations when interpreting our findings.

First, most of the studies were for a relatively short period of time, which limited our ability to consider longer-term effects on vision, sleep quality and eye health.

Second, the review evaluated effects in adults. We don’t yet know if the effects are different for children.

Finally, we could not draw conclusions about the possible effects of blue light-filtering lenses on many vision and eye health measures, including colour vision, as the studies did not evaluate these.

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In a nutshell

Overall, based on relatively limited published clinical data, our review does not support using blue-light filtering lenses to reduce eye strain with digital device use. It is unclear whether these lenses affect vision quality or sleep, and no conclusions can be drawn about any potential effects on the health of the retina.

High-quality research is needed to answer these questions, as well as whether the effectiveness and safety of these lenses varies in people of different ages and health status.

If you have eye strain, or other eye or vision concerns, discuss this with your optometrist. They can perform a thorough examination of your eye health and vision, and discuss any relevant treatment options.

In the past three years, Laura Downie’s research laboratory at the University of Melbourne has received funding from Alcon Laboratories, Azura Ophthalmics, CooperVision and Novartis for clinical research studies unrelated to this article. She is affiliated with the Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society, as a global ambassador.

– ref. Do blue-light glasses really work? Can they reduce eye strain or help me sleep? – https://theconversation.com/do-blue-light-glasses-really-work-can-they-reduce-eye-strain-or-help-me-sleep-213145