Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Walker, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In the form of machine learning tools and decision-making algorithms, it’s all around us. AI determines what news you get served up on the internet. It plays a key role in online matchmaking, which is now the way most romantic couples get together. It will tell you how to get to your next meeting, and what time to leave home so you’re not late.

AI often appears both omniscient and neutral, but on closer inspection we find AI learns from and adopts human biases. As a result, algorithms replicate familiar forms of discrimination but hide them in a “black box” that makes seemingly objective decisions.

Read more: Algorithms workers can’t see are increasingly pulling the management strings

For many workers, such as delivery drivers, AI has replaced human managers. Algorithms tell them what to do, evaluate their performance and decide whether to fire them.

But as the use of AI grows and its drawbacks become more clear, workers in the very companies that make the tools of algorithmic management are beginning to push back.

Trouble at Google

One of the most familiar forms of AI is the Google algorithm, and the order in which it presents search results. Google has an 88% market share of internet searches, and the Google homepage is the most visited page on the entire internet. How it determines its search results is hugely influential but completely opaque to users.

Earlier this month, one of Google’s lead researchers on AI ethics and bias, Timnit Gebru, abruptly left the company. Gebru says she was fired after an internal email sent to colleagues about racial discrimination and toxic work conditions at Google, while senior management maintains Gebru resigned over the publication of a research paper.

Gebru’s departure came after she put her name to a paper flagging the risk of bias in large language models (the kind used by Google). The paper argued such language models could hurt marginalised communities.

Gebru has previously shown that facial recognition technology was highly inaccurate for Black people.

Google’s response rapidly stirred unrest among Google’s workforce, with many of Gebru’s colleagues supporting her account of events.

Further annoying Gebru’s coworkers and academic sympathisers was the perceived attempt to muzzle unwelcome research findings, compromising the perception of any research published by in-house researchers.

When algorithms make decisions

Here are a few examples of how algorithms can recycle and reinforce existing prejudices:

• Automated resume-scanning systems have been found to discriminate against African-American names, graduates of women’s colleges, and even the word “women” in a job application.

• Credit-scoring AI that can cut people off from public benefits such as health care, unemployment and child support has been found to penalise low-income individuals.

• Misplaced trust in algorithms lay at the heart of Australia’s Robodebt debacle in which the assumption of a regular week-to-week wage packet was baked into the system.

Read more: From robodebt to racism: what can go wrong when governments let algorithms make the decisions

Human systems have checks and balances and higher authorities that can be appealed to when there is an apparent error. Algorithmic decisions often do not.

In our research forthcoming in the journal Organization my colleagues and I found that this lack of a right of appeal, or even a pathway to appeal, reinforces forms of power and control in workplaces.

Now what?

So AI, an influential tool of the world’s largest corporations, appears to systematically disadvantage minorities and economically marginalised people. What can be done?

The protest initiated and led by Google’s own employees may yet bring about change inside the company. Internal discontent at the online giant did get results two years ago, when protest over the kid-glove treatment of executives facing complaints of sexual misconduct led to a change in the company’s policy.

Read more: The Google walkout is a watershed moment in 21st century labour activism

Outsiders are also beginning to take more of an interest. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has boosted privacy standards since 2018, taught regulators around the world that the black box of algorithmic decision-making can indeed be prised open.

The G7 group of leading economies recently set up a Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to drive discussion around regulatory solutions to these problems, but it is still in its infancy.

As an industrial relations issue, the use of AI in hiring and management needs to be brought into the scope of collective bargaining agreements. Current workplace grievance procedures may allow human decisions to be appealed to a higher authority, but will be inadequate when the decisions are not made by humans – and people in authority may not even know how the AI arrived at its conclusions.

Until internal protests or outside intervention start to impact on the way AI is designed, we will continue to rely on self-regulation. Given the events of the past week, this may not inspire a great deal of confidence.

– ref. Upheaval at Google signals pushback against biased algorithms and unaccountable AI – https://theconversation.com/upheaval-at-google-signals-pushback-against-biased-algorithms-and-unaccountable-ai-151768

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, RMIT University

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine this week became the first major COVID vaccine candidate to have efficacy results from phase 3 trials published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The vaccine, AZD1222, is a viral vector vaccine. Researchers took an adenovirus from chimpanzees and modified it with the aim of training the immune system to mount a strong response against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).

The Lancet paper confirms interim analysis AstraZeneca released last month showing the vaccine is safe and has an overall efficacy of 70% in protecting against symptomatic COVID-19.

Let’s take a look at these latest results — and why they’re important.

Safety first

The published article consolidated safety data across four human trials with 23,848 volunteers from Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Only three people experienced serious adverse events (which were possibly related to the vaccine, but we don’t know for sure) over more than three months of follow-up. Each of these cases is recovering or has recovered.

While safety monitoring will be ongoing, this analysis gives us confidence the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is safe.

Read more: Oxford COVID-19 vaccine: newly published results show it is safe – but questions remain over its efficacy

Efficacy

The authors also analysed efficacy data for two of the above trials with a total of 11,636 participants. The follow-up period of the remaining two trials hasn’t yet been long enough to get a good sense of the vaccine’s efficacy — but this data will be coming.

Among the participants, there were 131 cases of symptomatic COVID-19. This included 30/5,807 (0.5%) in the vaccine group, and 101/5,829 (1.7%) in the control group. Based on the formulae researchers use to calculate how well vaccines work in clinical trials, this equates to an efficacy of 70%.

Of ten COVID-related hospital admissions, none were among the AZD1222 vaccine recipients — they were all people who received the placebo.

Although these numbers are small and will need confirmation with further data, this indicates the vaccine has strong potential to prevent severe COVID-19 disease.

The dosing debacle

While 70% is the overall efficacy figure, we learnt in AstraZeneca’s interim analysis that there were actually two separate dosing regimens. Variation in dose measurement methods — widely reported to have been an error — meant some participants received half of the expected dose for their first of the two shots.

The latest analysis confirmed that for people who received the low dose initially, followed by the standard dose, the vaccine displayed 90% efficacy, compared to 62.1% in participants who received the full dose at both time points.

While this error appears to have had a positive outcome, it’s concerning that we don’t really understand why the regimen with the half dose worked better.

The full, higher first dose may have induced more antibodies that recognise the vaccine’s chimpanzee adenovirus components than the half first dose did, and it’s possible these “anti-vaccine vehicle” antibodies could have interfered with the efficacy of the booster dose. This is a recognised concern when using adenoviruses as vaccine components.

Alternatively, the Lancet authors speculate the low dose may have induced a different type of immune response that we are yet to know about. If this were the case, it could raise questions for other vaccine developers too about the way the immune system behaves.

Read more: How to read results from COVID vaccine trials like a pro

A unique candidate

It’s exciting the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine could potentially work comparably well to the other front-runners from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, because this vaccine is one of the most practical vaccines to produce, store and distribute.

It only needs to be stored at 2-8°C — so in a normal fridge — compared to the mRNA-based vaccines, which need to be stored around -70°C.

It’s also the cheapest so far, at about US$4 a dose (roughly A$5), making it highly attractive for global deployment. Oxford/AstraZeneca has an agreement with the COVAX facility which will enable equitable access for countries who may not be able to afford the more expensive mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

Australia has signed a deal to receive 3.8 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine should it be approved for use. Meanwhile, biotechnology company CSL has been upscaling its manufacturing capacity for this vaccine, which will enable it to produce a further 30 million doses in Australia next year.

If a lower initial dose is recommended, this would also mean the available supply could be distributed to more people.

Some questions remain

One factor we still need to consider is the efficacy in older people (70 and above), as this age group is most susceptible to severe disease.

The current published efficacy results are mostly based on 18 to 55-year-olds. Although these trials do have older participants, they were recruited later, so collection of efficacy data for this group is ongoing.

A recent paper which looked at immune responses to the vaccine showed similar levels of antibodies across age groups (18-55, 56-69, and >70), which is encouraging. So it will be interesting to see efficacy results in older people as they become available.

Read more: Why the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is now a global gamechanger

Publication in a peer-reviewed journal means the data has been evaluated by expert independent reviewers whose job is to find any holes or problems. With this, the Oxford/AstraZeneca data now becomes more credible to the scientific community.

The data will likely encourage developers to move rapidly to request regulatory approvals for this vaccine, while awaiting further analysis on efficacy — and, importantly, how dosage affects this vaccine’s efficacy.

– ref. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is the first to publish peer-reviewed efficacy results. Here’s what they tell us — and what they don’t – https://theconversation.com/the-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-is-the-first-to-publish-peer-reviewed-efficacy-results-heres-what-they-tell-us-and-what-they-dont-151755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt McDonald, Associate Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland

Today, the Morrison government released updated projections of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, which indicate Australia is on track to meet 2030 Paris targets without using “carryover” credits earned from the Kyoto Protocol period.

Australia’s plan to use Kyoto carryover credits to meet Paris targets have long been contentious. The government claims that because emissions fell by more than Australia had committed to under the Kyoto Protocol, they should be allowed to carry these “credits” forward to the Paris agreement. Yet legal experts and other governments have suggested there’s no basis for applying these to the Paris agreement, which is a separate agreement.

The new modelling is good news for the Morrison government, which has been under increasing domestic and international pressure over its climate policy. And Prime Minister Scott Morrison is likely to announce this development proudly at the virtual Pacific Islands Forum on Friday night.

So are the latest projections enough to salvage Australia’s reputation on this issue? That appears unlikely.

Dumping credits

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia committed to reducing emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2030. This target has been widely criticised for years for being too meagre, but previous modelling had suggested even meeting this target was unlikely unless carryover credits were used.

Read more: Emissions projections indicate Australia won’t need carryover credits to meet Paris targets

The latest modelling suggests if the recently-announced technology roadmap — a policy which will support new and emerging clean energy technologies — is taken into account, then Australia would beat its 2030 target by 145 million tonnes. In other words, by 2030 Australia could be 29% under 2005 levels, without using carryover credits.

Morrison had flagged he would announce that Australia will dump the Kyoto credits at a global leaders’ climate summit at the weekend. However, it’s unlikely he’ll be given a speaking slot by the hosts, a reflection of his failure to make meaningful climate commitments. This is why he’ll probably make the announcement to Pacific leaders tomorrow night instead.

But even if Morrison announces he’ll scrap the controversial carryovers tomorrow, our international counterparts will still regard Australia as a climate change laggard. There are three big reasons why.

1. Our Paris target is still unambitious

A reduction of 26-28% by 2030 from 2005 levels is well below the commitments of other countries under the Paris Agreement. And under the Paris Agreement, states were encouraged to ratchet up their commitments to emissions over time.

Yet unlike other countries, Australia has not made any indication of a plan to outline a more ambitious contribution ahead of the CoP26 meeting in Glasgow next year.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat

It’s also worth recalling Australia’s 2005 baseline is a comparatively easy starting point. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Australia was one of only two developed countries allowed to increase its greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2008-12.

This means most other developed countries had already reduced emissions in sectors where it was easiest for them to do so — the “low hanging fruit”. This makes further commitments under Paris more challenging for those countries than Australia.

2. Improved projections are no thanks to federal policy

If we don’t have to use Kyoto carry-over credits to meet Paris targets, it may be despite — rather than because — of federal government policy.

Simply put, much of the decline in (projected) emissions can be attributed to the actions of state governments, which have more actively supported the renewable energy sector.

By contrast (and despite claims to the contrary) the government continues to commit billions of dollars to subsidising the fossil fuel industry. Yet there are clear indications of a declining future market for coal in particular.

Read more: Matt Canavan says Australia doesn’t subsidise the fossil fuel industry, an expert says it does

While the technology investment roadmap, a federal policy, may serve to further drive down emissions, this is still far from clear.

3. There’s still no commitment to a net zero emissions timetable

The European Union has had a long-standing commitment to net zero emissions by 2050. More recently it has been joined by other major emitters in Japan and South Korea, while emissions giant China has committed to net zero emissions by 2060.

US President-elect Joe Biden has also committed the US to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and to return the US to the Paris agreement.

And yet, the Morrison government continues to baulk at setting a net zero emissions timetable, preferring to describe this as a general ambition rather than endorse a specific target or date.

Read more: China just stunned the world with its step-up on climate action – and the implications for Australia may be huge

The response from the Pacific will be telling

Australia consistently ranks among the worst performers internationally on the Climate Change Performance Index, and there are indications already that other states will actively pressure Australia on climate ambition and action in the lead up to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26).

Combined with steadily growing domestic pressure to act on climate change and weakening financial prospects for Australia’s coal exports, international pressure may contribute to a perfect storm for the Morrison government on climate policy.

The response Morrison receives at the virtual Pacific Islands Forum to this position will be telling.

Read more: Pacific Island nations will no longer stand for Australia’s inaction on climate change

The region has long been deeply critical of Australia’s climate policy, and is at the frontlines of climate change impacts such as sea level rises, natural disasters and ocean acidification.

While Morrison may avoid the same diplomatic fallout from the 2019 Pacific Islands Forum on this issue, he’s unlikely to find an audience wholly convinced Australia now recognises the scale of the threat climate change poses.

– ref. 3 reasons meeting climate targets and dumping Kyoto credits won’t salvage Australia’s international reputation – https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-meeting-climate-targets-and-dumping-kyoto-credits-wont-salvage-australias-international-reputation-151836

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marilyn Campbell, Professor Faculty of Education, School of Cultural and Professional Learning, Queensland University of Technology

Last week, South Australia announced a mobile phone ban in primary schools. Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan endorsed the ban, saying:

Data shows a correlation between the uptake of mobile phones by young people and a downturn in student performance.

The federal government put “mobile phones on the agenda” in a September 2019 meeting with the Education Council. The minister then quoted research from Canadian Assistant Professor Louis-Philippe Beland, that he said:

[…] found the positive effect of banning mobile phones was equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or increasing the school year by five days.

He went on to say the research:

[…] also found the positive effect was even greater for low-achieving students, with a mobile phone ban the equivalent of an additional two hours a week, or ten school days a year.

The study the minister is referring to was published in 2016 about schools in the United Kingdom. The authors — Beland and Murphy — actually showed only a very minor correlation between students’ exam scores and their schools’ mobile phone policies.

The claim students’ use of mobile phones at school is connected with lower academic performance has consistently featured in the popular debate around school mobile phone bans. It has been used to justify blanket bans, both in Australia — such as the one in NSW public primary schools and all Victorian state primary and secondary schools — and overseas.

Despite the claims, we actually don’t have sufficient data to back the policy.

What the science actually says

The best kind of policy is grounded in evidence. But not all evidence is created equal and, when cited out of context, can obscure rather than illuminate the path forward.

Unfortunately, the ways evidence has been mobilised in the school mobile phone ban debate in Australia has turned children’s digital practices — and potentially their digital futures — into a political football.

Read more: Should mobile phones be banned in schools? We asked five experts

Beland and Murphy’s study surveyed 91 high schools in four English cities about their mobile phone policies. It then matched those schools’ mobile phone policies with students’ standardised test scores to estimate the effect of mobile phone bans on student performance.

The study reported that, when schools instituted a ban, student test scores improved by 6.41% of a standard deviation — which is an effect size of 0.06.

Let’s unpack what this means.

A small ‘effect size’

First, the “data” did not show that students’ “uptake” of mobile phones related to a “downturn” in their performance. Rather, it showed restrictive school mobile phone policies related to an upturn in student performance. These are different things.

Second, the study did not find a strong correlation between schools’ restrictive mobile phone policies and student performance. An improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation is actually an effect size of 0.06 — though it has been reported as a 6% improvement.

Effect sizes of 0.24 are considered small, 0.50 is moderate and 0.75 is large. So, an effect size of 0.06 is insignificant.

Students in the lowest quintile (fifth) of prior achievement gained slightly more in test scores when mobile phone bans were in place: 0.14% of a standard deviation, which is still very small. School bans neither positively nor negatively affected the test performance of students in the top quintile.

As for bans granting the equivalent of ten days of extra class time for low-achieving students quoted by the minister, this number doesn’t seem to be in the study.

In a Conversation article by Murphy and Beland about their study, they write:

We found the impact of banning phones for these [low-achieving] students equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days.

But even in this case, the data was collected from 2001 to 2011 in the United Kingdom. So the specific number of days of extra class time don’t directly apply to the Australian context.

Read more: How smart is it to allow students to use mobile phones at school?

Correlation is not causation

Third, although media coverage correctly reported the study found a correlation, many people mistake correlation for causation. Cheese consumption strongly correlates to death by bedsheet entanglement, but we wouldn’t say cheese causes such deaths.

If we noted a strong correlation between increased ice-cream sales and sunglass purchasing, we might infer, not that wearing sunglasses causes one to eat ice-cream, but that a third variable influences both outcomes — namely hot, sunny weather.

In the same way, the correlation between mobile phone bans and student performance could be caused by other variables simultaneously impacting the school environment and student performance.

Beland and Murphy acknowledge this limitation when they write: “We may be concerned that student sorting by observable or unobservable characteristics may be driving this estimate”.

Read more: Banning mobile phones in schools: beneficial or risky? Here’s what the evidence says

The results haven’t been replicated

Lastly, good science means repeating studies and finding similar results. Two other studies replicated Beland and Murphy’s research design.

A Norwegian study found no significant effect of mobile phone bans on academic results. However, when they divided the sample into public and private schools, they did find private schools experienced a somewhat positive effect of a mobile phone ban on academic performance.

This points to the fact school culture could make a difference to whether or not bans improve student performance. Or, put differently, blanket bans may not serve the best interests of all schools and their students.

And a study in Sweden found school mobile phone bans had zero impact on student performance. The authors said:

In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.

The main problem, though, is not the limitations of Beland and Murphy’s specific study. The real issue is the dearth of evidence to drive decision making about students’ use of mobile phones at school.

Until this vacuum is addressed, we cannot know for certain mobile phone bans in schools are a good idea. And it remains possible current policies are compromising students’ best interests, both now and into the future.

Read more: How creative use of technology may have helped save schooling during the pandemic

– ref. No, Education Minister, we don’t have enough evidence to support banning mobile phones in schools – https://theconversation.com/no-education-minister-we-dont-have-enough-evidence-to-support-banning-mobile-phones-in-schools-151574

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan Carroll, Senior research officer, Australian Institute of Family Studies

COVID-19 has brought about big changes in Australia and across the world, with much attention focused on the way governments are responding to the health and economic challenges of the pandemic.

Interactions with family and friends have been the focus of many of the public health restrictions and have been identified as a source of spreading infection. Less attention has been paid to the role families and social networks have played in supporting each other through a difficult year.

Findings from the first wave of the Families in Australia Survey have highlighted that Australians still turn to family for support in times of crisis.

The survey of 7,306 respondents, by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, ran from May 1 to June 9 2020, when most Australians were subject to multiple restrictions due to COVID. These forced them to spend more time with some family members, while separating them from others. The survey aimed to provide a better understanding of how Australian families adjusted during the pandemic.

Read more: Lonely in lockdown? You’re not alone. 1 in 2 Australians feel more lonely since coronavirus

New ways to connect

While limitations were placed on how families could meet in person, most people talked to family living elsewhere at least as often as before. A good proportion (44%) talked to them more than before. We heard stories of people connecting through new technologies, such as using video calls to share meals, or through more traditional means of sending care packages through the post.

In addition to social connections, family members living elsewhere were the primary source of help for those who needed extra assistance. This help included practical assistance with groceries, errands and other care-giving, as well as financial and emotional support.

Experiences of connection to family living elsewhere were mixed, with similar numbers reporting feeling more and less connected. For many, sharing lockdown led to an increased level of connection with those in their immediate household.

Changes to family life

This increase in connection is likely driven, at least in part, by spending more time together. When asked about time spent with children, many parents reported an increase in quality time, playing games, reading to their children and having meaningful conversations.

However, it wasn’t all quality time. Many families had to negotiate shared work spaces and juggling childcare while working from home.

Financial support from families

The financial impacts of the pandemic have hit some families hard. One in six survey respondents said their family income had reduced a little. Almost a quarter said it had been reduced a lot.

For many families, this resulted in cutting back on non-essential expenses such as take-away meals. While some dipped into savings to make up the shortfall, others reported cutting down on essential expenses like groceries or pausing rent and mortgage payments. More people asked for financial support from family and friends than from welfare or community organisations.

Among those who had not experienced a drop in income, many reported saving money, as they spent less on things like childcare and petrol. While some said they made changes to their savings and investments, financial actions taken as a result of COVID-19 were commonly aimed at helping family members who had a drop in income, and supporting their community by spending more at local businesses.

When asked about their level of concern about their family’s current financial situation, three out of five respondents said they were at least “a little concerned”. Those whose income had reduced as a result of COVID-19 expressed higher levels of concern. Over 70% of respondents said they were at least a little concerned about their family’s future financial situation.

Comments by respondents show their concern was not just for themselves and their partners. They included the financial situation of adult children living at home and family members living elsewhere. While some felt lucky not to have been affected financially by the pandemic, others worried about those who lost their jobs or income, businesses or investments.

Read more: We asked over 2,000 Australian parents how they fared in lockdown. Here’s what they said

Towards COVID normal

With Australia now negotiating “COVID normal”, we need to know more about what types of supports families need, and how to support those who may not have a family they can rely on.

The second wave of the Families in Australia Survey aims to do just that.

If you would like to share your experiences, please go to towardscovidnormal.com.au

– ref. The good, the bad and the lonely: how coronavirus changed Australian family life – https://theconversation.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-lonely-how-coronavirus-changed-australian-family-life-151688

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, University of Melbourne

Review: Daniel Thomas, recent past: writing Australian art, edited by Hannah Fink and Stephen Miller (Thames & Hudson Australia)

In 1958, when the young Daniel Thomas was first appointed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the word “curator” was not in the Public Service Board lexicon. He felt his official title of “professional assistant” was inaccurate so he signed his letters “curatorial assistant”.

In time, the bureaucracy adopted his language and the term is still used to describe the entry level curatorial position for new graduates.

The years I spent working for Thomas as a curatorial assistant in the 1970s transformed my understanding of what art can do. His generous pedantry means that even now I sometimes hear his voice in my ear, questioning the precise meaning of a word I want to use.

Thomas has been such a force for change in Australian art that he has influenced almost every institution, curator and artist.

Read more: Beauty and audacity: Know My Name presents a new, female story of Australian art

He was, in turn, the first curator at the AGNSW, the inaugural Head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia and Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, before retiring to Tasmania, close to where he was born 89 years ago. Here he continues to write and mentor those who wish to know both the small details and large visions of art in Australia.

In the 1960s and 70s, however, Thomas was perhaps better known as the witty and informative art critic of first the Sunday Telegraph and later the Sydney Morning Herald. His initial appointment, which today would be regarded as a conflict of interest, was seen at the time as a way of educating the public about the importance of art.

He also wrote perceptive extended essays for Art and Australia and later Art Monthly, as well as essays in scholarly catalogues. Steven Miller and Hannah Fink’s anthology, Recent Past: writing Australian art, has managed the Herculean task of condensing the essence of Thomas’s writing into one enjoyable volume, a scholarly resource that also delights the general reader.

Thomas has little time for theoretical constructs. Instead he focuses on art, artists and circumstance. “Fieldwork is more fun than library research,” he writes as he discusses both the landscape where John Glover painted and the mirrored wardrobe, which was the subject of many of Grace Cossington Smith’s late, great paintings.

Read more: How our art museums finally opened their eyes to Australian women artists

A brief to educate

Some scholars hug their knowledge to themselves, content to communicate only with their peers. Thomas sees his mission to spread the word, to let as many people as possible know the profound joy of art.

He soon became the master of the deft phrase. John Brack is described as “a clever painter, clever to the point of teasing”. Fred Williams’ paintings are “invested with magic”. An early painting by Janet Dawson is described with gusto as “an exhilarating event”. In later critiques he notes with pleasure Rosalie Gascoigne’s “well-made things” and describes Dorrit Black as one of “the reserved but passionate temperaments” in her art.

Read more: Fred Williams in the You Yangs: a turning point for Australian art

In this new book, Thomas has provided a written commentary on both his past writing and the illustrations. These intriguing, informative and often humorous notes are marked as “DT20”.

In a note on Martin Sharp’s Miss Australia, for instance, he writes that the artist “emphasised it was painted entirely by him”. Then, almost as an aside, Thomas tells the reader Sharp did not physically paint some works attributed to him, but rather delegated the hard slog to his studio assistant, Tim Lewis.

Obituaries written for artists are written with an eye to the longer judgement of history. In his considered obituary for Arthur Boyd, Thomas concludes “an uneven painter must be judged on his best works”, a subtle reminder that Boyd made many potboilers.

Pop artist Robert Rooney, he wrote, “failed a Swinburne Technical College commercial-art-diploma course in illustration and design but did not waste the experience.”

‘More exciting museums’

As the articles are arranged in chronological order it is possible to track how Thomas has long used his privileged background for good.

His “first schoolboy glimpse of the wild enchantment of art” came when he was a student at Geelong Grammar, inspired by the Bauhaus refugee artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. An Oxford degree and a deep knowledge of European art could have led to a career in the UK, but he chose to work in Australia as, “I wanted our art museums to be more exciting.”

The penultimate essay, Spirit of Place, written in 2018, can be described as a meditation on rock, trees, life and art. Thomas considers how the land he has known since childhood has changed “under unkind management by thoughtless humans”. Plastic is washed on the Bass Strait seashore when once it was kelp.

He has named his house, Loeyunnila, the word Aboriginal people from Port Sorrell use for “high wind”. But he remembers, too, how Aboriginal people from this place were taken by boat in “an exile equivalent to a death sentence”.

There is a tension between his appreciation of enduring Aboriginal cultures and knowledge that it was his direct ancestors who dispossessed them of their land. He resolves this by suggesting that “Aboriginal people are re-conquering the minds of their invaders, just as the Greeks re-conquered the ancient Romans.”

As with much of Thomas’s writing, it is an idea worth debating.

– ref. ‘Wild enchantment’: how Daniel Thomas’s writings conveyed the joy of art to Australians – https://theconversation.com/wild-enchantment-how-daniel-thomass-writings-conveyed-the-joy-of-art-to-australians-150737

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Baka, Senior Lecturer, College of Sport & Exercise Science, Victoria University

Surfing, skateboarding, karate and sport climbing will be the new sports included in the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, with BMX freestyle (think halfpipe snowboarding but on bikes) and 3×3 basketball (teams of three playing on a half court with on basket) added as disciplines in existing sports.

The Beijing 2022 Winter Games will feature seven new events — freestyle skiing big air (men’s and women’s), women’s monobob (solo bobsledding) and mixed team events in short-track speed skating, ski jumping, freestyle skiing aerials and snowboard cross.

The latest Olympic sport added to the 2024 Paris Games is “breaking”, which started as a form of dancing associated with hip hop culture and has morphed into a well-organised competitive sport governed by the World DanceSport Federation.

Not everyone is thrilled by the inclusion of breakdancing in the games, but this is all part of the ongoing transformation of the Olympics as it seeks to remain relevant to younger audiences more familiar with halfpipes than equestrian dressage.

A push for younger, more extreme sports

In fact, new sports are continually being added to the Olympics, while others are dropped.

Wrestling (a sport dating back to the ancient Olympics) was axed from the Tokyo Olympics only to be reinstated several months later. Baseball and softball were both in the games, then out, then in again (Tokyo 2021), then out again (Paris 2024).

Other sports, such as golf and rugby, were part of the Olympics in the early 1900s, then dropped for decades before being added back in.

The impetus for some of these changes can be traced to the International Olympic Committee’s Agenda 2020 policy document released in 2014. The objective was to usher the Olympic movement into a new modern era with a focus on sports that are more youth-oriented, do not require expensive venues, can ensure more gender balance and are television-friendly.

With the IOC often criticised as being male-centric and old-fashioned, the current IOC president, Thomas Bach, has been a major driver of this new way of thinking and modernising of the Olympics.

Read more: Everyone’s a winner with new events at the Winter Games

The IOC has also been pushed in some ways by the strong influence of the Extreme Games, launched in 1995 and later rebranded the X Games.

This event, with both a summer and winter version, was developed by the ESPN sports network. And it’s certainly made for TV: the focus is on action sports that have a high degree of “spectacle”.

Due to their success, the Olympic movement was reasonably quick to embrace several sports that originated in the X Games.

Summer Games are maxed out in terms of size

In 1994, the Olympics shifted to a new two-year, alternating cycle for the summer and winter games. This brought increased visibility for the Winter Olympics, which began adding new sports and grew rapidly in size.

Curling, women’s hockey and snowboarding were added to the 1998 Nagano Games program. Fourteen years later, an unprecedented 12 new events had their debut at the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

As a result, the Winter Games have blossomed from 16 events and 49 medals in 1924 to a record 109 events and 327 medals at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games.

Although the summer games have also grown gradually, they have been unable to add as many new sports due to size limitations and logistical factors. The summer games are over twice as large as the winter games in terms of budget and the number of athletes that take part. They also require far more purpose-built venues.

Read more: Snowboarding and freeskiing got to the Olympics by carving their own path

The Tokyo games are expected to feature 11,092 athletes in 339 events, but this will actually shrink to 10,500 athletes and 329 events for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Logically, if new contemporary sports like breakdancing are added, others (like baseball and softball) will have to go. Athlete numbers will also need to be reduced in existing sports, as will happen at the Paris games.

The IOC also has a gender-balance goal for athletes and it is expecting to reach 50-50 parity for the first time in Paris.

A history of obscure events, from pesapallo to kite flying

Until 1992, numerous sports were included in the Olympics as “demonstration” events. Medals were awarded, but they were not included in the official tally. The idea was to showcase a local sport of the host country or to trial a sport that could possibly be added as a full medal sport in the future.

There have been a number of unusual and obscure demonstration events in the Games, such as bandy (a mix of ice hockey and field hockey), dogsled racing, tug of war, military patrol (a skiing and shooting sport similar to biathlon), bicycle polo, roller hockey, rope climbing, pesapallo (a Finnish version of baseball) and Australian Rules football.

The 1900 Paris Olympics included a catalogue of strange events, such as cannon firing, fishing, pigeon racing, fire fighting, hot air ballooning and kite flying, though some were part of the adjacent World’s Fair and not considered “official” Olympic events.

The Olympics also have a long tradition of including various forms of arts competitions, as well. From 1912–48, an “Art Olympics” ran alongside the summer games, with medals across five categories: architecture, music, literature, sculpture and painting.

Not everyone is embracing the addition of breakdancing to the Olympic program. Some sports like netball and squash have lobbied unsuccessfully to be included in the Olympics for years — and were disappointed yet again for being passed over for the 2024 games.

Read more: Going for gold: why tenpin bowling should become an Olympic sport

Some purists are not fans of the Olympics’ embrace of youth-oriented sports, either. Bob Costas, the veteran US sports commentator, once compared slopestyle skiing to the types of pranks shown on the MTV television program Jackass.

Breaking may be the lucky winner for 2024, but many other new sports are knocking on the door to get into the summer games.

As the IOC attempts to keep pace with a changing world, it is likely we will see even more changes to the Olympic landscape for the Los Angeles 2028 summer games.

And if Brisbane does follow through on a bid to host the 2032 games, could we expect to see Aussie rules football back on the program?

– ref. Breakdancing in the Olympics? The Games have a long history of taking chances, from pesapallo (yes, it’s a sport) to kite flying – https://theconversation.com/breakdancing-in-the-olympics-the-games-have-a-long-history-of-taking-chances-from-pesapallo-yes-its-a-sport-to-kite-flying-151750

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Zic, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University, CSIRO

If you look up in the southern sky you can see the “pointer” stars, pointing towards the Southern Cross. One of these pointers is Alpha Centauri, which is actually a pair of Sun-like stars that are too close together to tell apart by eye.

There is a third member of the Alpha Centauri system as well: Proxima Centauri (Proxima Cen for short), which circles the central two stars in a wide orbit. This is the Sun’s nearest neighbour, at a distance of just 4.2 light years.

It is possible one of Proxima Cen’s planets is suitable for life. However, we recently detected the signature of fierce space weather from Proxima Cen, which implies an orbiting planet could be blasted with hazardous particles and magnetic fields.

Our neighbour is not like the Sun

Our Sun is a relatively unremarkable yellow dwarf star, hosting the only known life-bearing planet in the Universe: our Earth.

Proxima Cen is very different. It is a red dwarf star, with a diameter only 15% of the Sun’s, and a surface temperature of 3,000K (degrees Kelvin), much cooler than the Sun’s 6,000K.

Because Proxima Cen is relatively cool, the “Goldilocks zone” of orbits around it – where the temperature is just right for liquid water – is around one-twentieth the Earth’s distance from the Sun. We are interested in planets in a star’s Goldilocks zone because liquid water is necessary for life as we know it.

Read more: Say hello to the Earth’s nearest exoplanet neighbour: Proxima Centauri b

We know Proxima Cen has at least two planets: Proxima Cen b, a rocky “super-Earth” located in the middle of Proxima Cen’s Goldilocks zone, and Proxima Cen c, a “sub-Neptune” located further out.

For years, astronomers have suspected planets like Proxima Cen b may be a dangerous home for life because they are so close to their host stars. Many red dwarf stars produce frequent, powerful flares – intense bursts of radiation travelling out into space. If planets like Proxima Cen b don’t have protective features such as a thick atmosphere or a strong magnetic field, they would be exposed to perilous levels of radiation.

But what’s the weather like around these stars?

The “space weather” of red dwarfs is another important factor in determining how hospitable they are to life. While flares involve intense bursts of light, space weather events mean the magnetic field and charged particles from the star can interact with planets directly.

The most energetic space weather events are known as coronal mass ejections (or CMEs). These massive eruptions escape the atmosphere of a star and travel through space at millions of kilometres per hour.

If the space weather conditions are extreme enough, the planetary atmosphere can be blown away and its magnetic field can be pushed backwards, leaving the surface exposed to deadly flare radiation.

CMEs have been detected around the Sun since the 1970s, but detecting space weather events around distant stars is much harder.

For updates on the weather, tune into the radio

CMEs on the Sun produce characteristic bursts of radio noise, such as “type II” and “type IV” bursts. By detecting similar signatures on other stars, we can indirectly identify stellar CMEs.

In early 2019, we pointed our telescopes at Proxima Cen for 11 nights. We used CSIRO’s new radio telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), as well as the Zadko Telescope, the ANU 2.3m Telescope, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Our goal was to detect the signature of a CME.

On the night of May 2, 2019, we observed a massive optical flare with an estimated total energy output of 16 septillion joules. (That’s nearly 17 million years’ worth of Australia’s current electricity output.) On the Sun, flares this big happen only once every decade or two. But on Proxima Cen, they happen every few weeks.

Using ASKAP, we observed a spectacular sequence of intense radio bursts.

With the amazing detail revealed with ASKAP, we could see we had detected the best example of a solar-like type IV radio burst from another star to date.

This blast of radio waves implies the space weather environment around Proxima Cen is quite violent.

‘One swallow does not make a summer’

In 1859, British astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson made the first observations of a solar flare, which was followed by a massive space weather storm named the “Carrington event”. We now know the storm was caused by a massive coronal mass ejection hitting Earth.

Carrington noted the coincidence between these extraordinary events, but was cautious to draw any connection between them, famously stating “one swallow does not make a summer”. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to Carrington.

We have observed a radio burst signature implying a CME erupting from Proxima Cen. But to confirm the relationship of these stellar radio bursts with CMEs, we need to harness information from other wavelengths. Once we can do this, we should soon know exactly how hazardous it is to live next to a star like Proxima Centauri.

Read more: Is Alpha Centauri the right place to search for life elsewhere?

– ref. Bad space weather may make life impossible near Proxima Centauri – https://theconversation.com/bad-space-weather-may-make-life-impossible-near-proxima-centauri-150979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Taylor, Early Career Research Leader, Emerging Viruses, Inflammation and Therapeutics Group, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University

Chinese authorities have already approved multiple COVID vaccines for emergency use in the country, and nearly a million Chinese have already been vaccinated with one candidate.

Several local governments are already placing orders for domestically developed vaccines, though the Chinese government hasn’t confirmed how many people it’s aiming to vaccinate as part of emergency approval.

The first international shipments of the vaccine, by private Chinese company Sinovac, have also already arrived in Indonesia this week in preparation for a mass vaccination campaign ahead of expected local approval.

China is developing at least five COVID vaccines from four producers. These vaccines, which have progressed through development very rapidly, are largely based on traditional vaccine manufacturing techniques such as inactivating the virus.

These methods provide some benefits to the vaccines over others. For example, some of the Chinese-developed vaccines can be stored in regular fridges, making distribution much easier. This is in contrast to Pfizer’s jab, which must be kept at around -70℃.

Too early to tell if they’re safe and effective in the long term

The results of clinical trials of vaccines developed by Chinese-based companies have for the most part been published in leading international journals. These journals are independently reviewed by members of the global scientific community who provide open and critical analysis before acceptance of the work. They’re also some of the most trusted medical research journals in the world, a testament to the quality of the science being carried out in China.

The emergency approval for use of a number of the vaccines developed in China has come exceptionally early in the clinical trial process. This is likely to have raised concerns that the correct due diligence for safety isn’t being followed. These are, however, exceptional times. It should also be noted the vaccine developed by Pfizer, and granted emergency approval in the United Kingdom, hasn’t yet received full regulatory approval with phase 3 clinical trials set to conclude soon.

Read more: ‘Very convincing evidence’: Pfizer now has the data it needs to apply for COVID vaccine approval

The early rollout of these vaccines into the general population should really be viewed as an unofficial extension of phase 3 clinical trials, rather than an ultimate seal of approval. People who have been vaccinated should continue to be monitored for adverse events and lasting immune responses. Any subsequent reports of serious adverse events due to vaccination will halt use of that vaccine, but could also erode confidence in vaccination and vaccine uptake internationally.

So who are the companies developing these vaccines in China, and what do we know about them?

Sinovac

Sinovac Life Sciences is a private Chinese company that focuses on research, development and manufacturing of human and animal vaccines. It has developed and commercialised six vaccines for human use, and one for animals.

The company’s COVID vaccine, called CoronaVac, is an inactivated vaccine. It has recently been shipped to Indonesia.

It’s manufactured by growing the COVID virus in laboratories and treating it with a chemical that inactivates it. The chemical locks the virus in a state where it’s unable to replicate, but its structure is maintained, allowing the body to recognise it as foreign and mount an immune response.

It’s also delivered with an adjuvant, an immune stimulant that’s given to improve the protective response.

Having shown a substantial immune response and minimal safety concerns (mostly mild pain at the injection site) in phase 1 and 2 clinical trials, CoronaVac is now in phase 3 clinical trials.

The phase 3 trials have recruited tens of thousands of participants to test vaccine efficacy and safety, and are taking place in Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey.

Brazilian officials claimed in October that the vaccine is safe, amid phase 3 trials.

However, the death of a phase 3 trial participant in October led Brazilian authorities to temporarily halt the Sinovac trial. Although details of the death were unclear, the trial was quickly resumed with the Brazilian institute involved in the trial confirming the participant’s death was unrelated to the vaccine. The outcome of phase 3 trials may be released in a matter of days.

Despite not knowing the results of phase 3 trials, a condition typically required to receive regulatory approval, CoronaVac has been approved for emergency use in China to vaccinate high-risk groups since July 2020.

This emergency approval is likely to have followed positive data from the vaccine’s phase 1 and 2 trials.

Sinopharm

Sinopharm is a state-owned Chinese company that researches, develops and distributes vaccines and other pharmaceuticals. It has produced a number of drugs that’ve been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and by EU authorities.

The two COVID-19 vaccines being developed by Sinopharm are both inactivated vaccines. Both follow a similar inactivation process as the Sinovac vaccine, and also use adjuvants to stimulate an immune response.

Both have undergone phase 1 and 2 clinical trials with encouraging results. They produced an effective immune response in participants and reported adverse reactions, including pain at the injection site and fever, were mild and quickly resolved. Certain doses generated SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies in all phase 1 and 2 trial participants.

Both vaccines are currently in phase 3 trials. Again, despite incomplete clinical trials, both are reported to have been distributed for use by Chinese government officials and health-care workers.

What’s more, the United Arab Emirates, a site of ongoing phase 3 trials, granted emergency use for one of Sinopharm’s vaccines in September, following testing in 31,000 participants.

Despite this unusual early use of the vaccines, phase 3 testing is still required to determine if it’s safe and effective in the long run.

CanSino Biologics

This Chinese company has developed a COVID vaccine based on an adenovirus in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences. The adenovirus is unable to cause disease itself, but is used to deliver a coronavirus protein.

Phase 2 clinical trials reported the vaccine to be safe and induce significant immune responses in most participants.

This vaccine was also approved for limited use by the Chinese military in June, around the time of the conclusion of phase 2 trials.

Phase 3 clinical trials, which began in August, are ongoing in countries including Saudi Arabia.

Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical

Chinese-based company, Anhui Zhifei Longcom, has developed a protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine. Subunit vaccines use a purified piece of the virus, a protein, to trigger an immune response. It has recently started phase 3 clinical trials. There hasn’t yet been any announcement or published report of the results of phase 1 and 2 trials.

– ref. China’s COVID vaccines are already being distributed. But how do they work, and where are they up to in trials? – https://theconversation.com/chinas-covid-vaccines-are-already-being-distributed-but-how-do-they-work-and-where-are-they-up-to-in-trials-151589

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

Twenty years ago, UNESCO inscribed the greater Blue Mountains area on the World Heritage List for having “outstanding universal value”.

If you’ve travelled to the Blue Mountains, with its rugged sandstone cliff faces, hidden waterfalls and rich diversity of life, this value is undeniable. The Dharug and Gundungurra traditional owners long understood this value as they lived within and cared for Country (Ngurra) and, in turn, were nourished by it.

But after fires ripped through 71% of the greater Blue Mountains area, the condition of the World Heritage site has officially been downgraded.

Read more: ‘Severely threatened and deteriorating’: global authority on nature lists the Great Barrier Reef as critical

Last week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — the official advisor to UNESCO — rated the site as being of “significant concern”, a drop from “good with some concerns”. It’s now in the second-lowest category.

The news may be grim, but there are signs of hope. Despite threats of climate change, bushfires and decades of pollution, efforts are being made to minimise lingering impacts, and results are encouraging.

Ancient trees and unique animals

The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area covers just over one million hectares, divided into eight protected areas.

The largest protected area is Wollemi National Park (499,879 ha) in the north. This park is, famously, home to the last wild population of Wollemi Pine. These trees have a deeply ancient lineage tracing back to when the Earth’s land masses were all part of the supercontinent Gondwana over 100 million years ago.

Read more: Wollemi pines are dinosaur trees

The World Heritage area harbours 1,500 plant species, and 127 of them are rare or threatened. And in an outstanding example of the area’s uniqueness, it also contains more than 90 Eucalypt species — 13% of the global total.

The World Heritage area is also an important habitat for many rare and threatened animal species.

One celebrated seasonal visitor is the critically endangered regent honeyeater. Also under threat, and unique to the Blue Mountains, is the leura skink, which survives only in a handful of sensitive and vulnerable wetland communities.

Current threats

In its new report, the IUCN lists eight current threats undermining the greater Blue Mountains area. The most worrying – those considered “very high threats” in the report — are climate change and bushfires.

The severe fires of last summer inflicted long-lasting damage to many Blue Mountains species that contribute to the unique biodiversity of the area. And climate change is an emerging environmental pressure threatening the delicate ecology of the region through rising temperatures and changes to rainfall.

The IUCN also rated invasive plant and animal species, such as foxes, feral cats, horses, cattle and deer, as a high threat. Mining and quarrying, habitat alteration and several specific aspects of climate change (storms, drought, temperature extremes) were also listed.

The IUCN also named potential threats from planned operations, including future noise pollution from the new international airport in Western Sydney. Another is the impact of periodic flooding from a proposal to raise the wall of Warragamba Dam for flood mitigation purposes.

Cleaning up their act

Climate change and bushfires require massive, coordinated national and international responses, but some major issues in the Blue Mountains can start to be resolved on relatively smaller scales.

For decades, the Blue Mountains have been flogged by a number of human pressures, such as an outdated sewage system from the City of the Blue Mountains and pollution from coal mining. While the environment hasn’t fully recovered, we’re pleased to see successes in the recovery efforts.

For decades, inadequate sewerage systems polluted multiple streams and rivers in the Blue Mountains.

In 1987, the Sydney Water Corporation started a 25-year, $250 million scheme to reduce water pollution from this inadequately treated sewage. And by 2010, a massive upgrade to the region’s sewage system closed 11 antiquated treatment plants.

All Blue Mountains wastewater is now treated to a higher standard at Winmalee in the lower Blue Mountains and is released away from waterways in the World Heritage area.

Another important pressure in the Greater Blue Mountains Area is from coal mining, with UNESCO expressing concerns in 2001 about water pollution from mines, such as the one operated by Clarence Colliery.

This mine is in state forest adjacent to the World Heritage area boundary. Research from 2017 found wastewater discharging from the mine was severely contaminating water quality of the Wollangambe River and damaging the ecology for more than 20 kilometres.

Read more: How our research is helping clean up coal-mining pollution in a World Heritage-listed river

Two years earlier, Clarence Colliery, owned by Centennial Coal, was prosecuted after more than 2,000 tonnes of coal material (a slurry of water and coal particles) spilled into the Wollangambe River.

Centennial Coal agreed to comply with a new EPA licence in 2017 requiring the disposal of less polluting wastes.

The latest results from October of this year are very encouraging. They show an enormous reduction (more than 95%) in the zinc concentration in mine waste, compared to 2012 levels.

Read more: Cutting ‘green tape’ may be good politicking, but it’s bad policy. Here are 5 examples of regulation failure

Embracing ‘planetary health’

For an internationally important site like this, which is home to more than 80,000 residents, all levels of government must adopt the concept of “planetary health”. This recognises that human health entirely depends on the health of natural systems and embraces Indigenous knowledge.

We’re pleased to see the Blue Mountains City Council is already on board. It recently announced plans to establish a planetary health leadership centre in Katoomba in partnership with universities and other educational institutions.

So while there is much to grieve, we can celebrate small successes in the Blue Mountains’ journey, which show it is indeed possible for a diverse array of parties and the broader community to work cooperatively, and start to better protect it.

– ref. The Blue Mountains World Heritage site has been downgraded, but it’s not too late to save it – https://theconversation.com/the-blue-mountains-world-heritage-site-has-been-downgraded-but-its-not-too-late-to-save-it-150954

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siew Fang Law, Senior Lecturer, Melbourne Graduate School Of Education, University of Melbourne

Australian universities are diverse places. They are a mix of students, staff and communities from different demographic backgrounds.

This is not true of the people who run universities. Higher education leaders tend to have backgrounds that are “WEIRD”: Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic.

In 2018, of the 699 governing council roles across Australia’s 41 universities, 94% of the incumbents had Caucasian and British backgrounds. The top tiers of senior executives were 94% Caucasian and British in background, as were 96% of vice-chancellors.

Read more: Australia needs to confront its history of white privilege to provide a level playing field for all

What are the risks of homogenous leadership?

When top leadership are strikingly WEIRD, the culture of their institutions is too. This reproduces curriculum, library systems, research and thought paradigms that are also WEIRD. This kind of sameness across universities has consequences.

A large body of research shows homogeneous governance presents risks. These risks include groupthink, oversights and unchecked blind spots.

A range of risks and long-term implications are associated with under-representation in many sectors, including parliament, the legal sector, arts, journalism and media, military, films, creative writing and culinary industries.

Read more: Universities and government need to rethink their relationship with each other before it’s too late

Australian higher education has not been immune to tunnel vision. We see it in the discourse of “internationalisation” policy in Australia universities. There has been a lack of global vision in the construction of many university strategies.

The structural issues in Australia and Australian universities are entrenched, yet have been denied for decades, if not centuries. If we want Australian higher education to meet our aspirations and to prepare future generations, we need to confront this elephant in the room.

A deterioration of public trust in universities and expertise has forced many universities in the Western world to the brink of existential crises. WEIRD leaders are struggling to redefine what the purpose of the university should be.

Read more: We are losing sight of higher education’s true purpose

Diverse leadership has many benefits

Diversity delivers a wide range of social, economic and policy benefits. Higher education needs diversity to continue to thrive, to open mindsets, to gain new viewpoints, to broaden paradigms and to widen ranges of solutions.

Research shows diverse groups outperform homogeneous groups in productivity and innovation over the long term. Universities need to play a long game too.

The pandemic is forcing Australian universities to transform. But if this transformation is to be successful, the voices of young people, women, Indigenous people, diasporas and people of diverse abilities need to be heard across all levels. The sector needs to enable talents with all perspectives to co-create new insights and ideas to move forward.

Practical steps to diversify leadership

Beyond setting goals and informed targets, we can achieve a more diverse leadership with a few practical measures.

We can establish mentoring strategies and policies. These help ensure a more diverse range of people are in the leadership pipeline and have exposure to executive meetings.

We can create open and safe forums that promote dialogue about leadership issues. Universities need to have honest conversations about the complexities, challenges and barriers to achieving greater diversity in leadership. This includes being able to examine contested ideas such as decolonisation, quotas and meritocracy within the university system.

Read more: After coronavirus, universities must collaborate with communities to support social transition

We can engage young people and diverse groups using non-English media platforms to communicate key ideas to a wider and more diverse audience. This could shift attitudes toward the Anglophone-dominated status quo and create space for greater inclusion, both physically and intellectually.

The key to success will be empowering the “other” to advise leaders, become leaders and participate in problem-solving and decision-making.

We need to democratise workplaces through participation, to shift workplace relations and power dynamics. A mobilised and diverse university community could come up with more holistic, innovative and transformative solutions.

Diversity is integral to sustainability

More than ever, Australia’s higher education sector needs an intersectional lens, where leaders see the world through multiple perspectives and through the experiences of students and staff from different backgrounds.

Diversity in senior leadership is essential to give meaning to the assertion “we are all in it together” and to sustainable development. Acknowledging the interconnected nature of our society, universities need to reflect the ecology of knowledge that is integral to driving sustainable socio-cultural, environmental, economic and technological development.

Diverse leadership should be the norm as we imagine the “new normal”.

– ref. Most of Australia’s uni leaders are white, male and grey. This lack of diversity could be a handicap – https://theconversation.com/most-of-australias-uni-leaders-are-white-male-and-grey-this-lack-of-diversity-could-be-a-handicap-150952

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Gallagher, PhD Candidate, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland

Urban consolidation policies to contain development within existing urban areas are creating poor development outcomes in Australian cities. In Brisbane, our newly published research shows this means the low-density housing character of the city is being retained at the expense of backyards.

Current land development regimes place urban planning outcomes in the hands of property owners and developers whose motives are tied to their financial interests rather than good planning. In doing so, the system works counter to its intended aims, in that it favours “bad density” over meaningful place-making characterised by well-designed medium-density townhouses or low-rise apartments.

Read more: No need to give up on crowded cities – we can make density so much better

The ad hoc nature of redevelopment means consolidation is done in a piecemeal and patchy way. There is little uniformity to streetscapes and a poor mix of housing options.

What are the urban consolidation policies?

Our research, published in Australian Planner, focuses on the impacts of urban consolidation policy in central Brisbane. The Queensland government has set a target for Brisbane City of infill development – building within existing developed areas – to account for 94% of all new dwellings by 2041.

The state government defines an urban boundary to contain most new development. The state also sets dwelling targets by local government area, of which Brisbane is the country’s most populous.

At the local level, Brisbane City Council has a smaller-scale strategy. It aims for densification to be achieved through up-zoning (changing the zoning to permit higher density), increasing building heights and reducing minimum lot sizes.

At the same time, the council uses various mechanisms to protect the “cultural identity” of the city. These include the so-called “townhouse ban” and Character Residential (Infill) zoning, which applies to many inner-city suburbs.

The Character Residential (Infill) zone allows for higher density, but houses built prior to 1946 must be retained. Any new dwellings must be of a similar scale.

We analysed the rate of subdivision for house construction over a ten-year period. Focusing on the suburbs immediately south of the city centre, we compared subdivision for more houses to land assembly (merging two or more lots) for apartment construction.

We wanted to see how the physical layout of the city had changed so Brisbane could densify. How is this being achieved in a city that has banned townhouses, rowhouses and apartments of any size in more than 60% of the city’s residential area, but at the same time has had a policy of consolidating growth for decades? Specifically, we wanted to see how existing residential land was densifying, rather than former industrial or undeveloped land.

Read more: Unlocking the greyfields to inhibit urban sprawl

What does the research show?

Our results indicate that current consolidation policies run counter to their intended aims of protecting green space. The practical outcome is that the low-density housing character of the city is being retained at the expense of backyards.

We found 52% of redevelopments resulted from subdivision, compared with 30% from land assembly and 18% for all other reconfigurations. In the past decade, the seven inner-city suburbs we studied lost over 21,000 square metres of open space, usually backyards, to be replaced with more houses.

This is explained by a combination of developers’ lack of interest in residential infill, the difficulty of boundary change, and the political unpalatability of “density”. Together, these factors work to create outcomes in conflict with consolidation policy.

Read more: Vested interests behind ‘city shapers’ often subvert higher-density policies

Existing lot shapes and sizes largely determine redevelopment, as developers favour land that is easily transformed. In previous research, we found large-scale developers constructing high-rise apartments are often only really interested in brownfield land – previously developed but disused sites. These are usually large sites owned by one landholder.

It’s inherently difficult to co-ordinate redevelopment across multiple properties for high-quality, precinct-level infill. On the other hand, individual owners can reap financial benefit from lot-scale redevelopment, without the costs associated with larger developments.

As a result, backyard subdivision is pursued as a simple form of infill. Despite the city council’s policy to “protect the Brisbane backyard” and the state government’s goal of more diverse and affordable homes, more single-family homes are being crammed into less and less space.

How can we improve outcomes?

While low-density infill may balance consumer preference for detached houses with meeting infill targets, it in effect creates a “compressed suburbia”. The results fail to deliver on the core promises of consolidation policy, including greater housing diversity and affordability, and a halt to urban sprawl.

Read more: To cut urban sprawl, we need quality infill housing displays to win over the public

It also leads to a dichotomy of new dwellings: high-rise apartments or detached houses. We found very little development of medium-density dwellings.

The market-based approach to urban consolidation leaves individuals seeking financial gain to determine the most important decision about our cities – their urban form.

If this continues, the lack of focus on high-quality infill will be a significant missed opportunity for our cities.

Read more: Vanishing Australian backyards leave us vulnerable to the stresses of city life

– ref. Why city policy to ‘protect the Brisbane backyard’ is failing – https://theconversation.com/why-city-policy-to-protect-the-brisbane-backyard-is-failing-150173

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Mountain, Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University

It has been more than 20 years in the making, but there is now a new order in Australia’s grandest (and most problematic) example of cooperative federalism: the National Electricity Market.

Not completely national (it excludes Western Australia and the Northern Territory), it links most towns south of Port Douglas and west of Port Lincoln so that, in theory, electricity produced near any of them can be used anywhere else.

This year first Victoria, and now NSW, have brought the development of their transmission and generation systems back under their own control.

Victoria set the ball rolling earlier this year with legislation to take back the power to plan and deliver new transmission.

In November in its first major use of the new laws it announced the procurement of a 300 megawatt battery near Geelong. Just three years ago a battery this size would have been three times bigger than the biggest in the world.

Read more: Australia’s states have been forced to go it alone on renewable energy, but it’s a risky strategy

NSW followed with legislation in November to create new authorities to plan and contract for the development of what it expects to be A$32 billion worth of new transmission, generation and storage facilities over the next 10 years.

In both states the legislation obtained widespread support in parliament.

Why they’re bringing electricity home

The reasons are political and economic.

Politically, reductions in the costs of wind and solar generation has meant decarbonisation is increasingly seen as a way to cut electricity prices.

But in both states a small number of privately-owned coal generators dominate production. Their owners have little interest in cutting the value of their plants by bringing on (renewable) replacements.

Read more: The national electricity market has served its purpose, time to move on

In addition, notwithstanding the privatisation of generation and the creation of the National Electricity Market, voters have continued to look to state ministers to decarbonise the grid, keep the lights on and get prices down.

The arrangements that governed the market left state governments with responsibility but no control.

Economically, while the creators of the market 20 years ago recognised that separating generation from transmission could undermine the coordinated development of both, they were persuaded that the gains from competition in generation would deliver more value.

These days, in the context of the rapid switch from a small number of ageing coal-fired generators to a larger number of new renewable-powered generators that need access to transmission, coordination between generation and transmission has become more important.

And the ability of suppliers to locate generators in multiple locations (including on the roofs of factories and homes) rather than near coal mines which might be in other states, has made it easier for state governments to plan for self-sufficiency.

What state power will look like

Much remains to be worked out, but the direction is clear.

State governments will increasingly plan and contract for the delivery of generators and storage services themselves.

They will also be facilitating, and perhaps to some degree funding, the development of the transmission system.

Most of the assets will continue to be privately owned, but producers and storage providers will increasingly be contracting with states for access to their markets rather than competing against other producers in the national market.

The companies that own coal generators and supply to their own retail businesses will be the big losers.

Their generation will be rendered uncompetitive by wind and solar farms, and they will be forced to buy from them (and perhaps even from generators owned by state governments) in order to keep customers.

This is a much tougher business model than the one they have become used to.

But it isn’t right to say the clock has come full circle; that we are going back to the bad old days of (often self-serving) state electricity commissions.

There are certainly similarities, and a risk of governments planning and procuring badly and forcing customers to pay for their failures.

Read more: Pumped hydro isn’t our energy future, it’s our past

But much is different. Customers are able to choose who they buy electricity from and are able to make some of it themselves if they want to.

This ability to choose exerts a powerful discipline. It is assisted by developments in production and storage and access to data that presents opportunities that could not have been imagined five years, much less 20 years ago.

There are plenty of new opportunities waiting to be explored.

– ref. After two decades, the national electricity market is on its way out, and that’s alright – https://theconversation.com/after-two-decades-the-national-electricity-market-is-on-its-way-out-and-thats-alright-151018

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ann Vickery, Associate Professor in Writing and Literature, Deakin University

Growing up in Australia in the 1970s, I much preferred the hijinks of Han Solo and Chewie to Princess Leia’s sexualised damsel in distress. My sister and I spent an entire summer pigging out on Choc Wedges and Barney Bananas so we could collect the men’s cricket team on specially marked sticks. Feminism seemed a world “far, far away”. Yet what Australian girls could and couldn’t do was being explored through a glut of screen adaptations of classic novels.

These included Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Getting of Wisdom (1977), Seven Little Australians (1973) and My Brilliant Career (1979). Many revealed a depressing picture of what happened if you were different, clever or outspoken. You could be: left behind while other girls are led through a mysterious rock portal, the subject of school bullying, or crushed more literally by a falling tree in an act of sacrificial redemption.

My Brilliant Career offered an alternative. Sybylla Melvyn, its “little bush commoner,” remains untamed and unapologetic. She would be modelled on author Miles Franklin herself, who mailed the manuscript to her literary idol, Henry Lawson. He subsequently provided a rousing endorsement and saw through its publication.

My Brilliant Career emerged in 1901, the same year as Federation, and aligned women’s independence with national independence through a symbolic coming-of-age narrative.

While Australian women received the right to vote the following year, My Brilliant Career voiced an irrepressible desire to be heard. Addressed to “My dear fellow Australians,” Melvyn (or Franklin) argues the story seeks to improve on other autobiographies by telling a collective truth: “This is not a romance … neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn — a real yarn”.

As such, My Brilliant Career blends the intimacy of life writing with the broader scope of a story being retold. My Brilliant Career is everywoman’s career as much as it is the career of Australia.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — gender, gothic haunting and gaslighting

A hoydenish tomboy

Sybylla is a highly likeable but flawed heroine, kicking around a crowded home and lamenting the “agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality” of teenage life.

The family has fallen on hard times, shifting from three stations and 200,000 acres to the small and “stagnant” Possum Gully. Dick Melvyn, once his daughter’s “hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even religion”, reneges all paternal responsibility by turning to drink after a series of failed speculations.

Franklin captures the resulting strain between Sybylla’s hardworking mother and her eldest daughter. As Sybylla knocks about as a hoydenish tomboy and dreams of joining the ranks of poets like Gordon, Lawson and Paterson, her mother sees only domestic uselessness and self-centredness.

Sent with her siblings to the local school, mingling with the Italian migrants at nearby diggings, and absorbing pub slang when retrieving her father, Sybylla has a democratic outlook:

To me the Prince of Wales will be no more than a shearer, unless when I meet him he displays some personality apart from his princeship — otherwise he can go hang.

Such colourful vernacular underscores how Franklin mobilises a living language, as much as a bush landscape, to generate national distinctiveness.

Packed off to her grandmother’s to be transformed into more marriageable material, Sybylla soon navigates a class-bound squattocracy with limited options. Besides her mother’s descent into drudgery, her Aunt Helen has been forced to return to the family home after her husband’s desertion. Sybylla realises with

a great blow that it was only men who could take the world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, metaphorically speaking, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither.

She is critical of women’s value being reduced to an index of their beauty but also internalises it to think herself plain and unappealing. In this, she is proved wrong, for her unpretentious liveliness attracts a number of possible suitors, including neighbouring hunk, Harry Beecham.

For the 1979 film, Gillian Armstrong perfectly cast then little-known Judy Davis as the pimply, unkempt Sybylla, a far cry from the Chiko Roll or Big M girls then gracing Australian billboards and TV.

My mother, now in her 80s, still raves about Sam Neill’s blue eyes as the dashing Beecham. Both Franklin and Armstrong build the chemistry in Sybylla and Harry’s courtship, emphasising an equality of energy and wit.

A higher love

Distinguishing between sexual passion and friendship love, Aunt Helen advises Sybylla she might receive and find real love in the latter. Yet Sybylla seeks a higher love.

Having “learnt them by heart”, the “men I loved” are the poets and she continues her “hope that one day I would clasp hands with them, and feel and know the unspeakable comfort and heart rest of congenial companionship”.

Sybylla holds to a Romantic view of the poet as both bard of the people and transcendent. The poet must be “Alone because his soul is as far above common mortals as common mortals are above monkeys.” This drives her sense there is something more than her appointed lot in life.

While Harry is prepared to “give” Sybylla “a study” and “truckload of writing gear” so she can pursue her career, Sybylla refuses his marriage proposal. She reflects, “He offered me everything — but control.”

Realising she needs an unfettered life, she knows she would ultimately destroy Harry’s “honest heart”. At the same time, there is little possibility of finding an ideal mate, who would be someone who has similarly “suffered” for their dreams.

My Brilliant Career not only captured the frustration of women at the turn of the century; it refused to end happily. Whereas the novel ends with Sybylla stuck and wearisome at Possum Gully, the film has her hopeful at the fence-line sending off her finished manuscript. Even in the 1970s, a choice between career and love seemed harsh.

Read more: Reclaim Her Name: why we should free Australia’s female novelists from their male pseudonyms

Whereas Franklin suggests that women’s path to success requires lonely self-determination, second-wave feminism emphasised collective consciousness-raising, even if that forum of voices remained faultily selective in its whiteness.

A social divide

While representing the “rope of class distinction” drawing “tighter” around Australian working men and women, My Brilliant Career revealed a social divide marked as much by race as class and gender. The Irish M’Swats, for whom Sybylla is forced to become a governess to repay her father’s debt, are depicted as uncivilised in their dirtiness.

The Aborigines exist as unnamed servants, their culture similarly dismissed. Servant girl Jane Haizelip tells Sybylla of her disdain for the men at Possum Gully: “They let the women work too hard. It puts me in mind er the time wen the black fellows made the gins do all the work.”

While Franklin occasionally employs a slave rhetoric to emphasise female oppression, one is struck by the novel’s racial inequities.

Many of the problems in My Brilliant Career remain prescient: drought, bushfire, economic depression and social precarity. Whereas second-wave feminists advocated having it all, too often the message today is that women can’t expect to have love, family and career simultaneously.

Franklin achieved fame and showed women as central to Australian literature. I hope my daughter’s generation keep her spirit but that the yarn becomes one of shared, all-round fulfilment.

An adaptation of My Brilliant Career is at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre until January 31.

– ref. Guide to the classics: My Brilliant Career and its uncompromising message for girls today – https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-my-brilliant-career-and-its-uncompromising-message-for-girls-today-145452

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

Like so much of what I have done as Australia’s Chief Scientist, the electricity market review of 2017 was unexpected.

I was driving home after delivering a speech late one night in October 2016 when then federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg called and asked if I would chair a review of the National Electricity Market.

The urgent need had arisen as a consequence of the South Australian power blackout and ongoing concerns about the evolution of the electricity market. The call was brief; the task was huge.

This was new territory for me. While I have a PhD in electrical engineering, I had no specific interest in power systems. I had previously taken a business interest in green technologies. I had started a green lifestyle magazine, I had invested early in green technology stocks (and lost a small fortune), been involved in an electric car charging company, and I drove an electric car. I was an engineer but my work was in micro-electronics, at the scale of brain synapses. Large-scale power engineering had been my least favourite subject.

Now, it is close to my favourite. Work on low-emissions technologies has occupied a significant portion of my five-year term as Chief Scientist, which finishes at the end of this month.

Energy is a complex, vitally important topic, on which everyone has an opinion. The physics of human-induced global warming is irrefutable and a fast reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is urgent. Last summer’s bushfires were a grim reminder.

Read more: The Finkel Review at a glance

People often ask me whether climate policy is destined to destroy political leaders in Australia. Call me an optimist, but what I have seen is progress. When my proposed Clean Energy Target met its maker in October 2017, I was disappointed, but I was honestly excited the Australian, state and territory governments agreed to 49 out of 50 recommendations of our review.

Many of these recommendations ensured the electricity system would retain its operating strength as ever more solar and wind generation was added, and others ensured better planning processes for long-distance interconnectors and renewable energy zones. The public narrative that climate progress is moribund overlooks this ongoing work.

In early 2018, as I began to better understand the full potential of hydrogen in a low-emission future, I informally briefed Frydenberg, who responded by asking me to prepare a formal briefing paper for him and his state and territory counterparts. With support from government, industry, research and public interest colleagues, it developed last year into the National Hydrogen Strategy, which explored fully the state of hydrogen technology internationally and its potential for Australia.

Read more: 145 years after Jules Verne dreamed up a hydrogen future, it has arrived

The next step came this year with the Low Emissions Technology Statement, which articulates a solid pathway to tackle some of the pressing and difficult challenges en route to a clean economy. This was developed by Frydenberg’s successor, Angus Taylor, supported by advice from a panel I chaired.

Read more: ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’: here’s the lowdown on Australia’s low-emissions roadmap

When I was appointed Australia’s Chief Scientist in 2015, my predecessor Ian Chubb took me for a drink at Canberra’s Monster Bar. He had a prepared brief for me and we flicked through it. But Ian didn’t offer prescriptive advice, given the reality that the specifics of the role are defined by each chief scientist in line with requests from the government of the day.

I came to the role with a plan no more detailed than to work hard, do things well, be opportunistic, and always say yes – despite the device that sits on my desk and barks “no” whenever you hit the red button, a gift from my staff keen to see a more measured response to the many calls on my time.

I am most proud of my initiatives in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education. These include the Australian Informed Choices project that ensures school students are given wise advice about core subjects that will set them in good stead for their careers; the STARPortal one-stop shop for information on extracurricular science activities for children; a report to the national education ministers on how businesses and schools can work together to provide context to science education; and the Storytime Pledge that acknowledges the fundamental importance of literacy by asking scientists to take a pledge to read to children.

But many of the high-profile tasks have arrived unexpectedly – the energy and low-emissions technology work, helping CSIRO with its report on climate and disaster resilience, and my work this year to help secure ICU ventilators and most recently, to review testing, contact tracing and outbreak management in the coronavirus pandemic.

Read more: Exponential growth in COVID cases would overwhelm any state’s contact tracing. Australia needs an automated system

The incoming Chief Scientist, Cathy Foley, will no doubt find, as I did, the job brings big surprises and unexpected turns. I expect she will also find government more receptive than ever to taking advice from experts in health, the physical sciences and the social sciences.

That doesn’t mean gratuitous advice. The advice we offer as scientists must be relevant and considered. Much of my advice has been in the form of deep-dive reviews, such as the report on national research facilities that was funded in the 2018 budget. But this year, amid the pandemic, we began something quite different: the Rapid Research Information Forum, which gives fast, succinct advice to government on very specific questions. This has been a highly effective way to synthesise the most recent research results with a very quick turnaround.

Nor does advice mean criticism. The Chief Scientist’s job is not to be the chief scientific critic of government policy. It is to advise ministers with the best that science has to offer. In turn, their job is to weigh that advice alongside inputs from other sectors and interests.

For me, working with the government has delivered results. Ministers have been receptive, have never told me what to say, and have agreed to the vast majority of my work being made public. In the energy sphere, we’ve made incredible progress. I am delighted to be staying on in an advisory role on low-emissions technologies.

When Frydenberg called late that evening in 2016, I had no idea where to begin to assess the state of the electricity market. And I had no idea that three years later we would be taking the first steps towards a clean hydrogen economy.

Now I am confident we will achieve the dramatic reduction in emissions that is necessary. Because of the immensity of the energy, industrial, agricultural and building systems, it will be slow and enormously difficult in a technical sense, politics aside.

Anyone who believes otherwise has not looked in detail at the production process for steel and aluminium. Converting these industries to green production is a mammoth task. But the political will is there. Industry is on the job, as is the scientific community, and the work has started.

The beginning of my term coincided with one of the most momentous scientific breakthroughs in a century: the detection of gravitational waves, literally ripples in the fabric of spacetime. This confirmed a prediction made by Einstein 100 years ago and was the final piece in the puzzle of his Theory of General Relativity.

As I finish my term, the contribution of Australian scientists to that discovery has just been recognised in the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science. As chair of the Prizes selection committee, this was a nice bookend for me. More importantly, it’s a reminder we are playing the long game.

– ref. Alan Finkel: how a late-night phonecall in 2016 triggered ‘incredible progress’ on clean energy – https://theconversation.com/alan-finkel-how-a-late-night-phonecall-in-2016-triggered-incredible-progress-on-clean-energy-151588

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

Australia is on track to meet its 2030 Paris climate targets without resorting to carryover credits and could exceed them with the aid of the recently-announced technology roadmap, according to projections to be released on Thursday.

Australia has pledged to reduce emissions by 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2030.

The annual update of emissions projections shows that to meet the 26% cut, without using carryover credits, a further reduction of 56 million tonnes would be needed over the decade to 2030.

To reach the higher target of a 28% cut without the credits, a reduction of 123 million tonnes would be required over the decade.

Neither of these scenarios includes the technology investment roadmap – which is the government’s policy to support new and emerging energy technologies to a price that is comparable with higher emitting alternatives.

The Minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, said if the roadmap was taken into account, “Australia is projected to beat its 2030 target by 145 million tonnes”.

This would be without relying on the credits which have been gained from exceeding earlier targets.

“Under this scenario, Australia’s emissions are projected to be 29% below 2005 levels by 2030,” Taylor said.

Scott Morrison has flagged the government won’t use the carryovers if they are not necessary to meet Australia’s commitments.

He is set to confirm this when he addresses a Pacific Islands Forum virtual climate summit on Friday. This precedes the Climate Ambition Summit hosted by Britain, France and the United Nations at the weekend to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord.

The Pacific summit is aimed at putting pressure on the weekend meeting, which is being called “the sprint to Glasgow”, the delayed climate conference to be held in a year’s time.

There has been argy bargy over whether Morrison could get a speaking role at the weekend meeting, where leaders are being asked to make new commitments. As of Wednesday, he was not expected to be a speaker.

The update in the Australia’s emissions projections 2020 report shows Australia’s position against the 2030 target has improved by more than 300 million tonnes since the 2019 projections, and by 639 million tonnes since 2018.

The improvement since 2018 is equivalent to taking all of the country’s passenger vehicles off the road for 15 years.

Emissions are projected to decline to 478 million tonnes in 2030 which is 22% below 2005 levels. Incorporating the technology investment roadmap, emissions are forecast to be 436 million tonnes in 2030 – 29% below 2005 levels.

The update says the downward revision in the 2020 projections reflects:

• the inclusion of new measures to speed up the development and deployment of low emissions technologies in the recent budget

• a further reduction in projected emissions from the electricity sector due to continued strong uptake of renewables – especially small and mid-scale solar – by households and businesses; and

• the temporary effect of COVID-related restrictions on the economy.

– ref. Emissions projections indicate Australia won’t need carryover credits to meet Paris targets – https://theconversation.com/emissions-projections-indicate-australia-wont-need-carryover-credits-to-meet-paris-targets-151782

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deanna Kemp, Professor and Director, Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, The University of Queensland

On the eve of Reconciliation Week this year, news broke that Rio Tinto had destroyed ancient rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia to expand one of its 16 iron ore mines in the Pilbara.

The public was appalled to learn that a mining company could legally destroy such sacred Aboriginal heritage. Rio Tinto mishandled its response, and a national and international outcry prompted a parliamentary inquiry.

Today, the joint standing committee released its interim report into the incident, entitled “Never Again”.

The inquiry lifts the lid on a deeply flawed regulatory system. While the report is scathing of Rio Tinto, it concludes that the issues “are not unique” to the company.

Flaws in WA law and the native title system

The interim report recommends major legislative reform to prevent this happening again.

The report details significant deficiencies in WA’s outdated Aboriginal Heritage Act, passed in 1972. By excluding Aboriginal peoples from decisions about land development, the law undermines their right to manage their cultural heritage.

Read more: How Rio Tinto can ensure its Aboriginal heritage review is transparent and independent

The report recognises progress made on public consultation of a draft bill that would remove Section 18 of the act, which allows developers to apply for consent to legally damage or destroy Aboriginal sites.

The committee recommends any new legislation ensure Aboriginal people have meaningful involvement in and control over heritage decision-making, in line with the internationally recognised principles of free, prior and informed consent.

The interim report recommends placing a moratorium on any new Section 18 applications until new legislation is passed. It also encourages companies with existing permissions not to proceed with the destruction of heritage sites, but to have them assessed under the new legislation.

The findings highlight shortcomings in federal law and recommends major improvements in the statutory protection for Indigenous groups seeking to protect their significant sites.

The report calls for the removal of the so-called “gag clauses” in land use agreements, which prevent Aboriginal peoples from speaking out against developers.

In a public hearing, the traditional owners of Juukan Gorge, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples, explained how their agreement with Rio Tinto prevented them from objecting to the company’s Section 18 application, or seeking an emergency injunction under federal heritage legislation.

The report recommends all companies operating in WA undertake an independent review of their land use agreements, in line with calls from investors in mining companies.

The deep flaws in Australian’s native title system are described in the report as “another means to destroy Indigenous heritage”. These flaws are so alarming that Labor Senator Patrick Dodson, a committee member and senior Aboriginal leader, had earlier called for a royal commission.

Australia’s current regulatory system approves mining developments on a project-by-project basis. The approvals process does not consider the cumulative impacts to cultural landscapes, such as Juukan Gorge, from multiple and expanding mines. The committee will likely hear more about these issues next year.

Corporate responsibility beyond legal compliance

After the Juukan Gorge tragedy, Rio Tinto conducted an internal, board-led review of its heritage policies, but did not deliver meaningful recommendations on accountability and fell well short of stakeholder expectations.

The inquiry report concluded that Rio Tinto’s review did not fully grapple with the root causes of the Juukan Gorge debacle and its effects.

Rather than letting this slide, inquiry chair Warren Entsch and the rest of the committee doubled down on their interrogation of the company’s senior management.

Through persistent questions in public hearings, the committee probed Rio Tinto’s generic explanations of “missed opportunities”.

Seeing that other mining companies had “taken advantage” of the weak regulatory system, the committee also pressed BHP and Fortescue Metals Group on their cultural heritage policies and practices. This unearthed information that was not included in the companies’ public submissions. Some of this information aligns with our research.

For example, many mining companies have not kept pace with their social policy commitments. Across the industry, community relations departments have seen sizeable reductions. Our research has flagged the risks associated with these issues, but most companies have failed to adequately respond.

In many mining companies, the work of community relations and Indigenous affairs units remains peripheral to mine planning and production processes.

Read more: Destruction of Juukan Gorge: we need to know the history of artefacts, but it is more important to keep them in place

Mining engineers, lawyers and media managers routinely overrule the advice of social specialists — including local experts and Indigenous advisers who work directly with communities on the ground.

It is entirely normal for company personnel with a limited understanding of customary land tenure to dominate decisions about land access and cultural heritage. This knowledge gap is a known point of failure in mine-community relations.

The inquiry process has revealed a deep reluctance within mining companies to thoroughly investigate major social incidents and the impacts of their operations.

We have learned that companies don’t share these findings with the public – unless forced to do so. The report rejects the idea that companies can “feign ignorance” in order to avoid accountability.

What are the prospects for change?

The inquiry has laid bare the overwhelming challenges faced by First Nations peoples when mining occurs on their land. It highlights the urgent need for a rebalancing of power to avoid mining production priorities dominating at the expense of all else.

The report confirms that legislative reform is crucial. But this can be painfully slow and notoriously piecemeal. For example, the industry has already pushed back on aspects of WA’s heritage law review. For Aboriginal groups, these and other proposed reforms do not go far enough.

Pressure may have to come from other places. The report strengthens investor demands for better corporate management of the impacts of mining on communities and cultural heritage. Shareholder and investor advocacy at annual general meetings is only likely to intensify.

Read more: Can a mining state be pro-heritage? Vital steps to avoid another Juukan Gorge

Aboriginal leaders and new Aboriginal alliances are also primed to take collective action and push for national best practice standards.

The inquiry’s findings will likely be leveraged internationally, as well. The Apache people in the US have already linked Juukan to their campaign to protect the sacred Oak Flat site in Arizona. This is where Resolution Copper, jointly owned by Rio Tinto and BHP, is proposing a new mine.

Having been put on notice, global mining companies are bolstering their communities and cultural heritage teams. But it is not enough to just increase head count. Social specialists and Indigenous people must hold positions of authority and have influence internally to contain corporate self-interest.

Mining companies like Rio Tinto must do better. To avoid future catastrophes, industry leaders must internalise the lessons from Juukan and radically overhaul the way they do business.

– ref. Juukan Gorge inquiry puts Rio Tinto on notice, but without drastic reforms, it could happen again – https://theconversation.com/juukan-gorge-inquiry-puts-rio-tinto-on-notice-but-without-drastic-reforms-it-could-happen-again-151377

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

This month Alan Finkel ends his term as Australia’s Chief Scientist.

An entrepreneur, engineer, neuroscientist, and educator in his former life, Finkel describes the role he’s held since 2016 as consisting of two activities.

There’s “reviewing” – briefing government on all matters scientific, including energy and climate change. And then there’s “making things up” – developing programs to support the communication of science, technology, innovation, and research across the community.

Writing for The Conversation, Finkel expresses confidence Australia will achieve the “dramatic reduction in emissions” that is “necessary”.

However the road has not been easy, with many political setbacks.

“I was certainly somewhat personally disappointed, and disappointed for the country, that the Clean Energy Target wasn’t adopted,” Finkel tells the podcast.

“On the other hand, I took a lot of comfort from the fact that the other 49 out of 50 recommendations [in his report] were accepted and adopted and most of them have been implemented.”

“Those recommendations – a lot of them have been part of the reason that we’ve been able to introduce solar and wind electricity at extraordinary rates in the last three years.”

The debate currently is whether Australia will sign up for zero net emissions by 2050. While Finkel says “that’s a question for politicians, not for me”, he adds that “we’re taking the right measures already consistent with a drive towards zero or low emissions”.

These measures, he says, involve cheaper batteries, solar, wind, pumped hydro, and gas as a “backstop”, as we transition out of coal fire electricity.

Asked if a new coal-fired power station project could ever be started, Finkel said that to comply with carbon capture and storage, the cost of electricity from the plant would be “five or six times higher” than electricity produced by solar and wind.

“I would never predict anything…but I can say with some degree of confidence that that economics would be challenging”. His message was clear.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Chief Scientist Alan Finkel on climate, energy and emissions – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-chief-scientist-alan-finkel-on-climate-energy-and-emissions-151770

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jim Stanford, Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work, Australia Institute; Honorary Professor of Political Economy, University of Sydney

“We are all in this together,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison solemnly intoned in April – and for a brief few months, in the face of the economic crisis wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia’s industrial relations protagonists agreed.

Business groups, unions and governments put aside their usual differences and worked together to minimise job losses.

They quickly negotiated alterations to dozens of awards and enterprise agreements, adjusting rules and rosters to help keep Australians on the job.

Then, in late May, seeing opportunity in that spirit of cooperation, Morrison heralded a new consensus-based approach to industrial relations.

The federal government set aside its effort to impose more legal restrictions on unions and established new “industrial relations reform roundtables” for employer groups, unions and government officials to work together on reforming workplace laws Morrison said were “not fit for purpose”.

“We’ve got to put down our weapons,” he declared. The change in approach was even compared to the historic Accords of the 1980s, in which the Hawke-Keating Labor government convinced unions to accept wage freezes in return for enhanced social benefits (like Medicare and superannuation).

Read more: Australian politics explainer: the Prices and Incomes Accord

Well, the Kumbaya moment didn’t last long.

Within weeks the parties retreated to their corners and their standard speaking points. No meaningful consensus emerged on any issue from any table.

Even tentative proposals – like an idea supported by unions and the Business Council of Australia to combine fast-track approval of union-negotiated enterprise agreements with greater flexibility in determining their suitability – were shot down in partisan gunfire by more strident business lobbyists.

Read more: Morrison government invites unions to dance, but employer groups call the tune

Now, in the absence of consensus, the government has picked up its traditional hymn book and is once again singing the praises of “flexibility”.

Today federal industrial relations minister Christian Porter revealed the rotten fruit of the roundtable process, the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia’s Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020.

If passed, it will further skew the already lopsided balance of power towards employers.

The bill doesn’t just take the employers’ side in the five issues debated at those roundtables (award simplification, enterprise agreements, casual work, compliance and enforcement, and “greenfields agreements” for new enterprises).

One of its biggest changes is to suspend rules that prevent enterprise agreements from undercutting minimum award standards. This proposal wasn’t even discussed at the roundtables.

This confirms the gloves are off once again in Australia’s interminable IR wars.

Here are the most significant ways the bill will weight the scales further to the disadvantage of workers.

Suspending the BOOT

As the law now stands, enterprise agreements cannot not undercut minimum standards in industry awards. This is known as the “better off overall test” – or BOOT. The new bill instructs the Fair Work Commission to approve agreements even if they fail this test, so long as the deal is nominally supported by affected workers (more on this below) and deemed to be in the “public interest”.

Australia is unique among wealthy nations in allowing employers to unilaterally implement enterprise agreements, without involvement by a union. The BOOT is thus necessary to prevent enterprise agreements from undermining award rights.

The bill proposes suspending BOOT for two years. But even if it were restored after that (which is uncertain), agreements approved during that window would remain in effect (enterprise agreements typically last four years). Even after they expire, under Australian law they remain in effect until replaced by a new agreement, or terminated by the FWC – neither of which is likely in a non-unionised workplace.

Apparently in anticipation that unions will actively oppose non-BOOT-compliant agreements, the bill also includes measures to speed their approval by the Fair Work Commission. The process must be completed within 21 days (with some exceptions). This will limit the ability of affected workers to learn about and resist their loss of benefits and conditions. Unions will be restricted from intervening around agreements they were not directly involved in negotiating (including intervening against agreements that had no union involvement at all).

Broadening the definition of casual work

The growing use of “casual” employment provisions was a hot topic at the IR reform tables. The new bill clarifies the definition of casual work in the most expansive way possible: a casual job is any position deemed casual by the employer, and accepted by the worker, for which there is no promise of regular continuing employment.

In other words, any job can be casual, so long as workers are desperate enough to accept it. This will foster the further spread of insecure employment without paid leave entitlements. Most importantly, it removes a big potential liability faced by employers as a result of recent court decisions, under which they might have owed back pay for holidays and sick leave to employees improperly treated as casual workers.

Read more: What defines casual work? Federal Court ruling highlights a fundamental flaw in Australian labour law

Casualising part-time workers

Further casualisation will be attained through new rules regarding rosters and hours for permanent part-time workers. The bill extends flexibility provisions originally implemented earlier this year – during that brief moment of pandemic-induced cooperation. The rules allow employers to alter hours for regular part-timers without incurring overtime penalties or other costs (currently required under some awards). This will allow employers to effectively use part-time workers as yet another form of casual, just-in-time labour.

Doubling new project agreement times

Finally, the bill grants one more big wish from the business list.

It allows super-long enterprise agreements at major new projects. Agreements can last for up to eight years – double the time now allowed – and be signed, sealed and delivered before any workers start on the job (thus denying them any input into the process).

Under revised BOOT provisions, they could also undercut the minimum standards of any industry awards.

Back to business as usual

These changes are being advertised as a spur for post-pandemic job creation. But this claim is hollow.

In reality, the changes in part-time and casual rules will actually discourage new hiring. Since existing workers can be costlessly “flexed” in line with employer needs, there is no need to hire anyone else.

Weaker BOOT protections will spur a wave of new enterprise agreements, most union-free, and aimed at reducing (not raising) compensation and standards. This makes a mockery of the goals of collective bargaining, and grants employers further opportunity to suppress labour costs (already tracking at their slowest pace in postwar history).

So what to make of that short-lived spirit of togetherness that purportedly sparked this whole process? In retrospect, it seems to have been just an opportunity for the Coalition government to pose as visionary statesmen during a time of crisis.

Now, mere months later, the government is back to its old ways – and the pandemic is just another excuse to scapegoat unions, drive down wages and fatten business profits.

– ref. So much for consensus: Morrison government’s industrial relations bill is a business wish list – https://theconversation.com/so-much-for-consensus-morrison-governments-industrial-relations-bill-is-a-business-wish-list-151668

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shane Rogers, Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University

If you leave your car sitting the garage for too long, the battery can go flat. Similarly, if we don’t maintain our friendships, they can go a bit flat too.

So just as it’s good practice to drive your car every so often and have it serviced regularly, friendships are easier to maintain with some semblance of regular contact.

What has this meant for our friendships during 2020, a year of social distancing and lockdowns? My research suggests physical separation wasn’t necessarily associated with psychological separation or the breakdown of friendships.

And that appears to be thanks mostly to communication technologies.

Mental health, friendships and COVID

Consistent with research from other parts of the world, lockdown experiences in Australia have been associated with diminished emotional well-being for many people.

My colleague Travis Cruickshank and I surveyed 1,599 Australians from various age groups during the national lockdown in April. Our study is still at the preprint stage, which means it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

A substantial proportion of participants reported a deterioration in their mental health due to COVID-19 (10% deteriorated a lot, 44% deteriorated somewhat, 40% reported no change, and 6% improved somewhat).

We also asked how their friendships had been affected, and surprisingly, most respondents reported no change (66%). This was despite 72% noting they were interacting face-to-face with friends a lot less (and a further 14% somewhat less) during the pandemic.

Read more: It’s hard to admit we’re lonely, even to ourselves. Here are the signs and how to manage them

Communication technologies to the rescue

At first glance our results seem strange, as even the best communication technologies are arguably not an adequate substitute for face-to-face interaction. It’s difficult to make eye contact — an important social cue — through a screen. And if you’ve ever tried to catch up with a group of friends over Zoom or a similar platform, you’ll know it can become a little chaotic.

However, 56% of participants in our study reported spending more time interacting with friends using technology during the pandemic (for example, phone, email, or online chat). So it seems most people used communication technologies to stay connected with their friends during lockdown — even if it wasn’t quite the same as catching up in person.

Social media sometimes gets a bad rap. For example, excessive social media use has been associated with negative outcomes such as lower self-esteem and narcissistic tendencies. It can also be a vehicle for spreading misinformation.

However, having a raft of options for communicating digitally, of which social media platforms are a big part, has arguably been a good thing overall.

People have been able to share jokes with a wide audience to keep spirits up. For example, a Facebook group encouraging people to dress up in costumes to take their bins out, and then post pictures, went viral around the world.

Read more: Say what? How to improve virtual catch-ups, book groups and wine nights

More importantly, people could stay connected with friends and family during a stressful time. We know social support is important for managing anxiety, especially during fraught times.

Our results are consistent with other Australian research and US research which found people didn’t perceive their social support to be negatively affected during the pandemic.

But not everybody made use of technology

In our study, while most people reported no impact on their friendships, 27% of people reported a deterioration in their relationships with friends. These people were more likely to also report not increasing their level of communication via technological means.

These people were also more likely to report their mental health had deteriorated.

It’s important to note we collected our data fairly early in the pandemic. So it’s possible more people, particularly those in Victoria who endured a prolonged second lockdown, may have experienced deterioration in their friendships since we collected our data.

But our results highlight the important role communication technologies can play during a pandemic, and the value of using such technologies to maintain relationships and social support, for the benefit of our mental health.

Interestingly, 7% of people reported an improvement in friendship quality. Perhaps connecting over difficult times brought some people closer. Alternatively, with various communication technologies and apps gaining traction, some people may have started interacting with friends during lockdown who they wouldn’t normally see or speak to.

New communication technologies on the horizon

Video chat platforms (such as Zoom) saw a dramatic increase in use during the pandemic. While serviceable, video chat is still lacking compared with face-to-face interaction.

The pandemic has heightened interest in the development of new digital communication technologies. One prospect is communication in virtual reality (VR).

During the pandemic, a host of start-up companies have appeared selling VR meeting platforms. There was also an increase in usage of social VR programs, although these remain on the fringe.

A current issue with social interaction in VR is that the avatars generally have minimal expression and therefore only represent a shell of a character that transmits your voice. As summed up in this article on The Conversation, “VR technologies perhaps only offer a pale imitation of the multi-sensory experiences of life”.

However, new developments in motion tracking technology and touch-stimulating devices are set to significantly improve the social interaction experience in VR within the next few years.

New VR headsets are in development that include inbuilt facial motion tracking, such as those by Facebook, and also the DecaGear 1. In the coming years, we may be interacting in VR at work and at the weekend with our friends.

Read more: Why FaceTime can’t replace face-to-face time during social distancing

– ref. Has COVID cost friendships? Technology may have helped people stay connected during the pandemic – https://theconversation.com/has-covid-cost-friendships-technology-may-have-helped-people-stay-connected-during-the-pandemic-149276

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniella J. Forster, Senior Lecturer, Educational ethics and philosophies, University of Newcastle

This year, many of us have come to appreciate, perhaps more than before, the incredible work teachers do. We may wish to show our appreciation with a gift.

But what kind of gift will show our gratitude while ensuring we’re being ethical, too?

Read more: ‘Exhausted beyond measure’: what teachers are saying about COVID-19 and the disruption to education

What are the rules about gifts?

The key ethical concepts to consider when giving a gift to a teacher is undue influence and a conflict of interest, whether they be perceived, potential or real.

Public perception of the acceptance of a gift is important. In ethics policies and codes of conduct it can be affected by factors such as whether the gift was given in secret, the relationship between the giver and the receiver, and the magnitude and frequency of giving.

Teaching is an exposed profession when it comes to public perception — everyone has gone through the education system and has an opinion. The paradox is that public perception of teaching as a profession can differ from the warm and appreciative perceptions individuals often have of their own child’s teacher.

This means any gift, benefit or hospitality given to a teacher must not be easily considered a kind of bribe for special treatment, such as giving a specific grade to your child.

Each gift comes with some risk to the reputation of a teacher. Cash and items that can be easily exchanged for cash, such as shares, are generally forbidden. Parents should assume it is inappropriate to gift a teacher money for a nice dinner out, or an expensive piece of jewellery.

Read more: Is learning more important than well-being? Teachers told us how COVID highlighted ethical dilemmas at school

Each state and territory has its own gifts and benefits policies when it comes to ethical codes of conduct.

In Tasmania a gift must be worth less than A$100 and teachers must report offers of cash to their head of department and Tasmania Police. Whereas in the New South Wales Code of Conduct teachers must politely refuse gifts worth more than $50 (see Section 10.4) but can request approval for them.

In Queensland, teachers need to declare most gifts in a form. The gifts must be approved by the school and recorded on the public gift register. Gifts worth more than $150 will also be evaluated for appropriateness but those over $350 are unlikely to be approved.

In Western Australia a teacher can accept any minor gift valued less than $100 — such as chocolates, flowers, wine or jewellery — without declaring them. Other types of gifts such as consumables (event tickets) or property (mobile phones, computers) must be declared, registered and approved by the principal or director. Any gift over $1,000 cannot be kept for personal use.

In Victoria, a “gift of appreciation” valued at $100 or less from parents or guardians to a teacher can be accepted and does not need to be declared.

So, what can I give?

The questions you need to ask yourself before giving a gift are:

• can I be certain the gift is simply a demonstration of my gratitude for exemplary but complete teaching (such as end of year or semester), and not loaded with further expectations, such as a public acknowledgement or favours?

• is my gift excessive or could it be considered inappropriate?

• can my gift be exchanged for cash?

• am I a serial gift-giver? If so, calculate the total value of the gifts you have given to ensure they can’t be perceived as excessive or pressure for special treatment.

Some ethical gift ideas include:

• your favourite book, or a book voucher that can’t be exchanged for cash.

• a silk tie or colourful scarf, but not more intimate clothing

• scented candles, an engraved pen, a bound notebook or a small item from the antique store, as long as they are reasonably priced

• regifting a quality item, making a thank you card with your child, or planting some succulents in a nice pot

• getting together with other students’ families for a bigger gift. In Victoria a gift valued at over $500 may be approved if offered by multiple students or carers. In Western Australia, a teacher could be given a holiday trip as a farewell gift from a group of graduating students. So long as the teacher completes the required declaration and the gift is internally approved, the teacher can take the opportunity as a personal, private trip without requesting official travel approval

• making donations on your teacher’s behalf. In NSW, it is acceptable to donate a large sum of money, such as $1,000 to the school library for resources, or for playground equipment. But consult with your school about the process of such donations

• if you know your teacher has a special interest in, for instance, environmental protection, equal educational access for girls, or the provision of medical assistance to children in war-torn areas, you could give a tax-deductable donation to a reputable charity, on their behalf.

South Australia’s education department also invites students and parents to say a public thanks to their teacher on an online form.

The last ethical consideration is to ask yourself where the intended gift came from. Was it made ethically, on a living wage? Can it be recycled or made sustainably? Does it support a local industry or artist? Would your teacher like to know you have made a donation to a worthy cause on their behalf?

Read more: Five ways to reduce your eco-footprint this Christmas

If you are thinking about showing your appreciation to your teacher, it might be best to ask them what they would like, or what the school might need, to be sure they will be able to enjoy it.

– ref. Looking to buy a gift for your child’s teacher? Here’s how to be ethical about it – https://theconversation.com/looking-to-buy-a-gift-for-your-childs-teacher-heres-how-to-be-ethical-about-it-151572

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniela Simone, Senior lecturer, Macquarie University

Thousands of TikTok users have been creating a musical based on Disney/Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille under the hashtag #ratatouillemusical.

It began when US-based schoolteacher Emily Jacobsen wrote a “love ballad” in honour of Remy, the anthropomorphic rat with an acute sense of smell and taste who dreams of becoming a chef.

Jacobsen’s clip was then transformed by Daniel Mertzlufft, a composer and arranger, who revamped the song. Adding strings, trumpets, additional vocals and French horn, he turned it into a big musical number, capturing the imagination of thousands of TikTok users.

Soon others joined in: writing songs, crafting choreography and designing sets, costumes, makeup, puppets — and even the playbill. Others imagined the rehearsal process and the artistic director’s notes.

The result is a viral sensation. Even Disney has picked up the enthusiasm, with the Disney Parks TikTok account posting their own contribution — a Hamilton-esque rap about Remy’s culinary ambitions.

But what if Disney wanted to bring this collectively written musical to stage? Could they? And could Ratatouille The Musical be a ticket to riches for these gifted Gen Zers?

Who owns the copyright?

Generally speaking, anyone who makes their own song or dance on TikTok automatically owns the copyright. Copyright also allows for joint authorship, but it usually requires the authors to have been working together on a common aim — could this be said of TikTok creators who take and build on each others’ works sequentially?

Working out authorship is only the first hurdle. Because creators are located all around the world, different copyright and contract laws come into play.

And these creators are not only building on each other’s creations, they are also building off Disney’s original movie.

This means there might be potential, (as unlikely as it seems,) for Disney to sue the TikTokkers for their use of Remy. In the United States and some other jurisdictions, it is possible to assert copyright in fictional characters.

This is more complicated in places like Australia, where at least one eager TikTokker, Gabbi Bolt, is crafting songs for the musical. Here, characters themselves are not protected by copyright, but aspects could be protected under the broader copyright encompassing the movie’s story and artwork.

Infringement would turn on whether a “substantial part” has been copied — something difficult to assess as it’s a matter of degree.

Mind you, as long as the collaborations stay on TikTok, it seems unlikely Disney will sue. In a statement, the company told the New York Times “we love when our fans engage with our stories”.

But who can get paid?

Even though the TikTok users own their copyright, as a condition of participating on the platform, they agree to the terms of service. These terms are complex and hard to navigate — but it appears users grant TikTok a very broad irrevocable, perpetual, sublicensable right to copy, modify and share their content on a royalty-free basis.

This licence is non-exclusive so (in theory) TikTokkers could license their videos to others, such as Disney — but the terms imply that users can only access and use any TikTok content for “personal, non-commercial use”.

It’s not clear from the terms exactly what this personal use would cover. In addition, TikTokkers specifically renounce the right to remuneration for their creativity except as provided for in the terms of service.

(It seems even sponsored posts could be contrary to the terms of service, despite being so widespread. For stars like Charli D’Amelio, TikTok clearly tolerates — or has agreed to — some commercial uses.)

Under the terms of service, TikTokkers also waive their “moral rights”: anyone who uses their work doesn’t need to attribute them as authors, which they would normally have to do in Australia.

This means Disney could use the creative contributions of the users without having to compensate the creators, or even recognise them as authors.

So it seems the TikTokkers can’t get paid. But TikTok can. Under the terms of service, users agree TikTok can authorise others to make derivative works based on their work in any format or on any platform.

Disney would probably need to get TikTok’s permission to make any commercial use of the songs, artworks and dances uploaded on its service.

And while the TikTokkers who create the content are not allowed to receive any money for their work, nothing in the terms of service prevents TikTok from charging Disney a hefty fee for granting such permission.

A double sided coin

The story of #ratatouillemusical illustrates the two sides of social media services such as Instagram or TikTok, which can launch an artist or creator while, at the same time, making it challenging for them to monetize their content.

TikTok has recently launched a Creator Fund, allowing eligible “ambitious creators” to earn money off their videos, so far some users seem disappointed with the service which reportedly pays between 2 and 4 cents per 1,000 views.

And while there are agreements in place with some recording labels and independent distributors about the use of background music, this doesn’t really help amateur contributors.

Under COVID-19, we have seen a huge surge in collaborative creativity and a growing reliance on platforms such as TikTok for socialising and entertainment.

These are exciting opportunities — but the intellectual property implications of conducting more and more of our lives online have yet to be fully thought through.

– ref. TikTokkers are writing Ratatouille, the musical. But who owns the copyright? – https://theconversation.com/tiktokkers-are-writing-ratatouille-the-musical-but-who-owns-the-copyright-151294

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Dwyer, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

The long-awaited mandatory code that will force Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies for news content was finally unveiled yesterday.

The Treasury Laws Amendment Bill 2020 (news media and digital platforms mandatory bargaining code) will be introduced to parliament today, before being referred to a Senate committee.

Many of Australia’s news businesses have been on a hiding to nothing for more than a decade, as their revenue is undercut by the targeted advertising business model used by major digital platforms.

The most visible casualty has been public interest journalism — with the prospect of a well-informed citizenry on a slower, less obvious burn.

Against a backdrop of reports suggesting intense lobbying efforts by Facebook and Google against the new legislation, it appears some key concessions have been achieved by the platforms that weren’t present in the draft code.

Read more: No more negotiating: new rules could finally force Google and Facebook to pay for news

What’s changed in the revised code?

First, the revised code will now abide by an added “two-way value exchange” principle. This allows the monetary worth of traffic sent to news providers to be taken into account when determining the financial value of a particular news business’s content to the platforms.

How this will be calculated, however, will likely be an ongoing bone of contention for both parties.

A second major concession will see Facebook’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube exempted from the application of the new law. But the Treasurer will be able to add these (and other platforms) at a later date, should he deem it justified at the time.

A third concession is the halving of the 28-day notice period for the platforms to warn news websites of major changes to their ranking algorithms. These directly impact how news articles are displayed on Facebook’s Newsfeed and Google Search.

It seems the basic idea to “level the playing field” between platforms and news providers remains baked into the revised code, but only time will tell whether it works in practice.

A related objective — to implement a process that sustains public interest journalism — remains equally tricky and may hinge on the revised code’s success.

But many will be pleased the public broadcasters ABC and SBS now fall within the code’s scope, too. Both will be financially compensated for news content along with their commercial rivals.

This may seem like a win, and it may be eventually, but for now it’s unclear how this will actually play out in terms of the government’s ongoing funding of these broadcasters.

Although conjecture at this stage, it may emerge in a forum such as Senate estimates that any compensation payments should be factored into overall funding calculations for the public broadcasters.

The arbitration model

One pivotal feature of the new legislation is it will address the entrenched power of the platforms by introducing a “final offer arbitration” model for price negotiations.

This process, overseen by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, will be mandatory when parties are unable to independently reach an agreement. It will likely be central to the new code’s success, or lack thereof.

Curiously, the revised code’s framework encourages deals to be struck outside of it. In these situations, key elements of commercial negotiations between the parties can be “turned off” with mutual agreement.

This appears to be a pragmatic recognition by the ACCC the code will never be able to control the realities of commercial media deal-making, which continue to be struck despite the code’s new bargaining marketplace.

However, where negotiations break down, news media businesses will be able to trigger the code’s provisions for meeting minimum standards.

This will cover advance notice of algorithmic changes and the requirement to engage in good faith bargaining for up to three months, before participating in the mandatory arbitration process.

Smaller news publishers will be able to bargain collectively, or accept “standard” offers from the platforms.

When one party fails to engage

The code has reasonably strong enforcement provisions in cases where there is a failure to negotiate in good faith, comply with an arbitration decision, avoid participation or engage in “retaliatory action against news media companies”.

The maximum penalty for a breach by Google or Facebook is the greater of either 10% of the platform’s annual Australian turnover, A$10 million, or three times the benefit obtained as a result of hosting the specific news business’s content.

Facebook and Google have put their previous threats to switch off local news content on hold until they see the final version of the code. For now, they appear to be engaging with the ACCC.

Read more: Facebook vs news: Australia wants to level the playing field, Facebook politely disagrees

We still need to tackle media concentration

As we await the final version of the code, the irony is not lost on those of us also waiting eagerly for events to unfold before another Senate committee on media pluralism.

The committee was set up in response to a petition started by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Amassing more than 500,000 signatures, Rudd’s petition has called for a royal commission into the negative influence of News Corp’s power in Australia’s highly concentrated media landscape.

A rich history of Australia’s parliamentary inquiries into the media indicates we can expect delays, power plays and ongoing lobbying in both these committees. And clearly there will be winners and losers in both.

– ref. Expect delays and power plays: Google and Facebook brace as news media bargaining code is set to become law – https://theconversation.com/expect-delays-and-power-plays-google-and-facebook-brace-as-news-media-bargaining-code-is-set-to-become-law-151690

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Troy Baisden, Professor (Environmental Sciences), University of Waikato

There’s a serious mismatch between what New Zealand’s government identified as the most pressing environmental issues, including climate change and freshwater quality, and the investments in environmental research it actually makes.

A report released today by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) shows New Zealand spends about NZ$500m on environmental research each year. But the commissioner, former MP Simon Upton, says finding out “what gets funded and its links with policy priorities proved more difficult than I expected”.

The commissioner’s main recommendations include ring-fencing the money, developing a funding strategy and distributing funds through a new agency, based on the success of the Health Research Council.

New Zealanders are entitled to know that the environmental research they fund is focused on addressing the most important challenges we face. But the way public funds are currently invested in environmental research is fragmented, making it hard to respond to problems such as climate change, freshwater quality and biodiversity loss.

The report presents an almost complete map of environmental research funding, updating the incomplete picture previously available.

Among the major failings of the current funding system is the lack of systematic investment in collections and monitoring programmes to track the changing environment.

Read more: Why long-term environmental observations are crucial for New Zealand’s water security challenges

Lack of overview and strategy

The commissioner proposes the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) should lead the development of a strategy to identify environmental research priorities, even though its current investment is dwarfed by other government entities and regional councils.

Two of the four largest investors in environmental research deserve special mention. About $71m is funded by universities each year, but it is challenging to verify or break down into categories. The report also shows ratepayers contribute nearly as much as universities, through projects funded by regional councils.

The best possible environmental research might develop win-win solutions to what is often seen as a trade-off between the economy and the environment. Regenerative agriculture is one example where more research investment is needed to assess its potential to reduce environmental impacts while delivering higher-value products.

Missed opportunities

The report doesn’t explore New Zealand’s approaches to environmental research funding over the last few decades. The recommendation that a policy agency should coordinate research resembles what some consider one of the worst historic funding mechanisms.

Investments in ecological research between 2005 and 2015 supported short-term policy needs well. But this may have come at the expense of long-term monitoring projects and environmental databases.

The relatively large investment by regional councils also raises the question of whether central government should support long-term environmental monitoring that is of national interest but beyond immediate benefit to local ratepayers.

The commissioner could also have highlighted the 2010 report of the Crown Research Institute task force, which concluded that stable science institutions should manage funding strategically and use international advisory boards to review their success. A similar review conducted this year recommended the development of integrated research strategies across the country’s seven institutes, particularly on environmental issues such as climate change.

Read more: ‘Devastating’: The Morrison government cuts uni funding for environment courses by almost 30%

A return to a simplified public-good model should be considered together with the recommendation for a dedicated funding agency. Simon Upton was the cabinet minister who reformed New Zealand’s research institutions and funding systems back in 1992, and has lamented subsequent decisions that destabilised funding and institutions.

Changing post-pandemic focus

The COVID-19 pandemic represents both an opportunity and challenge, according to advisors to an assessment of how the research sector could better contribute to economic transformation.

Success depends on the research workforce. There are major concerns about too few Māori researchers, particularly in roles leading research. Early career researchers also face difficulty finding permanent positions.

Many benefits would come from reformed institutions with flexible funding to respond to public-good needs for environmental and natural hazards research. Less contestability would also reduce the effort wasted on unsuccessful proposals.

New Zealand’s main source of contestable research funding, the Endeavour Fund, invested $187M in 17 research programmes this year, but turned down 128 (87%).

New Zealand voters want progress on water quality and climate change, but ministers and councils appear unwilling to use taxes and rates to fully support a solution.

Ideally, a future research funding system will support all New Zealanders, especially farmers, to implement changes to look after our environment.

– ref. Report shows New Zealand’s ‘fragmented’ environmental research funding doesn’t match most urgent needs – https://theconversation.com/report-shows-new-zealands-fragmented-environmental-research-funding-doesnt-match-most-urgent-needs-151741

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Ireland, Senior Research Scientist at the Australian E-Health Research Centre., CSIRO

Allow us to introduce Edna — Australia’s first “genomics chatbot”.

Edna (short for “electronic-DNA”) helps patients make informed decisions about seeking “additional findings” testing.

Additional findings testing looks for variants in patients’ genes that aren’t relevant to their current health, but may be later on. For example, it can reveal if someone has an above-average chance of developing a hereditary heart condition.

But these tests can have major implications for patients and their families. Thus, individuals deciding whether they want such a test need support — which Edna can provide.

This chatbot was developed by us and our colleagues at the CSIRO and other members of the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance.

Genomic and genetic testing

A range of medical conditions have underlying genetic causes. Historically, this has been tested with genetic testing, by looking at either a single gene or a panel of genes related to one particular condition.

In genomic testing, however, almost all the genes in a patient’s DNA are analysed using a biological sample (such as blood).

In Australia, genomic testing is done for patients with certain medical conditions, to provide more information about the condition and medical care required.

But genomic data can be analysed further in an additional findings test, to report on potential gene variants responsible for other preventable and/or treatable conditions.

Although available in the United States, additional findings tests are currently beyond immediate medical need in Australia and are only carried out in research settings. That said, conversations have started about them becoming mainstream here, too.

If additional findings tests were offered in Australia, genetic counsellors would have to spend a large proportion of their time helping patients decide whether they want one. This is where chatbots come in.

Edna the chatbot in training

For chatbots to accurately recognise human speech and provide a meaningful response, their “brain” needs to draw on a large body of data.

Many chatbot brains are developed from open source data, but this is inadequate for highly specialised fields. We developed Edna by analysing transcripts of actual counselling sessions that discussed additional findings analysis.

Edna can emulate the flow of a real patient-counsellor session, explaining various conditions, terms, concepts and the key factors patients should consider when making their decision.

For example, it prompts them to consider the personal and familial implications of undergoing an additional findings analysis. As we all share genes with our family, results from genomic testing can lead to serious conversations.

Edna has several other capabilities, such as:

• knowing when to connect a patient with a genetic counsellor, if needed

• providing general information covered in most genetic counselling sessions, allowing counsellors more time to focus on patients with complex needs

• collecting a patient’s family history

• detecting various forms of common language, such as “nan” instead of “grandmother” and “heart attack” instead of “myocardial infarct” (the medical term for heart attack)

• recognising certain temporal markers. For instance, if a patient says “my mother died around Anzac Day two years ago”, Edna will know their mother died around April 25, 2018.

Edna is currently undergoing a feasibility trial with patients who have already had additional findings analysis done in a research setting, as well as genetic counsellors and students.

Read more: Aristotle and the chatbot: how ancient rules of logic could make artificial intelligence more human

The Eliza Effect and other hurdles

Past research has suggested people prefer chatbots that interact with empathy and sympathy, rather than unemotionally giving advice. This is called the “Eliza effect” — named after the first ever chatbot. Eliza was able to elicit an emotional response from humans.

Edna is quite advanced on this front. It can detect negative sentiment and even some forms of sarcasm. Still, this isn’t the same as true empathy.

Chatbots can’t yet match genetic counsellors’ ability to detect and respond to emotional cues. And “sentiment analysis” remains a significant challenge in natural language processing.

Since Edna provides generic information, it can’t discuss the implications of a future or previous genomic test for a specific patient. It also can’t link the patient with a support group, or provide expert medical advice.

Still, Edna represents a significant move towards a digital health solution that could take some pressure off genetic counsellors.

Read more: The future of chatbots is more than just small-talk

Providing more genomic healthcare

Edna’s main advantage is accessibility. It can support people living remotely, or who are otherwise unable to attend face-to-face genetic counselling.

It can also be accessed at a patient’s home, where family members may be present. They can then share in the information provided and engage Edna themselves, potentially improving the chances of an accurate history capture.

As a digital interface, Edna is almost endlessly modifiable. It can be updated continuously with data compiled during interactions with patients — whether this be information on new topics, or a new way to respond to a question.

A larger-scale patient trial is planned for the near future.

– ref. Introducing Edna: the chatbot trained to help patients make a difficult medical decision – https://theconversation.com/introducing-edna-the-chatbot-trained-to-help-patients-make-a-difficult-medical-decision-150847

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsten Small, Obstetrician and researcher, Griffith University

Pregnant women rightly expect that when they’re in labour, medical staff will observe them and their baby closely, and can deal with any potential problems quickly.

The majority of women who give birth in Australia are monitored with a cardiotocograph (CTG monitoring). But this isn’t the only way.

Research shows women want to be included in making decisions about how to monitor the baby, but often are not.

In this article, we set out some of the pros and cons for each option, to help women take an active role in deciding what’s best for them and their baby.

What is foetal monitoring?

Foetal monitoring during labour focuses on detecting particular changes in the baby’s heart rate, so doctors and midwives can respond if a problem is found.

This could be as simple as asking the woman to change position, or in other circumstances, medical staff might recommend a caesarean section. The goal is to prevent the baby dying, or suffering brain damage as a result of low oxygen levels during labour.

The first method of foetal monitoring is intermittent auscultation. The midwife or doctor will typically listen to the baby’s heart rate for one minute every 15-30 minutes, including during contractions, using a device called a foetal doppler. Foetal dopplers use ultrasound to detect the baby’s heartbeat.

The second approach is CTG monitoring. CTG records the baby’s heart rate and the strength of the woman’s contractions, usually by placing two recording discs on the woman’s abdomen, which are held in place with straps. The information is then plotted on a graph, helping the midwife or doctor understand how the baby responds during the pressure of a contraction.

Read more: Tokophobia is an extreme fear of childbirth. Here’s how to recognise and treat it

So, what’s the difference?

CTG monitoring is the most common approach to foetal monitoring in Australia and other high-income countries, and is usually used continuously throughout labour.

Some women find the straps used to keep the monitoring devices in place uncomfortable. Depending on the specific equipment, women may need to remain lying on a bed, and therefore find their movements are restricted.

Some, but not all CTG monitors can be used in the shower or a birthing pool. So women being monitored with CTG may not be able to access these options, which bring comfort to some women during labour.

Conversely, intermittent auscultation leaves the woman free to move in between episodes of monitoring, when she is not attached to the equipment.

While intermittent monitoring may be preferable from the perspective of the woman’s comfort, let’s look at how the two approaches compare on three important outcomes for mother and baby.

Women at low risk

Women who don’t have any risk factors that may increase the likelihood of complications for their baby are considered low risk.

A Cochrane review comparing intermittent auscultation with CTG monitoring showed no significant difference in the rare event of babies dying during labour or soon after among low-risk women (seven deaths per 10,000 births).

Cerebral palsy is a type of permanent brain injury that may sometimes occur due to low oxygen levels during labour. No research has looked at how the foetal monitoring approach used affects the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy in low-risk women.

Caesarean section was twice as common in women monitored by CTG compared with intermittent auscultation. We don’t know why, although it might have something to do with the fact women monitored with CTG often report not being able to move freely during labour.

Given caesarean section is associated with a higher rate of complications for the mother such as heavy bleeding or infection, and increased rates of miscarriage and stillbirth in subsequent pregnancies, intermittent auscultation is the safer monitoring option for low-risk women.

Read more: Why labour is such a pain – and how to reduce it

Women at higher risk

Some factors (for example, having a baby that’s smaller than expected, giving birth prematurely, or having diabetes) are associated with a greater chance of poor outcomes for the baby. Women with risk factors such as these are considered high risk.

We recently reviewed the evidence comparing the use of intermittent auscultation and CTG monitoring for high-risk women. CTG was again no better than intermittent auscultation in preventing babies dying during labour or soon after (16 deaths per 10,000 births).

However, cerebral palsy rates were almost three times higher with CTG monitoring over intermittent auscultation (going from 769 to 1,951 babies per 10,000 births). We don’t know why this is.

Once again, the caesarean section rate almost doubled with CTG monitoring.

Poor outcomes such as cerebral palsy and perinatal death occur more often in high-risk women, but remain relatively uncommon. Research shows the use of CTG rather than intermittent auscultation doesn’t reduce the likelihood of these outcomes, but does increase the risk to women by making it more likely they will give birth by caesarean section.

Making a decision

Intermittent auscultation is generally the recommended monitoring technique when there are no risk factors. But all major international foetal monitoring guidelines advise CTG monitoring should be used for women considered to be at high risk, despite the evidence.

As a consequence, clinicians don’t always explain foetal monitoring choices to women with risk factors in a way that helps them make up their own mind about how they want their baby to be monitored during labour.

Notably, much of the research we have on this topic is now dated, and not necessarily of optimal quality. It’s important that recommendations in professional guidelines align with research evidence and support midwives and doctors to help women make personalised and informed decisions about their own care.

If you’re expecting a baby, talk to your midwife who will be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each foetal monitoring option with you in light of your personal situation.

Read more: Having a scan? Here’s how the different types work and what they can find

– ref. Most women who give birth in Australia are monitored with CTG. But it might not be the best approach – https://theconversation.com/most-women-who-give-birth-in-australia-are-monitored-with-ctg-but-it-might-not-be-the-best-approach-147262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Biddle, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

A large study has, for the first time, shown preschool benefits Indigenous children more than other types of care such as long daycare (childcare) or home-based care.

This is important because while past studies had shown Indigenous children who had attended preschool were more likely to be ready for school, it was unclear whether preschool contributed to better outcomes.

These children might have had better developmental outcomes regardless of their participation in preschool. For example, children who attend preschool are also more likely to live in more advantaged households. This also contributes to better outcomes.

We set out to find whether preschool itself benefited children, and to measure these benefits using real-world data.

Our study of NSW public school children, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows preschool attendance appears to have developmental benefits for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, compared with home-based care in the year before school. This is after taking into account differences in children’s socioeconomic and health circumstances.

We classified any type of care that wasn’t preschool or long daycare as home-based care. This can include family daycare and care at home by parents and grandparents.

Although beneficial, Aboriginal children experienced fewer developmental benefits from preschool than non-Aboriginal children in our study. This suggests we need to improve the early childhood education experience of Aboriginal children.

We also found differences in early life circumstances explained much of the developmental gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in all types of early childhood education and care.

This highlights the importance of meeting the health and social needs of Aboriginal children and families, alongside early childhood education, to improve early life outcomes for these children.

Why we did our study

One of the seven early Closing the Gap targets was to ensure 95% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander four-year-olds were enrolled in early childhood education by 2025.

In 2018, the Morrison government updated the Closing the Gap framework in partnership with Aboriginal peak organisations. There are now two targets related to early childhood education:

• to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children enrolled in early childhood education the year before full-time schooling to 95% by 2025

• to increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children assessed as developmentally on track in all five domains of the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) to 55% by 2031.

One assumption underlying these targets is that early childhood education will improve developmental outcomes among Indigenous children. We wanted to find out if preschool is achieving this goal, and to what extent.

Read more: Preschool benefits children and the economy. But the budget has left funding uncertain, again

We used developmental data for 7,384 Indigenous and 95,104 non-Indigenous public school children who started school in NSW in either 2009 or 2012. The data were collected as part of the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC). It takes place every three years and is based on teachers’ knowledge and observations of the children in their classes.

Children’s development is scored between zero and ten on each of five key domains of development: physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive, and communication.

Children with scores in the bottom 10%, according to the 2009 AEDC benchmark, are considered developmentally vulnerable. We looked at how many children were developmentally vulnerable on one or more of the five domains.

We combined the developmental data with other population datasets, including birth registrations, midwives and hospital and school enrolment data. This was to understand children’s health, early childhood education and family circumstances.

We looked at whether children had attended a preschool program, a long daycare centre (without a preschool program) or home-based care in the year before full-time schooling.

Our findings

Overall, across the two school starter cohorts, 71% of Indigenous children and 74% of non-Indigenous children attended preschool in the year before full-time school. The majority of Indigenous (64%) and non-Indigenous children (80%) were not developmentally vulnerable on any of the domains assessed.

Among Indigenous children, 33% who had attended preschool and 44% who had attended home-based care were vulnerable on one or more domains. The figures for non-Indigenous children were 17% and 33% of those who attended preschool and home-based care, respectively.

There were substantial developmental gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in all types of early childhood education and care. Among children in preschool, Indigenous children were almost twice as likely as non-Indigenous children to be developmentally vulnerable at the age of five.

Our modelling shows a beneficial effect of preschool in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children — which was larger in non-Indigenous children.

After taking into account the differences in children’s early life circumstances, the risk of developmental vulnerability was six percentage points lower for non-Indigenous children who attended preschool than those in home-based care. It was three percentage points lower for Indigenous children who attended preschool compared with those in home-based care.

Read more: 1 in 5 kids start school with health or emotional difficulties that challenge their learning

Children in home-based care had the highest risk of developmental vulnerability. For non-Indigenous children, there was a lower risk for long daycare compared to home-based care.

However, we found there were no benefits of long daycare without a preschool program for Indigenous children. This highlights the type of early childhood education and care matters.

What does all this mean?

Preschool is an important part of the ongoing strategy to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children start full-time schooling ready to achieve their full potential.

Our findings reinforce the importance of the new Closing the Gap partnership with Aboriginal peak organisations to ensure Aboriginal leaders and communities are integrally involved in using data to understand, and respond to, the needs of their children and families.

This includes strategies to increase participation in preschool. We have shown this has benefits for Aboriginal children. It also highlights the need to invest in quality, culturally appropriate preschool for Indigenous children, as Indigenous children did not seem to benefit as much as non-Indigenous children from preschool.

Read more: Victoria and NSW have funded preschool for 2021. It’s shaping up to be a federal election issue

Differences in their early life circumstances explained much of the gap in developmental vulnerability between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. This suggests investments in early childhood education and care need to be considered alongside health and social services to improve the early life circumstances of Indigenous children.

A final point worth emphasising is that most Indigenous children are not developmentally vulnerable when they enter full-time schooling. This highlights areas of strength that future policies can draw upon.

This research would not be possible without governments facilitating access to, and links of, administrative datasets, and the ongoing contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families to data collection in Australia.

– ref. Preschool benefits Indigenous children more than other types of early care – https://theconversation.com/preschool-benefits-indigenous-children-more-than-other-types-of-early-care-149724

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shamit Saggar, Professor and Director, Public Policy institute, University of Western Australia

Getting ahead of climate change challenges is now a pressing need across our economy and society. Last month the bosses of 22 of Australia’s largest firms, including BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Commonwealth Bank, put their names to the Climate Leaders Coalition. It signalled their collective wish to push down emissions and push up their international obligations under the Paris Agreement.

Australia’s politicians are increasingly on the back foot — something universities and professions cannot risk. The cockpit of the knowledge economy must remain fit for purpose in the face of global challenges.

The biggest of these of late has been marshalling expertise to tackle a global pandemic. Climate change is an even bigger challenge.

Read more: Climate change is the most important mission for universities of the 21st century

Universities as knowledge communities take pride in leading discovery and understanding. The pressures to update and reform can come from beyond the academy, sometimes in response to perceived failure (think of economics and the GFC) or in meeting demand for new skills (the rapid expansion of business education in the past two decades).

The Preparedness Report, launched today by the UWA Public Policy Institute, argues disciplines, and the practitioners they educate and train, are already changing fast in response to climate change.

The report highlights the nature and extent of retooling in six fields: engineering, architecture, law, economics, healthcare and oceanography (the same is true for around 20 more disciplines).

Key questions for all professions

All professions need to find timely answers to some core questions:

• What will be the practical impacts of climate change on the feasibility, processes, sustainability and operations of their professions?

• How will future members of the professions need to be educated, trained and accredited?

• How will the underlying disciplines change?

• Which new fields of research and education will emerge?

• How will different disciplines develop new cross-overs and synergies?

Many new skills and competencies will have to be taught. Think, for example, of the need to engineer heat-tolerant public transport systems and plan water-sensitive cities.

Fresh mechanisms are also needed to ensure the value of current expertise, such as actuaries’ capacity to model commercial and household risk for insurance purposes.

Read more: Water may soon lap at the door, but still some homeowners don’t want to rock the boat

Greater use of cross-disciplinary collaboration will be needed too — for example, in building design and construction.

How 6 disciplines are responding

Engineering is synonymous with industrial society so has much to reflect on in terms of repurposing. Engineers will have to recalibrate their earlier assumptions. As UWA environmental engineer Anas Ghadouani notes:

Consider the fact that the sectors at the top of the emissions pyramid, including transport, electricity production and manufacturing, contributed over 75% of emissions. These top emitting sectors have been flush with engineers and engineering companies.

For architects to be credible in this new environment, they must grasp that “our modern experience of globalisation is predicated on three phenomena with spatial and environmental consequences: mobility, dispersion and density”, says UWA’s School of Design dean, Kate Hislop. Thus:

Lowering CO₂ emissions involves regenerative design, adaptive reuse, life-cycle costing, carbon modelling, post-occupancy evaluation, waste minimisation and adoption of low embodied carbon materials and systems.

Academic law is heavily exposed, and its challenges, reports David Hodgkinson from UWA’s School of Law, boil down to the laws and regulations that can be introduced to reduce emissions and assist people, species and ecosystems vulnerable to climate change. It is a question of intergenerational justice. He concludes:

The main issue at stake is that if we agree to reduce emissions now, people living in the future will benefit, not those living today. But we will, today, bear the costs of reducing such emissions.

For economists, whose counsel has become embedded in part thanks to the landmark Stern Report, the greatest contribution has been in evaluating policy options that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their very strong consensus is that the key policy response is to place a price on greenhouse gas emissions. David Pannell, who leads UWA’s Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy, states:

There are differences of opinion about whether a tax or a market in permits would be superior [in reducing emissions], but there is almost no dissent among economists that one or the other of these is needed.

In the field of health care, the emphasis is on training health-care professionals. For Sajni Gudka, from UWA’s School of Population and Global Health, climate change amounts to a public health emergency:

Real capacity shortfalls are close by in responding to growing infectious diseases, heat stress, food insecurity, poor water quality and nutrition.

Finally, for oceanography the urgency lies in mitigating the effects of climate change in coastal zones. Julian Partridge and Charitha Pattiaratchi, of UWA’s Oceans Institute, say a breakthrough depends on a grand alliance of disciplinary perspectives:

Climate change challenges cannot be solved by engineers and scientists alone. They need alliances with social scientists, cultural heritage specialists and others to join this collective endeavour.

Read more: This is how universities can lead climate action

Waiting for political action

The focus of the report is on the academic sector, related professions and the knowledge economy. But the preparedness question is also being asked of the political class and specific governments. As public attitudes become accustomed to environmental stewardship, heightened by the bushfire crisis last summer, voters are beginning to choose a direction of travel that was until recently dismissed.

In Western Australia, the government has just released its new Climate Change Policy, following several other states. Doctors for the Environment Australia is one of many campaigns that question the sagacity of short-term economic priorities.

How prepared is the country’s political class to use the advances made by universities and professions to address climate change?

– ref. How universities and professions are preparing to meet the climate challenge – https://theconversation.com/how-universities-and-professions-are-preparing-to-meet-the-climate-challenge-151662

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Gould, ARC Research Fellow, Social And Political Sciences, University of Melbourne

The coming decades represent an era of uncertainty for Australia’s cemeteries. They also present an opportunity to reflect on what our public cemeteries could and should be.

Our cemeteries are running out of space, with more Australians dying than ever before. As a result of a growing and ageing population, the country’s annual death count has more than doubled since 1960. It will double again by around 2070.

Unlike other real estate, cemetery space is largely a non-renewable resource. Many European countries lease grave sites for a limited period, but most Australian states and territories stipulate that each burial must be preserved in perpetuity. New South Wales has introduced a system of opt-in 25-year leases.

Read more: Housing the dead: what happens when a city runs out of space?

Some intercity cemeteries have been closed to new burials for decades. Demands on cemeteries as green spaces for leisure and recreation, as well as commemorating the dead, are also growing.

This is what makes Victoria’s Harkness cemetery development, a 128-hectare site on the edge of Melbourne’s West Growth Corridor, so significant. It’s Victoria’s largest new cemetery development in 100 years.

Harkness will shape how Australians live and die for many generations to come. And it is an opportunity to imagine a new future for death in Australia.

We are investigating these issues as members of The Future Cemetery project team, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Oxford University and the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust. Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted two studies:

1. a co-design workshop with representatives of the Australian death care industry, which came up with five models for future cemeteries

2. a national survey of attitudes to cemeteries, which found many Australians are open to change.

Read more: Buried beneath the trees: a plan to solve our shortage of cemetery space

How cemeteries are changing

Changes in demography, religious affiliation and technology, among other factors, shape public attitudes to how the dead should be treated.

The demographic trend is reasonably clear. Australia’s population is projected to grow strongly in coming decades (despite the effects of the coronavirus). This growth is driven mainly by high net overseas migration.

Read more: Migrant communities keep our cemeteries alive as more Anglo-Australians turn to cremation

Australia’s religious diversity will likely increase, too. Christianity is projected to become a minority religion by 2050 for the first time since European colonisation, and the population of religiously unaffiliated is growing. The preference for burial or cremation within Australia’s diverse communities has a particular marked impact on future cemetery design.

Technology could also revolutionise cemetery design. New methods for treating human remains, such as recomposition (“human composting”), alkaline hydrolysis (“water cremation”) and natural burial, could alter the volume and kinds of remains that end up in cemeteries. Other technologies could change how we see the cemetery, from augmented-reality historical tours to remote grave visits through 3D drone photography.

Read more: Ashes to ashes, dust to … compost? An eco-friendly burial in just 4 weeks

Five visions of the future cemetery

The co-design workshop’s five models are:

• the traditional cemetery as it currently exists

• the nature park cemetery, which integrates burial grounds with native bushland to provide a space that is resource-neutral and open to the public for walking and picnics

• the socially activated cemetery, which makes space available for a range of public uses, from educational activities such as birdwatching and botany to leisure activities such as playgrounds and cafés

• the urban high-rise cemetery, which takes take the form of a centrally located urban building rather than a rolling open lawn, drawing inspiration from multi-storey columbaria in North-East Asia, to enable the deceased to be laid to rest close to their loved ones

• the digital cemetery, which is the idea of a “technology layer” that will increasingly co-exist with, and perhaps one day even replace, the physical cemetery, where loved ones can share photographs, videos and stories about the deceased. In an age of pandemic lockdowns, this digital layer could even allow for people to visit graves remotely for memorial services.

Read more: Small funerals, online memorials and grieving from afar: the coronavirus is changing how we care for the dead

Each of these models is a hypothetical – no cemetery in the near future is likely to follow a single model to the exclusion of all others. However, they point towards the differing options cemetery designers have to think about when planning for the next 100 years.

How do Australians see cemeteries?

Australians appear to be relatively open to considering new concepts for the cemetery.

In our national survey, two-thirds of respondents disagreed with the idea that “the cemetery should only be for the interment and memorialisation of the dead”. About a third of respondents supported the use of cemeteries as nature reserves to conserve plants and animals. Similar numbers agreed that a cemetery would be a good place to learn about historical and philosophical issues.

Leisure activities at the cemetery, such as exercise classes, picnics and concerts, attracted much less public support. And conspicuous technologies such as drones and virtual reality systems proved a bridge too far for most.

Most notable was a lack of strong feelings – positive or negative – about many of the proposals for the future cemetery. This suggests to us that, given taboos around death, Australians rarely have the chance to consider the cemetery and its potential uses. We are perhaps open to considering new technologies and ideas for the cemetery, as long as they are implemented respectfully and do not disrupt the fundamental need to mourn the dead.

– ref. Visions of future cemeteries: 5 models and how Australians feel about them – https://theconversation.com/visions-of-future-cemeteries-5-models-and-how-australians-feel-about-them-149150

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

One of the central ideas in tax policy is the principle of the second-best.

Economic theory gives us a good idea of what an ideal tax system would look like, given our objectives. But in real life, things fall short.

It might be thought that piecemeal reform, moving some taxes closer to the ideal, would be a step in the right direction.

But it needn’t be, if other taxes aren’t moved.

Here’s an example. Imagine that the goods and services tax exempted health products, both mainstream and alternative.

An ideal GST wouldn’t exempt health products (though the government might provide subsidised access to some products, as it does through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme).

Imagine is administratively possible to remove the exemption for mainstream health products, which would bring it closer to the ideal.

Now imagine that for jurisdictional reasons it isn’t as easy to remove the exemption for alternative products.

Second-best can make things worse

Removing the exemption for mainstream products, which can be done straight away, seems like a good idea because it would be one step closer to removing all exemptions.

But if it is actually done straight away, without waiting the removal of the exemption on alternative products, it would have unintended (and perhaps dangerous) consequences.

People would be encouraged to switch from mainstream to alternative health products.

Read more: Think taxing electric vehicle use is a backward step? Here’s why it’s an important policy advance

The same sort of issues arise with the plans to charge electric vehicles per kilometre driven in order to treat them more like conventionally-powered vehicles (which are taxed per kilometre driven through fuel excise).

South Australia and NSW have announced plans to do so. Victoria has announced details, and will introduce the charge from July 2021.

It will charge electric, and other zero emission vehicles 2.5 cents per kilometre travelled and plug-in hybrids at cents per kilometre travelled.

Victoria justifies the charge this way:

Australian drivers pay fuel excise when they fill up their vehicle with petrol, diesel or liquefied petroleum gas. Zero and low emission vehicle owners currently pay little or no fuel excise but still use our roads.

Conventionally-powered car typically pay about 4.2 cents per kilometre through fuel excise and fuel-efficient cars about 2.1 cents.

This means Victoria will be charging electric vehicles as much or more than fuel-efficient vehicles, even though (at least when charged through rooftop solar) they won’t contribute to global warming.

Not only that, but conventionally-powered cars generate health and other costs through air and noise pollution, for which they are not charged.

What first-best would look like

The ideal system would include charges to cover the cost of

• building and maintaining the roads

• congestion

• the injury, death and damage caused by car crashes

• the health and other damage caused by air and noise pollution

• the global price of carbon emissions

Right now we charge through fuel taxes, registration fees and tolls (mostly paid to private firms, but this is irrelevant in economic terms) along with a variety of minor fees.

However, because fuel excise was frozen by the Howard government in 2001 (and only began increasing again in 2014) the revenue from it is barely enough to cover the cost of constructing and maintaining roads and grossly insufficient to cover the broader costs of conventional vehicle use.

Conventional vehicles get things for free

Although there is much debate about how carbon can or should be priced, any serious attempt to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement is likely to require a carbon price of $100/tonne, which corresponds to 23 cents a litre.

Estimates for local air pollution costs (including the cost of deaths from cancer and asthma) start at 10 cents a litre. Noise pollution costs are extra.

Electric vehicles powered by renewable energy generate hardly of these costs.

Put simply, just as much (or more than) the owners of electric vehicles, the owners of conventional vehicles pay a mere fraction of what they should.

Second-best would be worse

Increasing what the owners of electric-powered vehicles pay is a second-best solution that might move us further away from first best.

It might discourage the takeup of vehicles that impose fewer costs on society.

To end on a positive note, the 1997 decisions of the High Court that effectively prohibited states from taxing petrol forced the Commonwealth to collect the tax and pass it on to the states, exacerbating the problems of an unbalanced federal tax system.

Read more: Wrong way, go back: a proposed new tax on electric vehicles is a bad idea

There appears to be no constitutional impediment to a tax on kilometres travelled (and nor a privacy impediment, Victoria will implement it by reading odometers rather than monitoring where cars travel).

It would help redress the tax imbalance.

– ref. Victoria’s electric vehicle tax and the theory of the second-best – https://theconversation.com/victorias-electric-vehicle-tax-and-the-theory-of-the-second-best-150936

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

The government’s industrial relations legislation, to be introduced on Wednesday, would allow businesses affected by COVID to be exempt from the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) in enterprise agreements.

More broadly, the planned changes would make it easier for agreements to comply with the BOOT and speed up the approval process.

Enterprise bargaining has become sclerotic and addressing this problem is a central part of the government’s industrial relations reform package.

In December 2010 there were 25,197 current federal enterprise agreements covering some 2.6 million employees (23% of the total workforce). By June this year, the number had declined to 10,701, covering just under 2.16 million employees (20.8% of the workforce).

The BOOT considers whether the workers would be better off overall if a proposed agreement applied rather than the relevant award.

Under the current law, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) can approve an agreement that doesn’t comply with the BOOT if there are “exceptional circumstances”. The government proposes the impact of COVID effectively be the exceptional circumstance. The FWC also would have to consider the extent of support for a proposed agreement from employees and employers, and there’s a public interest test. There would be a sunset clause set at two years.

Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter invoked the name of Paul Keating in arguing for the changes. He said the government aimed to restore Keating’s “vision when he launched the enterprise bargaining framework almost three decades ago”.

Porter said this was for workers and employers to sit down and “agree on ways to increase productivity in exchange for higher wages and better conditions.

“But in reality, the system has been slowly choked by increased technicality, complexity and regulation, leaving it almost unrecognisable today – so much so that many employers no longer even attempt to get agreements across the line,” Porter said.

The government says application of the BOOT has become complicated because the FWC has increasingly taken into account “hypothetical” working arrangements unlikely to arise. This has led to long delays in approvals.

Apart from the COVID exemption, the changes the legislation proposes for the BOOT would

• remove the requirement for the FWC to consider patterns or kinds of work that are not reasonably foreseeable

• replace the requirements for assessing whether an agreement is “genuinely agreed” (for example, the requirement for employers to explain every clause to their workers even when the new agreement is largely unchanged) by a test that considers the substance of the agreement

• require the FWC to determine applications within 21 days (the median approval time in 2018/19 was 122 days), or explain the exceptional circumstances preventing this

• require the FWC to take into account the views of the employer and employees on the BOOT (including non-monetary benefits)

• restrict intervention at the approval stage to employees and bargaining representatives unless the FWC is satisfied exceptional circumstances exist for why a non-bargaining representative should be heard

• allow a new franchisee employer to join an agreement (e.g. McDonald’s, KFC) by only requiring that franchisee’s employees to vote, rather than everyone already covered by the agreement.

In other changes, existing agreements made before the Fair Work Act of 2009 will end in July 2022, and the government will initiate a review of the low paid bargaining provisions.

Porter said both unions and employers knew the present enterprise bargaining system was broken and wanted it fixed.

“The government recognises the BOOT’s importance as a key safeguard for workers,” he said.

“But a situation cannot be allowed to continue where the Fair Work Commission considers completely unlikely hypothetical situations.

“Similarly, the bargaining system has become grindingly slow due to the ability of third parties who were not involved in the initial bargaining process to object to agreements being made in the commission.

“Given that many industries are still reeling from the impacts of the pandemic, it is also makes good sense for the FWC to be able to consider agreements that don’t meet the BOOT if there is genuine agreement between all parties, and where doing so would be in the public interest.”

– ref. Businesses hit by COVID could give the boot to BOOT hurdle under workplace changes – https://theconversation.com/businesses-hit-by-covid-could-give-the-boot-to-boot-hurdle-under-workplace-changes-151697