Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Beth Webster, Director, Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology

Karen Andrews will continue as Australia’s Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, sworn in today with other cabinet members in Scott Morrison’s refreshed Coalition government.

As one of the shepherds of the Australian innovation system, Andrews finds herself between a rock and a hard place.

Read more: Infographic: who’s who in the new Morrison ministry

The “rock” is the consistent evidence that successful, developed country economies – such as the US, Germany and the UK – all commit large amounts of public funds to the development of business capabilities. These countries have large programs to translate and commercialise research and diffuse new methods of production from leading to lagging businesses.

The “hard place” is the Australian reality that businesses do not always voice strong support for public strategies to improve their long-term performance. Instead, on the whole they tend to preference tax cuts – although some prefer programs to build capabilities.

It is against this context that, under a Coalition government, our public innovation policy bodies have to walk a tight rope. They must be seen to be doing something effective, but with minimal budget and some semblance of a traditional pro-business stance.

National Innovation and Science Agenda

The overarching need for innovation is clear. Innovation means change – for the better – and without these changes we will not experience improvement in productivity and a rise in standard of living.

With that in mind, in December 2015 the Coalition government established the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA).

NISA is coming to the end of its natural life span and it’s worth reflecting on how well its recommendations have been travelling.

A key part of the agenda was the establishment of a strategic advice body, Innovation and Science Australia. As anyone involved in producing independent policy documents will attest, recommendations are usually vetted, at some level, by the relevant Ministers’ offices. Nothing too pointed gets said if the Ministers will not back it.

From the recommendations of this body came a policy document Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation, which contains a mixture of general aspirations – such as “business productivity in all sectors can be facilitated by healthy levels of competition” – and concrete suggestions.

Keeping teachers and kids in STEM

The first set of concrete recommendations aimed to reverse declines in both the quality of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) school teachers and the low enrolment of pupils in STEM subjects.

This policy is tricky for the Commonwealth government to enact, as school education is in the jurisdiction of the states and territories. Nonetheless, the Commonwealth has all the money and it can do much to address both these issues.

The 2030 Strategy recommends raising entry grades and prerequisites for teacher training, and increasing ongoing teacher professional development.

The difficulty here is that we already know it is the low pay of teachers, compared with alternative careers, that causes STEM teacher shortages. So raising entry requirements and requiring more in-service training is likely to have no impact on teacher quality, and may reduce STEM teacher quantity.

Australia should look to Finland if it wants to see how it’s done. Primary and secondary school teacher salaries are some of the highest among OECD countries and student outcomes are about the strongest.

Research and development focus

Strategy 2030 is quite sceptical about the ability of research and development (R&D) tax credit schemes to encourage business to do more R&D.

Many international empirical studies have looked at this question. The most recent of these are more positive about the effect of R&D subsidies than the strategy document.

For example, a comprehensive Australian study estimates that A$1 of subsidy will lead to about A$1.90 R&D (so a net increment of 90c).

Nonetheless, the 2030 Strategy recommended capping the subsidy (which the government did) and targeting the subsidy at mission-oriented, impact-focused programs and collaborations (which the government did not do). It’s too early to analyse the effects of this policy change.

Read more: It’s the only way to save Australia from a deep hole, but innovation policy is missing in action

Missions and direct research programs

The 2030 Strategy also recommended the government adopt a missions approach to public innovation strategy. To date, two missions have been established: genomics and precision medicine , and the Great Barrier Reef.

These missions need to be complemented with an evaluation process – which appears to be underway, although it is too early for results.

To complement the capping of the R&D subsidy, Strategy 2030 recommended increasing the funding for direct programs such as Cooperative Research Centres (CRC), the Entrepreneurs’ Programme and Industry Growth Centres.

The 2019 budget indicated a 10% rise in CRC funding for 2019-20 but a decline in real terms for the subsequent three years.

However, there was no increase in the Entrepreneurs’ Programme or Growth Centres. Nor does there appear to be any evaluation process for these programs to assess whether they represent value for the Australian tax payer. We don’t know if these should be scaled up or scrapped.

Working with the rest of the world

A key to transforming any economy is engaging with global value chains. These allow specialist producers of R&D, design, parts and components to achieve economies of scale – even if they are located in a small local market such as Australia.

The 2030 Strategy report notes there is evidence that export market development grants and trade missions increase business exports (compared with exports in the absence of these programs). It recommends increasing funding for these programs – which the Government did for the export market scheme in April 2019, with a A$60 million boost. But there has been no announcement for Austrade’s trade mission or tailored services programs.

Following a productivity commission review in 2017, Strategy 2030 also recommended exploiting the latent value present in government data through registrations and regulations.

Opening these data to the public may create financial value for companies and better service for governments. The strategy recommended the creation of a new national data custodian and a National Data Commission is currently being established.

We need to be more ambitious

If we’re giving our country a mark on innovation, Australia’s score is not a ten, but neither is it zero. Genuine attempts have been made to implement many of the concrete recommendations from the 2030 Strategy.

Really though, it’s most pertinent to look at what’s missing from our current government’s approach.

The overall level of funding for innovation system programs in Australia still remains low. Most programs are so small they essentially constitute pilots.

The implementation of some of the big ideas – such as using government procurement to de-risk innovation – have been left untraceable. Though looking closely at procurement and NISA in general does appear to be on Andrew’s agenda in the coming weeks.

The government has not announced any clear intentions to evaluate current programs to assess (and publish) whether they return value for the Australian public.

It is time for Australia to become more ambitious. As the world transforms away from thermal coal to renewable sources of energy, we may be in for the biggest terms of trade shock in a long time. We need to start transforming our economy and now is not the time to be timid.

– ref. Enough with the pilot programs: we need to kickstart innovation in Australia – http://theconversation.com/enough-with-the-pilot-programs-we-need-to-kickstart-innovation-in-australia-117826

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Webb, Clinical Lecturer and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney

The Queensland city of Rockhampton was free of dengue for decades. Now, a case of one of the most serious mosquito-borne diseases has authorities scratching their heads.

Over the past decade, dengue infections have tended to be isolated events in which international travellers have returned home with the disease. But the recent case seems to have been locally acquired, raising concerns that there could be more infected mosquitoes in the central Queensland town, or that other people may have been exposed to the bites of an infected mosquito.

What is dengue fever?

The illness known as dengue fever typically includes symptoms such as rash, fever, headache, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain. Symptoms can last for around a week or so. Four types of dengue virus cause the illness and they are spread by mosquito bites.

Once infected, people become immune to that specific dengue virus. However, they can still get sick from the other dengue viruses. Being infected by multiple dengue viruses can increase the risk of more severe symptoms, and even death.

Hundreds of millions of people are infected each year. It is estimated that 40% of the world’s population is at risk given the regions where the virus, and the mosquitoes that spread it, are active. This includes parts of Australia.

Read more: Explainer: what are antibodies and why are viruses like dengue worse the second time?

The last significant outbreak in Australia occurred in far north Queensland in 2009, when more than 900 people were infected by local mosquitoes.

Only a handful of locally acquired cases have been reported around Cairns and Townsville in the past decade. All these cases have two things in common: the arrival of infected travellers and the presence of the “right” mosquitoes.

The dengue virus isn’t spread from person to person. A mosquito needs to bite an infected person, become infected, and then it may transmit the virus to a second person as they bite. If more people are infected, more mosquitoes can pick up the virus as they bite and, subsequently, the outbreak can spread further.

Why are mosquitoes important?

Australia has hundreds of different types of mosquitoes. Dozens can spread local pathogens, such as Ross River virus, but just one is capable of spreading exotic viruses such as dengue and Zika: Aedes aegypti.

Aedes aegypti breeds in water-holding containers around the home. It is one of the most invasive mosquitoes globally and is easily moved about by people through international travel. While these days the mosquito stows away in planes, historically it was just as readily moved about in water-filled barrels on sailing ships.

The spread of Aedes aegypti through Australia is the driving force in determining the nation’s future outbreak risk.

The mosquito was once widespread in coastal Australia but since the 1950s, it become limited to central and far north Queensland. We don’t really know why – there are many possible reasons for the retreat, but the important thing now is they don’t return to temperate regions of the country.

Authorities must be vigilant to monitor their spread and, where they’re currently found, building capacity to respond should cases of dengue be identified.

Read more: Is climate change to blame for outbreaks of mosquito-borne disease?

What happened in Rockhampton?

Last week, for the first time in decades, a locally acquired case of dengue was detected in Rockhampton, in central Queensland. The disease was found in someone who hasn’t travelled outside the region, which suggests they’ve been bitten locally by an infected mosquito.

This has prompted a full outbreak response to protect the community from any additional infected mosquitoes.

While the risk of dengue around central Queensland is considered lower than around Cairns or Townsville, authorities are well prepared to respond, with a variety of techniques including house-to-house mosquito surveillance and mosquito control to minimise the spread.

These approaches have been successful around Cairns and Townsville for many years and have helped avoid substantial outbreaks.

The coordinated response of local authorities, combined with the onset of cooler weather that will slow down mosquitoes, greatly reduces any risk of more cases occurring.

What can we do about dengue in the future?

Outbreaks of dengue remain a risk in areas with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. There are also other mosquitoes, such as Aedes albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito), that aren’t currently found on mainland Australia but may further increase risks should they arrive. Authorities need to be prepared to respond to the introductions of these mosquitoes.

Read more: How we kept disease-spreading Asian Tiger mozzies away from the Australian mainland

While a changing climate may play a role in increasing the risk, increasing international travel, which represents pathways of introduction of “dengue mosquitoes” into new regions of Australia, may be of greater concern.

There is more that can be done, both locally and internationally. Researchers are working to develop a vaccine that protects against all four strains of dengue virus.

Others are tackling the mosquitoes themselves. Australian scientists have played a crucial role in using the Wolbachia bacteria, which spreads among Aedes aegypti and blocks transmission of dengue, to control the disease.

The objective is to raise the prevalence of the Wolbachia infections among local mosquitoes to a level that greatly reduces the likelihood of local dengue transmission.

Field studies have been successful in far north Queensland and may explain why so few local cases of dengue have been reported in recent years.

While future strategies may rely on emerging technologies and vaccines, simple measures such as minimising water-filled containers around our homes will reduce the number of mosquitoes and their potential to transmit disease.

– ref. After decades away, dengue returns to central Queensland – http://theconversation.com/after-decades-away-dengue-returns-to-central-queensland-117821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Petter Nyman, Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

Slurries of mud increasingly threaten the water we drink. This rush of sediment, known as “debris flow”, is a type of erosion where mud and boulders in steep catchments suddenly tumble down the stream channel, often travelling at speeds of several metres per second.

And they don’t just damage water supplies – they can cut roads, damage infrastructure, and even kill people. Last year, California saw mudslides that destroyed more than 100 homes and killed 21 people.

Read more: Deadly California mudslides show the need for maps and zoning that better reflect landslide risk

In our research, published in the journal Geology, we found that debris flow is likely to become more frequent and widespread as bushfire activity and rainfall intensity are predicted to increase. Climate change is likely to provoke the extreme weather conditions that cause these bushfires and intense rainfall events.

In turn, these debris flows can contaminate the water supply, with the potential to affect large catchment dams.

In 2003, debris flows poured mud into Canberra’s Cotter Dam – an event caused by bushfires in the catchment of the reservoir. The fires made debris flows more likely because they reduced vegetation cover and soil infiltration (a process in which water can be absorbed by soil).

The resulting turbidity (cloudiness), iron and manganese in the reservoir closed Canberra’s main water supply for six months. A new A$38 million treatment plant had to be built, in case this happens again.

Debris flows such as this one were once rare, but over the last decade they have become more common in southeastern Australia. In fact, we mapped nearly 500 debris flows that occurred in Victoria between 2009 and 2012.

Concern about this threat has led Melbourne Water, East Gippsland Water and the Department of Environment Land Water and Planning in Victoria to partner with us on a project that aims to develop tools for predicting and mitigating impacts of debris flows on water quality.

We can expect debris flows to increase

Debris flow frequency is a water contamination risk. The threat is at a maximum when there are frequent shifts between wet and dry extremes.

Read more: This is what Australia’s growing cities need to do to avoid running dry

And climate change, which is likely to cause more intense rainfall, more wet and dry extremes, stronger El Niños and more bushfires, will make both types of debris flow more common.

During wet conditions, often associated with La Niña, such flows are caused by landslides, which occur when soils are saturated and lose their cohesiveness. Landslides become debris flows when they travel through stream channels.

There were several hundred large debris flows in Wilsons Promontory and the Grampians National Parks, for example, during the extremely wet summer of 2011.

Read more: Cities turn to desalination for water security, but at what cost?

The debris flows in the Grampians caused water supply issues like those in Canberra. Lake Bellfield, for instance, which supplies water to 48 towns in the Wimmera region, could not be used for drinking water for more than three years.

During dry conditions, often associated with El Niño, debris flows are caused by post-fire surface runoff and a process called “sediment bulking”. This is when ash, gravel and debris are eroded from hillsides and stream channels by surface runoff during sudden thunderstorms with short and intense bursts of rainfall. These debris flows typically occur when soil is dry.

We identified more than 300 debris flows of this kind in areas burned by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.

Following the February 2019 fires, there is greater likelihood of debris flow, which in turn could contaminate water coming from Melbourne’s Thomson catchment. What’s more, the Upper Yarra catchment, which is crucial to Melbourne’s water supply, was close to being burned by bushfires in both 2009 and 2019.

In our study, we modelled post-fire debris flows with the movement of clay particles in a reservoir. The model suggests water contamination in the Upper Yarra catchment could disrupt Melbourne’s water supply for up to 12 months.

Based on our model, the cost of sourcing alternative water supplies during such interruptions is in the order of A$100 million.

How can we manage this problem?

Apart from ensuring we have alternative water supplies, there are some things we can do to reduce the chance of debris flows.

The risk of post-fire debris flows would be greatly reduced if high-severity bushfires could be avoided in steep and erodible areas. Strategic fire breaks, targeted firefighting efforts and fuel reduction burning are, to some extent, measures that can make this happen. We have developed models to identify high-risk areas to be targetted.

Read more: Massive storms are pumping pollution into our oceans: time to clean up our cities

Engineering structures to control debris flows are another option. Japanese and European engineers have developed structures such as “debris flow barriers” that can trap sediment, but also dissipate energy of the flow.

It is not clear if these structures can trap the fine sediment that would contaminate our reservoirs, but methods are being trialled in the Thomson water catchment.

Mitigating the risk through fire management and debris-flow control will need a coordinated approach, particularly in settings with complex land arrangements, such as Melbourne’s water supply catchments.

– ref. Freak mud flows threaten our water supplies, and climate change is raising the risk – http://theconversation.com/freak-mud-flows-threaten-our-water-supplies-and-climate-change-is-raising-the-risk-116418

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mai Sato, Fellow, School of Regulation and Global Governance, The Australian National University, Australian National University

On May 27, a 51-year old man went on a killing spree in the Japanese city of Kawasaki, located south of Tokyo. With a knife in each hand, he killed a 39 year-old man and a 12 year-old schoolgirl, and injured 15 school children aged between six and twelve as they waited for a school bus.

The attacker was detained at the scene, but later died from self-inflicted stab wounds to his neck and shoulders. A witness reported seeing the attacker swinging his knives and shouting “I will kill you” while children screamed for help.

Read more: Why Japan is reluctant to retry the world’s longest-serving death row inmate

A recent history of indiscriminate killings

The attacker was identified as Ryuichi Iwasaki. He grew up with, and was still living with, his relatives in Kawasaki city where the attack took place.

Those interviewed who knew Iwasaki did not seem surprised by the attack. His classmates from junior high school described him as a troubled child often losing his temper, behaving violently, and being bullied at school. More recently, Iwasaki was verbally aggressive to his neighbour because the leaves from the neighbour’s garden had brushed against him.

With the perpetrator dead, we are unlikely to get to the bottom of what motivated an apparently indiscriminate attack, but this incident isn’t the first time Japan has experienced a mass stabbings of this kind.

In 2016, 19 residents at a care home for people with mental disabilities were stabbed to death. A former employee at the care home who confessed to the killing claimed that:

it is better that disabled people disappear.

In 2008, a 24-year-old unemployed man who wanted to “end his boring life” went on a stabbing spree in Ibaraki, killing two people and injuring seven.

In the same year, a 25-year-old man stabbed and killed seven people and injured ten in Akihabara, a busy shopping hub in Tokyo. A month before the incident, the attacker wrote on an online platform:

I don’t have a single friend and I won’t in the future. I’ll be ignored because I’m ugly.

Children have also been victims of indiscriminate attacks. In 2001, a 37-year-old man killed eight children at a school in Osaka. He later told police:

I hate everything. I tried to commit suicide several times but could not die. I wanted to be arrested and executed by the death penalty.

Read more: The evidence is in: you can’t link imprisonment to crime rates

Low crime rates, but fear of crime is growing

Despite these incidents, Japan remains one of the safest countries in the world.

According to the 2016 UNODC statistics, Japan’s rate of intentional homicide per 100,000 population is the lowest in the world at 0.3 (if we exclude Macau at 0.2), compared with 0.9 for Australia and the 5.4 for the United States.

Officially recorded cases of murder in Japan have been decreasing steadily since the 1960s. The recorded statistics for murder averaged around 3,500 cases per year in the 1960s, decreasing to around 1,500 cases per year in the 1980s, and down to 710 cases in 2017.

The same downward trend can be seen in murder convictions: 234 cases in 2017, down from 609 cases in 2007.

While Japan’s remains extremely low, the Japanese public’s fear of crime has been growing. Government surveys, and the results of the Japan General Social Survey, show that the Japanese public are more fearful of being a victim of crime, and believe that violent crime is on the rise. At the same time, Japanese public are ill- and mis-informed about crime and punishment issues.

For example, while the majority of the Japanese public supports the death penalty, the same survey respondents lacked basic knowledge about how it works, such as the number of people executed per year, or the method of execution. Respondents overestimated rate of homicides and violent crimes.

The perception gap between actual crime trends and public perceptions is not unique to Japan. It is seen in countries, such as the UK, US and Colombia. And while people generally believe that the crime is on the rise, they are less pessimistic about local crime and overly pessimistic about national crime rates.

An ageing prison population

The low crime rate in Japan makes a horrific crime like the Kawasaki stabbing newsworthy. The moral panic created by media coverage of horrific crimes in the past has an impact on public perceptions of crime, but also on criminal justice policy and practice.

Some researchers argue that public’s fear of crime, and politicians’ response to the fear, resulted in new legislation imposing more severe punishment on offenders. This widened the criminal justice net, with a greater proportion being diverted into the formal criminal justice process.

The result of the expanded use of criminal justice system to deal with deviance, combined with the ageing population, has resulted one in five prisoners being over the age of 60. Japanese prisons have been described as a “nursing home”. Recidivism is high among elderly prisoners because they lack family and financial support. In 2016, of the 2,500 prisoners over the age of 65 who were convicted in 2016, around a third had six or more previous convictions.

Read more: Aum Shinrikyo subway sarin attack: Japanese cult members await execution two decades on

Lone attacks are different in Japan

After the Kawasaki stabbing, Japan’s education minister, Masahito Shibayama, announced that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe had instructed him to make every possible effort to secure safety at schools.

Unlike a number of lone actor attacks that have occurred outside of Japan in recent years – such as the Christchurch mosque attacks and the Pittsburgh synagogue attack – the attacks carried out in Japan are not motivated by right-wing ideology.

What lone attackers in Japan have in common are social exclusion and low social capital. A further expansion of formal social control through the use and threat of imprisonment is unlikely to prevent future attacks.

I grew up in Tokyo, where it was – and still is – normal for children as young as six to play without the presence of an adult, or to take public transport alone. I hope that the Kawasaki stabbing does not result in “indirect damage” that further excludes vulnerable people via the criminal justice system, or curtails the freedom and independence currently enjoyed by Japanese school children.

– ref. Despite Japan’s low crime rates, it’s seen a number of mass stabbings in the past decade – http://theconversation.com/despite-japans-low-crime-rates-its-seen-a-number-of-mass-stabbings-in-the-past-decade-117910

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Staff, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

Australia could once count itself among the vanguard of women’s rights reform, being the first country in the world to grant (some) women the dual rights of voting and standing for parliament in 1902.

While we have made significant advances since then, we are still lagging behind global standards when it comes to equal representation. Before the 2019 federal election, Australia was 48th in the world in terms of women’s lower house representation, tied with Angola and Peru and falling below many other countries such as as Rwanda, Nepal and Ecuador.

The election has not brought much of an improvement in this respect. Though the proportion of women in parliament looks set to rise to from 33% to around 35%, this clearly falls short of equal representation. This is a problem particularly for the Liberal party: only 23% of their representatives are women, compared to Labor’s 47%.

Read more: To achieve gender equality, we must first tackle our unconscious biases

And, despite the fact that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s newly unveiled ministry is being touted for its “record” number of women, it too falls short of equal representation. The seven women in the ministry hold just eight of the 28 total cabinet positions.

This is a problem for political leadership across the spectrum. In light of Tanya Plibersek’s decision to not contest the Labor party leadership, clearing the way for Anthony Albanese to become the new Leader of the Opposition, men once again hold the leadership of both major parties. This trend extends to most of the federal minor parties as well, bar Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Jacquie Lambie Network.

Why are women still struggling to make gains in our parliament and what does this say about the state of our democracy?

Women becoming political citizens

From the mid-19th century, women around the world – including in Australia – were voicing their discontent at the injustices they faced in many aspects of life, such as their lack of political rights.

Though women could vote in some Australian states from the 1890s, the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 standardised voting laws across the newly federated nation, granting women the right to vote at the federal level, as well as the right to stand for parliament.

This put Australia ahead of every other country at the time, including the UK (which gave some women the right to vote and stand for office in 1918) and even New Zealand (which took until 1919 to allow women to stand for office, despite having granted their voting rights in 1893).

Read more: Australian politics explainer: how women gained the right to vote

These victories were celebrated at the time, but it is important to note that not everyone was able to enjoy them. The Commonwealth Franchise Act explicitly excluded Aboriginal peoples and women from Asian, African and Pacific backgrounds from placing their name on the electoral roll. In 1925, the act was amended to allow all naturalised citizens to vote. Yet, for Indigenous Australians it would be a much longer battle – they would have to wait until 1962 to win the right to vote.

Standing for parliament

Women immediately seized on their new-found rights in Australia, approaching the 1903 federal election not only as voters, but also as candidates. In total, four women were nominated and stood as candidates: Nellie Martel, Mary Ann Moore Bentley and Vida Goldstein for the Senate; and Selina Siggins for the House of Representatives.

Vida Goldstein was the most well-known of this group. She had been active in the suffrage movement in Victoria in the 1890s, eventually becoming one of its most vocal leaders. She even travelled abroad in 1902 to promote the cause of women’s suffrage to a wider audience, including leaders like US President Theodore Roosevelt.

Read more: Birth of a nation: how Australia empowering women taught the world a lesson

Though unsuccessful in her bid for parliament, Goldstein stood four more times between 1910 and 1917. Believing in the need for women to work outside party politics, she campaigned as an independent every time – a choice that, though true to her values, also proved a hindrance.

It took almost two decades for a woman to be elected to a parliament anywhere in Australia. This milestone was reached when Nationalist candidate Edith Cowan won a spot in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, representing the seat of West Perth. Her image remains familiar today, adorning one side of the A$50 note.

It would be another 20 years before women cemented their place as federal parliamentary representatives. In 1943, Dame Enid Lyons won a spot for the United Australia Party in the House of Representatives and Dorothy Tangney captured a seat in the Senate for Labor.

Why did it take so long? In spite of their new political rights, women continued to face discrimination from those who viewed politics as a man’s domain. Additionally, women struggled to make their voices heard in a system dominated by the major political parties and their ideologies. Fractured along these lines, they lost some of the solidarity fostered by the battle for women’s suffrage.

Where are we now?

In 2010, Australia finally got its first woman prime minister with Julia Gillard, a historic moment that should have marked a turning point for women in politics. But the proportion of women in parliament has increased by just a few percentage points since Gillard’s rise to the top.

Women also continue to remain a minority in higher-ranking positions. And though those elected to parliament represent a somewhat greater diversity than the candidates of the early 1900s, there is much more to be done on that front, as well.

But this is not just a numbers issue. Women in politics continue to be the targets of gendered abuse and misogyny not endured by their male counterparts, as Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s recent experience with David Leyonhjelm demonstrates. This kind of entrenched sexism places limits on women’s ability to participate in politics on an equal footing.

The future of Australian democracy must be one in which true gender equality – both in terms of numbers and attitudes – forms a central part of the political system. We have a way to go yet to see this goal fully realised.

– ref. Why is it taking so long to achieve gender equality in parliament? – http://theconversation.com/why-is-it-taking-so-long-to-achieve-gender-equality-in-parliament-117313

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The Conversation

As Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s ministry is sworn in today, we’re taking a closer look at the members of the newly revamped cabinet.

Some of the faces are new – Stuart Robert, for example, takes over the new portfolio overseeing the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And some of the portfolios have shifted, notably Sussan Ley replacing Melissa Price as environment minister.

We’ve asked our experts to appraise the performances of the ministers and highlight what could be the key challenges in their new roles.

In some cases, ministers hold more than one portfolio. To simplify the policy analysis, we’ve chosen a key policy area for which they’re responsible and asked our experts to analyse those.

– ref. Infographic: who’s who in the new Morrison ministry – http://theconversation.com/infographic-whos-who-in-the-new-morrison-ministry-117909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The Conversation

As Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s ministry is sworn in today, we’re taking a closer look at the members of the newly revamped cabinet.

Some of the faces are new – Stuart Robert, for example, takes over the new portfolio overseeing the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And some of the portfolios have shifted, notably Sussan Ley replacing Melissa Price as environment minister.

We’ve asked our experts to appraise the performances of the ministers and highlight what could be the key challenges in their new roles.

In some cases, ministers hold more than one portfolio. To simplify the policy analysis, we’ve chosen a key policy area for which they’re responsible and asked our experts to analyse those.

– ref. A closer look at Scott Morrison’s new ministry – http://theconversation.com/a-closer-look-at-scott-morrisons-new-ministry-117909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Graham, Executive Director, La Trobe Asia, La Trobe University

The 2019 federal election, unlike previous campaigns, did not feature a dedicated debate on foreign affairs or defence. The conventional cynicism – that there are no votes in foreign policy – does not adequately explain this. It seems Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Labor leader Bill Shorten reached a shabby consensus that foreign and security policy questions were uniformly too hot to handle.

Foreign affairs is in fact among the most important challenges facing the Morrison government. The simple reason: the status quo that has served Australia so well in the past couple of decades is fast coming to an end.

Australia has uniquely avoided recession among the developed economies because it has surfed a once-in-a-generation wave of Chinese demand for commodities. Australia’s security has also been assured through its longstanding alliance with the US, while its military commitments have been kept largely at arm’s length in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Read more: Foreign policy should play a bigger role in Australian elections. This is why it probably won’t

However, as Asia-Pacific scholar Nick Bisley has commented, Australia now finds itself caught between two different forms of revisionism: the strategic revisionism of Xi Jinping’s China and the economic revisionism of Donald Trump’s United States.

Trump’s trade wars and protectionist policies are likely to be a continuing point of friction with Australia, which remains heavily reliant on Asian markets (not only China) for trade.

But China is the most important external challenge Australia faces. It’s so all-encompassing that it transcends traditional foreign, trade and defence policy silos, and includes a significant domestic dimension in terms of political interference, as well.

Even though Morrison has already served the better part of a year in office, it’s hard to be sure of his convictions on China. With his mandate secured, he now has both the opportunity and obligation to show his true colours.

Caught between a rock and a hard place

In theory, the Coalition’s election victory should mean continuity in foreign policy, as signalled by Morrison’s decision to retain Marise Payne as foreign minister.

When China was – belatedly – raised during the campaign, Morrison repeated a well-worn mantra about not having to “pick sides” between the United States and China. The former he characterised as Australia’s “friend”, labelling China as a “customer”. While this description no doubt raised eyebrows in Beijing, Morrison was arguing Canberra could “stand by” both.

The Morrison administration has generally sought to position Australia somewhere in between its chief ally and its chief customer. His reticence thus far to make waves with the country’s number one customer may be borne of a desire to maintain Canberra’s room for manoeuvre as a middle power, though this is getting steadily harder.

If the prime minister truly believes Australia can play an intermediary role, few in Canberra’s foreign policy and defence circles would agree. To do so would only expose Australia to heightened risk, precipitating the kind of invidious strategic choices that Morrison wishes to avoid.

It also plays into the Chinese Communist Party’s objective of sowing discord between the US and its Pacific allies.

Read more: In his first major foreign policy test, Morrison needs to stick to the script

If Morrison is privately more attuned to the strategic risks China poses – and after nine months of intelligence briefings he should be – then he has a duty to prepare the public for the likelihood of tougher times ahead. Should Australia-China relations take a darker turn, it may prove difficult for the government to persuade the public to back a significant adjustment in national security policy, including increased defence spending.

Moreover, there are risks to publicly framing US-China strategic competition as a destabilising factor for Australia’s security. Australians could judge the prospect of entrapment in a confrontational US policy towards China as potentially more threatening to Australia’s security than Beijing’s deliberate challenge to the “rules-based order” in the region.

This could undermine public support for Australia’s alliance with the US, which remains the bedrock of our security.

Stepping up in the Pacific

The Pacific is where the strategic interests of China and Australia clash most directly. Morrison’s most important security policy decision thus far, announced at last year’s APEC summit, was to establish a joint naval base with the US and Papua New Guinea at Lombrum on Manus Island. This was partly aimed at denying the location to China, as well as establishing a forward ADF presence in the Pacific.

It is also notable that Morrison will visit the Solomon Islands on his first post-election overseas trip. China is inevitably part of the subtext here, as Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is reported to be swaying towards switching allegiances from Taiwan to Beijing – yet another sign of China’s growing influence in the region.

Of course, there is more than geopolitics to the Pacific region and Morrison must be careful to demonstrate empathy and humility, given Australia’s patchy engagement with the region and the Coalition’s ambivalence on climate change – a major grievance for most Pacific nations.

Morrison’s appointment of Alex Hawke as both minister of international development and Pacific and assistant defence minister provides easy ammunition to critics, who will charge that the government’s Pacific “step up” is narrowly conceived through a geopolitical lens.

But Morrison appears to take the step up seriously, and a commitment to reversing the relative decline in Australia’s influence in its immediate neighbourhood (note: not “backyard”). A volatile political situation in PNG further demands a close watch on the Pacific.

Other key alliances to shore up

Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, Morrison has fallen on his feet now that friendly incumbents in Indonesia and India – President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Prime Minister Narendra Modi – were also returned in recent elections, making it easier for continuity to be maintained.

Morrison was quick off the mark to congratulate Jokowi on Twitter, who promptly replied that Australia is one of Indonesia’s “greatest allies.”

By pulling off an unlikely election victory, Morrison is in the fortunate position of being the first prime minister for some time who is not looking immediately over his or her shoulder for political assassins within their party.

Morrison also has more bandwidth to devote to foreign issues than any leader since Kevin Rudd. He is disadvantaged, however, by his relative inexperience and the thinness of his front bench. That places a special burden on whoever will be advising Morrison on international security – a role sure to take on greater importance in his administration – to provide the counsel he needs and to wrangle the bureaucracy into line. For there will be no shortage of challenges ahead.

– ref. Scott Morrison’s biggest foreign policy test: keeping peace with both China and the US – http://theconversation.com/scott-morrisons-biggest-foreign-policy-test-keeping-peace-with-both-china-and-the-us-117598

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire McKie, Senior Lecturer, Clinical and Communication Skills, Deakin University

In January, 107-year-old Daphne Keith broke her hip and became the oldest Australian to have a partial hip replacement. This isn’t something you would have heard of two or three decades ago.

For Daphne, the decision was fairly clear-cut. Surgery, with all its risks, was a better option than the alternative: to be stuck in bed for the rest of her life. As she summed it up, “What do I have to lose?”

But in many cases the balance between benefits and harms of surgery for older people is not as clear-cut.

Advances in anaesthetic and surgical techniques (especially keyhole surgery) now allow older adults to undergo operations and procedures that were previously not possible.

As the population ages, we’re operating on older and older people. Rates for elective surgery in Australia are increasing the most among those aged over 85.

So how do we decide who should and shouldn’t undergo surgery?

Age is a factor, but not the only one

As we age there are increasing differences between individuals in terms of how our minds and bodies function. Younger people – whether they’re aged five, 20 or even 40 – are generally very similar to their age-matched peers, in terms of their cognitive and physical abilities.

But if we compare older adults, there are marked differences in their function. Some 70-year-olds are fit, healthy and still working full-time. Other 70-year-olds have multiple medical conditions, are frail and living in nursing homes.

So decisions about surgery shouldn’t be based on age alone.

Read more: What’s happening in our bodies as we age?

However, we can’t ignore the changes associated with ageing, which means sometimes the potential harms of surgery will outweigh the benefits.

The harms associated with surgery and anaesthesia include death, surgical complications, longer hospital stays and poorer long-term outcomes. This might mean not being able to return to the same physical or cognitive level of function or needing to go into a nursing home.

The changes in our body as we age, as well as an increase in the number of diseases, and therefore medications we take, can increase the risks associated with surgery and anaesthesia.

Frailty is the strongest predictor of poor outcomes after surgery. Frailty is a decrease in our body’s reserves and our ability to recover from stressful events such as surgery. Frailty is usually associated with increasing age, but not all older people are frail, and you can be frail and still relatively young.

Consider the patient’s preferences

Patients tend to overestimate the benefits of surgery and underestimate the harms. This highlights the importance of shared decision-making between patients and clinicians.

Shared decision-making means the patient and clinicians come to a decision together, after discussing the options, benefits and harms, and after considering the patient’s values, preferences and circumstances.

Read more: Surgery isn’t always the best option, and the decision shouldn’t just lie with the doctor

Research shows that as we age many of us become less focused on longevity and prolonging life at all costs and much more focused on what that life is like, or our quality of life.

Outcomes such as living independently, staying in our own home, the ability to move around, and being mentally alert often become increasingly important in the decision-making process. This information about a person’s values is critical for shared decision-making conversations.

When considering these preferences, the discussion becomes more than just “could” we do this operation – it’s about “should” we do this operation? Someone living at home with early dementia may decide the risk of this worsening, and the possible need to move to a nursing home, is not worth any benefits of surgery.

It’s also important to note that, in some cases, cognitive impairment and dementia associated with ageing mean it’s not the patient (but their appointee) making decisions about surgery.

Not everyone should be offered surgery

The ageing of our population raises challenges for policymakers. More surgeries means greater pressure on the health budget. We don’t have a bottomless pit of health funding, so how do we decide who is eligible, based on fair and equitable resource allocation?

Given the marked variability between individuals as we age, decisions and policies about access to medical care (including surgery) should not be based on age alone. There should not be policies that say “no” to surgery based on age.

Equally, when considering resource allocation, it should not just be about how many years a person has to live, or blunt assessments based on how much their operation might cost the health system.

Take a decision about performing a hip replacement on a 90-year-old with arthritis, for example. A patient who has an elective hip replacement for arthritis and is able to remain living at home will probably “cost less” overall than if that same person would otherwise have had to live in a nursing home.

Read more: Who gets a piece of the pie? Spending the health budget fairly

However, this also does not mean we can, or should, offer surgery to everyone.

The practice of medicine, especially when considering older adults, needs to remain focused on individualised patient care. Decisions should be based on medical appropriateness of treatment combined with a patient’s goals and values.

To do this we need to train clinicians in shared decision-making and how to have these often difficult discussions. The goal is to have clinicians who are able to explore a patient’s values and preferences around outcomes, effectively communicate individualised information about options, benefits and harms, and then come to a decision together.

– ref. Surgery rates are rising in over-85s but the decision to operate isn’t always easy – http://theconversation.com/surgery-rates-are-rising-in-over-85s-but-the-decision-to-operate-isnt-always-easy-116814

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Law, Macquarie University

Privacy was not a hot topic in the recent Australian election, but it should have been. This is because the City of Darwin is adapting elements of the Chinese social credit system for use in Australia. The Chinese system’s monitoring of citizens’ behaviour has been widely condemned as “Orwellian”, with frequent comparisons to the dystopian near-future sci-fi of Black Mirror. But for Australians it’s pitched as progress towards a digitally integrated future, embedded innocuously in the “Switching on Darwin” plans for a smarter city.

Read more: China’s Social Credit System puts its people under pressure to be model citizens

To see why this is a worrying development for Australian democracy one must first play a patient game of join the dots.

Dot 1. One of Darwin’s six “sister cities” is Haikou, capital of the Chinese island province of Hainan. Links established through sister-city relationships are commonly understood to be a springboard to wider networks of co-operative arrangements. Such connections may provide opportunities for cultural exchange, but also for technological exchange.

Recently there have been reports on how smart city plans in Darwin draw inspiration from the Chinese social credit surveillance system.

The potential of the system for gathering data on citizens’ use of public services, such as Wi-Fi, has been noted. The potential to enhance council profitability through sale of user data to the private sector is significant. More so is the potential for this system to track citizen movements in real time.

Dot 2. The 2019 Northern Territory government budget earmarks A$1.4 million for expanding the local CCTV network as part of “Investing in a Safer Territory”. This figure might yet be supplemented by “proceeds of crime” funds, making the investment much larger.

That’s enough money to roll out biometric facial recognition software, which can link your face from a live CCTV image to your driver licence or passport, as well as “triggerfish” apps that can access, for example, identifying data on your smartphone remotely without your knowledge. All of these systems can be automated.

Read more: Big brother is watching: how new technologies are changing police surveillance

Dot 3. The Encryption Act, rushed through federal parliament in December 2018, gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies unprecedented access to communications technology. Telecommunications providers must now provide potentially unlimited back doors into private data. They must also, by law, conceal that they have done so from customers/citizens.

Read more: The government’s encryption laws finally passed despite concerns over security

Foundations of a surveillance state are in place

Each dot offers a point of triangulation for very real fears about the form and nature of Australian democracy in years to come. Combine these points of technology and law and we see the foundation of a surveillance state.

The ability of agencies to track citizen activity extends from which websites you browse on your mobile to what you write in your private messages to where you are right now. Given how grey these laws are, and the absence of a constitutionally protected right to privacy in Australia, this could extend to criminal records, medical files, payslips, spending patterns and browsing histories.

The Northern Territory News reported:

Darwin council will use Chinese-inspired surveillance technology to gather data on what people are doing on their phones and to put up ‘virtual fences’ that will instantly trigger an alert if crossed.

That is correct. This technology can track a smart phone. It can also, potentially, identify the user. Darwin City’s general manager for innovation, growth and development services, Josh Sattler, told the NT News:

We’ll be getting sent an alarm saying, ‘There’s a person in this area that you’ve put a virtual fence around.’ […] Boom, an alert goes out to whatever authority, whether it’s us or police, to say ‘look at camera 5’.

That equates to real-time tracking of a private citizen by law enforcement and local council. And this in a free and democratic country.

Is it smart for the public to be so trusting?

The Encryption Act takes on a different tint when looked at through this lens. Law enforcement and intelligence organisations have been empowered by law to invade your privacy and protected by law from you knowing that they have done so.

Such data can be used to place restrictions on free movement, a hard limit placed on a universal human right. Such data may also be sold to third parties, either in exchange for deals with government or to boost city coffers. The potential for abuse and the lack of safeguards for Australian citizens are staggering.

The public are told to place angelic trust in the honesty of government agencies, agencies that by and large regulate themselves. There is toothless public oversight by groups like the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, which are all too often hamstrung by a culture of silence.

But, remember, if you’ve got nothing to hide you don’t need to be afraid! After all, it’s only a smart city Wi-Fi program for better street lights.

Read more: Australians accept government surveillance, for now

The City of Darwin and City of Palmerston have also bought five new high-definition mobile CCTV units with A$635,000 in funding from the Australian government’s Safer Communities Fund. Northern Territory Police will deploy these across both municipalities. The camera systems will be used to police “crime and anti-social behaviour” and to “protect organisations that may face security risks”.

Remember the city of the future is a safer and more vibrant space. And, if you want to be in it, you will be watched both online and offline, wherever you go. All the time.

– ref. Is China’s social credit system coming to Australia? – http://theconversation.com/is-chinas-social-credit-system-coming-to-australia-117095

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

Unless the federal government changes its funding policy for universities, less well-off ones, particularly regional universities, are going to fail.

In Britain, it is already happening. Several bankruptcies are imminent.

In Australia, many are clearly in financial difficulties and are trying to raise money any way they can.

During the election campaign, ABC’s Four Corners highlighted questionable practices in the recruitment of full-fee paying international students at institutions including Murdoch University and Central Queensland University.

Desperate for funds…

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has found “severe shortcomings” in the performance of Charles Sturt University, sufficient to reduce its period of accreditation from seven to four years.

In an extraordinary move, the departing Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra has asked his staff to donate up to A$1,000 per annum to “support students”.

It’s easy to blame the universities themselves, but it is the government that has designed the policies that have forced them up against a financial brick wall.

This situation has come about partly because of a pea and thimble trick performed by both Labor and the Coalition. While recurrent funding has risen due to the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government’s introduction of “demand driven” funding, it has been followed by a withdrawal of capital funding.

…but it’s not their fault

In 2015 the Coalition axed A$11 billion Education Investment Fund set up by Labor in 2008 to maintain infrastructure “in urgent need of attention”. In 2017 it froze recurrent funding.

Four years after the Education Investment Fund was axed, estimates from the higher education facilities consultancy ARINA put the maintenance deficit at more than the $23 billion dollars that was estimated at the time. That’s what’s needed to return campuses to a condition where they are fit for purpose.

Although the new government has announced small additional funding for regional universities, it is nowhere near enough. Many have dilapidated campuses that are hard to work or study in. University buildings constructed during the 1960s are nearing the end of their useful lives.

It’s alright for the Group of Eight

The current funding model works best for the prestigious Group of Eight (Go8) universities – those named after the cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide as well as the states of NSW, Queensland and Western Australia plus Monash University and the Australian National University.

The universities in Sydney and Melbourne have the best access to high-quality full-fee paying international students, although even for them there are issues.

The Go8 universities require huge amounts of capital to build facilities to support research in the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and medicine. Under current funding policy, most of which now has to come from recurrent student income.

The proportion of international students at the biggest Go8 campuses climbs year by year. And they are continuing to expand domestic enrolments as fast as they can.

For the rest, options to fund capital works are limited. While some may have recruited international students regardless of quality, others are getting new buildings by doing deals with property developers.

There are few options for others

Western Sydney University is renting its new “state of the art” campus in the Parramatta CBD. Unfortunately, the rental model carries risks because it narrows the options for reducing costs if revenue falls.

Revenue can fall for many reasons outside the control of the university, including an abrupt reduction in the number of international students due to geopolitical factors or changes in government policy on immigration.

Rent is also more expensive than direct funding because the price charged includes margins for commercial risk and profit. The property sector likes the idea, but then it would, wouldn’t it?

The best way to fund needed capital works on university buildings, and make sure they survive, is for the government to return to making capital payments on the basis of need. It would mean that universities facing a chronic shortage of capital wouldn’t need to resort to extreme measures.

Direct funding would mean they would have to conform to government-imposed area and cost standards for buildings. This would put welcome downward pressure on building costs, which have soared for some of the big city universities that have access to cash from international students.

City universities are paying too much for buildings

General academic buildings, and those providing offices and teaching space, are in some cases being delivered for twice as much as they were 20 years ago, corrected for inflation, in large part because they have become unnecessarily elaborate, in part to attract foreign students.

The Monash Teaching and Learning building and the University of Melbourne Architecture building are examples, as is the $180 million University of Technology Sydney business school building.

Instead of making every new university building an award-winning icon, we ought to be content with making at least some of them just good.

Providing capital funding to universities is likely to cost at least an extra A$1.5 billion a year. But that’s small compared to the more than A$30 billion international education exports are said to pump into the economy.

It is also small compared to what would happen if they folded or failed to deliver the research we need.

Others can afford little

The sector can help its own case by focusing more on building costs and less on winning design awards. University peak bodies in Britain play an active role in benchmarking building and operational costs. Universities Australia should consider doing the same.

It ought to be in a position to document improvements in the operational efficiency of universities and highlight the magnitude of the maintenance funding needed. At the moment, it is not.

Read more: How has education policy changed under the Coalition government?

No one, including the government, really wants a university to fail. The cost of recovery would probably end up being borne taxpayers and the impact on students would be devastating.

It is in the interests of all Australians to have a university funding model that does not send less well-off universities to the wall, including most of our regional universities.

The current model generates perverse incentives to reduce acceptance standards for international students, encourages universities to use expensive developer-provided sources of capital and has driven the creation of mega campuses that are more about income than student outcomes. We can and should do better.

– ref. Why regional universities are at risk of going under – http://theconversation.com/why-regional-universities-are-at-risk-of-going-under-109374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian CH Lee, Associate Professor, Global Studies, RMIT University

The monsters that stalk us in popular culture embody fears about our contemporary human condition. As a new Godzilla film opens in cinemas this week, we might gain insight into what currently haunts us most.

The endless waves of zombies in film, TV and literature are said to reflect the mindlessness of our behaviour, whether as a cog in the industrial machine, or as noted by film scholar Leo Braudy, as “an unthinking member of a mass consumer society”.

For Braudy, zombies “may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century” because these nameless monsters can represent whatever fear most consumes us as individuals, which might include pandemics, globalisation, or the anonymity imposed by impersonal technology.

However, the age we are currently living in requires another monster – one that is capable of representing the awesome complexity and enormity of the challenges facing humanity today. That monster is Godzilla.

The consequences of human-induced climate change are now spoken of with increasing alarm, with prominent experts, including David Attenborough, suggesting the possibility of civilisational collapse. With the new film upon us, audiences may see their fears about the damage we have wrought reflected back at them.

A monster of awe

In their 1987 book Angels Fear, anthropologists Gregory and Mary Catherine Batseon proposed a fictional god called Eco, one that would represent the importance of seeing the world as a system of interconnected organisms, or the “unity in which we make our home”. They hoped that the existence of such a god might encourage humanity to behave more respectfully towards our world.

However, in today’s world, a figure such as Eco does not inspire the awe or respect which our age of existential crisis demands. A monster is needed, and as I have argued in my co-authored book Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for Our Critical Condition, Godzilla is the perfect monster to make us think about the consequences of our actions.

From the first Japanese Godzilla film in 1954, all the way through to Godzilla’s latest outing in this year’s aptly named Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla has been understood as a response to humanity’s mistreatment of the earth.

The first case of mistreatment to provoke Godzilla in 1954 was the use of nuclear weapons. While developing a premise for the first film, Tanaka Tomoyuki, a young producer at Toho Studios in Japan asked himself: “What if a dinosaur sleeping in the Southern Hemisphere had been awakened and transformed into a giant by the Bomb? What if it attacked Tokyo?”

Subsequent films, which vary immensely in their level of earnestness or goofiness, have referenced other environmental misdeeds, such the 1971 film Godzilla vs Hedorah (aka the Smog Monster) in which mankind’s pollution becomes a nearly invincible monster. Although Godzilla defeats the Smog Monster, viewers are left in no doubt that we ignore the effects of our pollution at our peril.

As time has moved on, so has the particular crisis that brings forth the monster. In the words of a protagonist in the trailer for the 2019 movie, “Our world is changing. The mass extinction we feared has already begun and we are the cause. We are the infection. But like all living organisms, the earth has unleashed a fever to fight this infection”.

Here lies an important trait of Godzilla’s. As the scientist Dr Serizawa says in the 2014 Hollywood movie simply titled Godzilla: “we may not have created this monster. But we summoned it. We brought this on ourselves.”

Godzilla is not on our side. It threatens humanity, although it sometimes incidentally helps humanity avert a larger threat (such as the Smog Monster) or Godzilla’s archenemy, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. But even when Godzilla and humanity share a common goal, it is not that Godzilla takes our side or that we make Godzilla “our pet”, as it is put in the 2019 trailer. Instead, Dr Serizawa observes, “we would be his”.

Wherever Godzilla appears, the triviality of humanity’s accomplishments and defences are made plain. Godzilla treats us and our great cities with the contempt and disregard with which we regularly treat our world.

Read more: Friday essay: is this the Endgame – and did we win or did we lose?

The Godzilla principle

In project management, The “Godzilla Principle” refers to the idea that problems should be addressed while small, because “left unchecked and uncared for, they wax, not wane, until they are too big too handle”. However, I argue that the lesson of Godzilla is in fact starker. The Godzilla Principle is that there is no forgiveness.

There is no forgiveness because Godzilla is our environmental transgressions reflected back to us, personified in the form of a monstrous reptile. In this way, Godzilla echoes Bateson and Bateson’s Eco: it “is of no avail to tell [Eco] that the offense was only a small one, that you are sorry and that you won’t do it again.” Every one of our misdeeds against the world irrevocably rebounds against us.

In reality, the impacts of our vandalism or thoughtlessness can remain in out-of-sight lands or immense garbage patches in our oceans, or be borne in the future. However, in fiction, Godzilla is karma incarnate, bringing ruin today to the cities that represent “civilisation”.

Although people can forgive the wrongdoings of each other and start afresh, our world cannot forgive in this way. We must act from the outset with an awareness of the gravity of our actions, to avoid awakening unstoppable “climate monsters”.

Godzilla, then, is the monster for our times. Godzilla is awful, implacable, and irresistible. Our only hope is not to bring it upon ourselves.

– ref. Why Godzilla is the perfect monster for our age of environmental destruction – http://theconversation.com/why-godzilla-is-the-perfect-monster-for-our-age-of-environmental-destruction-116996

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Guihot, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queensland University of Technology

Australia is among 42 countries that last week signed up to a new set of policy guidelines for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Yet Australia has its own draft guidelines for ethics in AI out for public consultation, and a number of other countries and industry bodies have developed their own AI guidelines.

So why do we need so many guidelines, and are any of them enforceable?

Read more: Artificial intelligence in Australia needs to get ethical, so we have a plan

The new principles

The latest set of policy guidelines is the Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It promotes five principles for the responsible development of trustworthy AI. It also includes five complementary strategies for developing national policy and international cooperation.

Given this comes from the OECD, it treads the line between promoting economic improvement and innovation and fostering fundamental values and trust in the development of AI.

The five AI principles encourage:

1. inclusive growth, sustainable development and well-being

2. human-centred values and fairness

3. transparency and explainability

4. robustness, security and safety

5. accountability.

These recommendations are broad and do not carry the force of laws or even rules. Instead they seek to encourage member countries to incorporate these values or ethics in the development of AI.

But what do we mean by AI?

It is hard to make specific recommendations in relation to AI. That is partly because AI is not one thing with a single application that poses singular risks or threats.

Instead, AI has become a blanket term to refer to a vast number of different systems. Each is typically designed to collect and process data using computing technology, adapt to change, and act rationally to achieve its objectives, ultimately without human intervention.

Read more: To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

Those objectives could be as different as translating language, identifying faces, or even playing chess.

The type of AI that is exceptionally good at completing these objectives is often referred to as narrow AI. A good example is a chess-playing AI. This is specifically designed to play chess – and is extremely good at it – but completely useless at other tasks.

On the other hand is general AI. This is AI that it is said will replace human intelligence in most if not all tasks. This is still a long way off but remains the ultimate goal of some AI developers.

Yet it is this idea of general AI that drives many of the fears and misconceptions that surround AI.

Many many guidelines

Responding to these fears and a number of very real problems with narrow AI, the OECD recommendations are the latest of a number of projects and guidelines from governments and other bodies around the world that seek to instil an ethical approach to developing AI.

These include initiatives by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the French data protection authority, the Hong Kong Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the European Commission.

Read more: Call for independent watchdog to monitor NZ government use of artificial intelligence

The Australian government funded CSIRO’s Data61 to develop an AI ethics framework, which is now open for public feedback, and the Australian Council of Learned Academies is yet to publish its report on the future of AI in Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, together with the World Economic Forum, is also reviewing and reporting on the impact of AI on human rights.

The aim of these initiatives is to encourage or to nudge ethical development of AI. But this presupposes unethical behaviour. What is the mischief in AI?

Unethical AI

One study identified three broad potential malicious uses of AI. These target:

• digital security (for example, through cyber-attacks)

• physical security (for example, attacks using drones or hacking)

• political security (for example, if AI is used for mass surveillance, persuasion and deception).

One area of concern is evolving in China, where several regions are developing a social credit system linked to mass surveillance using AI technologies.

The system can identify a person breaching social norms (such as jaywalking, consorting with criminals, or misusing social media) and debit social credit points from the individual.

When a credit score is reduced, that person’s freedoms (such as the freedom to travel or borrow money) are restricted. While this is not yet a nationwide system, reports indicate this could be the ultimate aim.

Read more: China’s Social Credit System puts its people under pressure to be model citizens

Added to these deliberate misuses of AI are several unintentional side effects of poorly constructed or implemented narrow AI. These include bias and discrimination and the erosion of trust.

Building consensus on AI

Societies differ on what is ethical. Even people within societies differ on what they regard as ethical behaviour. So how can there ever be a global consensus on the ethical development of AI?

Given the very broad scope of AI development, any policies in relation to ethical AI cannot yet be more specific until we can identify shared norms of ethical behaviour that might form the basis of some agreed global rules.

Read more: To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

By developing and expressing the values, rights and norms that we consider to be important now in the form of the reports and guidelines outlined above, we are working toward building trust among nations.

Common themes are emerging in the various guidelines, such as the need for AI that considers human rights, security, safety, transparency, trustworthiness and accountability, so we may yet be on the way to some global consensus.

– ref. Will we ever agree to just one set of rules on the ethical development of artificial intelligence? – http://theconversation.com/will-we-ever-agree-to-just-one-set-of-rules-on-the-ethical-development-of-artificial-intelligence-117744

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Ritchie, Senior Research Fellow, Deakin University

In recent days, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has announced his resignation, failed to formally resign, and is now taking legal action to prevent a parliamentary vote to remove him from office.

For most of PNG’s more than eight million inhabitants, today will not be substantially different from any other day. It will be a day of toil, hardship, humour, love, fear – and of negotiating how to survive in PNG’s villages and squatter settlements.

There are crises aplenty in the lives of these Papua New Guineans, but most won’t be worrying too much about the crisis unfolding in the nation’s capital, Port Moresby. Yet, this dispute is dominating the waking hours of the educated urbanites and social media commentators there and in the country’s major centres – as well as a small group of people watching PNG from Australia, and elsewhere.

Will Peter O’Neill really resign? Will he somehow manage to cling to the prime ministership? Will he leave, only to be replaced by one of his allies through whom he could continue to exercise power?

Read more: If there’s one thing Pacific nations don’t need, it’s yet another infrastructure investment bank

A reshuffling of the political cards

While we acknowledge the divide between the great majority of struggling Papua New Guineans and PNG’s elites, we shouldn’t minimise the importance of the current crisis engulfing the country. O’Neill’s departure has the potential for a wholesale shift in the policy direction taken by PNG’s government.

It could result in PNG moving away from the big spending on major projects of the past few years, which many Papua New Guineans see as having benefited Port Moresby at the expense of everywhere else in this still largely rural nation.

But the suspicion of at least some informed Papua New Guinean observers is that it will result only in the rearranging of the deck chairs. A reshuffling of the cards that will lead to another privileged insider, another member of PNG’s political class, taking over the PM’s role from the mostly unlamented O’Neill.

Rural citizens are disenfranchised and disengaged

Despite their apparent failure in Australia’s recent federal election, most people would still agree that polls and surveys are a valuable way of gauging popular opinion. One of the more curious (and frustrating) aspects of PNG’s public affairs is that there has never been a successful attempt to conduct systematic and reasonably reliable opinion surveying.

This means that it is basically impossible to say with any certainty what “the average Papua New Guinean” thinks about O’Neill and the current political crisis. We don’t really know if O’Neill’s departure would be celebrated, or mourned.

PNG’s geographical challenges, along with inadequate transport and communication structures, suggest that most people will hear the news of Port Moresby politics at several removes. Should they feel sufficiently energised to want to act on what they hear – well, events will have moved on by that time.

Most Papua New Guineans living in villages, in highland valleys, islands, or other remote places, are disenfranchised, and certainly disengaged, from what goes on in Port Moresby. The same observation could be made about the people who live in the mushrooming settlements in Port Moresby, Lae, Mt Hagen, and other centres. Even if they are notionally urban dwellers, their connection with the complexities of these events is remote.

So we tend to rely on what we hear from the city residents who are more engaged in public life, and especially those who are social media-savvy.

Read more: Morrison to unveil broad suite of measures to boost Australia’s influence in the Pacific

City-dwellers resent O’Neill

What this group thinks about the O’Neill situation is fairly apparent. Ever since he replaced the ailing Michael Somare as Prime Minister in 2011, resentment against O’Neill has been expressed in a range of forums (including social media, to the annoyance of O’Neill and his supporters).

The wave of anger has built over the years since then, and has crested recently with the revelations about O’Neill’s involvement with the Oil Search-UBS loan affair, which many regard as confirming every suspicion they held about the Prime Minister’s character. The A$1.2 billion loan from the Swiss UBS bank, which enabled the PNG government to buy shares in Oil Search Ltd, was, in the words of PNG’s Ombudsman Commission, “highly inappropriate”. It was undertaken in the face of contrary advice from PNG’s then Treasurer, Don Polye, whom O’Neill sacked.

Anti-O’Neill sentiment over the years failed to garner much support from the Members of PNG’s National Parliament. Until very recently, O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (PNC) and its coalition partners dominated the House. Crucially, and mostly driven by the UBS revelations, this has now changed.

The prime minister is becoming increasingly isolated as more parliamentarians defect from the O’Neill party to join the disparate collection of MPs who are gathering at one of Port Moresby’s luxury hotels. While some social media commentators reckon that his recent “resignation” may be merely a ploy, it is looking like the game might be up for Peter O’Neill – unless through the cunning and political adeptness he is known for, he is still able to turn the tables on his political enemies.

At the time of writing, O’Neill is pursuing action in the PNG Supreme Court over the legality of a “vote of no confidence” in his government.

Read more: Deep sea mining threatens indigenous culture in Papua New Guinea

Leadership isn’t the only crisis facing PNG

There is a crisis in PNG at the moment. Indeed, there are several. The country is suffering from significant health issues, ranging from the reappearance of TB and polio to the inadequacy of its pharmaceutical and medical supplies.

In October, the people of Bougainville may vote to secede from the rest of the country, of which they have been part since 1975.

The billions of kina spent on development has largely been confined to the cities, and most Papua New Guineans have experienced little change in their living standards over the past four decades.

These are the real challenges facing PNG, and the current leadership crisis in Port Moresby might – or, as some fear, might not – produce a meaningful response to them.

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Brime Olewale to this story.

– ref. Crisis? What crisis? A new prime minister in PNG might not signal meaningful change for its citizens – http://theconversation.com/crisis-what-crisis-a-new-prime-minister-in-png-might-not-signal-meaningful-change-for-its-citizens-117841

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

[I] walk this route to the train station. I often get cat-called whilst walking to the train. It’s also very poorly lit at night. (Female, age 27)

In 2019, The Australia We Want report noted that at least half of Australian women do not feel safe walking alone at night. This is unsurprising given the prevalence of sexual harassment and gender violence women manage when moving through cities every day. Women’s avoidance of areas of the city creates a complex internal geography of exclusion zones and “take extreme care” zones – all in the hope that this vigilance will keep them out of harm’s way.

Protecting women from the violence committed by some men is a priority. So too is recognising that most cities are gender-blind and disregard women’s needs and experiences.

Read more: Crowd-mapping gender equality – a powerful tool for shaping a better city launches in Melbourne

We need to understand the patterns that exclude women from areas of cities and not defer to the usual responses – brighter lighting, more CCTV cameras and more authority figures. In fact, our research into unsafe “hotspots” has found young women’s perceptions of urban safety do not correlate with the most brightly lit spaces.

We know that creating safer cities for women requires one fundamental shift: that we listen to women’s voices. We need to develop urban strategies and planning policies that draw on women’s experience and expertise as users of city spaces.

I pass through here twice a day to get to work and am routinely verbally abused by men. I feel unsafe and would never go through here at night. I wish the police or government would listen to women’s stories and do something about this place. (Female, age 25)

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

What does the research tell us?

Plan International, the Monash University XYX Lab and ARUP lighting researchers have pooled their expertise to drill down into the stories of young women and analyse the relationship between urban lighting and women’s perceptions of safety.

The research struck on some compelling correlations between light levels and unsafe places. Analysing over 80 of the most unsafe “hotspots” identified by women in Melbourne, the research found that high illuminance – or very bright and overlit spaces – does not correlate with young women’s perceptions of urban safety.

This is important information as planners often light spaces to a high “P” Category (a measure used in urban place-making guidelines) of lighting. It’s assumed this will reduce the risk of crime and increase the feeling of safety.

But our research shows that designing lighting that is positive for women’s urban experience requires more nuance. The findings show that sites with higher light levels are more likely to be perceived as unsafe sites – the average light level across these sites was twice what was measured across safe sites. This is a finding with the potential to radically change a city’s approach to lighting for safety.

Never felt safe walking in this area, even if I am not alone. The lighting is terrible and the design of the walkways leaves a lot of spots hidden from view. (Female, age 19)

This area feels so dodgy. The light level means you can’t see who is approaching you. (Female, age 39)

The analysis showed that consistent and layered lighting – where there are multiple light sources and where surfaces with different reflective values are taken into consideration – makes women feel most safe. This kind of lighting reduces the “floodlit effect”, the sharp drop-off of light beyond the path, and the potential for glare and contrast to blind and disorientate.

The emphasis on LED lights for their energy efficiency is unquestioned. But in urban lighting they are mostly a higher colour temperature such as 4000K “cool white” and above. This new research challenges the effects of this approach.

ARUP’s research shows the human visual spectrum reacts better to warm light, and the data from young women showed how sensitive they are to cool white light with regard to feeling safe in cities. Spaces with warmer colour temperatures are perceived as safer places.

Looking deeper into the quality of light in our cities, the majority of bad areas had a very large range of colour rendering. The lowest colour rendering came from sodium luminaires that make everything look overly yellow. Women preferred a high-quality LED light that enabled them to distinguish shapes and colour, helping to create a sense of safety.

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

What does this mean for urban design?

More broadly, the research challenged the assumptions that urban lighting design relies on in general, and the effect it has on the character of our cities at night.

At present, illuminance (the measure of light falling on a surface, or Lux) is the only unit of measurement required to comply with the P Categories of the Australian Standards. Based on the results, it appears other metrics such as luminance (light bouncing off a surface and hitting the observer’s eye) should be considered too. This will ensure the context of material finishes and surface intensity is taken into account for how the eye perceives space.

Through research such as this, we have the knowledge, data and technology to engage women in trialling new ways of co-designing better outcomes for cities after dark. We can use considered urban design as a tool for positive change.

This article was co-authored by ARUP VIC/SA lighting leader Tim Hunt. The site analysis was led by ARUP lighting designer Hoa Yang.

– ref. More lighting alone does not create safer cities. Look at what research with young women tells us – http://theconversation.com/more-lighting-alone-does-not-create-safer-cities-look-at-what-research-with-young-women-tells-us-113359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bryoni Trezise, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, UNSW

Review: Prima Facie, Griffin Theatre Company

Suzie Miller’s one-woman play Prima Facie is an unsparing study of the Australian legal system’s treatment of sexual assault cases. The play, which opened to standing ovation, concludes with a simple but compelling statement – spoken by the character Tessa, played by Sheridan Harbridge – “something has to change”.

This is not a plea, and it is more forceful than a call-to-arms. It is a voice of steely reckoning that contains within its very timbre the rage of being a woman. The voice not only carries the rage – its strength comes from having been conditioned by it.

Tessa is a criminal defence barrister who is proudly at the top of her game, having conquered class and gender barriers to get there. She enjoys the pace of the kill and plays expertly on witness vulnerabilities, with sleek mastery of the unemotional palette needed to win.

In the words of 1980s feminist playwright Caryl Churchill, Tessa is a “top girl”, a career woman who believes she has accessed patriarchal power by reaching the higher echelons of her field.

Then Tessa is raped by a colleague. Her journey is one from enabler of the legal system to its victim. It shows how rape ruptures not only body and psyche, but the narrative that binds them together. Yet the legal system expects coherence. Where rape ruptures sense of self, the legal system demands that a witness speak from a place of reasoned agency.

In the age of #MeToo, Prima Facie puts on the record that women’s experiences of assault have been silenced for as long as women have been abused by men and systems of power. It offers similar insight into the legal system to Queensland author Bri Lee’s award-winning 2018 memoir, Eggshell Skull.

The play states the problem plainly:

A woman’s experience of sexual assault / does not fit the male-defined system of truth. So it cannot be truth / and therefore there cannot be justice.

Miller’s text won last year’s prestigious Griffin Award for an outstanding play or play or performance text that displays an authentic, inventive and contemporary Australian voice. It is easy to see why. It is punchy, leaving almost no time for pause – witty and despair-making in equal measure.

Harbridge is dynamic as she moves Tessa through varying social vernaculars (such as when she imitates her Mum) and into a range of emotional tempos, activating every angle of an increasingly suffocating stage. Barring one exit, Tessa spends 100 minutes on a raised platform that feels much more confining than the usually intimate space of Sydney’s Stables Theatre. Most often starkly lit, and before an audience who plays quasi-theatrical jury, Harbridge does not miss a beat.

Sound is used only occasionally, with the depth of an inner eardrum/heart beat. Sparing projections mark the shifts in time as well as the legalese that Tessa traverses. The understated elegance of these elements allow the physical detail to mould the weight of the story: the rhythmic nuances of Miller’s script, their expression through Harbridge’s Tessa, and their unflinching, empathic direction by Lee Lewis.

This production seems to make clear that beyond the law, it is female labour – in myriad guises – which tries to change the present in view of its history.

Structurally, the play performs a process of finding voice. Narratively, this is conveyed as Tessa’s coming to terms with her own experience – a conflict that she describes as landing between “legal truth” and autobiographical truth. Beyond this particular story, the process of finding voice becomes a comment on the theatrical form itself. Where legal avenues fall short, theatre can testify, the play seems to declare – only it does so differently, and for different ends.

In her program notes, Miller draws her background as a lawyer into focus, explaining that the work “has been playing out in [her] mind since [her] law school days”. The implication here is that the inadequacies of the legal system in part led Miller to carve new ways of making justice happen. In the play, Tessa finds her voice, explaining, “it’s a different voice, but I keep talking”. Perhaps this is a subtle nod to Miller’s own trajectory into the realm of theatre-as-tribunal.

Prima Facie shows how rape becomes nullified by the legal system, which fails to recognise the ways in which this form of violence shatters. Prima Facie’s strength is that it fashions itself out of the shards of this shattering. And this is why it is so compelling and so resonant.

Prima Facie is on at SBW Stables Theatre in Sydney until June 22.

– ref. In Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, theatre finds a voice of reckoning on sexual assault and the law – http://theconversation.com/in-suzie-millers-prima-facie-theatre-finds-a-voice-of-reckoning-on-sexual-assault-and-the-law-117588

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Mortlock, Senior Risk Scientist, Risk Frontiers, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University

Most major airports in Australia are located on reclaimed swamps, sitting only a few metres above the present day sea level. And the risk of sea level rise from climate change poses a greater threat to our airports than we’re prepared for.

In fact, some of the top climate scientists now believe global sea-level rise of over two metres by 2100 is likely under our current trajectory of high carbon emissions.

Read more: Torres Strait Islanders ask UN to hold Australia to account on climate ‘human rights abuses’

This makes Cairns (less than 3m above sea level), Sydney and Brisbane (under 4m), and Townsville and Hobart (both around under 5m) airports among the most vulnerable.

In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has recommended that global mean sea level rise of up to 2.7 metres this century should be considered in planning for coastal infrastructure.

This is two to three times greater than the upper limit of recommended sea level rise projections applied in Australia.

But generally, the amount of sea level rise we can expect over the coming century is deeply uncertain. This is because ice sheet retreat rates from global warming are unpredictable.

Read more: Climate change forced these Fijian communities to move – and with 80 more at risk, here’s what they learned

Given the significant disruption cost and deep uncertainty associated with the timing of sea level rise, we must adopt a risk-based approach which considers extreme sea level rise scenarios as part of coastal infrastructure planning.

Are we prepared?

As polar ocean waters warm, they can cause glaciers to melt from beneath, leading to more icebergs breaking off into the ocean and then a rapid rise in global sea level. This has happened multiple times in the Earth’s past and, on some occasions, in a matter of decades.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts sea level rise projections for Australia somewhere between 50 to 90 centimetres by 2090, relative to the average sea level measured between 1986 to 2005. But the emerging science indicates this may now be an underestimate.

Some studies suggest if substantive glacial basins of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to collapse, it could contribute at least a further two metres to global sea levels.

Most Australian airports have conducted risk assessments for the IPCC projections.

In fact, there is no state-level policy that considers extreme sea level rise for the most critical infrastructure, even though it is possible sea levels could exceed those recommended by the IPCC within the coming century.

Read more: Young people won’t accept inaction on climate change, and they’ll be voting in droves

And for airports, the planning implications are stark when you compare the current projection of less than a metre of sea level rise and the potential of at least a two metre rise later this century.

Taking the most low-lying major airports in Australia as an example, our modelling suggests a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would see their near complete inundation – without any adaptation in place.

For more elevated locations, coastal infrastructure may still be inoperable more frequently when the combined effect of storm surges, waves, elevated groundwater or river flooding are considered.

A $200 billion problem

Our airports and other forms of infrastructure near the coastline are critical to the Australian economy. The aviation industry has an estimated annual revenue of over A$43 billion, adding around A$16 billion to the economy in 2017.

While there are many uncertainties around the future cost of sea-level rise, a study by the Climate Council suggests over a metre sea level rise would put more than A$200 billion worth of Australian infrastructure at risk.

It is difficult to assign a probability and time-frame to ice sheet collapse, but scientific estimates are reducing that time frame to a century rather than a millennium.

Read more: Climate change: sea level rise could displace millions of people within two generations

Uncertainty generally comes with a cost, so proactive planning would make economic sense.

Adapting our most critical coastal assets while sea levels rapidly rise is not an option – mitigation infrastructure could take decades to construct and may be prohibitively expensive.

Given the deep uncertainties associated with the timing of ice-sheet collapse, we suggest airport and other critical coastal infrastructure is subjected to risk analysis for a two to three metre sea level rise.

– ref. Rising seas threaten Australia’s major airports – and it may be happening faster than we think – http://theconversation.com/rising-seas-threaten-australias-major-airports-and-it-may-be-happening-faster-than-we-think-115374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glenn Hyndes, Professor in Coastal Ecology, Edith Cowan University

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

How do sea creatures stand the salt? – Marshall, age 9, Murrumbeena.

Everything in our bodies is made of cells. And these cells need chemicals, such as salt, in and around them to work properly. The chemical balance needs to be just right.

If we don’t get enough salt, a lot of our cells won’t work. But too much salt? That’s also a problem.

Drinking enough fresh water will help dilute the salt in our bodies. And depending on what and how much we eat and drink, our kidneys will remove excess salt and put it in our urine so we can get rid of it.

However, our kidneys can only process small amounts of salt. If we drank a lot of salty seawater, we’d feel sick and could even die.

Sea animals and sea salt

Animals that live in the sea cope with seawater in different ways, depending on how much salt their bodies can withstand.

Some animals, such as ghost shrimps, can take in large amounts of salt and will maintain a balance similar to the water around them.

They can do that even when they are in water that is saltier than seawater.

Animals that do this are known as “osmoconformers”, and the cells in their bodies can withstand big changes in salt concentrations.

They don’t necessarily drink seawater the way we do, but they can suck water and salt through their skin via processes called osmosis and diffusion.

Many invertebrates (animals without backbones, such as jellyfish) survive in salty water like this. They can cope with a level of saltiness that would be dangerous for us.

However, even these animals have their limits. And if the salt concentrations in their bodies get too high, they need to move to less salty water or they will die.

Read more: Curious Kids: What sea creature can attack and win over a blue whale?

Fish and some invertebrates such as some sea snails need to maintain salt concentrations that are less than seawater.

Fish tend to have concentrations that are about a third of that of seawater. They have developed ways to manage the amount of salt in their bodies and are known as “osmoregulators”.

When a fish drinks sea water, its kidneys (like ours) removes excess salt and gets rid of it via their urine. They can also get rid of salt via their gills, and even their skin.

But different fish have different limits. Some saltwater species, if they are trapped in more salty water, will die.

Others can live quite happily in saltier water, but even these will die if they get trapped in really salty water.

Freshwater fish have a different problem

Fish that live in freshwater have the opposite problem. Their bodies have higher levels of salt compared to the water that surrounds them. These fish needed to evolve a way to stop the salt leaking out of their bodies and into the water.

They do this by eating foods that have salt in them and drinking lots of water and keeping as much salt as they can in their bodies.

They also actively absorb a small amount of salt from the surrounding water through the gills and skin. If you move these freshwater fish into the ocean, however, they would get very sick and die.

Seabirds and turtles

Seabirds and turtles also need to remove salt from their bodies, but they have what we call “glands” to help.

Glands are special organs in their heads that help remove the salt. If you look at seabirds closely, they dribble water out of their beak nostrils. This water is very salty.

Turtles remove the excess salt from the eyes, which is why they sometimes look like they are crying.

And seabirds and turtles also have kidneys that remove salt in the same way that fish do.

So, the reason marine animals don’t get sick when they drink seawater is because the species have lived in marine water for a very long time and are adapted to living in that environment.

It comes down to what levels our bodies have evolved to cope with.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do you blink when there is a sudden loud noise close by?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: how do sea creatures drink sea water and not get sick? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-sea-creatures-drink-sea-water-and-not-get-sick-110979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Craig, Professor University of Sydney and University of NSW Paediatric Endocrinologist, Children’s Hospital at Westmead, UNSW

Diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia. At least 1.2 million Australians live with diabetes, and about 10% of them have type 1 diabetes.

Diabetes sees the body become resistant to the effects of insulin, or lose its ability to produce insulin from the pancreas. Insulin keeps the body’s blood glucose levels, or “blood sugar”, within a healthy range. Everyone with type 1 diabetes, and some people with type 2 diabetes, will need to self-administer regular insulin injections.

People with diabetes, particularly type 1, must continually monitor their blood glucose levels to manage their condition. Over the years, a number of different innovations have allowed people to do this.

The most traditional method is finger prick testing, which requires a person to prick their finger to draw a drop of blood. They test the blood on a strip that’s inserted into a blood glucose testing device, and must do this several times a day. This technique can be painful and disruptive.

But now we have a new and exciting tool that can help ease this burden for people living with type 1 diabetes. It’s called the flash glucose monitoring system.

Read more: Between health and faith: managing type 2 diabetes during Ramadan

What is it?

Flash glucose monitoring was first introduced in Europe in 2014, and has been available in Australia since 2016.

This glucose monitoring system involves a small, water-resistant sensor applied to the back of the upper arm. The technology automatically measures and continuously stores tissue glucose levels 24 hours a day. The patch only needs to be changed once every two weeks.

The devices are suitable for adults and children over the age of four who have diabetes that requires insulin. This includes the 120,000 people living with type 1 diabetes and a sizeable portion of people living with type 2 diabetes.

To gain a reading, a reader or compatible smartphone is simply scanned over the sensor for one second. The reader or the smartphone then displays the current glucose reading, a glucose trend arrow (indicating whether a person’s blood sugar has gone up or down) and a chart showing glucose levels over the previous eight hours.

What are the benefits?

Flash glucose monitoring gives people living with diabetes a chance to see the full picture of their glucose levels that is not possible with traditional blood glucose test strips.

Patients also have the option to share their readings with their health-care providers, giving them deeper insights to make more informed treatment decisions.

One of the most beneficial things is that it is discreet and allows people living with diabetes to keep an active lifestyle while maintaining their blood glucose levels within safe ranges.

Read more: How Australians Die: cause #5 – diabetes

Global data suggests users of flash glucose monitoring check their glucose levels on average 12 times per day, which is considerably more than the number of finger prick tests most people are doing.

More scans give people a stronger awareness of their blood glucose highs, lows and trends, resulting in better overall blood glucose control and a lower risk of recording a severely low blood glucose level.

This technology needs to be more accessible

Outgoing British PM Theresa May has been seen wearing a flash glucose monitoring device. Closer to home, AFL footballer Paddy McCartin has brought awareness to diabetes by wearing his on the football field.

But attaining subsidised flash glucose monitoring devices remains a challenge for everyday Australians. People have to pay for it out of pocket, which adds up to approximately A$2,400 a year.

And this cost is only a fraction of the financial burden a person with diabetes has to face. Other expenses can include maintaining their insulin pump, and appointments with endocrinologists, diabetes educators, optometrists, podiatrists, psychologists and general practitioners.

Right now, flash glucose monitoring is not on the National Diabetes Services Scheme product list, which means it’s not subsidised by the government. While traditional forms of blood glucose monitoring are subsidised, people who would benefit from flash glucose monitoring are largely not able to access it.

Flash glucose monitoring was supposed to be subsidised from March 1 2019 for select groups, such as people under 21, expectant mothers and breastfeeding women. But nothing has come of it. According to the Department of Health, this is due to ongoing price negotiations.

Funding flash glucose monitoring devices has been seen as a priority in other parts of the world. It’s currently subsidised in more than 30 countries, including Spain, Ireland and Greece.

Diabetes Australia supports the subsidy of this technology to make it more accessible for people with diabetes.

Read more: Explainer: what is diabetes?

The bigger picture

If patients don’t properly manage their diabetes, they risk heart disease, kidney failure, loss of vision and amputations. All of these complications require extensive health investments, but are avoidable with the right resources.

So subsidising a technology that’s going to help more people better manage their diabetes is worthwhile not just for the people that will see positive impacts in their day-to-day lives. This is an important investment on a broader scale.

– ref. Flash glucose monitoring: the little patches that can make managing diabetes a whole lot easier – http://theconversation.com/flash-glucose-monitoring-the-little-patches-that-can-make-managing-diabetes-a-whole-lot-easier-117249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Broadbent, Associate Professor in Dental Public Health, University of Otago

In New Zealand, wealth determines dental health. Inequalities in untreated tooth decay are wider in New Zealand than in Australia, Canada or the United States.

The latest New Zealand Health Survey, run annually by the Ministry of Health, reported that cost prevents an estimated 15% of New Zealand adults (just over half a million) from seeing a GP about a medical problem and nearly 7% (around a quarter million) from filling a prescription. For dentistry, cost stopped 44% of adults (around 1.6 million) from accessing care. In the young adult age group, this was over half the population.

New Zealand’s dental health-care system needs change. The government is currently reviewing the health and disability system, and all dental public health specialists in New Zealand (myself included) made a joint submission to that review. We see adult dental health care as a neglected health policy issue and here, I summarise how I see our ideas for improving the system.

Read more: Two million Aussies delay or don’t go to the dentist – here’s how we can fix that

The problems

The risk for dental problems is determined in early childhood and can be intergenerational. Those born into disadvantaged families go on to have greater rates of tooth decay as adults.

Young adulthood is when incomes are often at their lowest, but untreated dental decay is at its highest. In New Zealand, dental care for children is free, but the use of dental services declines sharply after the age of 18, when free access ceases. This affects oral health and sets the stage for losing teeth as an adult.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best approach to reducing inequalities is to educate the public, but that doesn’t work. To address social inequalities, we need to address the underlying structural issues and ensure timely access to quality dental care. In dentistry, inequalities in the delivery of dental care services are greater than inequalities in the disease itself. There is a definite gradient in the rate of tooth decay for those from disadvantaged childhood situations, but it is much greater for losing teeth than for decay.

Read more: Why some kids are more prone to dental decay

Public or private?

Some argue dentistry is changing from being a health profession to a simple commercial enterprise. People on low incomes miss out while some dentists are busy meeting targets for “high value work”. Dentists have to turn a profit to stay in business, so most dental practices are concentrated in well-off areas with better oral health.

The company with the biggest market share (15% dental practices in New Zealand), is squarely focused on the middle to high end dental market. It has described New Zealand’s dental health care sector as a “lucrative market” for investment.

On the other hand, the Minister of Health David Clark recently said:

There is widespread unmet need for dental care among adults in New Zealand.

Is “widespread unmet need” an opportunity for profit? Or is it a public health problem for the nation to grapple with?

The government spends around NZ$16 billion annually on health, but private expenditure for general health problems is estimated at just one-fifth of total expenditure. On the other hand, the government currently spends around a quarter of a billion dollars a year on dental care, but New Zealanders spend upwards of five times that amount in private dental health care. Estimates of the annual spend in the New Zealand private dental market range from NZ$0.8 billion to NZ$1.8 billion, reflecting real uncertainty about what actually goes on.

The solutions

New Zealand’s dental care system demonstrates why we can’t rely on market forces to equitably distribute population health services. The cost of introducing universal coverage for dental care would be high, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the idea, or variations of it. People certainly have a taste for free dental care.

We should start with prevention. Preventing dental problems isn’t just about brushing teeth and water fluoridation. Just as Scotland has done successfully, New Zealand needs to increase our spend on preventive dental care to save on the high costs of dental interventions. Many people miss out on preventive dental care and population-level prevention represents a very small component of the public dental health care budget.

Cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity have many of the same causes as dental diseases. Stricter limits on the marketing and sale of sugary drinks and lollies, better regulation of “hidden sugars”, and continued efforts for tobacco control would have benefits beyond dental health. If publicly funded dental services are to be expanded, then the government should seriously consider balancing the costs by applying a health tax at the point of purchase of products that cause oral disease.

Dentistry is poorly integrated with other areas of health care. Neither is it funded like other areas of health care, and this needs to change. Dental surgery is expensive, just like any form of surgery. Accessible dental health care can’t happen without funding.

Our first steps towards the goal that all New Zealanders should be able to access affordable comprehensive dental care should be population-level prevention and ensuring that disadvantaged groups can access emergency dental care.

– ref. High cost means more than half of NZ’s young adults don’t access dental care – http://theconversation.com/high-cost-means-more-than-half-of-nzs-young-adults-dont-access-dental-care-117494

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cathal D. O’Connell, Researcher and Centre Manager, BioFab3D (St Vincent’s Hospital), University of Melbourne

I work in the field of bioprinting, where the aim is to build biological tissues by printing living cells into 3D structures.

Last month I found my Facebook news feed plastered with an amazing story about “the first 3D printed heart using a patient’s own cells”. A video showed a beautiful, healthy-looking heart apparently materialising inside a vat of pinkish liquid.

Big news. According to an impact tracking algorithm, the story has been picked up by 145 news outlets, tweeted 2,390 times to 3.8 million followers (as of May 27, 2019). Articles on Facebook have at least 13,000 shares, and videos about the story have been viewed well over 3 million times.

Unfortunately, many of these media reports don’t match up well with the original science.

Over-reporting of medical science is unethical, and occasionally dangerous. It’s a problem all of us who work in the creation and telling of science can act to fix.

Read more: Titanium is the perfect metal to make replacement human body parts

How they printed a ‘heart’

In the original printed “heart” scientific paper, Isreali scientists describe how they built on their own earlier work on bio-inks (printable materials and cells) to create 3D structures in the laboratory. The main focus was to print a square “patch” of heart cells and blood-vessels using a “personalised” bio-ink; one where all of the cells and materials came from a particular patient. This is important because bio-inks typically contain some synthetic or animal-derived materials.

As a final flourish the team also printed the cells into a thumbnail-sized, heart shape. The text of the original paper clearly states the printed heart-shaped structure is not a real heart, and lacks most of the features required to make a heart work. But, along with those striking visuals, this is the aspect of the work that helped the paper become such a media hit.

This might sound like the envious griping of a rival scientist. However, I’m not criticising the science. This is impressive work – the cardiac patches may indeed turn out be an important development in the field.

I’m more worried about media reports giving the impression that our field of research is far more advanced than it is.

When medical research is overplayed

Sensationalism is rife in science journalism. And the 3D bioprinting field is interesting in particular, as it is currently fuelled by a “perfect storm” of hype: it builds on the wider buzz around 3D printing, is deceptively easy to understand, and blends ideas of science fiction with potential impact in real health outcomes.

There are other recent examples of sensationalised reporting in the bioprinting field.

For example, Wake Forest University had to issue a clarification notice following reports its scientist Anthony Atala had “printed” a human kidney live on stage

In December 2015, news articles announced that a 14-year old boy had become the first human patient to be implanted with a “3D printed nose”. In reality, 3D printing was only used to make a template to help the surgeon piece together pieces of donor cartilage into the correct shape.

We’re left with the impression that 3D bioprinting is a mature, clinically available technology, when currently it is not.

Read more: Edible seaweed can be used to grow blood vessels in the body

What’s the harm in a bit of hype?

There are numerous ethical downsides linked with over-enthusiastic portrayals of bioprinting in the media.

The problem is, mass media is one of the most important sources of health and medical information for the general public, especially prospective patients.

Positive portrayals of a novel technology in the media can affect patient consent to undergo treatment and can even prompt prospective participants to request enrolment in clinical trials.

I’ve seen this myself. Whenever our own research is reported, particularly on television, the next morning I get phonecalls from people who want to sign up for a particular treatment. On TV the message is rarely communicated that we are still at an experimental stage, with human trials still years away.

In the worst case, the buzz around new technology can provide an opportunity for unscrupulous charlatans, such as the cosmetic surgeon who reportedly sold an unapproved stem-cell technology in Beverley Hills. One patient ended up with fragments of bone in her eyelid.

Media reports of infamous thoracic surgeon Paolo Macchiarini’s implantation of a “synthetic trachea” arguably provided him a platform to accelerate his research program. Seven of the nine patients who received one of his synthetic trachea transplants have since died.

Read more: Whose hearts, livers and lungs are transplanted in China? Origins must be clear in human organ research

An anatomy of hype

Fed by enthusiastic reporting, technologies tend to follow a pattern called the Gartner Hype Cycle: first buoyed to an unsustainable “peak of inflated expectations” before falling to the “trough of disillusionment”.

The phenomenon can bring benefits to many players in the industry of science. So how can we fix the situation?

The exaggerated claims around particular stories tend to build upon one another in a snowball effect. This means all of those involved in creating and sharing the stories of science can step up: scientists, journals, universities and journalists.

Read more: Science journalism is in Australia’s interest, but needs support to thrive

Salesmanship has become an indispensable skill for modern scientists – really, every grant application is a sales pitch. Indeed academic science as a whole seems to be tending toward ever more bluster.

In published papers the use of positive terms such as “innovative,” “unprecedented” and “groundbreaking” have increased by thousands of percent over the past four decades. Scientists need to be wary of this trend and keep themselves in check when speaking to the media – especially in cases where their words will be taken very seriously by prospective patients and patient advocacy groups.

Journals and article reviewers can take responsibility for ensuring they publish top quality science, and also that the language in an article is accurate and not overblown. This includes the article title, which is sometimes the only part of an article journalists and general readers can see.

Language choices are also vital in materials coming out of university press offices.

Some reporters take press releases at face value, regurgitating lines or paragraphs verbatim. Non-specialist science reporters may not understand a field in enough detail to question this interpretation, or they don’t invest time in placing a new announcement in a broader context. Asking other experts for their views on a new piece of research is vital in science reporting.

A risky symbiosis

A symbiosis has evolved between scientists and the media: scientists need the media to bolster their record of exposure and “impact” on the next grant application. The media needs scientists for those shareable (and all too rare) positive, feelgood stories.

There is a stark mismatch between the elements required of a modern news story (novelty, impact), and the reality of medical research (slow, meticulous, often incremental). This can result in a distorted depiction of medical research.

When these pressures push the story too far, they can end up spinning a fairytale. And with medical research in particular, fairytales can be dangerous.

– ref. Misreporting the science of lab-made organs is unethical, even dangerous – http://theconversation.com/misreporting-the-science-of-lab-made-organs-is-unethical-even-dangerous-116987

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sung-Young Kim, Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics & International Relations, Macquarie University

From an appalling environmental scorecard 20 years ago, China has pioneered a “global green shift” towards renewable energy and recycling. The country’s drive to dominate renewables manufacturing benefits both China and the world, by sending technology prices plummeting.

Many have attributed this success to China’s authoritarian political regime.

Unlike a democracy, this line of reasoning goes, the state can override special interest groups or opposition parties to impose “authoritarian environmentalism”. This allows a rapid and encompassing response to severe environmental threats.

We take a different view. As the chief investigators on an Australia Research Council Discovery Project examining East Asia’s clean energy shift, we are examining why and how some East Asian countries – including China – are pursuing ambitious renewable energy transformations, and what Australia might learn from these countries’ experiences.

We argue China’s success in greening and growing its economy is not because, but in spite of, its authoritarian government.

Read more: What we can learn from China’s fight against environmental ruin

Not that different

China’s approach to greening shares much in common with democratic countries such as Germany, South Korea and Taiwan. All have ambitious programs to rapidly build domestic clean energy industries and “green” their power generation.

As such, our project emphasises the link between China’s green shift and what we call “developmental environmentalism”.

Developmental environmentalism refers to a state approaching greening as an opportunity to promote national techno-economic competitiveness. It helps explain both the drivers of the green shift and the means of its execution.

The “means” are less about authoritarianism and more about the state’s capacity to induce the private sector into a cooperative relationship.

This type of negotiated relationship between the state and industry is the exact opposite of authoritarianism, which pursues its goals irrespective of the wishes of the private sector. Indeed, the pages of history tell us authoritarian leaders are far more likely to misuse their concentrated economic power, resulting in developmental failure.

Democratic successes

China is not alone in its green shift. In fact, some of the world’s most ambitious national greening programs have sprung to life in democratic settings.

Germany

The clearest example is Germany and its widely admired Energiewende (“energy transition”). Germany took an early lead in the development of solar devices through government-sponsored industrial programs.

Then in 2011, in the wake of the Fukishima nuclear disaster, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the shutdown of Germany’s nuclear power stations.

Countries around the world are now emulating Germany’s Energiewende.

South Korea

In one of East Asia’s most vibrant democracies, South Korea, the election of President Lee Myung-bak in 2008 signalled a shift from intensive fossil-fuel development to “low-carbon, green growth”.

Lee’s focus was on greening the economy by investing in renewables and related infrastructure such as smart grids. His successor in 2013, President Park Geun-hye, continued this approach.

Finally, after President Moon Jae-in swept into power in 2017, South Korea committed to scaling down its use of nuclear energy.

Taiwan

Taiwan provides another fascinating example of a proudly democratic country that has followed in Germany’s footsteps. National efforts to establish a renewables industry began in 2009 under President Ma Ying-jeou. These initiatives targeted various clean energy industries for promotion, including generating solar and wind facilities and batteries.

However, just like Korea, the country’s over-reliance on nuclear energy (facilitated by a state-owned monopoly in the power sector) prevented the growth of a market for renewables.

A breakthrough in the country’s highly contentious debate over nuclear energy came with the election of President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, who committed to the complete shutdown of nuclear reactors in the country.

Developmental environmentalism in action

These examples provide a clue that China’s ability to green its economy stems from something other than its authoritarian political system. We argue China’s success in greening stems from developmental environmentalism in action.

This does not simply mean a state that is “pro-development” and “pro-environment”. Rather, policymakers see greening the economy as chance to gain a competitive edge over other countries. The pursuit of strategic industry development goals involves nurturing – not displacing, as would occur in an authoritarian setting – “governed interdependence” with the private sector.

Best depicted by the Korean example, developmental environmentalism as a policy initially emerged as a response to threats to national industrial competitiveness. These included acute dependence on fossil-fuel imports, which are highly volatile, and global competitive pressures in the race to gain an early lead in the green economy.

Developmental environmentalism is also a strategic response to domestic challenges, such as the need to drive new sources of economic growth.

Lessons for Australia

If an authoritarian government provides little to no advantage for coordinating a green shift, what lessons might these countries have for Australian policymakers?

The key lesson is it’s not about designing the perfect constellation of policies or about pouring more money into entire industries.

Developmental environmentalism involves the political will to take big risks. Policymakers must target technologies – or segments of the economy – where government support could build national competitiveness.

Of course, this means creating a strategic, long-term approach to industry development, coordinated with the private sector.

Despite political gridlock, Australia is well placed to establish a foothold in the rapidly growing clean energy industry.

As the nation’s leaders engage in a fruitless debate over building new coal-fired power stations, Australian companies with world-class strengths in clean energies are emerging. Nowhere is this growing confidence more evident than in the blossoming of companies that have commercially ready smart microgrid and energy-storage solutions.

It would be a great shame – if not a national tragedy – if these companies were allowed to be picked off one by one by foreign multinational enterprises. This is the sad and familiar story of Australian manufacturing: highly innovative companies – a testament to our wealth of knowledge – are bought out, intellectual property rights absorbed, and manufacturing eventually outsourced. Often, shells of our prized national assets (typically the marketing and sales divisions) are all that remain.

Read more: Wake up Australia, and take a lesson on solar from Korea

Yet, in the absence of a coordinated national strategy that focuses on building a national value chain or ecosystem of upstream and downstream players – as the Koreans and Taiwanese have done in smart microgrids – this future appears all but settled.

– ref. China succeeds in greening its economy not because, but in spite of, its authoritarian government – http://theconversation.com/china-succeeds-in-greening-its-economy-not-because-but-in-spite-of-its-authoritarian-government-115568

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Keddie, Professor, Education, Deakin University

Media reports of findings from the latest National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey caused a stir in recent days, with some highlighting the importance of education programs to teach young people about gender-based violence.

The survey of young people, aged 16-24, revealed some concerning findings. Nearly one-quarter of respondents agreed that women tend to exaggerate the problem of male violence. One in seven said women often make false allegations of sexual assault. One in eight weren’t aware non-consensual sex in marriage is a criminal offence.

But the 2017 survey also showed positive shifts in young people’s understanding of family violence compared to the survey in 2013. Young people showed an increase in their understanding of the different forms of violence against women and more respondents endorsed gender equality.

Schools play a significant role in educating young people about gender-based violence and helping change the underlying attitudes that lead to it.

The Victorian government began a rollout of respectful relationships education in primary and secondary schools in 2016. This is a whole-of-school program that aims not only to develop students’ gender awareness and respect but also to transform school cultures to be more gender-inclusive.

An evaluation of the program in secondary schools found positive results. One principal told researchers:

There were male teachers in positions of authority [who] used aggression as their method to get what they wanted. That just became unacceptable.

History of gender-based violence education

Schools have long played a significant role in teaching students respect and equity. Social and moral learning is embedded in the Melbourne Declaration, a 2008 document that sets out the agreed national goals of schooling. These values are also embedded in national and state curricula.

More than 25 years ago, the federal education department was commissioned to develop a position on gender-based violence education. This led to the development of “No Fear” – a teaching resource and whole-of-school approach to addressing the attitudes and behaviours that underpin gender-based violence.

Read more: Why education about gender and sexuality does belong in the classroom

Researchers in the mid-1990s highlighted the high levels of sexual harassment in schools, including early childhood settings. Others pointed to the broader gender equity and structural inequalities that impact girls’ options after leaving school.

All of this led to a high visibility and resourcing of gender (and other) equity reforms across Australian schools. By the late 1990s, however, anti-feminist backlash and government funding cuts led to a policy vacuum in this space.

Respectful relationships education

Governments have recently renewed efforts to address gender-based violence in schools through what is now referred to as respectful relationships education.

This kind of education is included in the Australian Curriculum but not all state and territory governments have been proactive in making it mandatory. Victoria’s 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence recommended respectful relationships education be mandatory in every school from prep to Year 12.

The program is now being rolled out in more than 1,000 government, Catholic and independent schools in Victoria.

Read more: Respectful relationships education isn’t about activating a gender war

Respectful relationships education seeks to prevent violence before it occurs. This is fostered through supporting schools to challenge and find alternatives to the rigid gender roles that support gender inequality and lead to violence against women. It encourages schools to examine gender in terms of:

• staffing (is there gender disparity in leadership positions, teaching responsibilities and extracurricular activities?)
• school culture (does the school have an inclusive and welcoming climate?)
• professional learning (are teachers provided with adequate and ongoing support to teach about gender, identity, power and violence?)
• support (are schools well-equipped to deal with disclosures of violence?)
• teaching and learning (how do curriculum and pedagogy foster students’ critical awareness of gender, power, identity and violence?)
• community connections (how are schools working with their broader community, including families, local services and sporting clubs, to challenge rigid gender norms?).

Research conducted by the charity OurWatch and Deakin and Swinburne universities has highlighted the potential of this model to change attitudes and school structures. Students expressed thoughtful and informed views about gendered violence following their participation in the program.

One student said:

People think sexual assault is about sex, but it’s about power […] It’s about a sense of entitlement.

Another noted:

I think it’s a good idea to have this sort of program in more schools. It’ll stop the system; boys growing up thinking that they should be the more dominant person in the relationship and learning this now might stop that and make it less of a problem.

Teachers and school leaders also relayed positive accounts of the program’s impact. One teacher observed students were now more respectful of each other.

Another said:

Respectful relationships education develops an understanding of the links between the language the students use with each other and how that leads to situations where women are not treated equally, undervalued or misrepresented.

There are still hurdles

Teachers, leaders and students have generally welcomed respectful relationships education. But there are still many challenges to ensuring the program is embedded in primary and secondary schools. These include:

• addressing misinformation, resistance and backlash – for example that respectful relationships education is about “gender engineering” or that it alienates and shames boys and men
• acknowledging the complexities of violence against women as intersecting with poverty, Indigeneity, ethnicity, culture, and disability, among other factors
• adequate funding to support ongoing professional learning for school leaders and teachers in relation to implementing a whole-school approach
• supporting schools to work with and educate families
• supporting schools to better respond to disclosures and violence-related trauma.

Schools are not a panacea for transforming the ills of society. Ending violence against women will require major and far-reaching social change. The history of respectful relationships or gender-based violence education indicates schools can play a significant role in this process.

But it is clear short-term, inadequately funded approaches do little to recognise the complexity of change and the time it takes to bring an education community to a common understanding, awareness and commitment to change.

– ref. Let’s make it mandatory to teach respectful relationships in every Australian school – http://theconversation.com/lets-make-it-mandatory-to-teach-respectful-relationships-in-every-australian-school-117659

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Power, Senior Research Fellow, Geography and Urban Studies, Western Sydney University

Growing numbers of Australians are locked out of home ownership or struggling in insecure and unaffordable private rental markets. There are concerns about home owners drowning in debt. And for lower-income earners, high housing costs mean that paying for food, energy bills and health costs is an ongoing challenge.

It is time for a new way of talking about housing in Australia. The housing crisis is quickly turning into a crisis of care.

We call on the newly re-elected Morrison government and new Housing Minister Michael Sukkar to recognise that the value of housing is not just economic. Housing is an infrastructure of care. Australian governments need to ask: is this a housing system that cares?

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

A location for essential care

Houses are hubs of care practices and relations. They are places of everyday care, of cooking, cleaning and washing, of care between household and family members. Houses are where we care for children, elders, partners and ourselves.

Houses are also anchors for community and neighbourhood-based care. We keep an eye on neighbours’ homes, support older neighbours to age in place, and care for pets.

This care work is what keeps us alive.

Even though care is not always done well, it is an essential practice that is connected in fundamental ways with housing. Without housing it can be very difficult to meet basic needs.

The care work of housing

But housing is more than just a place where care takes place. Housing systems – through housing policy, markets and design – organise the distribution of care and the ability of people to give and receive care.

In our research this drives us to ask: how does the housing system support or limit the capacity of households to care?

We argue that housing is a care infrastructure and call for this understanding of housing to be at the centre of housing reform.

Home owners benefit

In Australia we value housing as an individual investment and asset. The economic values of housing (how much we can buy, sell or otherwise leverage housing for) are at the heart of how housing is usually discussed.

Read more: Explainer: the financialisation of housing and what can be done about it

For affluent households housing markets can work very well as a care infrastructure. This is because these households can more readily afford housing that meets household care needs. They are also more able to invest in housing to cover the costs of care in later life and to support the needs and ambitions of children. For home owners housing is a private welfare net for funding care needs.

Australian housing and related policies create and reinforce the value of home ownership. Subsidies for first home owners, the proposed First Home Loan Deposit Scheme (which will be a focus of efforts by the new housing minister), preferential treatment for owner occupation in pension tests and tax breaks for investor landlords underpin the value of home ownership as an infrastructure of care.

However, for the growing numbers of households not in a position to own a home the picture is less rosy. In many cases housing becomes an infrastructure that inhibits access to necessary care. As increasing numbers of households rent for longer periods, we risk a housing system that only cares for some.

Read more: Home ownership foundations are being shaken, and the impacts will be felt far and wide

Housing affordability

Housing affordability is a central concern. Lower income earners have less ability to choose to live in places that are well serviced or where family-based care networks are located. Less affluent areas often have less access to public and private care services like doctors and other specialists.

Housing affordability also shapes the ability to afford other care resources like quality food and electricity. Households that face high housing costs are often forced to compromise in these areas.

In Emma’s and other related research older retirees in the private rental market depended on local food charities for nutritious food. And in winter they restricted their use of heating to avoid bill blow-outs.

Read more: Life as an older renter, and what it tells us about the urgent need for tenancy reform

There are also connections between paid work, caring capacity and housing affordability. High-cost housing markets can drive people to work longer hours and multiple jobs, or require multiple income earners within a household. This can reduce the ability of individuals and households to meet domestic care responsibilities.

Tenure and care

Non-home owners also face restrictions around their use of private rental properties. For a start, rental housing is notoriously insecure. There are also restrictions on the ability of renters to make a house into a home.

Private rental legislation typically does not require landlords to agree to property modifications to meet the needs of a person with disability or ageing body, even when tenant-funded.

Women in Emma’s research reported losing bonds to cover costs associated with removing modifications that had been agreed to during a tenancy. In Kathy’s research, the fear of eviction meant private renters found it difficult to ask for and be granted repairs that would make their homes habitable. They endured leaking roofs and mouldy walls that made housing unsuitable for meeting basic care needs.

Such policies reinforce the value of owned homes as powerful care infrastructures for home owners, while undermining the caring capacity of households that don’t own their homes. While social housing enhances the caring capacity of many households, social housing is chronically underfunded and undersupplied.

Read more: Ideas of home and ownership in Australia might explain the neglect of renters’ rights

Diversity helps meet different needs

As growing numbers of households find themselves locked out of home ownership and face difficulties securing affordable housing in our expensive private rental markets, Australia badly needs housing reform.

The care work of housing must be at the centre of housing policy. The new government and minister for housing must ask: first, is this a housing system that cares? And, second, who does this housing system care for?

Historically, this question has been answered with calls to increase home ownership. But there is value in a diverse housing system because different households have different needs.

Further, those who invest in housing are dependent on the people who will rent that housing. These people in turn have the right – and need – for housing that supports their care needs. Affordable housing is only the starting point.

– ref. Is this a housing system that cares? That’s the question for Australians and their new government – http://theconversation.com/is-this-a-housing-system-that-cares-thats-the-question-for-australians-and-their-new-government-117311

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Denny-Smith, Scientia PhD Researcher, UNSW

Adelaide football great Eddie Betts was just 15 when he moved to Melbourne from Port Lincoln, South Australia, to pursue his AFL career. Hawthorn legend Cyril Rioli was 14 when he left his family in Darwin.

They are among many Indigenous players in Australian football who have covered great distances – moving thousands of kilometres, often as teenagers, for a shot at the big time.

Not all make it. Sometimes the separation from kin and culture is too much.

It’s not just a predicament for those with a chance to be a sporting star. Many Indigenous people in regional and remote Australia face a hard choice between their mob and a job.

What price would you put on leaving your family, community and other things you value? How good would a job have to be to make it worthwhile?

This a dilemma for those who make and administer the policies and programs intended to “close the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.

Indigenous people don’t necessarily see the benefits of working being worth the required costs the same way as non-Indigenous people. Any policy that doesn’t account for this crucial human factor is probably doomed to fail.

Indigenous procurement policies

We’re studying how unacknowledged cultural differences shape the effectiveness of government programs and policies in the context of Indigenous procurement policies.

Our focus is the construction industry, because it is one of the largest employers of Indigenous Australians. The federal government has also committed A$75 billion in to building transport infrastructure investment over the next decade. This makes the sector especially important to Indigenous employment.

Indigenous procurement policies involve governments requiring private-sector suppliers and contractors to employ a minimum number of Indigenous workers on their projects.

They are increasingly being used by local, state and federal governments, in preference to approaches such as directly subsidising jobs, such as occurred under the old Community Development Employment Projects scheme.

The Commonwealth Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) requires at least 4% of the workforce deployed on a contract, and 3% of the workforce of the contractor, be Indigenous. Government departments have to meet contract targets to satisfy performance requirements.

The policy is so far regarded as a success, because it has exceeded initial targets. Under “IPP 2.0” there will be a further target – that 3% of the financial value of federal contracts go to Indigenous businesses by 2027.

Good intentions drive such procurement policies. The Indigenous employment rate is barely 48%, compared to 72% for non-Indigenous Australians of working age. The government set a target ten years ago to halve the gap.

But any Indigenous jobs policy is flawed if it doesn’t grapple with the cultural problem of someone having to move “off country” and be separated from his or her community for an extended period.

Policies need to appreciate the importance of connection to country and kin in Indigenous culture. They cannot assume an equal commitment to the hegemonic values of individualism and materialism.

Evaluating success

We have been talking to people in Indigenous communities and organisations to better understand the personal experience of procurement policies.

Appreciating both positive and negative impacts has important implications for governments wanting to properly evaluate the true social value of the policies.

The federal government has evaluation guidelines, which recommend involving stakeholders using participatory approaches. But the risk of miscalculating the social value created by Indigenous procurement policies is increased when an Indigenous sense of social value is not reflected in the contract targets and financial values that measure policy success.

There’s a risk of putting limited resources into the wrong initiatives, not the ones that create real value for Indigenous Australians.

There is already concern Indigenous procurement policies have mostly benefited a small group of Indigenous business people and their partners. Last year the federal minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, ordered a crackdown on sham arrangements to exploit the system (a practice known as “black cladding”).

What good is a policy that fails on many human levels yet gets counted as a success?

Not that there has been a lot of measurable successes.

A decade ago the Australian government set the target of halving the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment rates.

The deadline has come and gone. Virtually “no progress” has been made on this or other Closing The Gap targets.

It’s clear we need a new paradigm to evaluate Indigenous policies and programs.

– ref. It’s time we moved the goalposts on Indigenous policies, so they reflect Indigenous values – http://theconversation.com/its-time-we-moved-the-goalposts-on-indigenous-policies-so-they-reflect-indigenous-values-112282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor in astronomy, Monash University

UFOs over Cairns. Lights over Leiden. Glints above Seattle. What’s going on?

The launch of 60 Starlink satellites by Elon Musk’s SpaceX has grabbed the attention of people around the globe. The satellites are part of a fleet that is intended to provide fast internet across the globe.

Improved internet services sounds great, and Musk is reported to be planning for up to 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. But this fleet of satellites could forever change our view of the heavens.

Starlink’s ambitious mission

Starlink is an ambitious plan to use satellites in low Earth orbit (about 500km up) to provide global internet services.

Read more: What caused the fireballs that lit up the sky over Australia?

This is different from the approach previously used for most communication satellites, in which larger individual satellites were placed in high geosynchronous orbits – that stay in an apparently fixed position above the Equator (about 36,000km up).

Communications with satellites in geosynchronous orbits often require satellite dishes, which you can see on the sides of residential apartment buildings. Communication with satellites in low Earth orbit, which are much closer, won’t require such bulky equipment.

But the catch with satellites in low Earth orbit, which move quickly around the world, is they can only look down on a small fraction of the globe, so to get global coverage you need many satellites. The Iridium satellite network used this approach in the 1990s, using dozens of satellites to provide global phone and data services.

Starlink is far more ambitious, with 1,600 satellites in the first phase, increasing to 12,000 satellites during the mid-2020s. For comparison, there are roughly 18,000 objects in Earth orbit that are tracked, including about 2,000 functioning satellites.

Lights in the sky

It’s not unusual to see satellites travelling across the twilight sky. Indeed, there’s a certain thrill to seeing the International Space Station pass overhead, and to know there are people living on board that distant light. But Starlink is something else.

The first 60 satellites, launched by SpaceX last week, were seen travelling in procession across the night sky. Some people knew what they were seeing, but the silent procession of light also generated UFO reports. If you’re lucky, you may see them pass across your skies tonight.

If the full constellation of satellites is launched, hundreds of Starlink satellites will be above the horizon at any given time. If they are visible to the unaided eye, as suggested by initial reports, they could outnumber the brightest natural stars visible to the unaided eye.

Astronomers’ fears were not put to rest by Musk’s tweets:

Satellites are very definitely visible at night, particularly in the hours before dawn and after sunset, as they are high enough to be illuminated by the Sun. The Space Station’s artificial lighting is effectively irrelevant to its visibility.

In areas near the poles, including Canada and northern Europe, satellites in low Earth orbit can be illuminated throughout the night during the summer months.

Hundreds of satellites being visible to the unaided eye would be a disaster. They would completely ruin our view of the night sky. They would also contaminate astronomical images, leaving long trails across otherwise unblemished images.

The US$466 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, based in Chile, is an 8-metre aperture telescope with a 3,200-megapixel camera. It’s designed to rapidly survey the sky during the 2020s.

With the full constellation of Starlink satellites, many images taken with this telescope will contain a Starlink satellite. Longer exposures could contain dozens of satellite streaks.

Dark skies or darkened hopes?

Is there any cause for optimism? Yes and no.

Musk has produced some amazing feats of technology, such as the SpaceX Falcon and Tesla cars, but he’s also disappointed some on other projects, such as the Hyperloop tunnel transport plan.

Read more: A guide to ensure everyone plays by the same military rules in space: the Woomera Manual

While Starlink certainly blew up on Twitter, for now at least, Musk is 11,940 satellites short of his 12,000.

Also, initial reports may have overestimated the brightness of the Starlink satellites, with the multiple satellites closely clustered together being confused with one satellite.

While some reports have indicate binoculars are needed to see the individual satellites, they also report that Starlink satellites flare, momentarily becoming brighter than any natural star.

If the individual satellites usually are too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, that would at least preserve the natural wonder of the sky. But professional astronomers like myself may need to prepare for streaky skies ahead. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

– ref. Lights in the sky from Elon Musk’s new satellite network have stargazers worried – http://theconversation.com/lights-in-the-sky-from-elon-musks-new-satellite-network-have-stargazers-worried-117829

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor in astronomy, Monash University

UFOs over Cairns. Lights over Leiden. Glints above Seattle. What’s going on?

The launch of 60 Starlink satellites by Elon Musk’s SpaceX has grabbed the attention of people around the globe. The satellites are part of a fleet that is intended to provide fast internet across the globe.

Improved internet services sounds great, and Musk is reported to be planning for up to 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. But this fleet of satellites could forever change our view of the heavens.

Starlink’s ambitious mission

Starlink is an ambitious plan to use satellites in low Earth orbit (about 500km up) to provide global internet services.

Read more: What caused the fireballs that lit up the sky over Australia?

This is different from the approach previously used for most communication satellites, in which larger individual satellites were placed in high geosynchronous orbits – that stay in an apparently fixed position above the Equator (about 36,000km up).

Communications with satellites in geosynchronous orbits often require satellite dishes, which you can see on the sides of residential apartment buildings. Communication with satellites in low Earth orbit, which are much closer, won’t require such bulky equipment.

But the catch with satellites in low Earth orbit, which move quickly around the world, is they can only look down on a small fraction of the globe, so to get global coverage you need many satellites. The Iridium satellite network used this approach in the 1990s, using dozens of satellites to provide global phone and data services.

Starlink is far more ambitious, with 1,600 satellites in the first phase, increasing to 12,000 satellites during the mid-2020s. For comparison, there are roughly 18,000 objects in Earth orbit that are tracked, including about 2,000 functioning satellites.

Lights in the sky

It’s not unusual to see satellites travelling across the twilight sky. Indeed, there’s a certain thrill to seeing the International Space Station pass overhead, and to know there are people living on board that distant light. But Starlink is something else.

The first 60 satellites, launched by SpaceX last week, were seen travelling in procession across the night sky. Some people knew what they were seeing, but the silent procession of light also generated UFO reports. If you’re lucky, you may see them pass across your skies tonight.

If the full constellation of satellites is launched, hundreds of Starlink satellites will be above the horizon at any given time. If they are visible to the unaided eye, as suggested by initial reports, they could outnumber the brightest natural stars visible to the unaided eye.

Astronomers’ fears were not put to rest by Musk’s tweets:

Satellites are very definitely visible at night, particularly in the hours before dawn and after sunset, as they are high enough to be illuminated by the Sun. The Space Station’s artificial lighting is effectively irrelevant to its visibility.

In areas near the poles, including Canada and northern Europe, satellites in low Earth orbit can be illuminated throughout the night during the summer months.

Hundreds of satellites being visible to the unaided eye would be a disaster. They would completely ruin our view of the night sky. They would also contaminate astronomical images, leaving long trails across otherwise unblemished images.

The US$466 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, based in Chile, is an 8-metre aperture telescope with a 3,200-megapixel camera. It’s designed to rapidly survey the sky during the 2020s.

With the full constellation of Starlink satellites, many images taken with this telescope will contain a Starlink satellite. Longer exposures could contain dozens of satellite streaks.

Dark skies or darkened hopes?

Is there any cause for optimism? Yes and no.

Musk has produced some amazing feats of technology, such as the SpaceX Falcon and Tesla cars, but he’s also disappointed some on other projects, such as the Hyperloop tunnel transport plan.

Read more: A guide to ensure everyone plays by the same military rules in space: the Woomera Manual

While Starlink certainly blew up on Twitter, for now at least, Musk is 11,940 satellites short of his 12,000.

Also, initial reports may have overestimated the brightness of the Starlink satellites, with the multiple satellites closely clustered together being confused with one satellite.

While some reports have indicate binoculars are needed to see the individual satellites, they also report that Starlink satellites flare, momentarily becoming brighter than any natural star.

If the individual satellites usually are too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, that would at least preserve the natural wonder of the sky. But professional astronomers like myself may need to prepare for streaky skies ahead. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

– ref. Lights in the sky from Elon Musk’s new satellite network has stargazers worried – http://theconversation.com/lights-in-the-sky-from-elon-musks-new-satellite-network-has-stargazers-worried-117829

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Tregear, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Melbourne

Review: Il Viaggio a Reims, Opera Australia

In 1864, four years before his death, Italian composer Gioachino Rossini recalled to his biographer Alexis Azevedo that he would probably have ended up a “chemist or an olive oil salesman” had it not been for the French invasion of Italy. That invasion had begun in 1792, the year of Rossini’s birth.

By 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte had established the short-lived Cisalpine Republic in Northern Italy, in turn raising hopes a unified Italian state might soon emerge. Only two years later, however, an Austro-Russian coalition mounted a successful counter-offensive. Italian unification would not come until 1871.

Nevertheless, in Italy as elsewhere in Western Europe, the Napoleonic age heralded great social and cultural change. Opera houses became places of mass entertainment – Rossini could now contemplate a career as a freelance composer on a scale that had been denied to his forbears such as Handel and Mozart.

At first it seems ironic, that Rossini would eventually compose one of his finest works to celebrate a restored French monarchy. Il Viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Rheims) was conceived as a celebratory cantata (essentially a set of hymns of praise set to music) to mark the coronation of Charles X (1757–1836) and was first performed in Paris on June 19 1825.

Rossini never expected Il Viaggio a Reims to become a repertoire staple. Despite it being a popular triumph at its premiere, it received only four performances. Rossini instead repurposed about half of the music for his later opera Le comte Ory (1828).

It was only through musicological detective work that the original score was returned to life, receiving its first modern performance in 1984. But as a result, we can now appreciate how much Il Viaggio a Reims is as much a work of political satire as political propaganda.

The work is now receiving its first complete staging in Australia in collaboration between Opera Australia, Dutch National Opera, and the Royal Danish Theatre.

The opera’s plot setup is one familiar to us due to murder mysteries such as Agatha Christie’s, Murder on the Orient Express, or Quentin Tarantino’s, The Hateful Eight. In these, an ensemble of eccentric characters are forced to spend time with each other due to unforeseen circumstances.

In the original work, a group of aristocrats from Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, England, Italy and France arrive at a hotel in the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains, on their way to Rheims Cathedral for Charles’ coronation. A lack of available horses to take them the remaining 300 odd kilometres, however, thwarts their plans.

But their sojourn provides the excuse for a kind of allegorical diplomatic convention in song; the Concert of Europe in concert, no less.

The fact that the desired journey to Rheims never actually eventuates is one of a number of elements that suggests Rossini, and his librettist Luigi Balocchi, set out to subtly satirise some of the political pretensions of royalist France.

Charles’ decision to be crowned in Rheims was a deliberate act of provocation to his anti-royalist enemies. The last French king to have been crowned there had been the ill-fated Louis XVI. Constructing a commemorative work of theatre in which an imagined group of guests did not make it to Rheims for the occasion suggested an implied commentary concerning the credibility of Charles’ enthronement.

A new interpretation

Perhaps unsure how to engage a modern audience with such elements of historical political intrigue, director Damiano Michieletto’s production instead shifts the time and place to a present-day art museum on the cusp of a major exhibition opening.

Madama Cortese, the “Tyrolean hostess” in the original setting, now becomes the museum’s curator (here sung by Julie Lea Goodwin channelling Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada). The scholarly Don Profondo (superbly sung and acted by Giorgio Caoduro) becomes an art auctioneer; the Englishman Lord Sidney (charismatically portrayed by Teddy Tahu Rhodes) an art restorer, and so on.

The remaining assemblage of foreign nationals are transformed into the subjects of paintings that progressively emerge from their frames or their packing cases in a manner reminiscent of Shawn Levy’s film Night at the Museum, or Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical opera Ruddigore.

While this directorial fancy does nothing to alleviate the work’s already episodic nature, there is no doubt it also makes for a very entertaining evening on the stage.

The original context of the work is nevertheless eventually acknowledged, in spectacular fashion, when Paolo Fantin’s lavish set and the whole ensemble combined to recreate the painting “The coronation of Charles X” (1827) by François Gérard at the opera’s conclusion.

Standouts among the 14 principals include baritone Warwick Fyfe, who gave a marvellous comic turn as the Barone di Trombonok, and tenor Juan de Dois Mateos (Cavalier Belfiore) and sopranos Ruth Iniesta (Corinna) and Emma Pearson (Contessa di Folleville), who each sang with great beauty and virtuosity.

Orchestra Victoria delivered Rossini’s sophisticated score with great style, thanks to the superb direction of Daniel Smith (making a well overdue debut in his native Australia), fine continuo accompaniment work from Anthony Hunt on a fortepiano, and some terrific solo work from Lisa-Maree Amos (flute) and Megan Reeve (harp).

The latter’s two ravishing duets, with Ruth Iniesta and Emma Pearson respectively, were a particular musical highlight.

The second of these forms the inevitable song of praise to Charles which closes the opera. But it is the first (which itself slyly references the contemporaneous Greek struggle for liberation from Ottoman rule) that I suspect directs us to the more universal political message that Rossini wished to convey: the hope that “one day the dawn of the golden age will reappear, and fraternal love will reign in human hearts.”

Il Viaggio a Reims is on at Arts Centre Melbourne until June 1.

– ref. A night at the opera: art comes alive in a modern twist on Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims – http://theconversation.com/a-night-at-the-opera-art-comes-alive-in-a-modern-twist-on-rossinis-il-viaggio-a-reims-117807