Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Derrett, Professor, University of Otago

New Zealand’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic may be the envy of the world, but as the new government looks ahead, potentially with a more progressive lens, it will have to face several challenges in the health sector.

New Zealand is recognised internationally for having a good health system. Unlike citizens of some other high-income countries, all New Zealanders have, in principle at least, access to free secondary health care.

But inequality is a major issue, leading to shortened average life expectancy and more health problems for Māori, Pasifika communities and New Zealanders living with disabilities.

People also cite cost as a barrier to accessing health services and there are stark regional differences in service (in access, provision and outcome) and in support for those experiencing major illness, such as cancer, compared to those with major injury.

Improving health outcomes for all

Among the first non-COVID-19 health challenges for the government will be to decide whether to implement any recommendations from the recent Health and Disability System review, commissioned by the previous Labour-NZ First coalition government.

The first requirement for the review panel was to “recommend how the system could be designed to achieve better health and well-being outcomes for all” — and it highlighted addressing equity. The panel recommended adequate funding and an increased focus on public health as important steps towards achieving equity.

Achieving more equitable outcomes for Pasifika communities, people living in poverty or with disabilities and other marginalised groups is crucial. But the first priority should be to honour the Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) by embedding genuine partnerships with Māori at all levels of our health system.

Read more: Two inquiries find unfair treatment and healthcare for Māori. This is how we fix it

Some health organisations have deliberately appointed Māori health leaders to executive levels to advance equity for Māori. But genuine partnership must ensure many Māori voices are at the table, and heard — from local health committees to boards and executive leadership teams throughout the health system.

Consultation can not be the end point of equity partnerships. They must move to financial and decision-making empowerment. Most of the review panel, as well as the Māori advisory group, recommended a proposed Māori Health Authority, which should:

commission health services … for Māori using an indigenous-driven model within the proposed system to achieve equity.

The government must look closely at this as well as the Waitangi Tribunal’s report on the Health Services and Outcomes Inquiry to support Māori aspirations for tino rangatiratanga (self-governance) and mana motuhake (autonomy, independence).

The government also needs to explicitly address racism in the health system, which underlies health inequities.

Read more: Māori and Pasifika leaders report racism in government health advisory groups

Cost barriers and regional differences

Another challenge will be to get the balance right between regional and central decision-making.

New Zealand has a small and geographically dispersed population, and currently, more than three-quarters of public health funds go to 20 regional district health boards. These regional authorities plan, buy and provide health services within their respective areas.

The Health and Disability System review proposed a new agency, Health NZ, which would be separate from the Ministry of Health and responsible for leading health service delivery, with fewer district health boards. If Health NZ is established, its mandate could include reducing regional differences in access to, and quality of, care.

The current health funding also creates barriers to accessing primary care services. For many people, the cost of seeing a GP or after-hours service is too high, and these barriers fall unfairly.

Past governments have taken steps to increase the eligible age for free youth primary care services. GP visits are currently free for children under 14 — an improvement on the earlier age limit of six. These are positive steps and could be expanded to include all youth and marginalised groups.

Public versus private healthcare

New Zealand’s health care is a dual system of public and private provision.

People who can’t afford health insurance or private health care sometimes face long waiting times for surgery and other hospital services. The new government could improve access by learning from initiatives in other countries, including a recent high-profile judgement in British Columbia, Canada, which argued health care should be guided by medically necessary care, not the ability to pay.

New Zealand also has a strong and unique system of universal no-fault accident compensation. It looks after injured New Zealanders, from injury to rehabilitation, including salary support.

But people affected by illness have fewer services and only very limited means-tested financial support options available to them. The inequities arising from this include the obvious differences in financial and rehabilitation support, but also fewer people of working age with an illness returning to paid employment.

Read more: New Zealand’s ‘catch up, patch up’ health budget misses the chance for a national overhaul

Building on Labour Party history

In 1935, in a landslide, Michael Joseph Savage led the Labour Party to its first electoral victory. His government had a clear mandate and went on to establish New Zealand’s universal health-care system in 1938.

Jacinda Ardern’s leadership has shown we can act decisively in the face of a pandemic with, so far, relatively equitable health outcomes (although a Pasifika leader and two Māori men died in the August outbreak in Auckland).

The new Labour government could use its mandate to implement changes to health services with the explicit goal of realising health equity. Opportunities for this exist in genuine partnership with Māori at all levels of the health system and mandatory anti-racist systems and processes.

Further goals should include reducing regional variation, continuing to remove cost barriers and, finally, realising Justice Sir Owen Woodhouse’s 1967 vision of a united no-fault system of support for all New Zealanders in need, regardless of whether they have experienced major illness or injury.

– ref. Why equal health access and outcomes should be a priority for Ardern’s new government – https://theconversation.com/why-equal-health-access-and-outcomes-should-be-a-priority-for-arderns-new-government-148421

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor, Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne

The Japanese government recently announced plans to release into the sea more than 1 million tonnes of radioactive water from the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The move has sparked global outrage, including from UN Special Rapporteur Baskut Tuncak who recently wrote,

I urge the Japanese government to think twice about its legacy: as a true champion of human rights and the environment, or not.

Alongside our Nobel Peace Prize-winning work promoting nuclear disarmament, we have worked for decades to minimise the health harms of nuclear technology, including site visits to Fukushima since 2011. We’ve concluded Japan’s plan is unsafe, and not based on evidence.

Japan isn’t the only country with a nuclear waste problem. The Australian government wants to send nuclear waste to a site in regional South Australia — a risky plan that has been widely criticised.

Contaminated water in leaking tanks

In 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami resulted in the meltdown of four large nuclear reactors, and extensive damage to the reactor containment structures and the buildings which house them.

Water must be poured on top of the damaged reactors to keep them cool, but in the process, it becomes highly contaminated. Every day, 170 tonnes of highly contaminated water are added to storage on site.

As of last month, this totalled 1.23 million tonnes. Currently, this water is stored in more than 1,000 tanks, many hastily and poorly constructed, with a history of leaks.

How does radiation harm marine life?

If radioactive material leaks into the sea, ocean currents can disperse it widely. The radioactivity from Fukushima has already caused widespread contamination of fish caught off the coast, and was even detected in tuna caught off California.

Read more: Four things you didn’t know about nuclear waste

Ionising radiation harms all organisms, causing genetic damage, developmental abnormalities, tumours and reduced fertility and fitness. For tens of kilometres along the coast from the damaged nuclear plant, the diversity and number of organisms have been depleted.

Of particular concern are long-lived radioisotopes (unstable chemical elements) and those which concentrate up the food chain, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90. This can lead to fish being thousands of times more radioactive than the water they swim in.

Failing attempts to de-contaminate the water

In recent years, a water purification system — known as advanced liquid processing — has been used to treat the contaminated water accumulating in Fukushima to try to reduce the 62 most important contaminating radioisotopes.

But it hasn’t been very effective. To date, 72% of the treated water exceeds the regulatory standards. Some treated water has been shown to be almost 20,000 times higher than what’s allowed.

Read more: The cherry trees of Fukushima

One important radioisotope not removed in this process is tritium — a radioactive form of hydrogen with a half-life of 12.3 years. This means it takes 12.3 years for half of the radioisotope to decay.

Tritium is a carcinogenic byproduct of nuclear reactors and reprocessing plants, and is routinely released both into the water and air.

The Japanese government and the reactor operator plan to meet regulatory limits for tritium by diluting contaminated water. But this does not reduce the overall amount of radioactivity released into the environment.

How should the water be stored?

The Japanese Citizens Commission for Nuclear Energy is an independent organisation of engineers and researchers. It says once water is treated to reduce all significant isotopes other than tritium, it should be stored in 10,000-tonne tanks on land.

If the water was stored for 120 years, tritium levels would decay to less than 1,000th of the starting amount, and levels of other radioisotopes would also reduce. This is a relatively short and manageable period of time, in terms of nuclear waste.

Then, the water could be safely released into the ocean.

Nuclear waste storage in Australia

Australians currently face our own nuclear waste problems, stemming from our nuclear reactors and rapidly expanding nuclear medicine export business, which produces radioisotopes for medical diagnosis, some treatments, scientific and industrial purposes.

Read more: Australia should explore nuclear waste before we try domestic nuclear power

This is what happens at our national nuclear facility at Lucas Heights in Sydney. The vast majority of Australia’s nuclear waste is stored on-site in a dedicated facility, managed by those with the best expertise, and monitored 24/7 by the Australian Federal Police.

But the Australian government plans to change this. It wants to transport and temporarily store nuclear waste at a facility at Kimba, in regional South Australia, for an indeterminate period. We believe the Kimba plan involves unnecessary multiple handling, and shifts the nuclear waste problem onto future generations.

The proposed storage facilities in Kimba are less safe than disposal, and this plan is well below world’s best practice.

The infrastructure, staff and expertise to manage and monitor radioactive materials in Lucas Heights were developed over decades, with all the resources and emergency services of Australia’s largest city. These capacities cannot be quickly or easily replicated in the remote rural location of Kimba. What’s more, transporting the waste raises the risk of theft and accident.

And in recent months, the CEO of regulator ARPANSA told a senate inquiry there is capacity to store nuclear waste at Lucas Heights for several more decades. This means there’s ample time to properly plan final disposal of the waste.

The legislation before the Senate will deny interested parties the right to judicial review. The plan also disregards unanimous opposition by Barngarla Traditional Owners.

Read more: Uranium mines harm Indigenous people – so why have we approved a new one?

The Conversation contacted Minister for Resources Keith Pitt who insisted the Kimba site will consolidate waste from more than 100 places into a “safe, purpose-built, state-of-the-art facility”. He said a separate, permanent disposal facility will be established for intermediate level waste in a few decades’ time.

Pitt said the government continues to seek involvement of Traditional Owners. He also said the Kimba community voted in favour of the plan. However, the voting process was criticised on a number of grounds, including that it excluded landowners living relatively close to the site, and entirely excluded Barngarla people.

Kicking the can down the road

Both Australia and Japan should look to nations such as Finland, which deals with nuclear waste more responsibly and has studied potential sites for decades. It plans to spend 3.5 billion euros (A$5.8 billion) on a deep geological disposal site.

Read more: Risks, ethics and consent: Australia shouldn’t become the world’s nuclear wasteland

Intermediate level nuclear waste like that planned to be moved to Kimba contains extremely hazardous materials that must be strictly isolated from people and the environment for at least 10,000 years.

We should take the time needed for an open, inclusive and evidence-based planning process, rather than a quick fix that avoidably contaminates our shared environment and creates more problems than it solves.

It only kicks the can down the road for future generations, and does not constitute responsible radioactive waste management.

– ref. Japan plans to dump a million tonnes of radioactive water into the Pacific. But Australia has nuclear waste problems, too – https://theconversation.com/japan-plans-to-dump-a-million-tonnes-of-radioactive-water-into-the-pacific-but-australia-has-nuclear-waste-problems-too-148337

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

This week the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) filed a lawsuit accusing Google of using “anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in the markets” for search and advertising.

It is the most significant antitrust case since the US government took on Microsoft in 1998 for using its dominant position as the provider of the Windows operating system to force PC makers to bundle its Internet Explorer web browser.

That case was fought out in US courts for years before Microsoft agreed to settle in 2001. This case will no doubt be heavily litigated, and likewise take years to conclude. But it’s not too soon to consider the basic economics.

The bottom line is more complicated than one might think. Yes, Google has a huge share of the search-engine market – 92% globally according to statcounter.com, compared with 2.8% for Microsoft’s Bing, 1.6% for Yahoo! and 0.5% for DuckDuckGo.

But does that give Google a lot of “market power” – the ability to charge high price or produce low-quality products? Probably not.

To judge if a company like Google is really a monopolist, it is crucial to understand the difference between ordinary markets (like those for clothes, cars, or breakfast cereal) and technology markets (like those for internet search, social media, or ride sharing).

Read more: The US is taking on Google in a huge antitrust case. It could change the face of online search

Markets with ‘network externalities’

Any introductory economics textbook will tell you a large market share is smoking-gun evidence of market power; and that with market power comes the ability to shut out competitors, charge high prices and even get away with producing low-quality products.

Economists of all stripes agree that regulating monopolies and making markets more competitive benefits consumers, through lower prices and better products.

Indeed, this was the motivation behind the so-called “trust-busting” movement in the US in the early 20th century. The most famous scalp was John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which the US Supreme Court ordered in 1911 be broken up into 34 separate companies. (The break-up made Rockefeller the world’s richest man).

But internet search isn’t like oil. Neither is social media, ride sharing or platforms like Amazon. These are what economists call “markets with network externalities”. That is, when more consumers use the product, it becomes more valuable for other consumers.

Read more: Lawmakers keen to break up ‘big tech’ like Amazon and Google need to realize the world has changed a lot since Microsoft and Standard Oil

Facebook is useful because it connects one with lots of other users. A thousand little, disconnected social media platforms would be much less useful. Amazon connects lots of sellers with million of consumers. This is hugely valuable for both. Google connects lots of consumers with advertisers and information. Again, this is valuable to both sides of the market.

Because network externalities mean — all else being equal — the bigger the market share the more valuable the company’s product is to consumers, we tend to see one dominant company and a few smaller ones in such markets.

Just because tech companies have a big share of the market now, however, doesn’t mean they are destined to keep it.

Remember Netscape? In the mid-1990s it had a 80% share in the browser market, before losing it to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

But Internet Explorer’s dominance, peaking at 95% share in the early 2000s, didn’t last either. It now claims barely 1% of the browser market.

This is why companies in markets with network externalities are never asleep. Uber and Facebook are constantly running experiments to innovate their products, as are other companies like Amazon and, you guessed it, Google.

Influencers and defaults

An important part of the Department of Justice’s suit against Google is that it allegedly pays Apple as much as US$11 billion a year to be the default search engine on the Safari browser on every iPhone.

This is a bit like paying for a social media influencer to plug your product — with a twist. Making something the default doesn’t mean the user has to use it, but the small effort to choose an alternative means most don’t bother.

But if it really wasn’t a good product and didn’t deliver good search results, wouldn’t consumers (a) remove it and (b) be less likely to buy iPhones?

There’s a big difference between something being a default and there being no choice. Articulating this difference may end up being an important part of how the Google litigation plays out.

Indeed, Microsoft making Internet Explorer the default browser in Windows has been an ongoing source of back and forth with US and European competition authorities.

Read more: Twitter is banning political ads – but the real battle for democracy is with Facebook and Google

Ultimately misguided

As with the suits against Standard Oil and Microsoft, the case against Google will be decided by the courts, perhaps ending with the US Supreme Court. The outcome will be instructive as to whether other tech companies like Amazon, Facebook or Uber will also wind up in the firing line.

Ironically, at a time of extreme polarisation in US politics, breaking up big tech companies is popular on the left and the right.

But we should remember that consumers are huge beneficiaries from these tech companies. Think about how much it used to cost to take and print photographs. A 2018 International Monetary Fund report cites research suggesting US consumers would need more than US$25,000 a year to compensate for the loss of free services from tech companies.

That’s a lot.

What is crucial for competition regulators around the world to note is that the markets in which big technology companies operate are not like other markets. Because of network externalities they tend to have big “in” firms (with a large market share) and smaller “out” firms (with small market shares but providing competitive discipline).

That doesn’t mean these markets aren’t competitive. It means the “in” companies have a lot to lose by being leapfrogged by a small competitor. Which is why they work so hard to innovate and keep prices low.

– ref. Google’s huge market share doesn’t automatically make it a monopoly – https://theconversation.com/googles-huge-market-share-doesnt-automatically-make-it-a-monopoly-148525

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, University of Adelaide

Let’s talk about “city deals”. The Australian government is.

Its department of infrastructure website describes them as “a genuine partnership between the three levels of government and the community to work towards a shared vision for productive and liveable cities”.

The idea comes from the UK. There they award extra funding and special decision-making powers to local authorities who can demonstrate they will use them to boost economic growth.

So far Australia has had eight city deals, in Townsville, Launceston, western Sydney, Darwin, Hobart, Geelong, Adelaide, Perth and southeast Queensland.

This announcement about the western Sydney deal from federal urban infrastructure minister Alan Tudge and NSW minister Stuart Ayres is typical:

The Western Sydney Aerotropolis and Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport will attract infrastructure, investment and skilled jobs, and the benefits will flow into health and education, retail, hospitality and industrial activities that will power the region.

It’s one of 22 such announcements about the Western Sydney deal in the past two years.

The deal no vice-chancellor can refuse

Whatever their merits as a tool for planning, city deals are useful for making announcements about jobs, and also for spending money in electorates in which the government takes a special interest.

In western Sydney, four universities – one of them the University of Newcastle, which is hundreds of kilometres away – are being funded to develop a “Aerotropolis Multiversity”.

Read more: City Deals: nine reasons this imported model of urban development demands due diligence

City deal funding is funding no university can resist, in part because it is now about the only way they can get money from the federal government for buildings.

The new Perth city deal requires Edith Cowan University to relocate to the central business district to “kickstart major projects in the city centre”.

It comes at an eye-watering cost of A$695 million. The university has to find $300 million. The federal government will provide $245 million.

The Western Australian government might come out ahead. It will contribute a $50 million CBD site it has had problems selling and take possession of the university’s Mt Lawley campus, just 5 kilometres north of the CDB, which it can use to expand the adjacent high school and sell what’s left for medium-density housing.

It has promised to use the proceeds to “underwrite” $100 million of the university’s costs, although whether this will be a loan or a grant is not clear.

Instead of being in a spacious campus that needs some renovation, 10,000 students will be in a vertical city building of the kind the University of Technology Sydney no longer uses for teaching, because of the difficulty of moving students between floors.

City buildings from Perth to Launceston

The first city deal was in Launceston. This involves moving part of the University of Tasmania’s campus from the suburb of Newnham to Inveresk, a site 5 km closer to the centre of Launceston.

It has many similarities to the Perth city deal, not the least being the university will have to do most of the heavy lifting, including bearing the risk of cost overruns.

There are rosy projections that the new site will attract more students, including internationals, but they run counter to the experience of the university’s School of Architecture and Design, which has experienced a catastrophic decline in enrolments despite being at Inveresk for many years.

In another part of the “Northern Transformation” project, the University of Tasmania is moving its Burnie operation from a 25-year-old campus at Mooreville Road 2 km to a new $85 million campus at West Park.

All up, the Northern Transformation project will cost the University of Tasmania more than $300 million, which at the moment it does not have.

Darwin is getting yet another CBD campus

A similar story is playing out in Darwin, where a new CBD campus for Charles Darwin University is being delivered 14 km from its main campus at Casuarina.

There the aim is to create an iconic building “that links city-based elements of CDU to each other and to various parts of the city, and offers the potential to reimagine the CBD with the university at its heart”.

What’s odd is that Charles Darwin University already has a CBD campus, organised in a deal with a local developer. It hasn’t met its student growth targets, mainly because it lacks the things needed to attract students, including a decent library, cheap places to eat and affordable accommodation.

The new CBD campus will be better than that, but the vastly more efficient option of simply redeveloping the main Casuarina campus and dumping the failed existing city campus wasn’t on the table.

While the Darwin CBD campus will generate jobs during construction, and the territory government will be overjoyed to be getting some cranes back on the Darwin skyline, the benefit for the university is harder to identify.

Funding ought to be needs-based

I am not against funding university redevelopments, far from it. Many of Australia’s university buildings are old and in need of updating.

The University of Tasmania, Charles Darwin University, Edith Cowan University and Western Sydney University, among others, enrol less of the international students that have allowed other universities to fund the maintenance and redevelopment of their buildings. Charles Darwin University and the University of Tasmania are the only universities in their states.

But the City Deal process is forcing universities to move into CBDs to get funds, whether it makes sense or not.

Read more: Why is the Australian government letting universities suffer?

Evidence suggests that CBD campuses are a fad, not a solution. Campuses in tall buildings cost about twice as much per delivered square metre as low to medium rise sites and CBD buildings lack the long-term development flexibility of a campus.

Most importantly, undergraduate students don’t much like them. They lack parking spaces, they often lack child-care facilities, students are forced to cram into lifts to move between classes, and they are not near cheap accommodation.

Students prefer space to height

The campuses popular with students around the world tend to be about 5-10 km from a CBD and have 5,000 to 20,000 students, with a high proportion living on campus.

Bond, the University of New England and Griffith University are good Australian examples. Leiden, Bath, Lancaster and Stanford are overseas examples.

It is sometimes said CBDs attract students, particularly international students, but most of Australia’s biggest and most successful universities are located in the city fringe or the suburbs.

Read more: 3 ways the coronavirus outbreak will affect international students and how unis can help

Few successful research universities are located in the centre of cities. Of the top 100 research universities in the world, as measured by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, only a handful are in CBDs, and usually only because the CBD engulfed them.

The best research comes out of large campuses, rather than single buildings.

The best-value university projects ought to be the ones that get funded rather than those that have the side benefit of allowing politicians to (repeatedly) claim they are “revitalising” cities.

But that would require paying attention to universities for their own sake, something the government appears reluctant to do.

– ref. A fad, not a solution: ‘city deals’ are pushing universities into high-rise buildings – https://theconversation.com/a-fad-not-a-solution-city-deals-are-pushing-universities-into-high-rise-buildings-147560

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Douglas, Professor, Flinders University

When a young celebrity writes a memoir or has a biography written about them, a common response is: they are too young. This child or adolescent cannot possibly have lived enough of a life, or have a useful perspective. Their story cannot be instructive enough to be valuable to others.

This point of view reveals the weight of expectation around public life storytelling. We too often dismiss the valuable contribution children make to politics and culture.

This week sees the release of the biographical film I Am Greta, directed by Nathan Grossman. The film follows Thunberg across 2018 and 2019, as she became known to the world. It reflects a close collaboration between Grossman and Thunberg, and the access he had to her life during this time.

I Am Greta has inevitably raised some eyebrows. Thunberg always does. Critics have suggested that we do not get to know the real Greta; Grossman keeps too much distance; he does not adequately delve into Thunberg’s childhood or family to explain the origins of her activism.

Such critiques reflect a rather narrow perspective on how biographical storytelling works. I Am Greta, like many contemporary life stories, does not conform to the “great man” model for biography, where history was thought to be understood through the life of men with political or colonial achievements. As new biographical subjects are chosen, so are new ways of telling their stories.

In choosing not to centre on Thunberg’s family and early life, I Am Greta defies genre expectations. The film centres on Thunberg’s voice, illuminating her words and her image at a particular moment in history. The focus is not on who inspired Thunberg to acquire knowledge, but how she — a young activist — developed these interests independently.

A rich history

Children and young people have been engaging in life storytelling for centuries. We just haven’t been paying enough attention. As Anna Poletti and I found in our research, there are many examples through history of young women writing politically-engaged autobiography.

Young English housemaid Elizabeth Parker embroidered her life story of cruelty and abuse in a cross-stitch sampler in 1830. This was the only way she could tell it.

Ukrainian-French diarist Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in her diary every day from age 14 until her death from tuberculosis at 25 in 1884. Hers was an ambitious social commentary on middle-class life.

Anne Frank’s Holocaust diary was the precursor for Riverbend who blogged the Iraq war. Both Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and Bana Alabed in Syria have been compared to Anne Frank with their diaristic recounts of war.

When we give attention to young people’s stories, it shows respect for their lives. Children are not just adults-in-waiting: their experiences and voices are significant in themselves and worthy of our attention.

Reading young people’s stories recognises their citizenship and the vital role children play in the political world.

‘A spokeschild’

In I Am Greta, we meet Greta on the steps of Swedish parliament, complete with the now famous homemade sign, protesting global warming. She is a lone figure, but not for long.

In this opening scene, Thunberg’s words are juxtaposed with those of adults. We hear the voices of politicians; of adults passing by who ask her what she is doing and why she isn’t in school. These moments signal the film’s focus: the contrast between Thunberg’s voice and those of the adults who condescend or criticise her.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

I Am Greta asks us to think differently — not just about Thunberg, but about children’s voices more generally. Thunberg’s father, Svante, speculates that due to her photographic memory, Greta likely knows more about climate change than 97% of politicians. Such knowledge is possible.

Those who doubt Thunberg’s authority to speak on these issues most commonly argue because of her age, she cannot possibly be educated enough on these issues. Other critics suggest she is her parents’ puppet. She is often criticised for being an instrument of left-wing media.

Similar accusations have been made about other young female activists like Yousafzai, Emma González, Isadora Faber, and Bana Alabed.

When Yousafzai rose to prominence, critics referred to her as “the darling of Western media”, and “a tool for political propaganda”. Like Thunberg, her activism was assumed to be advancing her father’s politics and career.

Activists like Yousafzai and Thunberg are symbolic of rebellion, reconciliation and the complex spaces in between. Neither Yousafzai nor Thunberg ever intended their stories to become “master narratives”. Their activism is not an attempt to dilute the experiences or stories of other children, quite the opposite. Both have centred their careers on making connections with other young activists across the globe.

Read more: Why Malala matters: the Taliban’s war on women continues

Young activists find themselves at the coalface of difficult histories and debates. They are writers and public speakers. But they are also children who become a consistent focus for the media. This media is not always kind.

The criticisms levelled at young activists reveal the mixed feelings society has around children’s voices and their capacity to act meaningfully when it comes to social change. Why does it come as such a surprise that children can hold knowledge and perspectives that are culturally and politically valuable?

As Thunberg speculates, international leaders talk a good talk when it comes to being inspired by her. They invite her to their castles and palaces, sites representing the kind of opulence and over-consumption Thunberg denounces.

They profess a commitment to change, but the change never comes. Thunberg understands her position as symbolic of the future, as a “spokeschild” who helps leaders improve their own appearance.

Condescending adults

I Am Greta shows multiple incidents where powerful adults are condescending, awkward or dismissive of Thunberg. Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro are amongst the more vehement critics of Thunberg, but there are many others.

And there are others again who damn Thunberg with faint praise. The French President Emmanuel Macron, in patronising tone, asks, “You read a lot on climate?”

She meets Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose presence pales in light of Thunberg’s. She speaks intelligently at length, but Schwarzenegger simply repeats her final statement — “we need to join the dots” — as if lost for words.

Delegates at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference where Thunberg offered a powerful oration, seem adolescent in their desire to take selfies with Thunberg. There is nothing subtle in the film’s approach to this role reversal.

Read more: ‘We will never forgive you’: youth is not wasted on the young who fight for climate justice

Thunberg convincingly argues she has little choice but to speak publicly. She equips herself with sophisticated knowledge and trusts science.

She speaks readily about climate change because leaders do not.

An early telling

In I Am Greta, handheld camera shots bring us intimately into Thunberg’s life. We see her alone, reflecting; starting small, thinking big.

Being in the public eye triggers her anxiety, but so did her knowledge of climate change — when she first learnt of the enormous problems the world was facing, she could not eat, sleep, and would not even talk.

We see her sensitivity and quirky vulnerability. Thunberg argues that being on the autism spectrum allows her to “see through the static” and acquire deep knowledge quickly and astutely.

Perhaps it is confronting for some to imagine it is a young, neurodiverse woman who can show us the way to a better future.

I Am Greta represents an early version of Thunberg’s life story. Thunberg herself has readily circulated parts of her story through social media. There have been a plethora of literary and media representations of her. There is a biographical picture book. There will be more to come. This is not unusual now.

I am Greta reveals how young people’s stories and perspectives might be received generously and potently to promote change.

I Am Greta is in cinemas now and will stream on DocPlay from November 14.

– ref. Friday essay: why we need children’s life stories like I Am Greta – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-we-need-childrens-life-stories-like-i-am-greta-148178

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

The government can act super-fast on integrity issues when it wants.

On Thursday a Senate estimates committee was told the government-owned Australia Post bought Cartier watches worth $3,000 each for four senior employees as rewards.

Scott Morrison said he was “appalled” – immediately the government ordered Post’s CEO Christine Holgate to stand aside (or quit entirely if she preferred) and launched an inquiry, which will report to cabinet.

But when it comes to structural reform to improve integrity, the pace has been snail’s, the slowness justified by COVID.

On any reasonable timetable parliament would be voting about now to set up a national integrity commission.

Instead, draft legislation sits in the files of Attorney-General Christian Porter. In Senate estimates this week it was confirmed he’s had it since December last year.

The government was not inclined to conduct the necessary detailed consultations during the pandemic, Porter told parliament. Morrison said he wasn’t having a single public servant diverted from COVID.

Now COVID is more or less under control, and Morrison this week indicated to the Coalition parties he intends to run full term – that is, into early 2022.

So he has all next year to get this commission legislated and ready to start, assuming he really wants to.

He’d prefer not to be going down this path. The Coalition has been cornered by the politics into committing to a commission. Even Labor, which has become a passionate advocate, didn’t see the need for a federal body until recent years.

The New South Wales’s ICAC hearings about disgraced former state Liberal MP Daryl Maguire and premier Gladys Berejiklian have reignited the debate about integrity and a federal body.

More directly, a recent report from the federal Auditor-General exposed that the Commonwealth paid $30 million for a parcel of land, later valued at only $3 million, near Badgerys Creek, site for Sydney’s second airport.

The sale, now being investigated by the police, didn’t reach ministerial level.

But the other major scandal uncovered by the Audit Office this year had a minister at its core. “Sports rorts” claimed the scalp of Nationals’ Bridget McKenzie, though Morrison forced her out on a technicality and never admitted the political rorting.

Issues of accountability and transparency tend to be “nerdy” except when they break into spectacular headlines. But they’re at the heart of achieving good government.

Ministerial standards in practice vary from time to time but federally they’re lower than they used to be (for example in periods of the Fraser and Hawke governments and the first days of the Howard government). The inclination of governments is to hang onto ministers, however compromised. McKenzie was only chopped when it was politically impossible to sustain her.

The top of the public service has also become increasingly politicised, reducing the checks in the system. On the other hand, Senate estimates hearings have proved themselves invaluable forums to mine information that’s embarrassing or worse, as we saw again this week.

Though the government says it is committed to an integrity commission, it has blunted its proposed teeth, so far as they would apply to politicians, their staff and public servants.

The commission would have a law enforcement division and a public sector division – the latter (which we are concerned with here) covering federal parliamentarians, staffers and bureaucrats.

While Porter says its powers would be “greater than a royal commission” the hearings in this division would be in secret. Those who favour secrecy argue it is necessary to avoid the “kangaroo court” aspect of ICAC; others believe open hearings are in the public interest and the threat of them can be a deterrent.

Crossbenchers have been strong proponents of integrity measures.

On Monday Helen Haines, independent member for Indi, will introduce her private member’s bill for an integrity body; she describes it as “a consensus bill with strong safeguards”.

Senate independent Rex Patrick (formerly of Centre Alliance) says the pandemic is no excuse for the government failing to table its draft legislation immediately.

“They haven’t progressed it fast enough”, he says. “Their heart isn’t in it. They are trying to hide behind COVID.”

Patrick believes the commission should be able to hold open hearings at the discretion of the commissioner. But, he says, a threshold should be met before people’s names become public.

If anyone needed evidence of the Morrison’s government’s lack of enthusiasm for scrutiny bodies, they’ve only to consider the treatment of the Audit Office in this month’s budget.

The office unsuccessfully sought $6.3 million extra funding for 2020-21. Its finances are complicated – the best measure of what is happening to it is actually how much work it can do.

Its target is 48 performance audits a year. Auditor General Grant Hehir told Senate estimates: “We are forecasting that in 2020-21 we will produce 42 audits, falling to 40 in the following year, and then, by 2022-23, down to 38”.

In what might be less-than-welcome news for the government, Hehir noted in the Office’s annual report that its program in the longer term “will need to address the delivery of the intended outcomes of the COVID-19 response, including at a macro level, and we will plan for audits of recovery programs”.

Given the Coalition’s attacks on Labor’s programs responding to the global financial crisis, it will be interesting to see how its programs fare under forensic scrutiny.

Labor’s Julian Hill, deputy chair of the parliamentary joint standing committee of public accounts and audit, accuses both that committee (which receives the Office’s draft budget estimates) and Morrison of failing to stand up for the Office.

He claims the government has cut the Office’s funds in “revenge” for it exposing sports rorts, the Badgerys Creek land deal and defence spending blowouts.

Hill proposes changes to strengthen the independence of the Auditor-General – who is already an “officer of the parliament” but sits within the Prime Minister’s department administratively and has to look to the PM to support budget pitches.

The Audit Office deserves a big shout-out this year. But it can’t fill the gap that exists because of the absence of an integrity commission.

Surely the government can only dally on that for so long, shielded by COVID.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison’s promised integrity commission can’t hide behind COVID much longer – can it? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrisons-promised-integrity-commission-cant-hide-behind-covid-much-longer-can-it-148636

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Elms, Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

What’s the difference between an independent and non-independent director?

This question lies at the heart of the scandal embroiling Crown Resorts, Australia’s largest gaming company, which owns casinos in Melbourne and Perth, and is seeking a licence to run a third in Sydney.

The inquiry into the company’s suitability to hold that licence by New South Wales’ Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority’s has revealed abject board failures, including failing to prevent its casinos being used for money laundering.

As the Australian Financial Review has editorialised, the inquiry has revealed “a litany of extraordinary events, remarkable management failures, a bullying culture and an appalling lack of corporate governance.”

At Crown Resort’s annual general meeting today, shareholders expressed their displeasure with 34% of votes cast rejecting Crown’s remuneration report. Any vote of more than 25% represents a “first strike”. A second strike could require a spill of the entire 11-member board.

There were also significant votes against the reappointment of individual board members. Two directors were saved only by the votes of major shareholder James Packer, who holds a 36% share of the company.

Read more: Experienced shareholders better than independent directors for business

But that’s a big part of the problem – how much the board has been in the pocket of Packer, who quit as the board’s executive chairman in 2018.

In particular the inquiry has raised questions about four of Crown Resorts’ six “independent directors”, meant to ensure the company is run in the interests of all shareholders, not just major shareholders.

Committed to Packer’s interests

At the top of the list of cosy personal relationships is that between Packer and Andrew Demetriou, the former boss of the Australian Football League who Packer invited to join the board as an independent director in 2014.

Independent directors, as the name suggests, are expected to have no personal or economic ties with the company, its management or major shareholders.

But the inquiry heard how Demetriou pushed for less focus on complying with gambling regulations and more on increasing profits. In December 2018 he emailed Packer about compliance and regulatory issues taking up “time, resources, costs and focus of management”.

He went on: “We exist to win; I asked management and the board to come back in the new year and turn our minds to strategies to grow revenue.”

In a 2019 email he assured Packer of his commitment “to serving the best interests of Crown, and most importantly you”.

Read more: Independent isn’t necessarily better. Why appointing independent directors can achieve little

Not that independent

Demetriou’s relationship with Packer appears indicative of the relationship between the entire board of Crown Resorts and its major shareholder.

Since 2016, for example, Crown has provided Packer and his private company CPH Holdings confidential information not available to other investors. This arrangement was terminated the day before the annual general meeting.

Technically six of the 11 directors on the Crown Resorts board are independent, in line with the Australian Stock Exchange’s corporate governance principles.

This includes Helen Coonan, a former federal minister in the Howard goverment, appointed board chair in January; former Australian chief medical officer John Horvath; former senior federal public servant Jane Halton; former Aristocrat Leisure executive Antonia Korsanos; and advertising guru Harold Mitchell.

Yet the NSW inquiry also heard evidence of Packer’s personal ties to Horvath, once the doctor of Packer’s father Kerry, and Mitchell, given a “no-strings-attached” $1.9 million loan by Kerry Packer in the 1990s. It also heard Korsanos should not have been categorised as an independent director, given poker machine maker Aristocrat’s business contracts with Crown.

The rule, not the exception

My research into boardroom dynamics suggests cosy boardroom relationships are the rule, rather than the exception.

As part of my research I’ve interviewed more than 30 directors from for-profit, not-for-profit and government organisations. Those interviews confirm how important personal connections are in getting appointed to a board. Close friendships between senior executive and board members were not infrequent.

For example, one experienced director on the board of a public company described the intertwined relationship between the chair and chief executive. This included the chief executive renting his home from the chair and employing the chair’s former personal assistant. The problem, as the director told me, was “people didn’t know it”.

Misleading shareholders

This research – and the Crown Resorts saga – highlights a significant problem with corporate governance disclosures.

Independence on paper does not always translate to independence in decision-making. Boards are meant to assess and review the independence of directors. But while formal relationships are considered, friendship ties and social connections are typically ignored, despite the obvious conflict. And social connections among the corporate elite abound.

Read more: Company boards are stacked with friends of friends so how can we expect change?

This potentially misleads shareholders looking for independence as an indicator of good governance.

Minority shareholders without inside knowledge of a company’s decision-making rely on independent directors in particular to ask the hard questions and keep management accountable. In the absence of any clarity around a director’s true independence, shareholders are left guessing who is looking out for them and who has other loyalties.

Coonan has promised more “independence of thought” in the boardroom.

But as long as it remains at the board’s discretion to review and determine director independence, shareholders need to be aware that what they see may not be what they get.

– ref. Gaming the board: Crown Resorts shows you just can’t bet on ‘independent’ directors – https://theconversation.com/gaming-the-board-crown-resorts-shows-you-just-cant-bet-on-independent-directors-148522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Bartlett, Associate Lecturer Pharmacy Practice, University of Sydney

Electronic prescriptions (or e-prescriptions) are being rolled out in stages across Australia after being used in Victoria during the pandemic.

E-prescriptions have been common in countries such as the United States and Sweden for more than ten years. In Australia, a fully electronic paperless system has been planned for some time.

Since the arrival of COVID-19, and a surge in the uptake of telehealth, the advantages of e-prescriptions have become compelling.

So what are they? How does it all work? And is this the end of paper prescriptions?

How do e-prescriptions work?

Now, most doctors use a function in a patient’s electronic medical records to print out their prescription in the surgery. Patients then take it to the pharmacy for dispensing. The pharmacy needs to store this paper prescription for two years.

However, with e-prescribing, doctors can use their medical software package to write and transmit that prescription as a “token” to the patient’s phone. This can be as an SMS or email, containing a QR code.

Patients are then free to choose which pharmacy to take the token to for dispensing. They can present their phone to be scanned, or forward the SMS or email to the pharmacy.

The pharmacy imports the code into its dispensing program, unlocks the prescription, checks it, and dispenses the medication.

If patients accidentally delete the email or SMS, they will have to contact their doctor to have their token cancelled and reissued. This is not that different to someone losing a paper prescription.

Although e-prescribing has been used during telehealth consultations in Victoria, for instance, it can also be used during a normal face-to-face consultation, once it rolls out in your area.

What are the benefits of going paperless?

Telehealth initially involved a lot of extra paperwork. Doctors would fax or email a prescription to a particular pharmacy for the script to be dispensed, then medication was delivered to patients at home.

The pharmacy needed to wait for the doctor’s surgery to mail the paper prescription, or had to collect it from the doctor’s surgery. It also had to store the prescription for two years after dispensing.

Read more: Video and phone consultations only scratch the surface of what telehealth has to offer

However, regulations have now changed to legalise e-prescriptions with no need for paper.

This allows an efficient, contactless system for distributing medication, improving pharmacy workflows, and removing storage requirements.

For patients, it means not having to worry about paper copies, and offers the convenience of being able to send a code to the pharmacy of their choice.

Is it accurate? Does it save time?

When researchers evaluated other benefits of e-prescriptions, they had mixed results.

A review of 19 studies showed e-prescriptions may be clearer or more complete than paper handwritten prescriptions, reducing the need for pharmacists to contact doctors to clarify their instructions.

Another advantage is that e-prescriptions for addictive drugs, such as opioids, do not need doctors to write any details by hand (as is currently required for paper scripts for drugs of addiction).

However, e-prescriptions may not reduce the time it takes to process the prescription, as new errors may be introduced.

For instance, a Swedish study compared the number of times pharmacists had to contact the doctor to clarify information from new e-prescriptions, compared with computer-generated or faxed prescriptions.

The study found e-prescriptions were nearly eight times more likely to have issues about the dosage or how to take the medication. The authors believed this may be due to some electronic systems misinterpreting common shorthand doctors use (for example, lt3d for “one tablet three times daily”).

Is this the end of paper scripts?

About 10% of Australians do not have a smart phone. So paper prescriptions are still available and you can choose a paper one if you prefer or you don’t feel comfortable using the technology.

Some patients might find it a bit fiddly handling multiple e-prescriptions for multiple medications. At present, individual prescriptions are sent as separate emails or SMS messages and patients need some familiarity with searching their device to retrieve the right one.

However, in the near future, you will be able to store all of your current prescriptions electronically in an “Active Script list”. This will allow a patient to have all their medications in one file and choose to give a doctor or pharmacist access to either add more prescriptions or dispense medication. Once this is in place, using an app to aggregate all this information may make this more usable.

Until then, some patients with multiple medications might prefer to stick with keeping their paper prescriptions together in a folder as it helps them keep their current medication list up to date.

How about privacy and security?

When it comes to their health data, people are often understandably concerned about privacy and security.

The Australian Digital Health Agency, the federal agency that oversees e-prescriptions, requires providers to conform to rigorous standards when managing sensitive data.

E-prescriptions must meet the legal privacy requirements in Australia’s Privacy Act 1988 and eAuthentication framework.

Read more: Instant prescriptions might be the way of our digital future, but we need to manage the risks first

Countries that have had e-prescriptions for some time, such as Greece, have explored the issues around privacy. Australia, being much later to adopt e-prescriptions, has had the opportunity to address these concerns as part of the implementation process.

And a review comparing digital security of e-prescription systems in eight countries showed Australia (with the US) had the highest level of digital security.

– ref. E-prescriptions are coming. But what are they? And is this the end of paper ones? – https://theconversation.com/e-prescriptions-are-coming-but-what-are-they-and-is-this-the-end-of-paper-ones-148526

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Vilkins, PhD candidate, Australian National University

In April, as the coronavirus pandemic was gathering force around the world, reporters asked Brendan Murphy, then Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, about international case numbers. In his answer, he made an interesting comment:

The only numbers I have total faith in are the Australian numbers.

“Faith” might seem an odd word to use about about official statistics. But in our research, which involves talking to statisticians, public servants and journalists who produce and communicate the statistics that govern our lives, people say overwhelmingly that faith and trust are essential parts of what makes statistics useful.

Despite the objective and impartial appearance of statistics, it is a web of people and human processes that makes them trustworthy.

When trust falters

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the importance of numbers we can rely on. In many cases, early problems in data management have been indicators of bigger problems to come.

In the United Kingdom, a lack of local case data was hindering public efforts as early as June. By October, it emerged that some 16,000 cases had been lost from national reporting due to sloppy data management.

In Australia, the quality of COVID-19 responses in different states has broadly reflected existing perceptions of the quality of each state’s published data.

New South Wales was celebrated early on by data scientists for its responsiveness and transparency in data management, long before Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s September comment that the state’s contact tracing was the “gold standard”.

Meanwhile, inconsistencies in Victoria’s data management — such as irregular definitions of “local” and “community” transmission, and confusion over the definition of “routine testing” — were rankling data scientists back in June, before the state’s mystery cases blew up into a second wave.

Governing by numbers

Public statistics play a huge role in our lives. Political staffers we have interviewed in our research explained how the “mere presence of any kind of numbers” seems to make people more trusting of any claim.

Enthusiasm for decisions made “on data” often relies on the image of statistics having what philosophers call “mechanical objectivity”. By this logic, statistical results are essentially produced by machines or mechanical processes, so decisions based on data can be routine, apolitical, unbiased and incontestable.

But talking to the people behind our national numbers reveals how official statistics are in fact the product of expertise, immense resources, personal judgement calls, and trust.

Analysts we spoke to described official statistics as “icebergs” concealing vast tangles of sources and stories. Statisticians often used words like “instinct” and “vibe” in explaining how they check data sources and rely on long-term relationships to gather figures. One public servant summed up the situation neatly:

A lot of personal relationships are stringing together government statistical work.

The process of transforming real life into tables of data takes expert human intervention at every stage. These interventions can result in vastly different answers to the same initial questions. As the answers often form the bedrock of public decision-making, it becomes crucial we can trust the people who make the decisions behind the scenes.

“Total faith” in Australian numbers

When the Statistical Society of London was founded in 1834, discussion of interpretation or “opinion” was banned at its meetings. Modern statisticians have a much greater understanding of the importance of how people feel about data: the theme of this year’s World Statistics Day was “Connecting the world with data we can trust”.

But trusting “data” buries the work of the people who create statistics. In practice, they are the ones we are trusting.

Read more: Statistics is more than a numbers game – it underpins all sciences

In Australia, at least, we trust them a lot. Murphy’s “total faith” in “Australian numbers” is reflected in a 2020 survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which found 85% of the general community trust ABS statistics. The figure is even higher among “informed users”: a near-unanimous 99%.

Our communal faith in the numbers produced by the ABS reflects a web of trust and relationships built over decades.

Why trust matters

For many policy issues, such as unemployment, ABS statistics are taken as our absolute measure of reality. In these cases, the fact that 99% of informed users trust the numbers is what lets government and society keep functioning.

ABS data forms a shared basis for discussion. One analyst told us it’s not just trust in the bureau’s expertise that creates trust in the data — it’s also “because everybody else is using it as well”.

Read more: Why you should never use Microsoft Excel to count coronavirus cases

Those who work with public statistics agree these networks of trust — both between institutions like the ABS and the Australian public, and between individual academics, public servants, statisticians and journalists — rely on day-to-day honesty and responsiveness.

Transparency and consistency are essential. Statisticians and journalists alike emphasised that even data formatting plays a role in building trust. One journalist we interviewed talked about a health agency releasing coronavirus statistics as PDF files emailed to a private list early in the pandemic, describing it as “a ridiculous situation” that created extra work for the journalist to make the numbers clear and accountable in public. (State governments have since improved on this, generally making daily case numbers publicly available online.)

Long-term trust

Our response to future crises, whether the next pandemic or the impacts of climate change, will rely on the strong communal web of trust in our statistics.

Statistical failures, like the UK losing 16,000 cases or the United States massively undercounting coronavirus deaths, damage public trust in government. When institutions can prove their statistics are trustworthy, the public are more willing to follow directives based on those statistics. How do we know we can trust statistics? We talked to the humans behind the numbers to find out

Read more: The promise and problems of including ‘big data’ in official government statistics

– ref. How do we know statistics can be trusted? We talked to the humans behind the numbers to find out – https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-know-statistics-can-be-trusted-we-talked-to-the-humans-behind-the-numbers-to-find-out-148339

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Colin D. Butler, Honorary Professor, Australian National University

In all the talk of tackling environmental problems such as climate change, the problem of population growth often escapes attention. Politicians don’t like talking about it. By and large, neither do environmentalists – but former Greens leader Bob Brown has bucked that trend.

Brown recently declared the world’s population must start to decline before 2100, telling The Australian newspaper:

We are already using more than what the planet can supply and we use more than the living fabric of the planet in supply. That’s why we wake up every day to fewer fisheries, less forests, more extinctions and so on. The human herd at eight billion is the greatest herd of mammals ever on this planet and it is unsustainable to have that growing.

Research suggests our species has far exceeded its fair share of the planetary bounty, and Brown is right to call for the global population to peak. It is high time others joined the chorus – not only other environmentalists, but those concerned with international development and human rights.

Population growth, by the numbers

COVID-19 has killed more than one million people. While undeniably tragic, the figure is minor compared to world’s annual growth in population, estimated by the United Nations at about 83 million.

In 1900, the world’s population was about 1.6 billion people. By 2023 it’s expected to hit 8 billion. According to the UN, it will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

(The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently forecast a lower peak of about 9.7 billion by 2064, falling to about 8.8 billion by 2100.)

Read more: Is global fertility really plummeting? How population forecasts are made

Why is the population growing so fast? Much of it is due to advanced fertilisers and intensive farming practices, leading to higher crop yields that can sustain more people. Health care has improved, and people are living much longer. And many parts of the world have historically had high fertility rates.

There is no expert consensus on how many people the planet can support. The answer will largely depend on how much humans produce and consume, now and in the future. Some experts believe we’ve already hit the limit.

The “planetary boundaries framework” is one way to measure Earth’s carrying capacity. Introduced about a decade ago, it involves nine planetary boundaries such as biodiversity loss, climate change and ozone depletion. If the boundaries are crossed, Earth’s capacity to support civilisation is at risk. Research suggests in some parts of the world, multiple boundaries have already been breached.

It’s time to talk

In recent decades, many conservationists, politicians and scientists have been reluctant to talk about population growth.

When The Australian approached Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society regarding Brown’s remarks, the groups said they did not comment on population growth. Brown told the newspaper environmentalists avoided the issue because they were “frightened” of being targeted by News Corp.

In an address to the National Press Club this month, Greens leader Adam Bandt reportedly wouldn’t say whether he is concerned about population growth, saying “my priority is getting energy at running on 100% renewable. That makes much more of a difference than […] population size.”

Read more: How breastfeeding sparked population growth in ancient cities

Bandt wouldn’t be the first environmental advocate to avoid the topic. But why? I believe there are three main reasons.

Most obvious is the fear of being accused of racism. Some past advocates of population “control” supported eugenics and coercion, including forced sterilisation and abortion. In fact, eugenics and forced sterilisation has been reported in both rich and poor countries.

Second, the Catholic Church has played a big role in suppressing the topic. In the 1960s a papal commission suggested the church’s decades-long ban on birth control be dropped. But in 1968, Pope Paul VI rejected the advice, and declared artificial birth control to be morally wrong.

Third is the ascendancy of free-market economics. High population growth in low-income countries is convenient for capitalism, because these populations depress wages worldwide.

In 1984, the Reagan administration became the first in a long line to deny the importance of population problems. Its views were influenced by economic theorist Julian Simon, who believed adding to the world’s population was good for human well-being.

Starting the conversation

As Brown said, we should be “having a mature debate” about population growth. But where to start?

An obvious beginning is the unmet demand for contraception. For example, a UN report in 2015 reported fewer than half of African women who are married or in a union, and who need contraception, have their family planning needs satisfied.

Slowing global population growth will be helped by promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One goal seeks to ensure “universal access to reproductive health and family planning” by 2030. Improving female literacy – especially when combined with internet access – is also an important way to empower women.

Apart from reproductive health care, general improvements to health, including well-funded health systems, would give couples greater confidence their children will thrive. This would reduce their perceived need for additional children in case one or more dies.

These measures all require increased investment and public attention. The environmental movement, in particular, must awaken to the link between population growth and environmental degradation. “Business as usual” will hinder human development, further oppress women and magnify many forms of environmental damage.

Read more: Climate explained: why we need to focus on increased consumption as much as population growth

– ref. Bob Brown is right – it’s time environmentalists talked about the population problem – https://theconversation.com/bob-brown-is-right-its-time-environmentalists-talked-about-the-population-problem-148347

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Ngo, Honorary Fellow, Deakin University

Footscray Primary School in Victoria decided earlier this year to abolish its long-running Vietnamese bilingual program — where classes are taught in both English and Vietnamese. It will replace it with an Italian bilingual program. Vietnamese will be downgraded to two hours per week.

Footscray has been, and continues to be, an important Vietnamese community in Melbourne’s west. Unsurprisingly, there has been substantial community backlash about this decision. At the time of writing, an online petition initiated by one of the parents at the school has garnered around 17,000 signatures.

According to the latest census (2016) Vietnamese remains the most commonly spoken language in Footscray other than English — 11.4% of the population speak it (compared to 1.2% nationally). Vietnam is also listed the most common country of birth for residents who were born outside Australia (9.6%, compared to 0.9% nationally), or whose parents were (12.9% mothers, 12.4% fathers; compared to 1.4% nationally).

Italian does not figure in the top five responses in any of these categories.

The school says:

The bilingual program at Footscray Primary School is not a mother tongue maintenance program. It is a program that should deliver academic and content-based outcomes as well as language and culture to all students, regardless of which language they speak at home.

But placing Vietnamese on equal footing with any other bilingual program ignores its special significance to the local Vietnamese community, and beyond.

It also ignores the relentless battles people from minority immigrant and First Nations communities have had to fight to keep our cultures and languages alive in ways that are meaningful to us.

We live in, and through, language

German philosopher Martin Heidegger once described language as “the house of being”. What he meant is that language is more than a means of communication or transaction. Rather, we dwell in language. And since he conceives “being” as a kind of dwelling, it is in language that we are (or be).

That’s language — but what of languages?

French philosopher and philologist (who studies the history of languages) Barbara Cassin writes the maternal language is:

the one in which we are steeped … we are master of this language and yet it is the one that has a hold on us. It’s an extraordinary relationship. We are master because we can say what we want in it, but it has a hold on us because it determines our manner of thinking, our manner of living, our manner of being.

Cassin’s words might ring true for some, but not all in diasporic communities, as language retention among second and subsequent generations can be difficult to sustain.

Yet if one lives in a society where one’s maternal language is not the dominant one, the linguistic intimacy Cassin describes still only presents a partial picture. This is because our “manner of being” is also shaped by how we are received, supported and validated (or not) in our broader communities.

Read more: How to make Australia more bilingual

In a context where non-white migrant communities are perennially held in suspicion and at the margins — that is, until our cultures and cuisines become trendy enough to consume — to “be” or “dwell” in our language becomes a lot more fraught.

Latinx feminist and queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa calls this relentless switching, negotiating, and self-contorting between language-worlds, living in “the borderlands”, a state of psychic unrest. There is much to affirm and celebrate about living this enriching state of in-betweeness. But it does not erase the labour non-white communities are endlessly performing, to translate our languages, cultures and selves to a decidedly committed monolingual society.

Nor does it erase the pain often felt. Celebrated Chinese Australian artist Lindy Lee has said of her experience growing up under the White Australia Policy:

It was telling me that my difference was not acceptable. And that is an excruciating place to live in.

The ‘superiority’ of some languages

Bilingual language programs are not the only way to maintain local community languages, and in fact few bilingual programs across the country explicitly serve this purpose. But they present a powerful, and rare, opportunity to support such languages, while still offering benefits to the rest of the school community.

As language and literacy experts have recognised, bi- or multilingual children in Australia are chronically underestimated and undervalued in our education system; the system “kills off” languages already existing in their community during early school years, only to encourage new languages in the final years of schooling, when it is least effective.

The decision by Footscray Primary does not do exactly this, since the proposal is to replace one bilingual program with another — Vietnamese with Italian. But it does point to how we value languages differently. Researchers have long recognised the perceived “prestige” of European languages in Australian society, compared with Asian languages, which are often only seen as instrumentally useful — for example, as “trade languages”.

Read more: Want to get ahead this century? Learn an Asian language

But for migrant communities, language is more than instrumentally useful, and programs such as these are more than an educational “value add”.

A revived Twitter thread recently asked: “What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?” To which many replied: “speaking two languages”. Substitute “rich and poor” for “white and non-white” and the quip starts to ring a little truer.

– ref. Housing a sense of self: for migrant communities, bilingual school programs are about more than learning – https://theconversation.com/housing-a-sense-of-self-for-migrant-communities-bilingual-school-programs-are-about-more-than-learning-148099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Macquarie University

The year has been a strange one for sports lovers.

We’ve seen athlete protests here and around the world. Where big gatherings have been permitted in the US, discordant NFL crowds have highlighted America’s divisions.

Australian stadium rules have varied from state to state and the AFL Grand Final will be played before a smaller than normal crowd at the Gabba rather than the MCG. Sunday’s NRL Grand Final, meanwhile, will bring 40,000 fans together.

Sport can unite people with a common sense of purpose and identity. The sporting crowd can also vent community concerns and express social dissatisfaction.

This power of cheering — or jeering — goes back to ancient times.

Read more: Thucydides and the plague of Athens – what it can teach us now

Blues versus Greens

By the late Roman Republic, prominent statesmen were expected to provide public entertainments, which also served to keep the masses content and under control.

Like his predecessors, emperor Augustus organised gladiatorial games but also a number of athletic events, taking his inspiration from the Greek Olympic Games.

To commemorate his victory against Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at the naval battle of Actium, Augustus established the Actian Games, which took place every four years in emulation of the Olympic Games.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Kyniska, the first female Olympian

Notably, in his Res Gestae, the public summation of his reign, Augustus rejoiced in his games alongside his conquests. In each of the events he attended, the leader and his public barracked in chorus and their harmony represented the harmony of the state.

The same could not be said of the chariot races between rival teams — the Blues and the Greens — in Constantinople in 532 AD. Emperor Justinian, an unpopular ruler, was watching at the hippodrome with up to 100,000 spectators at one of the 70-odd races held there annually. Then the crowd turned on him.

The amphitheatre had already been the scene of chaos in 501 AD, when the Greens ambushed the Blues and massacred 3,000 people.

Yet in 532 AD, the fans, upset by Justinian’s high taxes and poor response to their political demands, along with widespread corruption among his officials, put sporting rivalries aside to chant “Nika!” in unison, meaning “Conquer!” A slogan typically used to cheer on charioteers, was now directed against the emperor. Massive civic unrest erupted for a week; the city was torched, its major church (Agia Sophia burnt, and thousands murdered.

Justinian’s reign went on to be marred by disaster: from 541 to 549 AD, Constantinople suffered the first old world pandemic. In 542 AD alone, 5,000—10,000 deaths occurred daily, until one third of the population was wiped out. Justinian was infected and although he survived the plague, he remained unpopular.

Read more: Dying old, dying young – death and ageism in the times of Greek myth and coronavirus

Chanting to power

At sporting events and other large crowd spectacles in the ancient world, people could pitch requests and voice socioeconomic grievances.

It was customary for high officials — the emperor, his ministers, or local authorities — to be present, and they were expected to respond to such petitions.

In 362 AD, the people of Antioch, in Roman Syria, greeted the emperor Julian in the hippodrome with the chant, “Everything is plentiful, everything is dear,” protesting the high prices of grain in the city.

In first century Alexandria, meanwhile, which was home to a large Jewish population, racial tension, combined with racially-based tax exemptions and civic rights, found expression at sports grounds and public events. Violence consumed the city in 38 and again in 66. It began at the gymnasium and the theatre.

The importance of sport for cementing authority was also reflected in 540 AD when the Sasanian king Khosrau I tried to oversee chariot racing in a captured Roman city in Asia Minor. According to the historian Procopius , Khosrau demanded that the Blues lose the race because he knew they were Justinian’s favourite team!

Read more: Leaders as healers: Ancient Greek ideas on the health of the body politic

Sport and civics today

Although we now interpret political legitimacy differently to the ancients, aspects of our sporting events are the same.

There is the conspicuous presence of politicians, singing of anthems, the over-the-top displays of military might and performances.

And, as in ancient times, symbolic or vocal protests in venues and at events laden with national significance are hard to ignore. When these actions are witnessed by thousands and speak to raw existential conflict, such as famine (in the past) or racism (today), they become even more powerful.

This year’s grand final has already been mired in political point-scoring. How the crowd behaves remains to be seen.

– ref. The power of the grand final crowd recalls ancient times – https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-the-grand-final-crowd-recalls-ancient-times-145619

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rick Sarre, Emeritus Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

One can always sense an election is looming when law and order becomes headline news.

As Queenslanders head towards election day on October 31, the state’s opposition leader Deb Frecklington has announced that, if elected, the Liberal National Party will trial a curfew for children.

Read more: As the Queensland campaign passes the halfway mark, the election is still Labor’s to lose

In Townsville and Cairns, the LNP would introduce an 8pm curfew for unaccompanied children aged 14 and under, and a 10pm curfew for those aged 15 to 17.

Frecklington said under the planned six-month trial, teenagers would have to prove to police they had a reasonable excuse to be out at night, or be put in a “refuge”. Parents would be fined $250.

This is similar to a policy the party took to the 2017 state election.

‘Dog pound for kids’

The Labor Party and One Nation have both announced populist “tough on crime” policies in the run up to the election, but neither has endorsed a curfew. Labor’s Police Minister Mark Ryan labelled the LNP’s plan a “simplistic answer to a complex problem”.

Katter’s Australian Party has warned a curfew will result in a “dog pound for kids.”

With a significant proportion of young people in the far north of the state identifying as Indigenous, the Greens slammed the policy announcement as a “racist dog whistle.”

There is little doubt the LNP announcement is pitched primarily at voters in and around Townsville, where three marginal seats are up for grabs — and which some commentators suggest could decide the election.

Youth crime in Townsville is perceived to be a problem, although some experts say this is overblown. Whatever the reality, tackling the perceptions is clever politics.

Are curfews legal?

This year, COVID-19 has reminded us governments do have the power to enact legislation that places a brake on where and when people can be out in public.

This is so long as there are overriding reasons in the interests of public safety, and a lockdown is not a disproportionate limitation on freedom of movement.

Read more: FactCheck: did the Northbridge WA curfew see a ‘dramatic drop’ in crime?

So, the imposition of curfews in cities and towns around Australia has never been illegal, and indeed they have been implemented in the past. In relation to Aboriginal Australians, they were in place well into the 20th century.

While Amnesty International says the proposed Queensland curfew may breach Australia’s commitment to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this is unlikely to dislodge the zeal of politicians keen to display their “tough on crime” credentials.

Do curfews work?

Various studies have looked at specific curfews in the past, both here in Australia and in the United States.

Evidence of their effectiveness is weak.

To my mind, the best evidence comes from meta-analyses, studies that amalgamate the findings of only the most trustworthy scholarship into one place. One of the most reputable meta-analysis research conglomerates in the world is the Campbell Collaboration.

Their researchers undertook a systematic review, up to 2014, of all the quantitative studies that had assessed the effect of a curfew on criminal behaviour and victimisation. Twelve studies met their rigorous standards.

According to their summary, the evidence suggests juvenile curfews do not reduce crime or victimisation.

[…]all the studies in the review suffer from some limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless, the lack of any credible evidence in their favor suggests that any effect is likely to be small at best and that curfews are unlikely to be a meaningful solution to juvenile crime and disorder.

Are there counterproductive consequences?

There is another problem for advocates of a curfew. Imposing a curfew may make matters worse.

For one thing, proponents are likely to exaggerate the problem, while pretending crime issues will be solved simply by taking unaccompanied children off the streets at night.

But the most puzzling incongruity is there is also plenty of evidence to suggest what should be done to alleviate the disorder and dysfunction curfews are designed to address.

The evidence is clear: whatever we do must stem the flow of young offenders into the justice system in the first place. By targeting and detaining the inevitable number who will flout the new law, curfews will bring about exactly the opposite.

Read more: Ten-year-olds do not belong in detention. Why Australia must raise the age of criminal responsibility

Currently Indigenous over representation in the justice system is a national disgrace. Schemes designed to mentor and guide all young people, and Aboriginal young people especially, to enhance their life-skills and their prospects of education and employment must be prioritised.

There is no lack of potential guidance in this respect.

The recently launched Justice Reform Initiative — of which I am a patron — boasts dozens of experts, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who are available to guide and direct political parties to develop policies that build safe and supportive communities.

This is done by strengthening community connections, not isolating and stigmatising their most disengaged members.

– ref. Queensland’s LNP wants a curfew for kids, but evidence suggests this won’t reduce crime – https://theconversation.com/queenslands-lnp-wants-a-curfew-for-kids-but-evidence-suggests-this-wont-reduce-crime-148529

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW

The effects of a warming planet are no longer far away in time or distance. We are witnessing transformed landscapes, mass extinctions and people on the move, whether by force or choice.

Across the globe, the adverse effects of disasters and climate change are already prompting millions of people to move. More people are now displaced within their countries each year by disasters than by conflict.

The Asia-Pacific region has been the hardest hit by these disasters.

In the Pacific islands, king tides, cyclones, droughts and flooding displace people on a regular basis. Countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu are now facing existential questions about their capacity to sustain their populations into the future.

‘Burying our heads in the sand’

There are potential consequences for Australia, too, which may disrupt many of our foreign and domestic policy agendas – including energy, environment, foreign aid, national security, labour and migration.

This is why Pacific governments, including Australia, are currently engaged in talks about how migration could alleviate pressure on threatened Pacific island nations and become a climate change adaptation strategy.

Most Pacific Islanders want to remain in their homes. Policies designed to reduce their exposure to disaster risks, improve their adaptation to climate change and bolster their development can all help.

But at the same time, Pacific communities acknowledge

that the movement of people needs to be discussed … [and] failing to do so will be like burying our heads in the sand.

Most displacement in the Pacific is temporary and internal, but it is occurring with increasing regularity.

Some Pacific governments have already developed guidelines on internal displacement and planned relocations in the context of climate change and disasters. Fiji has established a trust fund to support relocations. (New Zealand has contributed A$3 million to the fund).

Read more: COVID-19 provides a rare chance for Australia to set itself apart from other regional powers. It can create a Pacific ‘bubble’

How Australia can expand visas for Pacific islanders

Australia could play a much bigger role in this effort, too.

A new Kaldor Centre policy brief argues that smarter Australian migration policies could give Pacific peoples more choice to take control of their own lives.

By creating more temporary and long-term visa opportunities, Australia could provide a release valve for Pacific islanders at risk of displacement.

Read more: China wants to be a friend to the Pacific, but so far, it has failed to match Australia’s COVID-19 response

If only 1% of the Pacific’s population was permitted to work permanently in Australia, this would bring more benefits to the region than Australia’s annual aid contribution. Migration can enhance the resilience of those who move, as well as those who stay behind.

Australia already has targeted Pacific work schemes: the short-term Seasonal Worker Programme and the longer-term Pacific Labour Scheme.

These could be expanded and complemented by additional initiatives, such as

• special educational or training visas

• preferential access to existing labour, education or family visas

• humanitarian visas to assist those displaced by disasters, or those already in Australia when a disaster strikes and who cannot safely return home.

Australia should also create a visa category similar to New Zealand’s longstanding “Pacific Access Category”.

This enables 650 Pacific Islanders from specific countries (plus their families) to become permanent residents of New Zealand annually. The Samoan quota resident visa allows 1,100 Samoans to come, as well.

The New Zealand schemes are based on a ballot that prevents “cherry picking” based on people’s skills, going some way to alleviate concerns about a brain drain resulting in Pacific nations.

Migration can be a win-win

The lockdown of borders in response to COVID-19 has wrought unprecedented damage to the already vulnerable economies of the Pacific.

Dame Meg Taylor, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, powerfully observes that the pandemic’s

humanitarian and economic fallout offers us a glimpse of what the global climate change emergency can become – if it is left unchecked and if we do not act now.

As Australia reshapes its Pacific policies in response to COVID-19, dignified migration should be front and centre.

The pandemic itself has revealed just how reliant Australian horticulture is on Pacific seasonal workers; likewise, seasonal employment is a lifeline for many Pacific families.

Increased migration could thus be a win–win strategy in the face of climate change, as well.

Read more: Pacific nations aren’t cash-hungry, minister, they just want action on climate change

– ref. We can no longer ignore the threats facing the Pacific — we need to support more migration to Australia – https://theconversation.com/we-can-no-longer-ignore-the-threats-facing-the-pacific-we-need-to-support-more-migration-to-australia-148530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ananish Chaudhuri, Professor of Behavioural and Experimental Economics, University of Auckland

With the government borrowing heavily to fund its pandemic response and recovery, it has been suggested it could simply cancel its debt by printing more money. That sounds like an attractive idea, but it is one that would have seriously adverse consequences.

Derived from “modern monetary theory” (MMT), the suggestion is that expansionary monetary policy (i.e. money creation by the central bank) be used to finance government spending.

According to proponents of MMT, a country that issues its own currency can never run out and can never become insolvent in its own currency. It can make all payments as they come due. Therefore, there is no risk of defaulting on its debt.

This is a flawed idea based on economic misconceptions. It has been opposed by economists, liberal and conservative, including Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Harvard University’s Greg Mankiw.

So, what does happen when the government wants to spend more than it raises in tax revenue? It needs to borrow money (known as deficit financing), and so instructs the Treasury to issue debt.

There are three major types of debt: treasury bills, treasury notes and treasury bonds.. Treasury bills have the shortest maturity (less than a year) while treasury bonds have maturities of ten years or more. They all must be paid back in the future.

The debt is typically held by banks, institutional investors and managed funds (such as Kiwisaver accounts). Because the government is not expected to default on the loans, the debt is considered to be secure. So, these bonds can typically be issued at lower interest rates than bonds from other financial entities.

Where government debt goes

When the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) engages in “quantitative easing” it essentially buys up these government issued bonds. To do this, it prints currency to pay for the bonds and this currency goes into circulation, increasing the money supply.

Quantitative easing floods the system with liquidity — the amount of money readily available for investment and spending. In turn, this should put downward pressure on interest rates because money is cheaper to borrow when there is more of it.

The RBNZ can also lower the official cash rate (OCR) to push retail interest rates (on mortgages and savings deposits) down. The aim in both cases is to make borrowing cheaper in the hope that businesses will borrow money to invest, in turn creating more jobs.

If the RBNZ is buying government bonds from the banks and investors who had bought them earlier, it follows that the creditors have been paid off. So why can’t the government simply write off this debt?

Read more: With a mandate to govern New Zealand alone, Labour must now decide what it really stands for

Firstly, this takes away the RBNZ’s ability to act as an independent entity, which in itself is problematic. But even so, the debt does not disappear, it just takes the form of that additional amount of money floating around the economy.

At some point this extra money will end up being deposited in commercial banks and be held as reserves which earn interest from the RBNZ.

The currency in circulation is also legal tender backed by the authority of the government. If no one else wants to accept it, holders of this money should be able to sell it back to the RBNZ for something of value in return (US dollars, say).

One way or another, sooner or later the debt will have to be honoured.

The risk of inflation

In the meantime, if lower interest rates do not lead to business expansion and higher production (and there are good reasons to suppose they may not) then the net result is a larger amount of money circulating in the economy with no new production happening.

This will eventually set off inflationary pressures, which make savers worse off and provide a disincentive for saving. But saving by households is fundamental to making funds available for businesses to borrow.

In the absence of increased production this extra money may also make its way to non-productive financial assets such as equity and houses, setting off speculative bubbles in those markets.

Read more: COVID-19 is predicted to make child poverty worse. Should NZ’s next government make temporary safety nets permanent?

Why might businesses not expand, even with lower interest rates? In deep recessions it is not the lack of credit that holds them back, it is that they cannot sell their goods at prevailing prices. This reduces demand for labour, further reducing demand for goods because more customers are unemployed.

It becomes a vicious cycle of insufficient demand, where the key issue is not credit or liquidity but rather a crisis of confidence. Monetary policy loses its teeth at this point, leaving fiscal policy (via deficit financing or tax cuts) as the only option.

It’s all about trust

However, government borrowing is a long-term game. The entire system, whether deficit financing or printing money, is based on trust — that the government will honour its debt.

Simply put, no government could satisfy all its creditors if they wanted their money back at the same time. But as long as the government keeps making the interest payments on the loans, or at least has the capacity to pay back some of those creditors (sometimes by borrowing even more), the economy remains stable. The juggler’s balls stay in the air.

Read more: NZ election 2020: survey shows voters are divided on climate policy and urgency of action

If for some reason trust in a government goes, watch the balls come crashing down. Any hint of default or not honouring debt obligations will lead to long-term damage to a government’s reputation and its future ability to borrow. No one will want to hold the government’s debt in the form of government bonds.

When that happens, we see capital flight — money flows out of the country as people seek a return elsewhere. The value of the currency goes through the floor, with catastrophic effects on the economy, such as occurred during the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

The economic crisis New Zealand is facing is real and deep. Attempting to cancel debt would only reduce trust in the government and risk making the crisis worse.

– ref. Explainer: why the government can’t simply cancel its pandemic debt by printing more money – https://theconversation.com/explainer-why-the-government-cant-simply-cancel-its-pandemic-debt-by-printing-more-money-148514

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah John, College of Business, Government and Law, Flinders University

In the US election next month, record-breaking numbers of voters will cast their ballots by mail for the first time. Millions of these ballots will be processed by local election administrations inexperienced with large numbers of mail-in votes.

In this environment, many ballots are likely to be rejected for technical reasons, such as non-matching signatures (the signature on the ballot doesn’t match the signature on voter registration forms), raising the risk of protracted court battles in key battleground states.

Already, lawsuits are being filed in many of these states to try to prevent or reduce ballot rejections, which, perversely, may only make the problem worse if voters can’t keep track of constantly changing rules.

Large numbers of ballot rejections could prove pivotal if the race is close in key states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which Donald Trump won by less than 80,000 votes in total in 2016 to claim victory over Hillary Clinton.

But there is also a longer-term risk to voters’ belief in the fundamentals of democracy itself if they cast a ballot that literally does not count.

How many ballots could be rejected?

According to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a federal agency created to help states modernise their voting systems after the “hanging chads” problem in the 2000 presidential election, less than 5% of voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted by mail in 2016.

But 2020 will be different. In Pennsylvania, 2.5 million voters requested mail-in ballots — about eight times as many as 2016. And more than ten times as many North Carolinians requested mail-in ballots in 2020 than 2016.

A dramatic increase like this could very easily overwhelm county election administrators who are unfamiliar with the system and under-resourced to process masses of mail-in ballots.

In every election with mail-in voting, some ballots are not counted for reasons unrelated to the eligibility of the voter. Most commonly, these “rejected” ballots arrived too late, lacked the requisite signature or “secrecy” envelope or had some other technical problem.

Read more: Mail-in voting’s potential problems only begin at the post office – an underfunded, underprepared decentralized system could be trouble

In the 2016 presidential election, the EAC found about 1% of the 33.4 million total absentee ballots were rejected — or about 319,000 overall.

However, in some counties, rates were much higher. Nassau County, an affluent county just outside New York City, reported rejecting 82% of its mail-in ballots (mostly because they missed the deadline). Greene County, Arkansas, reported rejecting 48% of its mail-in ballots (mostly because the voter did not write their address on the envelope, which is a requirement in Arkansas).

It is likely more ballots could be rejected in this year’s election — USA Today estimates more than 1 million, if half the nation votes by mail.

We got our first taste of the problem during the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries earlier this year. More than 550,000 ballots were rejected in these contests — nearly twice as many as the 2016 general election.

Mishmash of laws and court rulings

Even in normal times, voting by mail is complex. Technical requirements and formats vary greatly from state to state.

Some states, like Pennsylvania, require the ballot to be ensconced in a second “secrecy” envelope. Without this, the ballot will be rejected.

And six states, including the key battleground states of North Carolina and Wisconsin, require a witness to verify the voter’s signature. Without this, the ballot will be rejected.

Unsurprisingly, research reveals inexperienced voters, including younger voters, are more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected.

And while there is no evidence mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud — as Trump has repeatedly claimed — rejected ballots do have the potential to determine election outcomes.

For this reason, rules about accepting and rejecting mail-in ballots are currently the subject of hundreds of court actions.

In the absence of a concerted national effort to reduce ballot rejection rates, citizen and activist groups and Democratic state party organisations have filed lawsuits seeking to remove technical requirements for mail-in ballots in numerous states.

Republican state party organisations, meanwhile, are appealing those decisions and challenging policy changes that loosen technical requirements.

Read more: No mail-in votes, proof of citizenship: the long history of preventing minorities from voting in the US

Using the courts in this way creates uncertainty, and may even serve to increase the number of ballots that are rejected.

In some states, court rulings that have loosened requirements have been overturned only weeks later by higher courts. In early October, for example, the US Supreme Court reinstated the witness requirement for South Carolinian mail-in voters after a lower court had ordered it removed.

Consequently, South Carolina voters have received mail-in ballots with outdated instructions, increasing the risk their votes will be rejected.

Every day, there are new court rulings. For example, last week, a Michigan appeals court overturned a lower court ruling that prevented ballots from being rejected if they arrived late, so long as they were postmarked November 2 or earlier.

This week, the US Supreme Court ruled mail-in ballots could be counted for up to three days after election day in Pennsylvania, so long as they were postmarked by November 3.

This decision could prove critical in a tight race. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by just 44,000 votes out of some 6 million cast.

And in Texas, which has the most restrictive voting rules of anywhere in the country, an appeals court overturned a lower court decision this week to allow election officials to reject ballots without matching signatures without giving voters a chance to challenge.

Will ballot rejections erode trust in democracy?

There are long-term risks to these battles over mail-in voting, as well.

Voters would understandably be disheartened to learn their ballots were rejected in the election — and their votes didn’t count — after they went to the effort of voting by mail. This risks a genuine disengagement with the electoral system.

Researchers in Scotland have found high rates of ballot rejections in the 2007 Scottish parliament elections caused many to question the fairness of the electoral system, possibly resulting in lower voter turnout rates in future elections.

Read more: Mail-in voting is safe and reliable – 5 essential reads

Not much research has emerged in the US on the effects of ballot rejection on future political participation. But this will likely change after this election, particularly if ballot rejections are widespread.

We should expect to hear many angry partisan allegations about “naked” ballots (those missing special secrecy envelopes), postmarks and signatures in the weeks after the election.

But we should also spare a thought for the citizens who find out the ballots they diligently returned were rejected on a technicality. They may not be so inclined to vote again in the future.

– ref. Over 1 million mail-in ballots could be rejected in the US election — and the rules are changing by the day – https://theconversation.com/over-1-million-mail-in-ballots-could-be-rejected-in-the-us-election-and-the-rules-are-changing-by-the-day-148188

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, University of Melbourne

Almost all private health insurers increased their premiums in October, and have scheduled another price rise for April 2021. As many people struggle financially amid the pandemic, you may be wondering whether you should drop your private health insurance altogether.

Before you do, bear in mind some government policies affect the cost of your insurance, and sometimes dropping it may even cost you more.

Here’s the bottom line

For singles with an income above A$105,000, and for families with an income above $180,000, it’s worth buying private hospital cover even if you don’t think you’ll use it. I’ll explain why in a moment.

People with incomes below these levels need to compare value and costs. The decision varies a lot depending on your age.

Three key polices affect your premium costs: the Medicare levy surcharge, government rebates, and discounts for younger people.

Throughout this article, we’re talking about hospital cover, not “extras” like dental, optical or physio, which aren’t affected by these policies. You can buy extras cover separately without hospital cover. Extras cover is much cheaper than hospital cover, and an easier decision overall — you can readily compare how much you stand to gain from extras cover (based on how often you’re expecting to visit a physiotherapist, for instance) and then weigh that against how much it will cost you.

Here are the main things you should factor in when deciding on hospital cover.

There’s the Medicare levy, and then there’s the surcharge

Almost all Australians pay 2% of their taxable income as the Medicare levy. This money goes towards funding parts of the public health-care system. It pays for Australians to get free (or much cheaper) GP visits and care in public hospitals.

If you earn above a certain income and don’t have private hospital cover (extras cover does not apply), you have to pay an extra 1-1.5% of your taxable income, called the Medicare levy surcharge.

For example, if John Citizen has a total taxable income of $150,000, he must pay $2,250 in additional tax (the Medicare levy surcharge), on top of the $3,000 he already pays as the Medicare levy. If he buys an appropriate level of private hospital cover, he can waive this extra tax and just pay the $3,000.

Keep an eye on government rebates

Singles with an income below $140,000, and families with an income below $280,000, can get government rebates on their private health insurance — that is, a partial refund. The level of this rebate varies by income and age.

Discounts for the young

Since April 2019, people aged 18–29 have been able to get discounts of up to 10% of their private hospital premiums. The allowable discounts are 2% for people aged 29, 4% for 28, 6% for 27, 8% for 26, and 10% for 18-25. People will retain that discount until they turn 41, then the discount gradually decreases by 2% per year.

Factoring the above policies in, for singles with an income above $105,000 and families with an income above $180,000, it makes sense to buy private hospital insurance even if you won’t use it. That’s because you can find hospital cover cheaper than the Medicare levy surcharge.

For those with an income below these levels, you need to compare whether the value is more than the cost. Value consists of two components: protection from unexpected catastrophic risk, and your expected use of private hospital care.

First, value from risk protection is highly subjective, depending on your level of tolerance for potentially catastrophic uncertainties. Some people might naturally be more anxious about risks, but others less so. For example, people buy home and contents insurance to cover unexpected natural or accidental catastrophes, or burglary. But arguably, this component of value is small in the health insurance market because all Australians are insured by Medicare to cover their health needs in public hospitals, and are therefore protected from the financial risk of catastrophic health problems.

Second, there is value in buying private health insurance if you anticipate using private care, which can reduce your waiting time for certain elective surgeries, or give you a choice of doctors. This goes to the second part of value: expected use.

Take a look at the table below for the national averages for your age regarding your expected use of private hospital care. Basically, the older you are, the more you’re likely to use it, and the greater the expected benefit.

Here’s an example. If you are single, 24 years old, are comfortable taking risks, have an income below $90,000, and your expected use of private hospital care is in line with the national average, your value from buying private hospital insurance is about $550 a year. As per the above graph, for people 20-24 years old, $550 was the national average of benefits actually paid by private insurance companies between July 2019 and June 2020.

Meanwhile, your median premium cost is $1,457 after rebates and discounts, and you are exempt from the Medicare levy surcharge. So it may not be worth buying private hospital insurance in this set of circumstances.

When comparing value and costs, you are most likely better off buying private hospital insurance given the current government policies for the following scenarios:

• family cover: family income above $180,000; family income below $180,000 if older than 44 or with special needs for private hospital care (such as childbirth in private hospitals).

• single cover: income above $105,001; income below $90,000 and older than 54; income between $90,000 and $105,001 and older than 24.

And don’t forget

There are a few final things you should keep in mind. When you use your insurance for a stay in hospital, there will be out-of-pocket, or “gap”, costs. So you’ll still have to pay extra even with private hospital insurance.

Then there is the Lifetime Health Cover loading, which adds 2% to your insurance premiums for every year you are over 30 if you don’t have hospital cover by 1 July following your 31st birthday.

For example, if you wait until you’re 40 to buy private hospital insurance for the first time, you could pay an extra 20% on hospital premiums. The loading is removed once you’ve held appropriate private hospital cover for ten consecutive years.

More generous coverage requires higher premiums. What’s more, even for the same coverage, premiums may vary substantially across insurers. So, shop around and use free resources to compare health insurance policies.

Finally, it’s a good idea to re-evaluate your options every year or every other year as your situation or government policy changes.

– ref. Thinking of ditching private health insurance in the pandemic? Here’s how to calculate if it’s worth it for you – https://theconversation.com/thinking-of-ditching-private-health-insurance-in-the-pandemic-heres-how-to-calculate-if-its-worth-it-for-you-148191

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Morgan Disspain, Adjunct Researcher, Southern Cross University

A recent program for school kids in Kakadu and West Arnhem Land, incorporating traditional knowledge and Western science, is a model for teaching Indigenous children on Country.

The Djenj Project (djenj means “fish” in the local language) involved teaching Bininj (Aboriginal) children and rangers about fish, and scientific water research techniques, to improve employment opportunities.

As archaeologists, we wanted to find out how fish populations near the 65,000-year-old Madjedbebe archaeological site have changed over thousands of years. Evidence collected from the rock shelter suggests it’s one of the oldest sites on the continent.

We wanted to know which fish Bininj inhabitants at the site ate in the past, where and how they caught them, what the environment was like then, and what impact humans and environmental change have had on fish populations.

We needed to gather information about traditional fishing methods and knowledge. We also needed to gather samples of the current fish in the region, to compare them with fish remains excavated from Madjedbebe.

Read more: When did Aboriginal people first arrive in Australia?

To do that meaningfully, we wanted to bring the community on the journey with us, rather than working in our labs in isolation. Dozens of school children between the ages of seven and 17 were involved in the project. They helped us answer our questions and learnt a lot in the process.

Beyond thinking about our scientific aims and questions, we put community-based benefits at the forefront of the research process. At the heart of the project were the core ideas of respect and two-way knowledge sharing, especially giving senior Bininj people the opportunity to share their knowledge and skills.

What it looked like

The project included about 80 community members from the small townships of Jabiru and Gunbalanya, and surrounding outstations in the Top End of the Northern Territory.

Bininj Elders shared traditional ecological knowledge with Bininj children, rangers (the Djurrubu Rangers of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation and Njanjma Rangers), and Western (Balanda) researchers. Everyone worked together to prepare teaching resources so the project has long-lasting benefits.

Fishing is a favourite activity for Bininj, so participation in the project was high. While word-of-mouth was the main way to reach the community about catching fish for the project, we also shared short videos on social media. These explained what we were doing and how people could get involved.

One positive side-effect of the project was providing large amounts of fish for the community to eat, promoting healthy eating.

In between the fishing and the eating was the science and the learning. A key aim was to integrate cultural knowledge into school lessons to improve literacy and numeracy skills.

Local teachers interwove The Djenj Project throughout the class curriculum for the entire year. Researchers ran monthly workshops to teach children and rangers how to collect and interpret scientific information from fish, such as species, length, girth and weight, as well as the capture location and the fishing method used.

Fish were then processed to collect otoliths (ear bones), and sometimes their entire skeletons. Otoliths provide valuable information about the fish’s life, such as its size, age, season of death, and the water conditions it lived in.

Elders shared traditional knowledge about fish and fishing methods with the children. They worked together to construct bone points to use as fish hooks. They also constructed traditional fish traps, which involved making string from plant fibre.

Groups made trips to the rock art (bim) sites, where Elders shared knowledge about djenj, and the children found, recorded and counted djenj images.

While the Elders shared their knowledge about the local waterways, water monitoring specialists provided training in testing water quality for rangers and children. Children also learnt about the importance of water quality to the health of all living things.

Woven throughout all activities was attention to Indigenous languages, with staff from the Bininj Kunwok Language Resource Centre creating a dedicated language booklet and app focused on djenj. This resource is helping with language maintenance and revitalisation in the Bininj community, as well as providing Balanda with the necessary terms to have productive discussions with Bininj about fish and water.

What we learnt

Students and rangers gained a new appreciation for how much we can learn from our environment. The project also reinforced the rights of Bininj to engage in water and fish management processes.

The project also laid a foundation for future skills and environmental awareness with children (many of whom will go on to join local ranger teams). They have learnt cultural and scientific knowledge about fish, water, archaeology and rock art.

As researchers, we have established modern fish reference collections we can use and have learnt about local traditional fishing methods and ecological knowledge.

The Djenj Project is a great example of how grass-roots projects can provide practical benefits for Aboriginal communities, while contributing to scientific research. The model of collaborative teaching and learning from each other can be customised to benefit other communities.

We are planning to do more projects like this in West Arnhem Land over the following years, investigating other species of plants and animals.

Read more: Secondary school textbooks teach our kids the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers

– ref. School of fish: how we involved Indigenous students in our investigation of a 65,000-year-old site – https://theconversation.com/school-of-fish-how-we-involved-indigenous-students-in-our-investigation-of-a-65-000-year-old-site-144577

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rafal Chomik, Senior Research Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), UNSW

This article is part of our series on the future of aged care.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety will hold its final hearing on Friday, where Counsel Assisting will spell out his case for reforms.

With over 10,000 submissions and many hours of hearings, the Commission has identified systemic failures in the design, objectives, and regulation of aged care in Australia.

At their heart is a two-way lack of trust on funding and the cost of providing aged care.

The main funder is the Commonwealth, with expenditure of about A$20 billion in 2019, distributed across residential, home care, and home support services.

This is topped up by user contributions of just over $5 billion.

At first glance, public funding and the continued prospect of demographically-driven demand suggest lucrative opportunities for providers.

The customer base of people aged 85 years and over is projected to more than double by 2040.

More for-profit providers, fewer profits

Though the system relies heavily on not-for-profits, the four years to 2019 saw the for-profit shares of residential and home care places climb from 35% to 41% and from 10% to 21%.

In practice, profits have dived or barely kept pace.

Between 2017 and 2019 earnings per care recipient slid by 26% in residential care and nearly 60% in home care.

Read more: If we have the guts to give older people a fair go, this is how we fix aged care in Australia

Many operators are no longer financially viable.

Smaller, regional operators are suffering the most, but even large providers listed on the stock exchange have seen their prices drop by as much as 80% over the past five years.

More than one third of aged care homes recorded operating cash losses during the nine months to March 2020. And that was before the full impacts of the hits to occupancy and infections from COVID-19.

Part of it is a squeeze on costs. Community expectations are increasing at the same time as staffing costs are climbing and care needs are becoming more complex.

Residential care is increasingly seen as a last resort, making the profile of residents older and more frail.

Over the past decade the share of residents with a “high care needs” has climbed from 33% to 60%.

Even worse, uncertain profits

Declining profits is one thing. Uncertainty over profits is another. A recurrent theme in the evidence presented to the Commission is that funding is not only insufficient, but also uncertain, which itself is harming care.

As an example, in residential care, food, cleaning, and administrative overheads tend to be higher than the capped basic daily fee that is expected to pay for them.

The government believes that the process used to set care funding is open to over-claiming, allowing providers to make their own assessments of care need.

So on a number of occasions it has frozen the indexation of payments – a blunt tool that might drive productivity improvements but punishes the whole sector.

Read more: Despite more than 30 major inquiries, governments still haven’t fixed aged care. Why are they getting away with it?

The mistrust is compounded by a lack of transparency in the corporate structures employed in the sector as well as financial reporting practices which are blind to the terms, returns, support, or recoverability of loans to related entities.

This makes it difficult to tell what earnings truly look like.

It’s also hard to get a handle on key performance indicator data, such as direct care staffing costs.

What’s needed is an honest broker…

To address the challenges of trust and transparency, the royal commission is expected to recommend the establishment of an independent Aged Care Pricing Authority, tasked with identifying the lowest price for services achievable by those providing excellent care.

It would also estimate the uplift in price for regional and specialist services.

The idea has merit and has been welcomed by both providers and bureaucrats. It has a precedent in the hospital system.

It is likely to expose the need for much more funding.

For example, appropriate staffing of home care and the cutting of home care waiting lists is estimated to cost the equivalent of a 1% increase in taxes.

…and more spending

Australians appear open to the idea. A recent survey found taxpayers were willing to pay an additional 1.4% per year on average to ensure that all Australians in need had access to a satisfactory level of quality aged care, and an additional 3.1% per year if it gave all Australians in need access to a high level of quality aged care.

The royal commission was told that a European-style social insurance scheme could work. It would explicitly link contributions with the right to benefits and would quarantine them from general revenue.

In practice such schemes don’t guarantee sustainable funding and they are out of kilter with the usual Australian approach which is to provide needs-based rather than contributions-based support.

It could come from a Medicare-style levy

A better option would be a dedicated tax similar to the Medicare levy. Its clear social benefit might be acceptable to the electorate and earmarking it for aged care could build the confidence providers will need to invest in its future.

It could differ by age to address intergenerational equity.

The reality is that in a world with fewer younger workers and more retirees with considerable wealth we will need a combination of measures, with extra funding coming from care recipients as well as taxpayers.

Current means testing caps and thresholds require too little from those with greater means and require too much from those with modest means.

Read more: The budget must address aged care — here are 3 key priorities

The regime favours homeowners, couples, and those receiving care at home. Better and simpler means testing could raise more, reduce distortions, and improve fairness.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has suggested collecting contributions from deceased estates.

We already have the mechanism in the form of the Pension Loan Scheme which could be used alongside fairer means testing.

The Commission will formally report by February 26, kicking off what could be the rebuilding of trust in the system.

– ref. At the heart of the broken model for funding aged care is broken trust. Here’s how to fix it – https://theconversation.com/at-the-heart-of-the-broken-model-for-funding-aged-care-is-broken-trust-heres-how-to-fix-it-147101

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

Over the past seven months, many of us have got closer to experiencing the kind of solitude long sought by monks, nuns, philosophers and misanthropes.

For some, this has brought loneliness. Nevertheless, like religions such as Buddhism, the West has a rich literature — both religious and secular — exploring the possible benefits of being alone.

“Take time and see the Lord is good,” Psalm 34 enjoins, in a biblical passage long read as a call to periodically withdraw from worldly occupations. The best form of life will be contemplative, the philosopher Aristotle concurs.

Solitude, according to the Renaissance poet-philosopher Petrarch,

rehabilitates the soul, corrects morals, renews affections, erases blemishes, purges faults, (and) reconciles God and man.

Here are four key benefits of solitude these very different, contemplative authors point to.

1. Freedom to do what you want — any old time

The first boon identified by those who praise solitude is the leisure and liberty it provides.

There is freedom in space. You can (proverbially) get around in your PJs, and who’s to know? There is the release from the needs and demands of others (a liberty many parents may have found themselves longing for recently). And there may be a freedom in time, also. In solitude, we may do, think, imagine and pay easy attention to whatever pleases us.

“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep,” the 16th century French philosopher Montaigne, a connoisseur of the quiet life, mused.

Yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time, for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

2. Reconnecting with yourself

Solitude (unless of course we are working from home) withdraws the external objects, demands and tasks crowding our days. All the energies we have distributed so widely, in different relationships, projects and pursuits can regather themselves, “like a wave rolling from sand and shore back to its ocean source,” as psychologist Oliver Morgan has written.

Advocates of solitude hence stress how, with fewer preoccupations, we can reconnect to aspects of ourselves we usually don’t have time for. This may not always be pleasant. But periodically reassessing who we are, even when it throws up confronting desires, harrowing fears or humbling insights, may be renewing.

This value of solitude as a test explains why, in many cultures, rites of passage involve periods of enforced withdrawal from the wider group. If a person can’t be content in their own company, the odds are they will not be happy around others either, as the Stoic Epictetus observed.

Read more: What would Seneca say? Six Stoic tips for surviving lockdown

3. Finding your ‘inner citadel’

Solitude can enable us to recharge. As Montaigne joked, it allows you to take a step back from ordinary life, the better to leap into it next time. It also enables us to cultivate a valuable inner distance from the pressures, shocks and follies that usually beset us.

“We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health,” Montaigne observed. But also, metaphorically, “We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum …”

The Roman emperor and thinker Marcus Aurelius called such a virtual back room an “inner citadel” to which the wise person could retreat, retiring into his own soul.

Read more: Guide to the Classics: how Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations can help us in a time of pandemic

4. Seeing the bigger picture

In ordinary life, the horizons of our concern are practical and short-range. We are too busy to take stock — fearing and desiring what is coming up today, next week, next month or next year.

Ferried along in this way, years can pass without our noticing.

Solitude gives us the means to recall the bigger picture: our lives are quietly passing by; there are good people who we too often take for granted; we have neglected many things we deeply wanted to do and Nature or God (if we are religious) is far more awe inspiring than we usually credit.

Indeed, many sources suggest it is only through being alone that the highest truths become accessible to the seeker.

As the mystic St John of the Cross reported: “The very pure spirit does not bother about the regard of others or human respect, but communes inwardly with God, alone and in solitude as to all forms, and with delightful tranquillity, for the knowledge of God is received in divine silence”.

It is for these reasons that holy men and women from diverse global traditions have withdrawn into the desert, as Christ did, or onto isolated heights, as did Mohammad in the Quran or Moses in Exodus.

Of course, most of us will not emerge from the pandemic convinced solitaries. It is natural to long for the many goods of human connection.

But one unlikely benefit of 2020 for some harried moderns may be gaining insight into why older cultures valued time alone so highly.

– ref. Why philosophers say solitude can be helpful (even if you didn’t choose it) – https://theconversation.com/why-philosophers-say-solitude-can-be-helpful-even-if-you-didnt-choose-it-147440

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW, and Academic Lead, UNSW Grand Challenge on Trust, UNSW

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for unlawful monopolisation. The department says Google’s conduct harms competition and consumers, and reduces the ability of new innovative companies to develop and compete.

It’s the most important monopolisation case in the US since 1998, when the DoJ brought proceedings against Microsoft.

It’s possible the current proceedings, given their timing, are politically motivated. US President Donald Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly voiced the view that Google is prejudiced against conservative beliefs.

But even if Democratic candidate Joe Biden is elected president, this action against Google is unlikely to go away.

The ramifications for Google, if the court rules against it, could ultimately be dramatic. The DoJ’s associate deputy attorney general, Ryan Shores, has refused to rule out seeking orders to break up the tech giant, saying “nothing is off the table”.

Google’s monopoly power

Google’s economic power is no secret. Regulators around the world, including in the European Union, are investigating the company’s conduct and bringing actions under competition, consumer and privacy laws.

US Attorney General William Barr said the new DoJ action:

[…] strikes at the heart of Google’s grip over the internet for millions of American consumers, advertisers, small businesses and entrepreneurs beholden to an unlawful monopolist.

Specifically, the DoJ claims Google is illegally monopolising the markets for online search and search advertising (the advertising that appears alongside search results).

According to the DoJ, Google’s US market share is roughly:

• 88% in the market for general search services

• 70% in the search advertising market.

However, holding a dominant position isn’t against the law. A company is allowed to enjoy a dominant position or even a complete monopoly, as long as it doesn’t do so by unlawful means.

Read more: The ACCC is suing Google for misleading millions. But calling it out is easier than fixing it

So what has Google allegedly done wrong?

The DoJ’s main complaint is Google has entered into several “exclusionary agreements” that preserve its monopoly power by hindering competition from rivals (and potential rivals). Exclusionary agreements are deals that restrict the ability of at least one party to deal with other players.

The DoJ says Google spends billions of dollars each year on:

• long-term agreements with Apple that require Google to be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser

• exclusivity agreements that forbid pre-installation of competing search services by certain mobile device manufacturers and distributors

• arrangements that force certain mobile device manufacturers and distributors to pre-install Google search applications in prime locations on mobile devices and make them undeletable, regardless of consumer preference

• using monopoly profits to buy preferential treatment for its search engine on devices, web browsers and other search access points.

The DoJ claims these agreements have created a “continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolisation” in the market for online search and search advertising (which relies on Google’s dominance in online search).

Google has responded by describing the court action as “deeply flawed”. In a blog post it said:

[…] people don’t use Google because they have to, they use it because they choose to.

It also said users are free to switch to other search engines.

But even if that’s technically true, Google’s agreements for pre-installation, default settings and preferential treatment give it a substantial advantage over its rivals.

Does any of this matter when Google is ‘free’?

Google provides services that are hugely valued the world over — and with no direct financial cost to the user. That said, “free” services can still cause harm.

According to the DoJ, by restricting competition Google has harmed search users, in part “by reducing the quality of search (including on dimensions such as privacy, data protection, and use of consumer data)”. This is an important recognition that price is not all that matters.

The logic behind this claim is that other search engines with better track records on privacy, such as DuckDuckGo, might otherwise be more successful than they are.

Or, to frame that another way, Google might actually have to compete vigorously on privacy, instead of allegedly imposing privacy-degrading terms on its users.

What might happen if the action succeeds?

If Google is found to have contravened the prohibition against monopolisation under the US Sherman Act, it could face substantial fines and damages claims.

But perhaps more concerning for Google would be the prospect of the DoJ seeking to break up Google’s various businesses.

Google owns a range of highly successful services, including Google search, Google Chrome, the Android operating system, and numerous ad tech (“advertising technology”) services. Google’s position and access to data in one business arguably give it advantages in its other businesses.

Eleven Republican attorneys general from various US states have joined the proceedings and could individually seek remedies.

The action won’t be having a major impact any time soon, though. Google’s lawyers estimate the case would only come before the US District Court for the District of Columbia in a year.

Could our competition watchdog be taking notes?

Google could contravene Australia’s misuse of market power law under the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, if it has engaged in conduct of the kind alleged by the DoJ that has an effect on Australian markets.

As part of its 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said Google has substantial market power in the general search and search advertising markets in Australia. It has a market share of about 95% in both cases.

If this is true, it would be unlawful for Google to engage in any conduct that substantially lessens competition in a market (or has the purpose or likely effect of doing so). This could include entering exclusionary agreements that affect Australian markets.

So far, the ACCC has twice brought proceedings against Google, alleging it misled users about how it collects and uses their data. It is also investigating the conduct of Google and Facebook, in particular, in digital advertising markets as part of its ad tech inquiry.

While Australia’s consumer watchdog might wait and see how proceedings against Google fare in the US and the EU, the recent DoJ action could encourage the ACCC in any action it might be contemplating under Australian law on misuse of market power.

Read more: Every step you take: why Google’s plan to buy Fitbit has the ACCC’s pulse racing

– ref. The US is taking on Google in a huge antitrust case. It could change the face of online search – https://theconversation.com/the-us-is-taking-on-google-in-a-huge-antitrust-case-it-could-change-the-face-of-online-search-148519

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Sullivan, Associate Professor of Education, University of South Australia

The disability royal commission heard from experts last week on the disproportionate number of students with a disability who have been suspended or expelled from school for “problem behaviour”.

The commission’s public hearings come at the same time the NSW education department is receiving submissions on a new behaviour management strategy. This plan, among other things, would see the maximum number of days students can be suspended for cut from 20 to ten.

The strategy was designed after inquiries showed too many suspensions being given to students who have a disability, are Indigenous, experience socioeconomic disadvantage, are in out-of-home care, and live in remote and regional areas.

In 2019, more than 113,000 students across Australia were removed from government schools, either for a set period or permanently — representing 4.3% of all government school enrolments. This figure is based on the limited data released by state and territory education departments. The true number is likely higher.

So, what are the rules around suspensions and expulsions in NSW, and the rest of Australia? And what needs to be done to reduce discrimination?

Different rules for different states

Schools use suspensions and expulsions to help change unproductive student behaviours, and allow time for other strategies to be implemented, to help avoid repeat situations.

Each state and territory has its own legislation (except NSW, which has a policy) that defines and guides the use of expulsions and suspensions.

The length of time students can be suspended for varies between states. For instance, a student in Queensland (and NSW under current legislation) can be suspended for up to 20 days. But in WA, the maximum is ten, and the school needs approval from the education department if it wants to extend it.

Suspensions in Victoria can generally be given for up to five days, but this can be extended to 15 with education department approval.

Each state also provides different grounds on which schools can suspend or expel students. In Queensland and Tasmania, a student can be suspended for disobedience or misbehaviour. Whereas in Victoria, a student has to “consistently behave in an unproductive manner that interferes with the well-being, safety or educational opportunities of any other student”.

Read more: Why suspending or expelling students often does more harm than good

In South Australia, a student can be expelled for similar behaviour to Victoria — for “persistently interfering with the ability of a teacher to instruct students or of a student to benefit from that instruction”. But an SA student can also be suspended for “persistent and wilful inattention or indifference to school work”.

Under the proposed changes in NSW, a school can only expel a student in kindergarten (the first year of school) to Year 2 for serious violence or possession of a weapon. And the maximums days a student in these year levels can be suspended would be reduced from 20 to five.

For students in Years 3 to 12, the maximum days for suspensions would be reduced from 20 to ten.

Problems with suspending or expelling kids

Children with disability aren’t the only group excluded from school more than others. Data from South Australia and Victoria show male students accounted for three-quarters of all suspensions and expulsions in 2019.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students also receive disproportionately more suspensions and expulsions than non-Indigenous students. In Queensland, Indigenous students accounted for 10% of all state school enrolments in 2019, but they made up 25% of all suspensions. And 25% of all students expelled in the state were Indigenous, too.

Research consistently shows removing children from school is not the best way to manage behaviour. It fails to address the underlying cause, and can often exacerbate the problem. An analysis of several studies conducted mainly in the US found suspensions are associated with poor academic achievement and dropout.

Removing students from school for indifference or inattention is unlikely to promote greater engagement. Research indicates suspensions exacerbate disengagement.

Within 12 months of being suspended from schools, students are 50% more likely to engage in anti-social behaviour and 70% more likely to engage in violent behaviour. In the US, many students who have been suspended or excluded from school end up in the juvenile justice system.

What needs to be done

Suspending or expelling a student should be considered a last resort. In determining whether to remove a student, principals should first investigate whether other issues could be impacting their behaviour.

They should also prepare a plan to support students and minimise repeat behaviours. This could include supporting the teacher, teaching the student social skills, providing them with literacy support and offering counselling.

The NSW proposal does encourage principals to first consider alternative strategies such as preparing a prevention and intervention plan, professional learning for staff and conflict resolution. But the proposal has gaps in other areas.

Children and their parents/guardians have a right to procedural fairness which means giving them opportunity to be heard before a decision is made and ensuring the decision-maker is impartial. The NSW proposal doesn’t include this.

Victoria’s legislation has the most comprehensive expectations for procedural fairness which include the opportunity to be heard and considering other forms of action that could address the behaviour for which the student is being suspended.

Read more: Excluded and refused enrolment: report shows illegal practices against students with disabilities in Australian schools

Most states also include an appeal process (through the school or education department) for expulsions. Queensland and the ACT have an appeal process for suspensions. But the NSW proposal does not include an appeal process for suspensions or expulsions.

Schools should develop a plan that outlines educational support during the students’ absence, so they can continue their education. In the case of expulsion, a principal must take reasonable steps to arrange for access to an educational program that allows the student to continue their education.

The NSW plan includes this expectation. Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria, ACT and Tasmania have similar requirements.

And finally, a school should outline how it will support a successful transition back for a suspended student. This could include reintegration meetings with parents, children and other service agencies, and a phased re-introduction into the school.

The NSW proposal commits to improved guidance on reintegration, but few details are given on how it would go about doing this. It is important schools develop such a plan in consultation with the student and their parents.

– ref. NSW wants to change rules on suspending and expelling students. How does it compare to other states? – https://theconversation.com/nsw-wants-to-change-rules-on-suspending-and-expelling-students-how-does-it-compare-to-other-states-144676

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graham Meadows, Professor of Adult Psychiatry, Monash University

COVID-19 outbreaks and the resulting lockdowns, particularly in Victoria, have adversely affected many people’s mental health.

Social isolation, financial stress, and anxiety about contracting COVID-19 can all contribute to psychological distress. For some people, these experiences may trigger mental disorders, such as depression.

People in lower socioeconomic groups are likely to be in particular need of mental health support in the face of the pandemic.

While federal and state governments have rightly boosted mental health services, we need to ensure these services reach those who need them most.

‘Better Access’ doesn’t guarantee access for all

The “Better Access” scheme entitles people to Medicare-subsidised sessions with a psychologist, occupational therapist or social worker, including via telehealth.

Recognising the mental health consequences of the pandemic, the federal government has increased the number of psychological therapy sessions subsidised under Better Access from ten to 20 sessions per year.

Well before COVID-19, we knew socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with poorer mental health. Our earlier research has shown very high psychological distress is much more common in the most disadvantaged fifth of Australian areas than in the most affluent fifth.

But for reasons including out-of-pocket costs and service locations, we’ve found people in poorer areas receive fewer Better Access treatments.

In Victoria, as in other parts of the world, COVID-19 has taken a higher toll on people in disadvantaged areas.

Not only have poorer areas suffered disproportionate numbers of COVID-19 infections, but they also seem to be enduring greater associated social and economic hardships such as job losses.

And if people in these areas need extra mental health support, they may find they’re under-served by the existing system.

Read more: When it’s easier to get meds than therapy: how poverty makes it hard to escape mental illness

Three concerns

The expansion of Better Access may in fact deepen the inequity around access to these services.

1. Access to providers

The supply of therapists has not suddenly increased, so neither has the availability of treatment sessions. The increased number of allowable sessions will largely benefit people who already have access to treatment — and who are less likely to come from disadvantaged areas.

With scarce provider time, this potentially means fewer available sessions for those in disadvantaged areas.

2. Gap fees

Telehealth items continue to allow uncapped co-payments (gap fees). Whatever principled commitments practitioners may have to bulk billing, it makes financial sense to want to attract clients who can afford to pay.

So there may be better access for people with greater financial resources.

Read more: Budget funding for Beyond Blue and Headspace is welcome. But it may not help those who need it most

3. A digital divide

Telehealth items, including video mental health consultations, may be less accessible in disadvantaged areas because of poorer access to technology, including reliable internet connections.

Those in disadvantaged areas may also be living in overcrowded conditions, and therefore have less privacy to use telehealth.

Where is the need greatest?

The Index of Relative Socioeconomic Disadvantage (IRSD) summarises a range of information about the economic and social conditions of people and households in Australia.

It can help planners direct resources to more disadvantaged areas — which, as we’ve shown, is particularly important for mental health services.

Our new paper offers a model for policy-makers to apply what we know about the IRSD and poorer mental health to planning and monitoring mental health services.

We created a spreadsheet using area IRSD scores to estimate mental health resource needs for different areas.

In Melbourne, for example, we estimated more disadvantaged parts of the western suburbs have a need around 2.5 times greater than parts of the eastern suburbs.

We used Victoria as an example, but this model could easily be adapted for use elsewhere.

How can we make services in Australia more equitable?

We hope our research will complement other Australian tools so the influence of disadvantage on mental health-care needs can be more consistently and transparently taken into account when designing mental health services.

State-based mental health services are often funded by areas, such as those for adults with serious mental illnesses in Victoria. So getting the funds to where they’re most needed is possible for state and territory governments.

But with services such as Better Access, which are funded by Medicare item rather than by geographic area, we will need new ways to ensure they’re distributed equitably.

A thought experiment

The government could encourage a practitioner using telehealth to ensure 40% of these services get to people living in areas in the lowest 40% according to the IRSD.

The government could also implement an overall bulk-billing target of, say, 50%. Disincentives could follow if the provider falls short of these targets.

For example, a provider would receive commonwealth funding for all services provided if they achieved the 50% target. If not, they would receive funding for all bulk-billed consultations, plus the same number of co-payment services.

So, if a provider only bulk bills 40% of their clients, 80% of their services would receive funding. Similar mechanisms may operate for IRSD targets.

Such a move would likely face opposition, including from practitioners who might find it difficult to change their referral and charging practices. For some, at least initially, their income would suffer. So it could be challenging to introduce.

Read more: Social housing, aged care and Black Americans: how coronavirus affects already disadvantaged groups

This is just a draft proposal and the details, including specific targets, could be refined in discussion with professional bodies. The model in our paper could be used to assess if changes succeed in improving equity.

But something like this could see people with the greatest mental health needs, particularly those in the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, better able to access services.

– ref. Greater needs, but poorer access to services: why COVID mental health measures must target disadvantaged areas – https://theconversation.com/greater-needs-but-poorer-access-to-services-why-covid-mental-health-measures-must-target-disadvantaged-areas-146306

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liam Elphick, Adjunct Research Fellow, Law School, University of Western Australia

It has long been a glaring problem that the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act (ADA) does not prohibit religious discrimination.

One Nation’s Mark Latham recently proposed a new Religious Discrimination Bill. One key part of the bill is to fill that gap: to prohibit religious discrimination.

This is a welcome and long-overdue development in NSW.

No-one should be refused employment or access to goods and services because of their religious beliefs. The ADA should provide protection for religion as it does for race, sex and disability.

Public parliamentary committee hearings on the bill, which start this week, will undoubtedly reaffirm the importance of prohibiting religious discrimination.

However, the bill goes far beyond this.

It privileges and prioritises religion over all other views, practices and attributes.

It provides wide exceptions to religious bodies to permit them to discriminate and to refuse to comply with some existing NSW laws.

And it renders it near impossible for employers to enforce codes of conduct and promote safety and equality in their workforces.

These issues undermine the bill’s ability to effectively prohibit religious discrimination, and unduly infringe on other laws and rights.

How is religious discrimination defined?

The bill adds two new protected attributes to the ADA, making it unlawful to discriminate because of one’s “religious belief” or “religious activity”.

Unlike the simpler definitions provided in other state laws, religious belief has been given an unnecessarily complex definition.

“Religious belief” is defined as either:

a) having a religious conviction, belief, opinion or affiliation, or

b) not having any religious conviction, belief, opinion or affiliation.

This definition is entirely subjective: each person can effectively decide what their religious beliefs are. The explanatory notes to the bill say this is intended “as a means to avoid courts determining matters of religious doctrine”.

But as two High Court justices remarked in the famous 1983 case of Church of the New Faith:

The mantle of immunity would soon be in tatters if it were wrapped around beliefs, practices and observances of every kind whenever a group of adherents chose to call them a religion.

This definition also likely excludes agnostics from protection: by definition, they do not have a specific religious conviction and also cannot be said to have no religious conviction.

“Religious activity” is defined as an “activity motivated by religious belief”. This wide definition would capture a vast array of actions, even where the link to religious doctrine is only tenuous.

The only limitation is that it excludes “offences punishable by imprisonment”. This means some unlawful acts can still be protected.

Employers, goods and service providers and accommodation providers would not be able to treat someone differently based on them breaking the law. Schools would be unable to sanction students for engaging in religiously motivated bullying or harassment.

The biggest challenge will be for employers to determine if an activity is indeed motivated by religious belief.

If an employee (Person A) makes a complaint of harassment against another employee (Person B) and that harassment is based on a religious view of, say, gender or sexuality, employers would be placed in an impossible position.

They would either need to investigate and sanction Person B and risk them bringing a religious discrimination claim against them, or they would need to reject the complaint and risk Person A bringing a harassment claim against them.

Employers will be forced to act unlawfully, no matter what they do.

Other states, such as Victoria, have avoided this conflict by protecting only “lawful” religious activities.

The NSW bill also does not prohibit religious vilification, despite this being a widespread problem for Muslim and other faith groups.

How does the bill apply to religious conduct?

The bill applies to religious conduct in three key ways, each of which goes far beyond equivalent discrimination laws in Australia.

First, employers are barred from restricting or limiting their employees from engaging in “protected activity”.

A “protected activity” means a religious activity performed by the employee when they are not working and not at their workplace. This includes religious views expressed on social media, in a clear nod to the Israel Folau saga.

Read more: Explainer: does Rugby Australia have legal grounds to sack Israel Folau for anti-gay social media posts?

Let’s assume an employee expresses religious views or comments on social media – hypothetically, that “hell awaits homosexuals” – that breach an employment code of conduct. Under this bill, the employee cannot be punished for this.

They can actually sue their employer for any such punishment, unless the comment directly criticises the employer, attacks the employer and causes financial detriment to the employer. The bill, though, provides that withdrawal of sponsorship or of financial support does not count as “financial detriment” – so it seems an impossibly high threshold for any employer to meet.

As a result, these provisions would significantly curtail the ability of employers to protect their brand and reputation, enforce codes of conduct and promote the safety and equality of their workforce. Employers would need to uncover the motivation behind an employee’s comments or actions before they could even attempt to enforce codes of conduct.

Because this protection is only afforded to views and activities that have a religious basis, employers would be forced to treat employees of faith differently from other employees. An atheist employee could make the same comment – that “hell awaits homosexuals” – and their employer would be free to sanction them.

These “protected activity” provisions also extend to qualifying bodies, universities and schools.

This means a school would be unable to sanction a student for bullying another student after school, so long as their bullying is religiously motivated.

Second, the bill makes it unlawful to require any religious body, when performing functions under NSW laws, to engage in conduct in a manner contrary to their religious doctrines. There appears to be no equivalent provision in any other Australian discrimination laws.

The breadth of this provision may mean that, for instance, religious bodies could challenge and avoid criminal laws imposing duties to report child abuse and neglect to authorities. This could be on the basis that a particular religious body’s doctrines oppose unsealing the confessional.

Local governments might also be unable to impose noise restrictions on religious ceremonies. The NSW government might even be unable to impose COVID-19 public health restrictions on religious ceremonies.

Third, religious bodies are granted wide exceptions from the operation of the entire bill. These allow religious bodies to discriminate against people of other religious beliefs.

Religious bodies are defined widely to include all schools and charities conducted in accordance with religious beliefs.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison will go into 2020 with a challenging cluster of policy loose ends

In some instances, this is entirely appropriate. For example, an Anglican school is likely to want its religious education teachers to be of the same faith – and this seems fair.

But this bill goes much further. The exception covers any conduct that “furthers or aids” the religious body in acting in accordance with their religious beliefs. This is an easier test to satisfy than in any other Australian discrimination laws.

Imagine, for example, a student joins an Islamic school in Year 7 and at the time shares the same religious beliefs. Halfway through Year 12, that student may decide they do not identify strongly with those beliefs anymore.

This bill would allow the school to expel that student on the basis that they do not share the same religious beliefs as the school.

Similarly, a Catholic soup kitchen could refuse to serve food to Jewish people, or require them to participate in Catholic practices to receive food.

Allowing organisations primarily engaged in charity, health or education to be granted a carte blanche to discriminate is a step too far. Indeed, this frustrates and undermines the fundamental purpose of the bill: to prohibit religious discrimination.

What’s the best path forward?

The ADA is an outdated piece of legislation. It often provides ineffectual protection from discrimination.

While NSW has stood still, other states and territories have reformed their discrimination laws. These provide much stronger protection for all individuals.

As we argued in our joint submission on this bill, a wider, expert review of the ADA is the best way to effectively prohibit religious discrimination. This bill will only be a stop-gap measure.

As its own committee inquiry recently recommended, the NSW parliament should “undertake a thorough review of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 with the aim of updating and modernising the Act”. This would provide better protection for all people in NSW, not just those of faith.

It is tempting to approach reform to discrimination law as a “patch-up” job. But such an approach only enshrines and exacerbates the flawed NSW regime.

– ref. NSW needs to prohibit religious discrimination, but not like this – https://theconversation.com/nsw-needs-to-prohibit-religious-discrimination-but-not-like-this-148007

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alana Piper, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

The Black Lives Matters movement in the United States and Australia has drawn welcome attention to Black deaths in the criminal justice system. Such fatalities are extreme manifestations of a long history of excessive punishment of Black bodies: from the use of neck chains on Indigenous Australian prisoners into the 1940s to their over-incarceration for minor offences today.

One historical case that demonstrates this in Australia is that of William King, an African-American sailor who arrived in Melbourne in 1887. Little is known about King’s life before this but the following year he was convicted for burglary and sentenced to 18 months’ hard labour. Thus began a cycle in and out of prison.

Read more: Captain Cook wanted to introduce British justice to Indigenous people. Instead, he became increasingly cruel and violent

King’s second conviction in 1889 — on four charges of receiving stolen goods — earned him nine years’ imprisonment. This sentence was unusually steep. Data on prosecutions for this crime in Victoria during the 1880s show the vast bulk of offenders were sentenced to less than two years in prison, even when facing multiple charges.

Even more remarkable is the wide range of additional punishments King was subjected to in prison.

‘Insolence’

Prison records show during his time in Pentridge, King was punished for 53 infractions of prison discipline, far more than any other prisoner at the time. These infractions, mostly consisting of “insolence” or “disobedience of orders”, were punished by stints of solitary confinement, months spent wearing heavy, iron chains and an extension of his original sentence.

King was a problematic individual. But the colour of his skin probably engendered hostility from the guards or increased their perception he was a dangerous offender in need of rigid control. King later said he believed his race had made him a target.

Public attention was drawn to King’s treatment in 1898 when an anonymous informant — most likely a former inmate — alerted socialist newspaper The Tocsin to his plight.

In a lengthy exposé, the paper alleged prison guards not only deliberately targeted King by imposing groundless punishments on him, but even ganged up to give him beatings at night. King had spent more than 100 days in solitary confinement in the previous year alone.

Continued media attention may have prompted the decision to release King by “special authority” in 1900.

Just six weeks later he was convicted on two counts of burglary. At his trial, King said he would “rather be hanged” than return to prison. He alleged continual police persecution following his release, and said he was merely a convenient suspect for the crimes.

While King’s assertions of innocence must be read with a grain of salt, officials at the time were undoubtedly influenced by pervading racist rhetoric that associated Black men with increased criminality and violence.

Read more: Why the Black Lives Matter protests must continue: an urgent appeal by Marcia Langton

‘Big, burly, repulsive’

One of the detectives who worked the 1900 case, David George O’Donnell, tellingly recalled King in his later reminiscences as “a big, burly, repulsive looking American nigger … absolutely dangerous to life and limb”.

King’s return to prison was marked by further infractions and solitary confinement. In 1908, he was released for only a month before again being convicted of burglary. Declared a habitual criminal under the 1907 Indeterminate Sentences Act, King was remanded to prison indefinitely.

In 1909, King was convicted of stabbing prison guard William Sharp in the cheek with a knife. King claimed Sharp had brought the knife into his cell, and had been stabbed as King tried to get it away from him. As a result, King spent even more time in solitary confinement.

Later that year, Pentridge’s medical officer expressed concerns about the toll lengthy solitary stays were having on King’s mental and physical health after he lost ten pounds (4.5 kilograms) in just one week.

Read more: From molten lava to cobbled laneways: how bluestone shaped Melbourne’s identity

The use of solitary confinement against King was halted for several months — until he stabbed another warder. King’s defence was that he had been held down and beaten by five warders until he had managed to draw out a knife to defend himself.

King’s final trial occurred in 1911, this time for attempted murder of a guard. While admitting the offence, King again claimed to have been defending himself after repeated, racially-motivated violence from both guards and fellow prisoners.

‘Treated like a wild beast’

He claimed to have been treated “not like an ordinary prisoner, but more like a wild beast”. The jury appears to have been sympathetic, returning a verdict of not guilty.

King remained incarcerated until 1916, when the government ordered his release on the condition he be immediately deported to the US. Police escorted King on board the ship Puacko, bound for San Francisco.

According to Detective O’Donnell’s memoir, the vessel’s Captain told King if they had any trouble from him during the voyage, a quick burial at sea would mean there would be no coroner’s inquest.

King was indeed buried at sea during the voyage. His cause of death was recorded as a stomach complaint.

– ref. The tale of ‘habitual criminal’ William King: a Black life in Victoria’s white justice system – https://theconversation.com/the-tale-of-habitual-criminal-william-king-a-black-life-in-victorias-white-justice-system-147274

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona R Martin, Associate Professor in Convergent and Online Media, University of Sydney

If Facebook prevented Australian news from being shared on its platform, could the ABC start its own social media service to compensate? While this proposal from the Australia Institute is a worthy one, it’s an impossible ask in the current political climate.

The suggestion is one pillar of the think tank’s new Tech-xit report.

The report canvasses what the Australian government should do if Facebook and Google withdraw their news-related services from Australia, in reaction to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s draft news media bargaining code.

Tech-xit rightly notes the ABC is capable of building social media that doesn’t harvest Australians’ personal data. However, it overlooks the costs and challenges of running a social media service — factors raised in debate over the new code.

Platforms react (badly) to the code

The ACCC’s code is a result of years of research into the effects of platform power on Australian media.

It requires Facebook and Google to negotiate with Australian news businesses about licensing payments for hosting news excerpts, providing access to news user data and information on pending news feed algorithm changes.

Predictably, the tech companies are not happy. They argue they make far less from news than the ACCC estimates, have greater costs and return more benefit to the media.

If the code becomes law, Facebook has threatened to stop Australian users from sharing local or international news. Google notified Australians its free services would become “at risk”, although it later said it would negotiate if the draft law was changed in its favour.

Facebook’s withdrawal, which the Tech-xit report sees as being likely if the law passes, would reduce Australians’ capacity to share vital news about their communities, activities and businesses.

Read more: If Facebook really pulls news from its Australian sites, we’ll have a much less compelling product

ABC to the rescue?

Cue the ABC then, says Jordan Guiao, the report’s author. Guiao is the former head of social media for both the ABC and SBS, and now works at the institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.

He argues that, if given the funding, ABC Online could reinvent itself to become a “national social platform connecting everyday Australians”. He says all the service would have to do is add

distinct user profiles, user publishing and content features, group connection features, chat, commenting and interactive discussion capabilities.

As a trusted information source, he proposes the ABC could enable “genuine exchange and influence on decision making” and “provide real value to local communities starved of civic engagement”.

Financial reality check

It’s a bold move to suggest the ABC could start yet another major network when it has just had to cut A$84 million from its budget and lose more than 200 staff.

The institute’s idea is very likely an effort to persuade the Morrison government it should redirect some of that funding back to Aunty, which has a history of digital innovation with ABC Online, iView, Q&A and the like.

However, the government has repeatedly denied it has cut funding to the national broadcaster. It hasn’t provided catch-up emergency broadcasting funds since the ABC covered our worst ever fire season. This doesn’t bode well for a change of mind on future allocations.

The government also excluded the ABC and SBS as beneficiaries of the news media bargaining code negotiations.

The ABC doesn’t even have access to start-up venture capital the way most social media companies do. According to Crunchbase, Twitter and Reddit — the two most popular news-sharing platforms after Facebook — have raised roughly US$1.5 billion and US$550 million respectively in investment rounds, allowing them to constantly innovate in service delivery.

Operational challenges

In contrast, over the past decade, ABC Online has had to reduce many of the “social” services it once offered. This is largely due to the cost of moderating online communities and managing user participation.

First news comments sections were canned, and online communities such as the Four Corners forums and The Drum website were closed.

Last year, the ABC’s flagship site for regional and rural user-created stories, ABC Open, was also shut down.

Even if the government were to inject millions into an “ABC Social”, it’s unlikely the ABC could deal with the problems of finding and removing illegal content at scale.

It’s an issue that still defeats social media platforms and the ABC does not have machine learning expertise or funds for an army of outsourced moderators.

The move would also expose the ABC to accusations it was crowding out private innovation in the platform space.

A future without Facebook

It’s unclear whether Facebook will go ahead with its threat of preventing Australian users from sharing news on its platform, given the difficulties with working out exactly who an Australian user is.

For instance, the Australian public includes dual citizens, temporary residents, international students and business people, and expatriates.

If it does, why burden the ABC with the duty to recreate social media? Facebook’s withdrawal could be a boon for Twitter, Reddit and whatever may come next.

In the meantime, if we restored the ABC’s funding, it could develop more inventive ways to share local news online that can’t be threatened by Facebook and Google.

Read more: Latest $84 million cuts rip the heart out of the ABC, and our democracy

– ref. Calls for an ABC-run social network to replace Facebook and Google are misguided. With what money? – https://theconversation.com/calls-for-an-abc-run-social-network-to-replace-facebook-and-google-are-misguided-with-what-money-148338