Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Silvia Griselda, PhD student, University of Melbourne

Last month, the Australian Academy of Science published a report showing the COVID-19 pandemic would disproportionately affect women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) disciplines.

The report noted before COVID-19, around 7,500 women were employed in STEM research fields in Australia in 2017, compared to around 18,400 men. The authors wrote:

The pandemic appears to be compounding pre-existing gender disparity; women are under-represented across the STEM workforce, and weighted in roles that are typically less senior and less secure. Job loss at a greater rate than for men is now an immediate threat for many women in Australia’s STEM workforce, potentially reversing equity gains of recent years.

Women are less likely to enrol in science and maths degrees than men. In Australia, only 35% of STEM university degrees are awarded to women. This figure has been stable over the past five years.

Some research in the 1990s suggested girls don’t study maths and science because they might not do as well as boys. But recent research shows girls score similarly or slightly higher than boys in maths and science.

So why don’t they choose these careers as often as men?

Our recently published study found while women perform at the same or higher level in maths and science as men, their performance in the humanities is markedly better. This may be the reason they’re choosing not to pursue STEM careers.

Girls just as good at maths and science

We wanted to see if there were gender differences in school performance when it came to science and maths and whether these affected students’ university applications.

Our study used data of more than 70,000 secondary school students in Greece over ten years.

We found girls’ scores in maths and science were around 4% higher than boys. But their scores in humanities subjects were around 13% higher.

We also found girls were 34% less likely to chose a STEM-related specialisation in their last years of high school.

These findings can be translated to Australia. According to the latest results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), girls in Australia perform on a similar level to boys in maths and science, but at a much higher level in reading.

The difference between girls’ and boys’ performance in reading is 6% in Australia and 9% in Greece.

But when it comes to maths and science, there is not much of a difference between girls’ and boys’ performance in either country.

Female comparative advantage in STEM

Our study showed students decided which fields they want to specialise in by comparing their academic strengths and weaknesses between subjects and with their classmates.

Using our data, we compared the students’ grades in STEM and humanities subjects. If a student had a higher grade in STEM than reading and writing subjects, we defined this student as having a STEM advantage. If this STEM advantage was greater than one of the students’ classmates, this student had STEM as an academic strength.

Because boys were generally better in science and maths than humanities, they had a higher STEM advantage. As girls were only slightly better in science and maths than humanities, their STEM advantage was lower than that of boys.

In our data, we considered pairs of girls with identical grades in STEM and humanities subjects at the beginning of secondary schools, who were randomly assigned to different classrooms. We then observed their enrolment decisions one to three years later.

For instance, two girls with a similar performance in STEM and humanities (with same STEM advantage) were assigned to different classrooms.

One girl was assigned to a classroom where her classmates had a high STEM advantage (higher scores in STEM than humanities). The other girl was assigned to a classroom where her classmates had a similar performance in STEM and humanities subject (no STEM advantage).

Our findings showed these two girls, on average, even if they had identical grades in STEM and humanities, chose different fields of study at the end of secondary school. The former (whose peers had a STEM advantage) was less likely to choose a STEM-related field.

Our study showed these two girls with identical performance ended up choosing a different educational career, based on which classmates they sat with.

This explained up to 12% of the gender gap in STEM enrolment in tertiary education.

We did the same for boys. Analysing pairs of boys with identical grades but different classmates, we did not observe any difference in their enrolment decisions.

What can be done?

Our research indicates girls are more influenced by their success relative to their peers, whereas this does not hold for boys.

Our findings are in line with previous research that suggests girls are more influenced by negative grades than boys, especially in STEM, when making decisions about their future.

Our research suggests the teacher has an important role to play in recognising and encouraging individual academic strengths, independently of classmates or gender.

Previous research has shown teacher gender stereotypes regarding girls’ ability in STEM negatively affects the way girls see themselves.

Teachers can and must foster confidence in girls when it comes to science and maths subjects, even if they may be better at reading and writing.

Maths and science studies lead to occupations such as engineering, physics, data science and computer programming, which are in great demand and generally pay a high salary. So turning away from STEM may have a long lasting impact on girls’ life earnings.

– ref. Girls score the same in maths and science as boys, but higher in arts – this may be why they are less likely to pick STEM careers – https://theconversation.com/girls-score-the-same-in-maths-and-science-as-boys-but-higher-in-arts-this-may-be-why-they-are-less-likely-to-pick-stem-careers-131563

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Flynn, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Work, Monash University

Earlier this month, horrific reports emerged of a baby girl dying in Katherine, while her mother was in police custody.

Without commenting on this specific case, it raises important issues that should be of concern to all of us, about what happens to children when a parent or carer is arrested.

People may be surprised to learn of the scope this issue and the potential for harm.

When we arrest adults, we are often arresting parents

Many children in our community confront the experience of parents being arrested on a daily basis. When we arrest adults, more often than not, we are arresting parents.

There are no publicly available arrest data. But recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures support a cautious estimate that at least 100,000 Australian children each year have a parent who is arrested.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth?

Some of these parents will end up in prison. It is generally accepted by those working in this area that around 50% of imprisoned adults have dependent children. Conservative estimates note that more than 40,000 children experience parental incarceration each year in Australia.

Figures from our research with imprisoned parents also suggest most of these children will be under the age of ten.

Indigenous children are over-represented in this group, given the high rates of Indigenous incarceration in Australia.

But what happens to the kids?

Despite the frequency of parents being arrested, we know very little about what happens to their children.

Existing research has focused on children who witness arrest, consistently noting the long-term risk of trauma.

Much less is known about the arrest process, how this occurs and the immediate consequences for children, although recent Monash University research highlighted poor attention to children at this time.

Read more: As we imprison more adults, what’s happening to the children?

Researchers are most concerned about those children whose parents are arrested and remanded into custody. There are many anecdotal cases of children being left alone, with no adult supervision and no basic provisions.

Haphazard responses

When police arrest a parent, there is no formal Australia-wide information gathering about the children. And specific guidelines to ensure children are “seen” and cared for are largely absent.

Some Australian states have agreements with child protective services. But often officers are unaware of the detail of these agreements, or their subsequent responsibilities.

These agreements are also typically framed in general terms. This means children’s safety is largely left to the interpretation and discretion of police officers, who have many competing responsibilities, and are often under-resourced to deal with children.

The result is that responses to children are individualised and haphazard. With no clear roles and responsibilities, children can fall through the cracks.

While some local, small scale research, including my 2015 study with colleagues – has shown evidence of good policing practices, these are not guaranteed, and nor are good outcomes for children.

Some parents more at risk

Some parents and children are more at risk. Our research shows mothers fall into this category, more often being primary carers of children. Indigenous women – the fastest growing group in prisons – and their children are even more at risk.

Our small, unpublished study by Monash University researchers in 2015 draws on data from 14 Indigenous women in Victoria and NSW, who were interviewed for a larger investigation. Their experiences show additional challenges for them and their children, with police reported to have more extreme responses than for non-Indigenous families.

These children were more likely to be either taken immediately into out-of-home care, or it was simply assumed that extended family would care for the children. Minimal attention was paid to ensuring suitable care. While it is clear police stations are not childcare centres, we need to ensure much better processes to protect vulnerable children.

There are solutions

Solutions to this problem are both very easy and very complex.

In recent years, we have seen policing become more responsive to issues that intersect.

For example, in some jurisdictions, police are required to actively ask arrestees about their Indigenous status, then follow specific guidelines in their interactions. The same goes for mental health. In Victoria, a protocol requires police attention to determining a person’s fitness for interview.

Three things we can do now

Three immediate actions are needed.

First, police officers need to ask about dependent children during any standard arrest. This is successfully done in other countries, such as Sweden, alongside a clear relationship with child protective services and relevant community services.

Second, police need to develop and implement child-sensitive arrest procedures.

And third, police services, in collaboration with child protection and relevant non-government specialist organisations, need to develop guidelines to care for children where parental arrest will likely see the immediate removal of the parent.

Collaboration across different sectors and a “child-aware” approach is already happening in other “adult-focussed” systems, such as mental health, alcohol and drug abuse and family violence. It is also possible here.

Change is possible. But unless it happens – and happens quickly – children will continue to fall through the cracks.

Read more: To fix the family law system, we need to ask parents what really works

– ref. At least 100,000 children have a parent who is arrested each year. There are no proper systems to protect them. – https://theconversation.com/at-least-100-000-children-have-a-parent-who-is-arrested-each-year-there-are-no-proper-systems-to-protect-them-140872

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Irga, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in Air and Noise Pollution, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney

Australians are accustomed to having fresh air, and our clean atmosphere is a source of pride for many.

Last summer’s bushfires, however, brought air quality to the public’s attention, as millions of Australians breathed some of the world’s worst quality air.

But there’s a lesser-known source of pollution causing billions of dollars worth of health costs every year: indoor wood-fired heaters.

This week, the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association endorsed calls to remove these heaters via a buyback or subsidy scheme. But will it work?

Read more: How does poor air quality from bushfire smoke affect our health?

Wood heater smoke is a huge pollution source

In winter, wood heater smoke is the single biggest air pollutant in New South Wales and the ACT. Similarly, in Victoria, wood smoke on cool winter days is responsible for most breaches of air quality standards.

Wood heater smoke is generated from both open fireplaces and wood-fired heaters. Wood-fired heaters are controlled-combustion, domestic heating appliances. In order to discharge emissions, they use a metal pipe called a flue, while open fireplaces use chimneys.

Around 10% of Australian households – roughly 900,000 homes – use wood as their main source of heating, according to the ABS.

Read more: Bushfire smoke is everywhere in our cities. Here’s exactly what you are inhaling

Based on NSW guidelines, burning 10 kilograms of wood (an average day) in a modern, low-emitting wood heater can produce around 15 grams of “particulate matter”.

This is composed of tiny particles which can penetrate into the respiratory system, potentially causing lung and heart diseases. It is one of the most dangerous components of smoke, and a carrier for many of its cancer-causing chemicals.

By contrast, a truck travelling on congested urban roads can produce just 0.03 grams of particulate matter per kilometre travelled. A truck would therefore have to travel 500km in heavy traffic – roughly the distance from Melbourne to Mildura – to produce the same particulate matter emissions as one average day of using a wood heater.

So a wood-fired heater is like having a truck idling in your living room all day (albeit with the bulk of the emissions escaping via the chimney).

Smoke is toxic

The smoke from wood fires is very similar to that generated by bushfires, and is also detrimental to our health.

Australia’s wood-fired heaters are estimated to cause health costs of around A$3,800 per wood heater each year.

Given the roughly 900,000 wood heaters used as primary household heating sources in Australia, this could be as high as A$3.4 billion annually across the country.

One study published in May estimated 69 deaths, 86 hospital admissions, and 15 asthma emergency department visits in Tasmania were attributable to biomass smoke each year – the smoke which comes from burning wood, crops and manure. More than 74% of these impacts were attributed to wood heater smoke, with average associated yearly costs of A$293 million.

Another study modelled the effects of air pollution on over-45-year-olds in Sydney over seven years. It found chronic exposure to low levels of particulate matter was linked with an increased risk of death. Depending on the model used, it found between a 3-16% increased risk of dying occurred with each extra microgram (one millionth of a gram) of particulate matter per cubic metre of air.

Read more: From face masks to air purifiers: what actually works to protect us from bushfire smoke?

All of this assumes wood heater users follow the law and use clean, dry hardwood as fuel. Problems become far worse when treated wood is used as the fuel source.

Treated timber offcuts from construction or demolition activities are freely available and therefore continue to be used as fuel for wood heaters, against recommendations.

Much of this timber is treated with an antifungal chemical called copper chrome arsenate. Breathing the emissions when this wood is burned can increase incidents of liver, bladder, and lung cancers, and reduce the production of red and white blood cells, leading to fatigue, abnormal heart rhythm, and blood-vessel damage.

There is no safe level of indoor or outdoor air pollution. This is an ideal time to consider the hidden dangers associated with our “clean” air.

Change is difficult

Standard testing for new stoves is one way authorities try to reduce wood smoke emissions. Australian heaters must be designed to pass strict standards, however this system may not reflect the way heaters are actually operated in the home environment, because this varies so much between households.

For example, in New Zealand, testing on five heaters installed in people’s homes recorded particulate matter levels more than 15 times higher than their predicted average calculated during testing.

Banning wood stoves altogether is inequitable, as some people cannot afford any other source of heating, and many people employed in the wood-fire heater industry could lose their jobs. But changing economic incentives could work. An intervention method currently being proposed in Victoria is a wood stove buyback or subsidy scheme, which is now supported by the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association.

However, a similar rebate scheme did not have much impact in Canberra. Since November 2015, residents have been able to claim a subsidy of up to A$1,250 if they replace their wood heater with a ducted electric reverse cycle system. Just five households took up this rebate in the first six months. Meanwhile, 40,000-50,000 wood heaters are sold in Australia each year.

Another option is fines. Tasmanians can be fined A$1,680 if their chimney emits smoke which is visible for more than ten minutes. However, when these regulations were announced the laws were considered by many Tasmanians to be heavy-handed and the government was met with community resistance.

A way forward?

In 2001, Launceston established several strategies to encourage use of electric heaters instead of wood heaters, including a grant of A$500 to those switching over.

Following this, wood heater prevalence fell from 66% to 30% of all households, corresponding to a 40% reduction in particulate air pollution during winter.

Education could also help. If people knew the concentrations of air pollutants in their homes, they might be motivated to change their wood burning behaviour. Often residents are unaware of the concentrations of smoke generated by their activity, with many considering opening a window reduces the level of wood smoke in their home. Controlling indoor pollution is difficult, especially if the major source of the pollution is outdoors – opening the window would actually let more pollution in.

We suggest that together with the proposed rebate schemes, one way forward could be to provide affordable access (through subsidies or otherwise) to air-quality sensors. At the lower end of the scale, prices range from A$100-500, with more accurate devices in the range of A$1,000-5,000.

Despite the expense, they can improve awareness of levels of air pollution among those with wood-fired heaters, and may provide the impetus for people to work together and change community perceptions around wood-burning appliances.

Read more: How does bushfire smoke affect our health? 6 things you need to know

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. ‘Like having a truck idling in your living room’: the toxic cost of wood-fired heaters – https://theconversation.com/like-having-a-truck-idling-in-your-living-room-the-toxic-cost-of-wood-fired-heaters-140737

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

The anger and frustration at New Zealand’s border quarantine failure have been palpable.

Two women, recently arrived in New Zealand, were granted compassionate leave from quarantine to be with grieving family after a parent’s death. But they were not tested for COVID-19 before being allowed to travel the length of the North Island by car. Both later tested positive.

Since news of the failure broke, other examples of mismanagement and claims of an overly relaxed quarantine regime have emerged.

Having endured lockdown and now nursing an ailing economy back to life, the “team of 5 million” has not been forgiving. Nor has Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who directed her director-general of health to immediately suspend compassionate exemptions for anyone in quarantine.

Read more: 2 new COVID-19 cases in New Zealand, but elimination of community transmission still stands

The fact she has also called in the military to oversee quarantine facilities and strengthen border control speaks volumes. The deployment of our armed forces was always an option during the emergency. The government wisely chose not to do so in any highly visible way.

Now it’s different. But rather than being a move against non-compliant New Zealand citizens or visitors to the country, it’s a last resort in response to the failed bureaucracy that allowed the mistakes to happen.

Legal uncertainty is not to blame

While the specific point of breakdown in the chain of command governing quarantine management has yet to be pinpointed, one thing is beyond doubt: this is not a matter of legal uncertainties.

The powers of the government in times of infectious and notifiable disease are vast under the Health Act. With the paramount goal of protecting public health, the obligation to direct people for medical examination and contact tracing is clear.

If there was any doubt about those existing powers during the COVID-19 crisis, two other pieces of legislation cleared it up.

First, specific laws were introduced with the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Act. This gave the government additional powers to add conditions to all forms of visas as is “reasonably necessary to manage the effects, or deal with the consequences, of […] COVID-19”.

Second, the much-disputed COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 established orders that could be made to “require persons to refrain from taking any specified actions that contribute or are likely to contribute to the risk of the outbreak or spread of COVID-19”.

Read more: The next once-a-century pandemic is coming sooner than you think – but COVID-19 can help us get ready

Those orders extend to requiring people to be isolated or quarantined, report for medical examination or testing, and provide any information needed for contact tracing.

At the core of this debate is a question of compulsion. The challenge lies in finding a path between the continuing global emergency and a domestic situation that is largely controlled but vulnerable. Enforced quarantine, mandatory testing and contact tracing are the logical solutions in protecting our borders, and the current legislation provides for them.

Longer term – especially if and when a vaccine is developed – this will be a difficult debate. Kiwis (rightly) do not like the idea of compulsion, unless there is a clear and declared emergency.

Furthermore, the right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment became part of our Bill of Rights. This has been interpreted as the right to object to a range of medical practices, vaccinations being most notable. The question will be whether this interpretation is correct and, if so, whether it can be overridden for the public good.

Regardless, the existing pieces of legislation should have been ample to protect the population from exposure to the two women in question.

Read more: The coronavirus crisis shows why New Zealand urgently needs a commissioner for older people

We need a royal commission of inquiry

There is now an immediate need to assign accountability to the individuals or groups responsible for putting the community at risk. And this leads to the greater need for a royal commission to critically examine this current problem and many others, in the overall way that COVID-19 had been dealt with.

From the first national diagnosis of the COVID-19 crisis all the way to the recovery processes, a royal commission should be tasked with reviewing it all: the health, scientific, economic, constitutional, legal and cultural elements of the event.

This would provide a public record of what worked, what didn’t, what gaps were apparent and what could be improved next time. And it is the next time we have to be particularly worried about. Pandemics are an intergenerational problem, and what we are enduring will not be the last such experience.

– ref. The law is clear – border testing is enforceable. So why did New Zealand’s quarantine system break down? – https://theconversation.com/the-law-is-clear-border-testing-is-enforceable-so-why-did-new-zealands-quarantine-system-break-down-141036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Dobson, Professor and Dean of Education, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The recent release of global university rankings and the way these are reported raises important questions about the role and reputation of our tertiary institutions.

Are universities measured and ranked according to what we really value? Or are they ranked and valued only by what is measured? And are those measures authentic and trusted indicators of quality?

There was a time when no one feared that a university might slip a quality ranking or two in the eyes of the world, the taxpayer, benefactors or students considering domestic or international study. Nowadays, however, universities see no limit to the black hole of global rankings. Its gravitational pull consumes their attention.

While a modern phenomenon, rankings have historical origins. The birth of the modern research-intensive university can be traced to Western Europe in 1665 when the first academic journals appeared. In Germany, more than 3,000 journals were published between 1665 and 1790, marking an institutional move from the teaching university to the research university.

Academics were able to share and legitimise their research by publishing in these journals. Students who were called on to write and defend their essays orally could draw on the journals to support their learning.

Read more: University students aren’t cogs in a market. They need more than a narrow focus on ‘skills’

There is no one ranking standard

Today’s journals and the number of citations academics can claim in them are key indicators of a university’s rank and quality. However, when a university has to research and teach in a language other than English, the effect on its ranking can be drastic.

Databases used by the larger university ranking systems, such as Scopus and CSI/SSCI, don’t automatically pick up non-English journals. Opportunities for researchers to gain “ranking points” through peer citations are therefore reduced.

In the global rankings of university quality, various factors are weighted slightly differently. The QS World University Rankings pay particular attention to reputation among colleagues in the discipline. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) considers citations in journals as a proxy for research quality. And the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) allocate equally across peer reputation, citation and institutional self-report surveys.

The systems are far from simple and universities increasingly invest in experts to advise on how to improve and maintain ranking scores, especially as more universities crowd the global ranking field.

If we are to accept this imperative to measure and rank universities by academic reputation, publishing record, teaching and research intensity, then we need to ask another question: what other indicators of quality and value might be included?

While online programs have often been considered inferior to “live” learning, for instance, the impact of COVID-19 has forced us to reconsider. There is now broader awareness of the opportunities online teaching opens up – including its positive impact on universities’ carbon footprints.

In fact, the THE rankings tracked progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for the first time in 2019. One example of such sustainable activity is Goldsmiths College at the University of London, which banned the sale of beef on campus.

How do you measure intangible value?

Taking an even broader view, might we consider the spiritual dimension of higher education? The university has long been valued for its divine contribution: Oxford University’s motto has been “Dominus illuminatio mea” (the Lord is my light) for at least 200 years. “O my Lord. Advance me in Knowledge” is the motto of the University of Karachi.

This marriage of the sacred and the scientific has been a theme since the founding of the University of al-Qarawiyyin in 859 AD in Morocco. It’s said to be the oldest continually operating higher educational institution in the world.

In the rush to measure quantifiable indicators of output have we obscured these less tangible forms of value?

Read more: COVID-19: what Australian universities can do to recover from the loss of international student fees

If COVID-19 taught us anything, it was the value of communication and connection (sometimes called connectivism). In fact, experts from universities came to the fore as rarely before. Rather than handing more influence to PR and social media experts, might this be an opportunity to re-create the university as the place for exchanging ideas, teaching and research?

Maybe we should look back to the House of Wisdom (بيت الحكمة‎), founded in Baghdad in 786 CE, where scholars met daily to translate, discuss and write in many languages: Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Latin. Aristotle’s work was famously translated from Greek. So too the work of the physician Hippocrates.

What hadn’t been accessible was made accessible and shared. The “West” benefited from this knowledge from the East, laying the foundations for the Renaissance.

This was a true academy of the arts and sciences, valued not for its citations, number of Nobel Prize winners or the ratio of doctorates to bachelor degrees, but for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. One wonders how this global multilingual forerunner of a quality modern university might fare under our ranking regime.

By reaching back in history we might recover those other measures of quality and value that formed the foundations upon which modern universities are built. The adage that “if everything is to be as before, then all must change” rings true. How we value and rank the exchange of knowledge and ideas will once again become something worth striving for.

– ref. Beyond the black hole of global university rankings: rediscovering the true value of knowledge and ideas – https://theconversation.com/beyond-the-black-hole-of-global-university-rankings-rediscovering-the-true-value-of-knowledge-and-ideas-140236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Johnston, Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne

Interest in Aboriginal fire knowledge has been high since last summer’s terrible bushfires. One initiative shows the huge potential benefits of this ancient practice – not just in Australia, but globally.

The International Savanna Fire Management Initiative (ISFMI) is taking the fire management techniques of indigenous northern Australians to the world. Recently, it’s reinvigorated traditional fire management in Botswana, in southern Africa.

Results so far show the Botswana project is likely to prevent significant amounts of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, reduce destructive fires, promote a productive landscape, increase biodiversity and revive traditional culture.

Australia’s bushfire royal commission is currently looking at how Aboriginal knowledge can be incorporated into mainstream fire management. So let’s take a closer look at how it’s already working in Australia and abroad.

Reviving an ancient practice

Intense bushfires devastate ecosystems, biodiversity, human health, livelihoods and economies. Climate change will increase the severity, incidence and intensity of bushfires in many regions.

Over thousands of years, Aboriginal people in Australia have used fire to manage natural resources, and as an integral expression of culture.

Burning was often undertaken in the early dry season, when fires can develop gently and be easily controlled. Such burning removed fuels such as grass and leaf litter that might otherwise cause bigger fires. It also retains the canopy and other plant matter, and so preserves habitat for animals.

Read more: Our land is burning, and western science does not have all the answers

Over time, following the colonisation of Australia, indigenous land managers were forced off or left their traditional lands. Their absence has allowed large and intense bushfires in the late dry season to increase.

Traditional fire management techniques were first reintroduced at scale in Western Arnhem, in the Northern Territory, in 2007. Now there are 76 such projects – more than half either owned by, or significantly involving, an Aboriginal community.

Since the projects began, the total area affected by destructive wildfires has fallen. This reduces emissions because fires caused by cultural burning are less intense and extensive than large wildfires. This reduction is recognised by the federal government as carbon credits, generating more than A$90 million for communities so far.

Exporting Indigenous know-how

The initiative focuses on fire-prone savanna landscapes which globally account for more than 60% of carbon emissions from fire each year. Principally funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it comprises an active network of indigenous organisations, traditional owners and experts.

Botswana was the first site to prove that transferring this knowledge is possible. Among the reasons it was chosen were its savanna landscapes and a tradition of fire management by its own indigenous people.

The first ranger exchange took place in May 2019, when Indigenous rangers from Northern Australia travelled to Botswana at the invitation of the Botswanan government.

Read more: A surprising answer to a hot question: controlled burns often fail to slow a bushfire

In savannas outside the town of Maun, Botswanan firefighters pitted their controlled burning skills against Australia’s indigenous rangers.

The Botswanans applied European-style fire suppression techniques they’ve adopted over the years. This involved fire trucks and 30 people. They ignited the windward side of their area, let the fire race through and then extinguished the flames.

It was 38℃, the wind was strong and the bush was dry. It was no surprise the fire was intense and all that remained was a charred landscape.

In contrast, two Australian indigenous rangers used hand-held devices called drip torches to weave a path of fire through their area. Their block was gently burnt using the wind, the bush and their skill – clearing out undergrowth and leaving green-topped trees.

The demonstration emphatically convinced the 300 spectators, who comprised most of Botswana’s firefighting community, that the skills of Australia’s indigenous rangers were effective in Botswana’s savannas.

Indeed, the techniques used by the visitors are not dissimilar to traditional Botswanan fire methods. The common ground was reflected when the two groups exchanged almost identical fire sticks when the rangers visited a nearby community.

Last year, Botswana sent a delegation to Northern Australia to learn more about the techniques.

At pilot sites in Botswana, the communities, indigenous rangers and local fire managers are now experimenting with reinvigorating traditional fire techniques.

Lessons learnt

The degradation of savanna landscapes in Australia following colonisation is replicated around the world.

Globally, bushfire management is dominated by the concept of fire suppression rather than prevention. Fighting fire with fire seems counter-intuitive to many people. But the Botswana experience shows these attitudes can be changed quickly.

Another key lesson is that convincing people and communities to use traditional fire techniques requires real-life demonstrations. Trying to make the point through lectures, simulations and written material has limited impact.

And creating networks is essential to connect the few experts and limited resources. Knowledge of traditional fire management around the world is scarce, and experience even more so. In Botswana for example, only a few community elders still have this knowledge.

The experiences also show scale is key. A couple of small sites, with a few local people involved, is not enough to manage wildfires effectively.

Beyond Botswana

The initiative has demonstrated how Northern Australia-style traditional fire management will be useful in other savanna environments around the world

We are now working on expanding this Australian technology to other promising sites in Angola, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Brazil and Timor Leste.

Many other countries are interested in adopting these techniques. New funding, including from the private sector, is needed to scale up traditional fire management internationally.

Read more: Australia, you have unfinished business. It’s time to let our ‘fire people’ care for this land

The following people made important contributions to this article:

– Nolan Hunter, CEO, Kimberley Land Council

– Dean Munuggullumurr Yibarbuk, Warddeken Land Management

– Rowan Foley, CEO, the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation

– Cissy Gore-Birch, Executive Manager Aboriginal Engagement, Bush Heritage Australia

– Professor Jeremy Russell-Smith, Charles Darwin University

– Professor José M.C. Pereira, University of Lisbon

– Professor Guido van der Werf, Vrije Universiteit

– ref. Fighting fire with fire: how Botswana is adopting the ancient burning of Indigenous Australians – https://theconversation.com/fighting-fire-with-fire-how-botswana-is-adopting-the-ancient-burning-of-indigenous-australians-135363

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James C. Murphy, PhD, Lecturer and Tutor, Politics and History, Swinburne University of Technology

The Conversation is running a series of explainers on key figures in Australian political history, examining how they changed the country and political debate. You can read the rest of the series here.

As Australia’s longest serving prime minister, the career of Robert Menzies remains a model of political success in this country.

Despite this, much of Menzies’s legacy has failed to live long past his time in office, let alone into the 21st century. He was, for instance, firmly in favour of White Australia, obsessed with Australia’s British roots and idolised the monarchy. He also believed the Communist Party ought to be outlawed, and oversaw a highly protected, regulated economy. In many ways, Menzies was the last bastion of an old Australia we would hardly recognise today.

However, there are two notable exceptions – ways in which Menzies did manage to transform Australian political debate in a lasting way: firstly, through his construction of a middle-class political constituency he called “the forgotten people”; secondly, as the founder of the Liberal Party and Coalition.

Rising through the ranks

Born in Jeparit, Victoria, in 1894, Menzies rapidly made his way into the elite of Melbourne society. After working as a barrister and later a youthful minister in two Victorian state governments, he was elected to the federal parliament with the United Australia Party in 1934.

Attorney-General Menzies then became prime minister after Joseph Lyons died in office in 1939, just as the second world war broke out.

His factional enemies in the UAP were not impressed by his wartime leadership and, after his closest allies were killed in a plane crash, Menzies was forced out of the leadership in 1941.

Within a year, Labor was in government, and the UAP was collapsing.

This was not the end of Menzies, though. In 1944, he led efforts to reunite various right-of-centre groups to form a new anti-Labor party — the Liberal Party of Australia. He then headed the party’s campaigns against the Labor government’s alleged “socialist” excesses, such as bank nationalisation and petrol rationing.

In 1949, he led the Liberals to a sweeping election victory. Though he had some electoral near misses, and part of his longevity was owed to a fortuitous split in the Labor party, Menzies remained Liberal leader and prime minister until his retirement in 1966.

‘The forgotten people’

In 1942, as he sought to resurrect his political career, Menzies gave one of Australia’s most famous political speeches, which envisaged a constituency he called “the forgotten people”:

But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class – the middle class – those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false class war; the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country.

These were middle-class, god-fearing citizens, neither rich enough to fend for themselves, nor poor enough to seek trade union representation, and thus lacking power. They would become Menzies’ core constituency, with the party tailoring its policies to helping them meet their modest aspirations for themselves and their families.

Where the UAP had been seen as tied to the upper class and big business, Menzies would seek to attach his party to this ignored middle class, a group more Australians could imagine themselves to be part of, even if they had never thought of themselves in those terms before.

This construct has remained at the centre of Liberal Party rhetoric, reincarnated as John Howard’s “battlers” and Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians”.

Even Labor has, at times, sought to defer to this supposed “backbone of the nation”. In his first speech to the Press Club as Labor Leader, Anthony Albanese suggested the ALP had lost the 2019 federal election because, to many voters, it failed to be the party of aspiration; essentially, that they neglected Menzies’s forgotten people.

Of course, this is not to say there really is a quiet, unassuming, aspirational majority lurking out in the suburbs. Rather, Menzies’s forgotten people are a rhetorical construct that has grown a life of its own. Politicians believe in this constituency and defer to it, even if it is not, actually, a meaningful voting bloc.

A Liberal-National Coalition

Menzies was also the driving force in creating and holding together the Liberal Party — and indeed the long-term Liberal-National Coalition, an alliance that has historically shifted the focus of political debate.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: Robert Menzies and the birth of the Liberal-National coalition

Keeping liberals, conservatives and rural interests in one bloc has meant the battle for leadership in Australia became a contest between the Coalition and Labor. This was no easy feat. Indeed, until 1944, there had been numerous minor parties campaigning on the right of the political spectrum. Some were reluctant to join Menzies’s new party, given that it would be a “liberal”, rather than “conservative” party.

Free-traders and economic moderates frequently fell out over welfare and tarrifs; hard-line conservatives and social liberals had serious disagreements over censorship, multiculturalism and other social issues. However, Menzies managed to unite them under what Howard would later call the Liberal Party’s “broad church” by focusing on Labor’s “socialism” and the international threat of communism. This appeal similarly kept the Nationals as Coalition partners. Menzies said:

In 1949 we were swept into power at what was then an almost record level of majority. Now all that happened because we had something to believe in, not just something to oppose, something to believe in.

Consequently, the issues, problems and demands that divided the Coalition have not been fully discussed in the public arena, but rather suppressed within party room debates and compromises. This has, to an extent, enabled non-Labor alliances to dominate politics. More recently, the two-party system has begun to break down, with more and more voters availing themselves of minor parties and independents in order to place previously ignored issues on the political agenda.

Read more: Can the Liberal Party hold its ‘broad church’ of liberals and conservatives together?

Menzies’s legacy

Menzies’s legacy, then, is not so much his particular beliefs or policies, nor in the model of leadership he provides as Australia’s longest serving prime minister. Rather, his lasting contributions were the rhetorical and organisational structures he built. While the former have faded into obscurity, the notion of “the forgotten people” and the Liberal-National Coalition remain as important now as they were when Menzies retired from office in 1966.

Had he retired from public life at his low ebb in 1942, Australian politics might look very different today.

– ref. ‘The time has come to say something of the forgotten class’: how Menzies transformed Australian political debate – https://theconversation.com/the-time-has-come-to-say-something-of-the-forgotten-class-how-menzies-transformed-australian-political-debate-131383

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sherene Idriss, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Deakin University

Do you make the 7/11 worker Indian? Or is that offensive? If you make them white …well … you’re lying really.

But also, you’re taking a job away from an Indian actor if you don’t.

This exchange, the first comment from actor-comedian Josh Thomas and the second by Celia Pacquola, during a panel discussion at the Sydney Opera House in 2016 was shared on social media this week. It has re-energised discussions about the lack of cultural diversity in the Australian arts scene.

Compare Thomas’s comments with an interview I did with a young Iraqi man, also in 2016, after a workshop on diversity in the arts in Western Sydney. Ziad said

I do so many of these talks and the white person in the crowd will be like, ‘Thanks for sharing, it’s a great start’. Like, great start really? … We have been having these conversations for 15 years already, you should know by now … It’s so frustrating because that ignorance is such an easy cop out and it doesn’t change anything. In five years’ time I could give the same talk and someone in the audience will say the same thing. They just want to give themselves a pat on the back, like, ‘good job me’, and go back to their normal lives.

Conversations about cultural diversity in the arts have been running on a parallel track. Against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement they seem to have finally come to a head.

Many Australians are interrogating how whiteness has been fundamental to shaping our settler-colonial society – and how race has been depicted in performance. Comments like Thomas’s have taken centre stage in public debate about the kind of society we want to live in.

Calling out

The panel discussion clip was shared a week after actor Meyne Wyatt passionately closed the ABC’s Q&A program with his monologue about injustice towards Indigenous Australians.

The immediate online backlash to Thomas cast him as racist. But people of colour working in the arts offered more nuanced responses.

Rather than focus on Thomas, it is the nature of the panel discussion and how it centres the white experience that needs deeper analysis.

Additionally, it shows how difficult it is to challenge race-thinking and stereotyping – especially as a person of colour just starting out. Thomas’ comments are a symptom of systemic racism – not the whole problem.

Read more: Explainer: what is systemic racism and institutional racism?

Creative work is different to a lot of other jobs

In Australia it is illegal to engage in hiring practices based on race, gender, sex and age. But these are usually the attributes that can make or break your chances as an artist.

This harsh reality often confronts people of colour, who get into the arts hoping to freely express themselves.

My research includes over 30 interviews with young people of colour about how race, gender and socio-economic status shapes their experiences.

Because the arts scene is often based on unspoken rules, networking and gatekeeping, there are generally no channels for complaint if you are typecast or overlooked as “inexperienced” based on race.

Networks have to be maintained and that can mean accepting work perpetuates racist stereotypes because those are the easiest stories to tell.

The personal is political

Recognising systemic racism requires an understanding that being from a migrant background is often tied to socio-economic disadvantage. For Indigenous young people, heavy police surveillance intensifies structural disadvantage.

Young people trying to get work in the creative industries face many structural challenges early on in life that, over time, become compounded.

One of the participants in my research, who worked in publishing, illuminated this:

When I have been on hiring panels, I’ll say we need to try and recruit people of colour and they’ll be like, ‘Well, no Indigenous or Black person applied’. Or in the writing scene, ‘Oh there aren’t enough writers of colour or their stories aren’t good enough’.

The problem doesn’t start at the point of job ads. Like for me, it starts when I was born. I grew up in housing commission, I went to shit schools, we got moved around because we were displaced when they [the government] took over our building, and the fact that I have enough experience is a fucking miracle.

In the 2016 panel discussion, American TV writer Dan Harmon comments that diversity in the arts goes beyond what happens on screen. It’s the lack of support and resources available for young Black children, for example.

My research echoed this disadvantage in the Australian context. Ibrahim told me:

I told the art teacher that I wanted to do an animation [for year 12 art assessment] but I was waiting for my father to buy me the camera that would allow me to do it. Because the school didn’t have the technology … at one point the teacher said to me “are you gonna work on something you can do?” He just didn’t believe I could do it.

Read more: By rejecting stereotypes, Slam and Ramy show us authentic Arab Muslim men on screen

‘A great start’

In my research, being blocked from securing a gig based on racial stereotypes – like the hip hop artist who has to pretend to be Latin American instead of Arab Muslim – resulted in some young people suffering from poor mental health.

Some moved abroad to try their hand in the US or UK arts scene, as Asian Australian actors including Alexander Hodge have done. Others have become part of the “multicultural arts scene”. Some gave up on their dream altogether.

Rather than focus on Thomas’s apology, now is the time to ask whether arts gatekeepers really understand what cultural diversity means and to think beyond “adding colour” to the mix. It’s time for a deeper conversation about achieving transformative racial justice across our society, including the arts.

– ref. The sorry part is easy – why true racial diversity in the arts will take more than words – https://theconversation.com/the-sorry-part-is-easy-why-true-racial-diversity-in-the-arts-will-take-more-than-words-140933

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leisa Armstrong, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Edith Cowan University

In recent months, food security concerns have emerged for nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as swarms of desert locusts wreak havoc on crops.

While the same level of damage isn’t currently being felt in Australia, the threat of infestations extends to us too. But drone technology is offering up solutions.

Not just a Biblical threat

In January, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned rising locust numbers in the Horn of Africa presented an “extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods.

According to the FAO, a swarm of about 40 million desert locusts can eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people. Swarms can be as large as several hundred square kilometres, with as many as 80 million adults per square kilometre.

Countries impacted by infestations this year include Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

A review of records by the Australian Plague Locust Commission has reported eight large outbreaks in Australia since 1930. The FAO has encouraged the use of drones to provide early warning systems that may help prevent locust outbreaks.

Control with technology

In nature, locusts are controlled by birds, spiders, parasitic flies and wasps – but these aren’t effective when numbers explode.

In Australia, locusts are generally controlled by aerial spraying of pesticides from light aircraft. One solution may be to destroy eggs by ploughing in crops or pastures, but there’s no conclusive data on how effective this is.

Drones are now providing an innovative alternative to the more expensive use of light aircrafts. These aerial vehicles can be used to remotely sense areas, carry out pest surveillance and monitor crop growth.

They also allow for targeted pesticide application through atomiser sprayers that deliver a fine, even spray from liquid.

Read more: How many locusts does it take to start a biblical plague? Just three

Each state and territory of Australia has been affected by plague locusts at some point in the past, with outbreaks having occurred in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. The latest April bulletin shows limited outbreaks in New South Wales.

There is a growing body of research on the use of drones for pest monitoring and management, with several Australian agricultural consultancy companies offering drone services for crop and soil monitoring. State and federal agricultural agencies also use drones for crop, disease and pest monitoring.

Understanding the movement of locusts helps determine the best way to control crop damage.

Last month marked the first time drones were used to clear swarms in Rajasthan, India. Spraying insecticides dispersed the insects into different areas.

Drones can also be used in the aftermath of infestations. For instance, recent outbreaks in Kenya have seen the use of drones for post-disaster mapping. These maps, along with satellite information, can provide more accurate assessments of the extent of crop loss.

On-ground internet-connected sensors with thermal and image processing capabilities could also potentially be used to monitor the spread of infestations. These could provide additional real-time monitoring to support satellite imagery.

Some bugs remain

There are limitations when it comes to using drones to tackle locust problems.

Drones don’t perform well in areas that are densely packed with locusts, due to damage to propellers. And while the technical specifications of drones have made rapid improvements over the past few years, they still only provide a limited load of insecticide for spraying.

The duration of flying time for drones is also usually less than an hour. Flying drones requires a degree of expertise, and any commercial drone flying requires certification from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

Small creature, big bite

Locusts belong to the same order of insects as grasshoppers, katydids and crickets. Locusts are grasshoppers that develop “gregarious” behaviours and become more voracious as a result.

Grasshoppers can become gregarious and start to swarm due to an increase in chemical serotonin in their nervous system. This results in them going from individual walking grasshoppers to flying locusts. There are no clear differences between locusts and grasshoppers other than behaviour.

In Australia there are three main pest locust species: the Australian plague locust (Chortoicetes terminifera), the spur-throated locust (Austracris guttulosa) and the migratory locust (Locusta migratoria). Controlling these pests is difficult when they travel in swarms.

Locust swarms can decimate swathes of crop in their way, consuming everything from leaves and grains, to pastures and even trees.

With ongoing locust infestations, a rise in extreme weather events, and now COVID-19, the struggles faced by farmers the world over are compounded. Improving current technologies and finding new ways to innovate may help ease this burden in the coming years.

Read more: Swarming locusts: people used to eat them, but shouldn’t anymore

– ref. Huge locust swarms are threatening food security, but drones could help stop them – https://theconversation.com/huge-locust-swarms-are-threatening-food-security-but-drones-could-help-stop-them-140625

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brigid Clancy, PhD Candidate (Psychiatry) & Research Assistant, University of Newcastle

If you’re feeling excited about being out of lockdown, you’re not alone. Social media is buzzing with plans of big nights out to celebrate the relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in Australia and New Zealand.

But before you go on that big bender, here are some things to keep in mind so you don’t overdo it.

How has lockdown changed our drinking habits?

Several surveys have highlighted the disruption coronavirus has made to our drinking habits. First, there was a run on alcohol, with people stockpiling their favourite drinks. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia reported spending on alcohol was up more than 20% in the initial few weeks of lockdown.

Many experts were worried drinking would drastically increase, along with many of its harmful consequences. These include greater risk of mental health problems, family violence, and alcohol dependence.

Data from several sources confirmed drinking habits changed during lockdown. A survey by alcohol advocacy group Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE) found people who had been stockpiling alcohol weren’t just keeping it for a rainy day – 70% reported drinking more and 30% were worried about their own or someone else’s drinking.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) found, overall, 14% of Australians reported increasing their alcohol consumption, while 10% reported a reduction.

The Australian National University found, in particular, women have been drinking significantly more than pre-lockdown levels. Having child-caring responsibilities was a big predictor of increased alcohol consumption.

The ABS data also found the major increase in drinking was among women. This exacerbates a worrying trend over the past few years of women increasing their drinking.

Read more: Women are drinking more during the pandemic, and it’s probably got a lot to do with their mental health

Hello Sunday Morning, an organisation that helps people change their relationship with alcohol, also reported a significant increase in people accessing their online services.

Your alcohol tolerance may have changed

Changes in the amount you drink can affect your alcohol tolerance. How intoxicated you feel is related to your tolerance, whereas your blood alcohol concentration is more related to how much you have drunk over a certain time period.

This means if you’ve been drinking more during lockdown, your tolerance has probably increased. You would need to consume more alcohol to feel the effects you used to get from fewer drinks. If you feel less of the effects of alcohol, you might drink more without realising it.

Read more: Thinking about taking a break from alcohol? Here’s how to cut back or quit

While you might not feel as drunk, your brain function is still affected and you can still be over the legal limit for driving. Take care to monitor the number of drinks you are consuming and plan how you’ll get home without driving.

Higher tolerance to alcohol means you are also at increased risk of alcohol-related harm. Higher tolerance is associated with alcohol-use disorders and is one of the first signs of dependence.

On the other hand, if you have been drinking less, your tolerance may have decreased so a smaller amount of alcohol will affect you more than normal. This means if you drink the same amount as usual you might get drunk more quickly.

Take it slowly or you might end up a lot drunker than you planned. Monitor how you feel, and if your tolerance has decreased enjoy the extra cash you’re saving on drinks!

How to avoid drinking too much

To help avoid unintentionally drinking more than you planned, keep in mind these simple tips:

• set limits and count your drinks. Before you start drinking, decide how much you want to drink and stick to it. The draft Australian alcohol guidelines recommend no more than ten standard drinks a week, and no more than four in a day for healthy adults. If you have an existing health problem, alcohol affects you more so you should drink even less. If you are under 18 or pregnant, you shouldn’t drink at all

• alternate your drinks with water and sip slowly. Have at least one glass of water or a no sugar, non-alcoholic drink for every alcoholic drink. It will help slow you down and can also reduce the likelihood of a nasty hangover the next day. Avoid shots or buying rounds, so you can comfortably sit on your drinks and sip them slowly

• eat before and during drinking. This will help slow your drinking down and also slows the absorption of alcohol. You’ll be better able to monitor how much you are drinking, so you are less likely to overindulge.

Read more: What causes hangovers, blackouts and ‘hangxiety’? Everything you need to know about alcohol these holidays

How to have a good time while distancing

While you might be itching for things to get back to normal, we are still distancing while out in public. Make sure you are aware of your state or territory’s restrictions.

Remember your favourite pubs and restaurants have to follow strict rules, so respect the staff and the new practices they have put in place to keep everyone safe. Ask before merging tables, respect capacity limits, sign in with your name and phone number when requested, and use hand sanitiser if offered on arrival.

When out drinking, don’t share drinks and continue to follow COVID-related rules and guidelines such as:

• keep 1.5 metres away from each other

• don’t touch your eyes, nose or mouth

• maintain good hygiene practices such as hand-washing

• download the COVIDSafe app and have it open and running while out.

Read more: COVIDSafe tracking app reviewed: the government delivers on data security, but other issues remain

Where to get help

If you want to lower your tolerance, you can take a break from alcohol and “reset” your system.

To check your consumption, try the AUDIT screening tool online.

If you’d like to talk to someone about your drinking, call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015. It’s a free call from anywhere in Australia. You can chat online with a counsellor at CounsellingOnline.

You can also talk to your GP. Many clinics are now conducting appointments via telehealth.

Read more: Coronavirus has boosted telehealth care in mental health, so let’s keep it up

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Getting back on the beers after lockdown? Here’s what you should know – https://theconversation.com/getting-back-on-the-beers-after-lockdown-heres-what-you-should-know-140454

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin Mudd, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, RMIT University

Of all the elements on Earth, none is more strictly controlled under law than uranium. A plethora of international agreements govern its sale and use in energy, research and nuclear weapons.

Australian environmental law considers nuclear actions, such as uranium mining, as a “matter of national environmental significance” under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This means uranium involves matters of national and international concern for which the Australian government is solely responsible.

The states, which own minerals, cannot exercise such oversight on uranium exports and use. So any new uranium mine needs both state and federal environmental approvals.

The Minerals Council of Australia wants to change this. In a submission to a ten-year review of the EPBC Act, the council argues that uranium’s special treatment is redundant, as environmental risks are already addressed in state approval processes.

On Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that BHP’s proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam copper-uranium-gold-silver mine in South Australia was one of 15 major projects set to be fast-tracked for environmental approval. This would include a single, joint state and federal assessment.

But responsibility and past performance make a compelling case to maintain our federal environmental laws more than ever. Here’s why uranium mining must remain a federal issue.

Our international obligations

Australia is a signatory to several international treaties, conventions and agreements concerning nuclear activities and uranium mining and export.

These include safeguards to ensure Australian uranium is used only for peaceful nuclear power or research, and not military uses.

As of the end of 2018, the nuclear material safeguarded under international agreements derived from our uranium exports totalled 212,052 tonnes – including 201.6 tonnes of separated plutonium.

Making sure our uranium trading partners don’t redirect that material for the wrong purpose has been the raison d’être of our nuclear foreign policy since 1977. It’s clearly a national legal and moral obligation, and something the states simply cannot do.

In response, a spokesperson for the Minerals Council of Australia said a national mechanism to manage safeguards already exists through the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, adding:

Uranium is further regulated through the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) […] under the provisions of the ARPANS Regulations 1999. The object of the ARPANS Act is “to protect the health and safety of people, and to protect the environment, from the harmful effects of radiation”.

But ARPANSA regulates radiation safety and not uranium exports. If uranium mining was removed as a nuclear action, then there would be no public process involving our uranium exports – creating more secrecy and reducing scrutiny.

Successful rehabilitation has yet to be seen

Uranium mines are difficult to rehabilitate at the end of their lives. In my 24 years of research, including visiting most sites, I’ve yet to see a successful case study of Australia’s 11 major uranium mines or numerous small sites.

For example, the Rum Jungle mine near Darwin, which operated from 1954 to 1971, left a toxic legacy of acidic and radioactive drainage and a biologically dead Finniss River.

As a military project for the Cold War, it was Australian government-owned, but operated under contract by a company owned by Rio Tinto. The site was rehabilitated with taxpayer money from 1983-86, but by the mid-1990s the works were failing, and pollution levels were again rising.

The Northern Territory government is proposing a new round of rehabilitation. After accounting for inflation to 2019 dollars, Rum Jungle has cost taxpayers A$875 million for a return of A$139 million. The next round of rehabilitation is expected to cost many millions more.

The former Mary Kathleen mine, also part of Rio Tinto’s corporate history, operated from 1958-63 and 1976-82.

Rehabilitation works were completed by 1986 and won national engineering awards for excellence. But by the late 1990s, acid seepage problems emerged from the tailings dam (where mining by-products are stored) and overlying grasses were absorbing toxic heavy metals, creating a risk for grazing cattle.

Rare earth metals are also present in these tailings, leading to the possibility the tailings will be reprocessed to fund the next round of rehabilitation. The site remains in limbo, despite its Instagram fame.

Both Rum Jungle and Mary Kathleen were rehabilitated to the standards of their day, but they have not withstood the test of time.

Australia’s biggest uranium mine, Ranger, is fast approaching the end of its operating life.

Rio Tinto is also the majority owner of Ranger. Despite Ranger’s recent losses, Rio has retained control and given Ranger hundreds of millions of dollars towards ensuring site operations and rehabilitation.

In recent years the cost of rehabilitation has soared from A$565 million in 2011 to A$897 million in 2019, over which time A$603 million has been spent on rehabilitation works.

Site rehabilitation is required to be complete by January 2026, with Rio Tinto and Ranger assuming 25 years of monitoring – although plans and funding for this are still being finalised.

The legal requirement is that no contaminants should cause environmental impacts for 10,000 years, and no other mine has ever faced such a hurdle.

Recently, it emerged that Ranger had not agreed to continue its share of funding the scientific research required for the rehabilitation – an issue still unresolved. So despite promises of world’s best ever rehabilitation, concerns remain.

The Conversation contacted Rio Tinto to respond, and it referred us to Energy Resources Australia (ERA), which operates Ranger. An ERA spokesperson stated:

Since 1994, ERA has made an annual contribution to research into the environmental effects of uranium mining in the Alligator Rivers Region under an agreement with the Commonwealth. The agreement provides for a review of funding contributions at fixed periods or at either party’s request to acknowledge changes in Ranger operations.

ERA is required to cease processing in January 2021 in accordance with the expiration of its Authority to Operate under the Commonwealth Atomic Energy Act. Given the impending cessation in processing, ERA believes it is appropriate and reasonable to review the current research funding arrangements.

ERA has followed due process in this matter and welcomes the Commonwealth’s decision to support a process of mediation to resolve the issue.

No other former uranium mine in Australia can claim long-term rehabilitation success. Nabarlek, Radium Hill-Port Pirie, South Alligator Valley and other small mines all have issues such as erosion, weeds, remaining infrastructure, radiation hot-spots and/or water contamination. They all require ongoing surveillance.

Uranium mining is set to be outcompeted

Australia’s uranium export revenue from 1977 to December A$2019 was A$29.4 billion. Lithium has now overtaken uranium in export revenue – from 2017 to 2019, lithium earned Australia two to three times our uranium exports.

Even if Olympic Dam expands (and especially if it stops extracting uranium in favour of tellurium, cobalt and rare earths also present), this trend is expected to increase in the coming years as Ranger closes and the world transitions to renewable energy and electric vehicles to help address climate change.

In response, the Minerals Council of Australia stated that lithium’s contribution to large-scale electricity storage is just beginning, arguing:

With the development of new nuclear technologies such as small modular and micro reactors, the prospects for the future of both uranium and lithium are positive and no one should be picking winners apart from the market.

Ultimately, uranium remains an element with immense potential for misuse – as seen with North Korea and other rogue nuclear states. Federal oversight of uranium mining must remain. After all, the price of peace is eternal vigilance.

– ref. Expensive, dirty and dangerous: why we must fight miners’ push to fast-track uranium mines – https://theconversation.com/expensive-dirty-and-dangerous-why-we-must-fight-miners-push-to-fast-track-uranium-mines-139966

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Verity Firth, Executive Director Social Justice, University of Technology Sydney, University of Technology Sydney

This essay is based on an episode of the University of Technology Sydney podcast series “The New Social Contract”. This series examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through this global pandemic.

COVID-19 comes with a set of pressing social challenges. These include environmental catastrophes such as the Australian droughts and bushfires, and the impending crisis of global warming. Social and health issues – include debilitating poverty, racial and income inequality, and chronic diseases – also loom large.

In this turbulent environment, universities have an important role to play as anchor institutions that support communities in transition.

Rather than undertaking knowledge work on behalf of society, they must do so in collaboration with society. This means building relationships with business, industry, government and not-for-profit organisations, to name but a few.

Out of the ivory tower

Recent decisions by the federal government to change the JobKeeper legislation three times, in a way that makes university staff ineligible, has left many in the sector feeling undervalued.

Criticisms of universities stem from both sides of politics. For many people, universities remain institutions embodying past imperial practices.

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

The rise of the #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and the growing movement in Australia to decolonise the curriculum, demonstrates black and First Nations’ students’ frustration at an institution they still see as predominantly elitist and white.

On the other side of the political spectrum, universities are seen as aloof and disconnected from the real-world concerns of businesses and ordinary people.

In 2017, then Vice-Chancellor of The University of Melbourne, Professor Glyn Davis, warned of a “rising tide of hostility” towards universities.

And the former president of the University of Pennsylvania argued that to ensure ongoing relevance, universities must engage with the real world, and move “out of the ivory tower and into the streets”.

Universities have fared reasonably well compared to declining levels of trust in other institutions. But it’s fair to say universities are built on an expert model that prizes academic knowledge and often de-legitimises other forms of knowledge and learning.

This often gets in the way of constructive collaborations between universities and communities.

Co-designed and collaborative knowledge

COVID-19 has allowed for a brief re-emergence of public and government trust in expertise. University and medical institute researchers, public health officials and politicians have been working alongside each other on the same problem.

Each have been able to contribute their expertise (and interests) at critical points in the decision-making process.

No consideration (such as opening the economy) has been given primacy over another (protecting Australian’s health). Instead there has been a weighing of the evidence and difficult calls made along the way.

Read more: Australians’ trust in politicians and democracy hits an all-time low: new research

This engaged decision-making process has been a key component of creating public trust. For this trust to continue, universities need to learn from this period and create new processes.

This point was best made by French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, Bruno Latour, when he argued the COVID-19 pandemic has given the public an opportunity to engage with scientific complexity, and debate with each other about statistics, experimentation and how diseases are spread.

He said

if you want people to have some grasp of science, you must show how it is produced.

But it goes further than just transparency. It’s about respecting all types of knowledge in the search for answers. In relation to the science of climate change, Latour argued that far from being an elite endeavour, everyone can contribute to a conversation about the weather and its impact on their community.

Respect for, and engagement with, knowledge from outside the “academy” is critical both for driving trust in expertise and finding better solutions to the problems faced by the globe.

Subscribe to the New Social Contract podcast on your favourite podcast app: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher

A new way forward for universities

Research partnerships between Indigenous elders and university academics are an excellent example of engaged research .

At the University of New England, researchers are working with the Banbai nation to better understand how to use Indigenous land management practices and science to apply fire strategically.

Extending this approach into the world of public policy, the Bushfire Royal Commission is looking to understand ways

the traditional land and fire management practices of Indigenous Australians could improve Australia’s resilience to natural disasters.

Griffith University is involved in “Logan Together”. This collective impact project, to support early childhood intervention in the Logan community, is a radical way for a university to embrace its role as an anchor institution.

The project deliberately empowers citizens and puts community members in leadership roles across the project. The goals and outcomes of this project are co-designed with community members, industry and government.

At the University of Technology Sydney, the Shopfront program helps deliver student community coursework projects for academic credit. Community organisations are paired with skilled student teams to deliver on a wide variety of community-led projects.

The students learn on the job, and not-forprofit partners benefit from the students’ expertise.

But how do universities change?

University groups like the Talloires Network and Engagement Australia champion the unique role universities have to address today’s global challenges through teaching, learning and research partnerships.

The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification (now being piloted in Australia by ten universities) has established a gold standard for engagement. This is based on the principle of reciprocity between universities and their partners in the community, government and industry.

It outlines a new era for universities, abandoning the expert model and embracing the concept of engaged research and teaching.

Outwardly focused, Carnegie promotes the

partnership of […] university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to […] address critical social issues and contribute to the public good.

Universities complete an accreditation process to receive the Carnegie classification. The classification acknowledges the old adage that an organisation values what it measures.

Traditional university ranking systems mainly rely on indicators around research – mainly reputation, citations and funding. Although these are important metrics, they do not speak to the broader public benefit of the university and the role it plays through teaching, learning and research engagement.

Read more: Climate change is the most important mission for universities of the 21st century

The Carnegie classification rectifies this imbalance. It asks universities to provide evidence about their engagement activities, and demonstrate these are part of the university’s core mission. It encourages universities to reflect on their relationships with industry, community and government and gain insights into how the university can improve its engagement practices.

Participating in the process provides universities with a roadmap to becoming a different type of university. It allows them to examine the culture of traditional academia and examine whether institutional practices stymie collaboration and relationships of trust with those outside the academy.

COVID-19 has shown how addressing the present crisis (and other big issues) as a multi-part player in the creation of new knowledge for a social purpose, has the capacity to renew the social license of universities.

‘Universities and Communities- who should they serve?’ was made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney – an audio production house combining academic research and audio storytelling.

– ref. After coronavirus, universities must collaborate with communities to support social transition – https://theconversation.com/after-coronavirus-universities-must-collaborate-with-communities-to-support-social-transition-140541

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shanthi Robertson, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Successful settlement and integration are shared goals of refugees and the communities where they settle. The findings of our research released today highlight the importance of simple everyday encounters and experiences for newly arrived refugees to feel welcome in Australia. We also found refugees’ strong social bonds with family and community do not prevent them developing connections with the broader Australian community.

Here we explore two aspects to refugees’ social connections:

• “social bonds” that connect refugees to others within their ethnic or religious community

• “social bridges” that connect them to others in the wider community.

Most research on refugee integration focuses on areas like employment, education, English proficiency and health. Our research shines a light on aspects of settlement that are often overlooked: refugees’ social connections. The social dimensions of integration help them to build resilience in the face of the challenges of navigating a new chapter of their lives in Australia.

These social connections help lay the foundations for belonging. Ultimately, this promotes their long-term integration.

We surveyed 334 refugees in their preferred language. All were past participants in an on-arrival settlement program in New South Wales. We conducted 15 follow-up interviews.

Importantly, all the survey participants had permanent residency in Australia. This gave them full and equal access to rights and services. We believe this was a critical factor in the high levels of belonging they reported.

The security of permanent protection provides a bedrock for high levels of trust in both the Australian community and institutions. The majority of respondents reported strong trust in:

• the government (a lot of trust, 85%)

• the people they work and study with (78%, a lot/some)

• the people in their neighbourhood (75%, a lot/some)

• the wider Australian community, to a slightly lesser extent (67% a lot/some).

Building bonds with Australia starts locally

As refugees engage with their ethnic and religious communities, our research found they also develop a strong sense of belonging to their local neighbourhood and mixed friendship networks.

Over three-quarters of respondents regularly meet and get to know people from ethnic and religious backgrounds other than their own. This indicates a high level of interactions and social bridges in everyday situations.

However, age, gender and particularly place of residence all play a role. Refugees living in regional areas were more likely than people in metropolitan areas to regularly meet people from ethnic/religious communities other than their own (90% strongly agree/agree in rural areas compared to 81% in urban areas). Men were more likely to regularly meet people from different backgrounds (81% strongly agree/agree compared to 70% among women), as were those between the ages of 18 and 24 (79%).

Good neighbours create social bridges

We found it’s mainly everyday encounters and experiences that foster refugees’ social bridges to the wider community. Their rates of participation in formal community activities – such as school, parent support groups and youth groups – were relatively low.

Despite reporting language difficulties in talking with their neighbours, refugees had high levels of trust in their neighbours and neighbourhoods. This was a result of positive and regular interactions and experiences.

The findings suggest that local, everyday and neighbourhood-level social bridges are a critical part of refugee belonging.

It is at this local scale that policy and service interventions are most likely to succeed. The findings also highlight why it’s important to safeguard and enhance positive attitudes towards refugees in the wider community.

For example, 25-year-old Maher from Afghanistan, who arrived in 2017, spoke about the importance of neighbours being friendly. He remembers them saying hello to him when he first arrived:

The neighbours were always very welcoming and warm, and usually when they see me they were greeting me well and it was making me feel very comfortable.

Aram, a 39-year-old Armenian man from Syria, also arrived in 2017. He, too, valued the general friendliness in his multicultural neighbourhood:

The community where I’m at, or the neighbourhood, there are people from all different races, from Asian to Middle-Eastern, Africans, they are all different nations. So we get along really well. We all say ‘hello’ to each other, very courteous to each other. So, in both ways, it feels that I’m welcome from this end and welcome from the other end.

These are the simple things anyone can do

Overall, our findings suggest people in the community can do a number of simple, everyday things to help refugees feel welcome. And, in doing so, they support their integration. Suggested actions include:

• say hello, smile and wave to neighbours – even if there is a language barrier, small positive actions make people feel like they are living in a safe and supportive community

• help with everyday activities if you can – offer to carry in shopping, give lifts to work or school, keep an eye on the house or collect mail when neighbours are away, which are all small actions that newly arrived families remember as very welcoming

• support grassroots ethnic and religious community groups if they are fundraising, holding activities or looking for volunteers – these are great local spaces to build social “bridges”

• contribute to an overall positive social climate and public discourse by sharing positive attitudes towards refugees and supporting organisations that do the same.

– ref. ‘The neighbours were always very welcoming and warm’: little things count to help refugees belong – https://theconversation.com/the-neighbours-were-always-very-welcoming-and-warm-little-things-count-to-help-refugees-belong-140449

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Baxter, PhD Candidate in Law/Criminology, researching human trafficking and modern slavery in Australia, Flinders University

Yes, there was slavery in Australia. Yes, there is slavery in Australia now.

It occurs as forced labour, sexual exploitation and forced marriage.

These situations rarely involve the actual chains and bars we commonly associate with historical slavery. They are nonetheless conditions of enslavement: a person is forced to work under threat; is controlled by another; is dehumanised or treated as a commodity; and is not free to leave.

Relatively speaking, modern slavery is rare in Australia. Perhaps a few thousand people fit the strict definition, compared with about 40 million globally.

But every number is the story of a human being. Their stories are, however, rarely heard as modern slavery in Australia remains largely invisible.

Australian statistics

The best official data on modern slavery in Australia come from the Australian Federal Police, the agency to which all alleged human trafficking and slavery offences must be referred. Between 2013 and 2017, as reported to the federal parliament’s Inquiry into establishing a Modern Slavery Act, there were 496 referrals.

Read more: At last, Australia has a Modern Slavery Act. Here’s what you’ll need to know

The cases represent just a fifth of the iceberg, according to Anti-Slavery Australia, a research and policy centre that provides free legal services to victims of modern slavery. It estimates more than 80% of victims go undetected. This means about 2,000 more people in modern slavery than the AFP numbers indicate.

Forced labour

The most common form of slavery globally is (non-sexual) forced labour. An estimated 25 million people are forced to work through the use or threat of violence, or physical, emotional or financial restraints. Particularly prevalent is bonded labour or debt bondage – having to work to pay off a debt.

These practices thrive in the regulatory gaps of global supply chains. They are common, for example, in Indian textile making, in Thai fishing and in Chinese manufacturing.

In Australia such cases are relatively uncommon.

The first conviction under forced labour laws enacted by the federal parliament in 2013 was in April 2019. The case involved a Brisbane couple, Isikeli and Malavine Pulini, who were sentenced to five and six years’ jail respectively for forcing a Fijian woman to work as their domestic servant for eight years.

The woman had previously worked for the Pulinis in Tonga from 2001 to 2006. In 2008 they enticed her to Brisbane on a tourist visa, then took her passport from her. They manipulated her desire to stay in Australia and made her work long hours as nanny, cook, maid and cleaner. They paid her $150 to $250 a fortnight. She fled in 2016.

As the crown prosecutor Ben Power observed, this was “a secret hiding in plain sight” for eight years.

The majority of victims remain hidden for a long time. Commonly contributing to their invisibility are language barriers, a fear of immigration authorities, and an ignorance of Australian laws. Thus, while we can make estimates of the numbers of people caught in these situations, there might be more cases than we think.

Sexual exploitation

More common in Australia than labour exploitation, according to the AFP numbers, is sexual exploitation, which represents about 30% of slavery cases.

Sexual exploitation involves a person having to perform sex work due to coercion, threats or deception. To the extent this is done for the exploiter’s commercial gain, the International Labour Office considers sexual exploitation a form of forced labour.

One such case to end in a successful sexual slavery conviction is the November 2019 sentencing of Rungnapha Kanbut to eight years in jail for keeping two Thai women as slaves.

The two women came to Australia to do sex work. The man who made their travel arrangements took naked photos of them. The threat of these being posted on the internet was later used to deter the women from fleeing.

When they arrived in Australia, Kanbut took their passports and told them they needed to pay off a $45,000 debt. They worked up to 12 hours a day at multiple Sydney brothels. Most of their earnings went to Kanbut.

They were, as the judge put it, effectively kept “in a prison without bars”.

Read more: Human trafficking and slavery still happen in Australia. This comic explains how

Forced marriage

Forced marriage appears the most prevalent form of modern slavery in Australia. It involves being tricked, forced or coerced into a marriage without full consent. Of the estimated 15.4 million people in such arrangements globally, 13 million are female.

Research suggests victims of forced marriage in Australia are mostly the children of first-generation migrants from places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Fiji (though it should be noted the practice is in no way limited to specific nations or cultures).

An example is the case of an Australian-born teenager whose strict Indian-born parents tricked her into travelling to India on the premise of marrying the man she loved but then extorted her into marrying someone else.

The teenager had angered her parents by conducting a long-distance relationship then moving from Sydney to Melbourne to live with her chosen boyfriend.

They finally cajoled her into agreeing to a wedding in India as part of a reconciliation. But once the wedding party was in India, they took her passport and threatened to have her boyfriend’s mother and sister kidnapped and raped if she didn’t do what they said. So she did.

This case has a comparatively happy ending. The Family Court of Australia declared the marriage void.

But for many women there are many barriers to getting to court. These are complex situations compounded by social stigma, family pressure, fear of violence and cultural and gender expectations.

Read more: Dowry abuse does exist, but let’s focus on the wider issues of economic abuse and coercive control

Complex problems, complex responses

Each form of modern slavery is complex. Each requires a different policy response.

Forced marriage needs more of a “soft approach”, including consultation and education strategies, and prevention and empowerment opportunities that engage whole communities.

Sexual exploitation requires addressing the reasons that lead women into sex work and then to become part of the cycle of exploitation.

With forced labour, Australia’s Modern Slavery Act provides a focal point to promote accountability in business supply chains.

That wouldn’t have helped the victim of the Pulinis, though. In her case, as is uncounted others, the ability to hide in plain sight is slavery’s first defence.

So, along with policy measures, there’s also a need to heighten community awareness. We all have to be able to better spot the signs of slavery even without chains and bars.

– ref. Forced labour, sexual exploitation and forced marriage: modern slavery in Australia hides in plain sight – https://theconversation.com/forced-labour-sexual-exploitation-and-forced-marriage-modern-slavery-in-australia-hides-in-plain-sight-140838

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Professor and Director, Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University, Griffith University

Over the past three years, our Making Music Work project has mapped the creative, social, cultural, and economic realities of a music career in Australia.

We surveyed nearly 600 musicians to understand their working lives, creative goals, career paths and economic circumstances. We also conducted interviews with 11 diverse musicians to explore their careers in more depth.

Our study shows the vast majority of Australian musicians undertake a portfolio career which encompasses concurrent and often impermanent roles. This is not a new phenomenon but in recent decades there have been major shifts in how music is made, paid for and consumed.

Now, the impact of COVID-19 on the funding and policy landscape has dramatically affected how musicians develop and sustain their careers – or not.

Balancing acts

Musicians told us they stay in the music industry because of their love and passion for music, which is central to their identity. Far from the “starving artist” myth, they combine music and non-music work in highly entrepreneurial ways. Surveyed before the current crisis, almost half (49%) the musicians in our study held two or more concurrent paid roles.

We found 560 different job titles, the most common being instrumental musician (25%) and private music teacher (10%). Musicians worked in music-related jobs as disparate as composers, sound technicians and community arts workers, and non-music jobs including sales assistants, journalists and librarians.

We spoke to musicians from 18 years old to 65 and above. Almost 70% had worked in music for more than 10 years, with nearly one in three of them practising as professional musicians for more than 20 years. This gives an indication of how committed Australian musicians are to the industry and sustaining their music careers and creative practice over time.

While most musicians we studied are committed to the profession, 12% said that they were thinking about leaving.

The most common reasons for leaving the music industry were financial stress, lack of income and caring responsibilities – all of which have since been exacerbated by the pandemic.

A live industry

Performance is the most common paid activity for musicians, with two-thirds of musicians deriving at least some of their income from performance fees.

Live performances are also crucial for peer networking and career development. Peer networks are mostly built and maintained through events, and are key to musicians’ building and renewing skills, developing new creative collaborations and securing jobs.

Given live music was immediately impacted by the COVID-19 restrictions and will be slow to return, the capacity of musicians to maintain their careers has been severely limited.

Federal, state and local governments have initiated a range of targeted grants and subsidies to help support the sector and its workforce. However, lobby groups and representative bodies have called for significantly more funding.

Read more: Friday essay: the politics of dancing and thinking about cultural values beyond dollars

On 10 June, music rights organisation APRA AMCOS published an open letter with more than 1,000 industry signatories imploring the Australian government to consider a suite of proposals.

In making their case, the signatories assert:

[w]e contribute $16 billion to the economy and we are an asset that is a lynchpin for the tourism and hospitality sectors and a powerful driver of metropolitan and regional economies and export to the world.

The employment puzzle

Musicians are predominantly self-employed or are employed on temporary contracts, leaving them ineligible for the current JobKeeper scheme.

Only half of musicians receive all of their income from music-related work, and the most common sources of music-related income are performance fees, music teaching and grants. The average income from all work was $41,257, with a median income of $30,576.

While the Australian government has permitted early release of superannuation in response to COVID-19, our study has shown that musicians have limited access to this and other employment-related benefits.

Less than one-third of our survey participants reported employer-based superannuation contributions, and only 7% had access to a health plan or private health insurance scheme.

Read more: The government says artists should be able to access JobKeeper payments. It’s not that simple

Cause for hope

In spite of the challenges, Australian musicians have shown tremendous creativity and resilience in adapting their work to online environments during the pandemic.

Musicians’ resilience is unsurprising given how creatively and financially nimble they have to be when negotiating music and non-music roles. To successfully engage across a variety of markets, genres and performance sites, musicians deploy diverse and agile skill sets. If they were to receive similar support as other sectors of the economy in this current crisis, they would be well placed to survive and thrive into the future.

Throughout our research, Australian musicians generously shared their expertise. They recognise the crucial role of peer networks to develop creative practices, sustain livelihoods and nurture the sector. This creative generosity will be central to the industry’s recovery from COVID-19.

Scott Harrison, Vanessa Tomlinson and Paul Draper also contributed to this research.

– ref. A long way to the top: Australian musicians balance multiple roles to make their careers work – https://theconversation.com/a-long-way-to-the-top-australian-musicians-balance-multiple-roles-to-make-their-careers-work-140840

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

After its calls for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, Australia has found itself targeted by China with trade retaliation as well as sharp rhetoric.

In this podcast, we talk with two prominent China experts about the superpower’s wider ambitions and tactics and the bilateral relationship.

Clive Hamilton, from Charles Sturt University, has just coauthored, with Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand. The book probes China’s ever-expanding activities on the international stage. “From Beijing’s perspective, they see themselves not in a new Cold War, but still in the old Cold War,” Hamilton says.

Richard McGregor, who as a journalist reported from China for many years, last year published Xi Jinping: The Backlash. McGregor argues for a rather different “tone” in Australia’s diplomacy. “We always seem to want to bring on a fight with China, and that ignores the economic equities we have in the relationship. We don’t want to give them any excuse to unfairly punish us.”

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Clive Hamilton and Richard McGregor on Australia-China relations – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-clive-hamilton-and-richard-mcgregor-on-australia-china-relations-140959

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By L Gordon Flake, CEO, Perth USAsia Centre, University of Western Australia

After a period of relative quiet, North Korea again commandeered news headlines with the dramatic, if symbolic, demolition of the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in the city of Kaesong, just north of the demilitarised zone.

The office was refurbished at considerable cost to South Korea following the 2018 inter-Korean Summit, and was intended to function as a virtual embassy between the two Koreas. Its destruction was an unmistakable indication of North Korea’s displeasure with its neighbour, and a dramatic end to two years of pageantry and hope.

Tensions between the Koreas have been rising after the north protested the launch of anti-North Korean propaganda-filled balloons and plastic bottles into North Korea by South Korean civic groups. Just three days before the liaison office’s demolition, Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister, specifically threatened its destruction.

North Korea, clearly sensitive to the anti-regime flyers, has abandoned expectations of meaningful sanctions relief or economic benefits from South Korea. It may also be trying to bolster the credentials of Kim Yo-jong, just months after she was speculated to be a potential successor to Kim Jong-un following rumours of his demise.

However, these alone do not fully explain what appears to be a deliberate series of actions intended by North Korea to draw attention by ratcheting up tensions on the peninsula.

To fully comprehend the current situation in North Korea, one must understand developments over the past two years. In late 2017, it appeared increasingly possible there would be some form of conflagration between the United States and North Korea.

This stemmed from a series of North Korean missile and nuclear tests that had, both in their range and demonstrated capability, convinced White House national security planners that North Korea posed an unacceptably high direct risk to the American homeland.

US President Donald Trump openly derided the North Korean leader as “little rocket man”, and threatened “fire and fury like the world has never seen”. It was this that led Kim Beazley and me to warn of the potentially dire consequences.

Read more: War with North Korea: from unthinkable to unavoidable?

Instead, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, facing the risk of a conflict that could draw the Korean peninsula into war, and an escalatory cycle over which he would have little direct influence, scrambled to diffuse the situation.

Latching onto a few positive elements in Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s speech, South Korea welcomed a North Korean cheering team led by none other than Kim Yo-jong to attend the 2018 Winter Olympics.

This in turn opened the door to the full-body embrace between the two Korean leaders at the inter-Korean Summit two months later, and the Singapore-based US-North Korean Summit in June 2018.

But despite a small number of follow-on meetings, that is where the progress ended.
Trump, always more concerned with theatrics than substance, asserted a North Korean commitment to denuclearisation that was not apparent to anyone outside his administration, and returned home.

The question is, what does North Korea want?

It wants to be accepted and recognised as a nuclear power. It also wants to secure sanctions release and economic benefits, despite having reversed none of the actions or policies that led to the imposition of those sanctions in the first place.

In addition, there is increasing evidence that North Korea has not been immune from the ravages of coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps more importantly, the economic global economic downturn will also have an impact on an already weak North Korean economy.

In this context, North Korea appears to be returning to its tried and true approach of instigating international tensions as a way of forging greater domestic solidarity in the face of ongoing economic privation.

The danger now, as always, is the risk of a North Korean miscalculation, particularly in an uncertain international environment. There is evidence Pyongyang had already dismissed the US, and had no expectations for further progress until after the US elections. This latest act of aggression indicates they have likewise now written off South Korea.

Unfortunately, the longer-term questions surrounding North Korea remain unsolved by the summits with South Korea or the US. It is increasingly apparent that even if we get through 2020 without further incident, we will still be facing a North Korea that is more capable and more dangerous.

If the most recent actions are any indication, it may also be more desperate than it was when we issued a stark warning two years ago.

– ref. Tensions rise on the Korean peninsula – and they are unlikely to recede any time soon – https://theconversation.com/tensions-rise-on-the-korean-peninsula-and-they-are-unlikely-to-recede-any-time-soon-140935

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Hall, Deputy Director (Research), Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Sometime on Monday, an Indian army patrol skirmished with Chinese troops in the Galwan River Valley, high in the Himalayas.

According to reports, no guns were involved, but the fight left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead from injuries caused by stones, makeshift clubs, and falls down the steep cliffs of the valley.

Although standoffs and even fistfights between Chinese and Indian troops have been relatively common in recent years, there have been no deaths on the disputed border for decades.

Read more: ScoMosas over Zoom: what to expect from Scott Morrison’s virtual summit with India’s Narendra Modi

Such confrontations are usually defused by talks between commanders on the ground, leading to choreographed disengagements.

In this case, it appears those processes have failed, and at a moment when relations between China and India – both nuclear armed states – are already tense.

Origins of the dispute

When India gained its independence in 1947, it inherited unsettled frontiers with several neighbours.

That situation was exacerbated by Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s decision to seize control of Tibet – which up to that point had been a buffer state – three years later.

More than a decade of failed negotiations to agree a border followed, to the frustration of all. Then, in October 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mao ordered a sudden attack on Indian forces.

China decisively won this short “pedagogic war” – designed to teach New Delhi a lesson. It gained ground from India, but then withdrew its forces, bringing them back close to their starting positions.

Since then, a “Line of Actual Control” (LAC) has, in effect, constituted the frontier.

Several more fruitless rounds of talks to settle an official border have taken place. And there have been several military standoffs, including one in 1975 that left four Indian soldiers dead.

Mounting tensions and the threat of war

The Galwan River Valley incident is by far the worst to occur on the LAC for some time. It also comes against a backdrop of several years of deteriorating relations between China and India, dating from the rise to power of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Since 2013, New Delhi has reported a series of incursions by Chinese troops into what it regards at its territory.

Read more: China-India border dispute a grim sign for stability in Asia

The visits of both Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in May 2013, and Xi in September 2014, were overshadowed by such incidents.

And in mid-2017, there was a ten-week standoff between Chinese and Indian troops in Bhutan, in a disputed area called Doklam (or Donglang).

During that crisis, Beijing openly warned that if New Delhi did not pull back, it might go to war.

Disagreement over other issues

At the same time, China and India have quarrelled and competed over a number of other issues.

New Delhi has emerged as a vocal critic of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and has tried to dissuade other states in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region from signing on to BRI projects.

India has complained about China’s trade practices, pointing to a growing trade deficit with its northern neighbour, as well as Beijing’s alleged attempts to influence the policies of smaller states such as Nepal.

Meanwhile, India has strengthened security ties with the United States, Japan and Australia among others – to Beijing’s obvious irritation.

The biggest test yet

There can be little doubt that what just happened in the Galwan River Valley constitutes the biggest test yet faced by Narendra Modi’s government.

India’s prime minister has long been portrayed as a “strongman”. This image has been burnished by retaliatory strikes against Pakistani targets for cross border terrorism in 2016 and 2019, as well as by his government’s apparent resilience during the Doklam crisis.

Indian public opinion is already angry with China over COVID-19 and in the wake of the deaths on the LAC, some media outlets, as well as opposition politicians, are calling for retaliation.

Modi’s options are, however, constrained.

If he backs down, or even concedes the area around Galwan River Valley that some think Chinese soldiers are now occupying, he could face a political backlash from Indian voters.

If he orders some kind of military response, he risks a wider war. There have been persistent reports of troop build-ups right along the 3,500 kilometre frontier with China.

There is no guarantee a limited action would not escalate into something bigger, nor that India’s friends and partners, including the US, would support such a move.

All eyes now on China

Much depends on what Beijing hopes to gain.

If Xi is simply seeking to humiliate India for perceived transgressions – and warn it off deepening ties with its security partners – he may now order his troops to pull back, having made his point.

But if he wants to redraw the border and send a message to others – in Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere – that China is determined to take what it claims – then deescalating the situation will be very difficult for New Delhi.

Read more: Why is there so much furore over China’s Belt and Road Initiative?

– ref. China and India’s deadly Himalayan clash is a big test for Modi. And a big concern for the world. – https://theconversation.com/china-and-indias-deadly-himalayan-clash-is-a-big-test-for-modi-and-a-big-concern-for-the-world-140930

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamen Franklen Gussen, Lecturer in Law, Swinburne University of Technology

In one relatively short section of the Australian Constitution, section 92, you will find this phase:

[…] trade, commerce, and intercourse among the states […] shall be absolutely free.

You would think there is not much in it, but it turns out this section is one of the most litigated sections in the constitution.

Australians have taken a special interest in section 92 since mid-March. Debating the constitutionality of state border closures in response to COVID-19 seemed to be trending with everyone staying home to help flatten the curve.

Legal challenges on border closures are already underway in the High Court, with arguments of its constitutionality.

Read more: States are shutting their borders to stop coronavirus. Is that actually allowed?

Now, this interest in section 92 is being rekindled with the partial re-opening of borders between South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania.

With Australia being one country, it was hard enough to accept it is constitutional for states to close their borders, but now South Australia seems to be offering travellers from these states and the territory special treatment.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has more recently suggested the partial opening of borders may be unconstitutional. Is it?

The issue is not the partial opening of borders. It is the rationale for these actions.

When South Australia announced this partial re-opening, it also indicated it plans to open its borders to all remaining states by July 20. The issue then is whether South Australia’s discrimination against New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland can be justified by efforts to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 deaths.

Since 1988, the High Court has interpreted section 92 as prohibiting discrimination of a protectionist kind – that is to say, the section prevents states from passing legislation to restrict trade. In the 1988 case of Cole v Whitfield, the High Court, in a unanimous decision, upheld Tasmanian regulations prohibiting a person from taking, buying or selling crayfish of less than a prescribed size, whether or not taken in Tasmanian waters.

In the course of his interstate trade, David Whitfield brought crayfish from South Australia to Tasmania for the purpose of sale to mainland and overseas markets. The crayfish were less than the prescribed size under the Tasmanian regulations, though above the prescribed size under comparable regulations in South Australia. The court explained in the decision that the legislation was not protectionist in nature. It was intended to help protect Tasmanian crayfish rather than restrict trade. The court elaborated in the following terms:

[D]iscrimination commonly involves the notion of a departure from equality of treatment. It does not follow that every departure from equality of treatment imposes a burden or would infringe a constitutional guarantee of the freedom of interstate trade and commerce from discriminatory burdens […]

As was the case when all states decided to close their borders, the legal issue is whether the purpose of the closures is to restrict trade or to help protect the citizens of each state from becoming infected with COVID-19.

The orthodox view among Australian constitutional jurists is that section 92 does not allow for a balancing exercise between the competing interests of free trade and combating a pandemic. This might well be a question for the High Court to elaborate on when deciding the legal challenges brought against the Queensland government.

At a different analytical scale, the issue is not the interpretation of section 92, but rather the effect of crises on the interpretation of our constitution.

This interpretation is not impervious to pandemics or other crises. We see this in what are known as purposive powers, such as the defence power in section 51. In times of war, the core of this power will expand to equip the Commonwealth with the type of intervention necessary to keep Australia safe. There is no reason this rationale would not extend to pandemics.

Read more: National and state leaders may not always agree, but this hasn’t hindered our coronavirus response

Enter the principle of subsidiarity. Elsewhere, I have argued the Commonwealth Constitution is superior to the Canadian and US constitutions, because it is more efficient. It allows for a wider area of concurrent powers. Our federal model is more agile, in the spirit of true subsidiarity, with its rules of assistance, non-interference and helping states acquire more competencies over time.

It is this principle of subsidiarity that holds the key to understanding the constitutionality of border closures and partial re-opening in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The states are best positioned to judge what intervention will work best in their case.

In the time of crises, no one size fits all.

– ref. South Australia will re-open its borders to some states, but not others. Is that constitutional? – https://theconversation.com/south-australia-will-re-open-its-borders-to-some-states-but-not-others-is-that-constitutional-140934

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor | Program Director, Undergraduate Pharmacy, University of Sydney

First, we tried the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. Then we tested the antiviral drug remdesivir. But new UK research gives the strongest indication yet we may have found a useful treatment for COVID-19.

This time it’s an old anti-inflammatory drug, dexamethasone, which has been described as cheap, old and boring.

Preliminary results from a clinical trial just released indicate the drug seems to reduce your chance of dying from COVID-19 if you’re in hospital and need oxygen or a machine to help you breathe.

The results were significant enough for the UK to recommend its use for severe COVID-19.

Before we roll it out in Australia, we need to balance the drug’s risks with its benefits after peer-review of the full trial data.

What is dexamethasone?

Dexamethasone has been used since the late 1950s, so doctors are familiar with it. It’s also inexpensive, with a packet of 30 tablets costing around A$22 (for general patients) under Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

So if it does work for COVID-19, this cheap and boring drug, already available in Australia with a prescription, would be easy to add to current treatments.

Dexamethasone belongs to a class of drugs known as corticosteroids and is used to treat a range of conditions related to inflammation. These include severe allergies, some types of nausea and vomiting, arthritis, swelling of the brain and spinal cord, severe asthma, and for breathing difficulties in newborn babies.

And it’s dexamethasone’s application to those latter two respiratory conditions that prompted doctors to think it may also help patients severely affected by COVID-19.

Read more: ICU ventilators: what they are, how they work and why it’s hard to make more

What did the trial find?

The recently reported results come from the Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy, or RECOVERY, trial.

The researchers put patients into one of three groups: those needing ventilation (a machine that helps them breath); those who just needed oxygen therapy; and those who needed no treatment to help them breathe.

Patients in each of those groups were given dexamethasone (6mg once a day, either as a tablet or via intravenous injection), for ten days. A fourth group (a control group) was not given the drug.

Dexamethasone was most useful for the ventilated patients; deaths for this group dropped by about one-third with drug treatment. In contrast, deaths only dropped by one-fifth for those patients who were only receiving oxygen therapy. There was no benefit to patients who could breathe normally.

The researchers calculated that giving dexamethasone to eight ventilated patients would prevent one from dying, on average. And giving it to around 25 patients needing oxygen alone would prevent one death.

Read more: The fascinating history of clinical trials

How might dexamethasone work for COVID-19?

When a patient has severe COVID-19, their immune system ramps up to catch and control the virus in the lungs.

In doing this, their body produces more infection-fighting white blood cells. This results in inflammation and pressure on their lungs, making it very difficult for them to breath.

It’s therefore likely dexamethasone reduces this inflammation, and so reduces pressure on the lungs.

Read more: How does coronavirus kill?

What are the downsides?

There are potential complications with using dexamethasone.

First, dexamethasone also suppresses the immune system when it reduces inflammation. So, it’s not usually recommended for people who are sick, or could be sick, from other infections. So doctors will need to make sure patients have no other infections before they are prescribed the drug.

If the results of this trial are correct though, the drug doesn’t appear to compromise the patient’s ability to fight COVID-19; it might just affect their ability to fight off other diseases.

Second, the drug is only useful for patients with difficulty breathing and needing some assistance either through ventilation in a hospital or from oxygen therapy.

There appears to be no benefit for patients who don’t need help breathing. So we shouldn’t be giving it to everyone who tests positive to the virus.

Read more: In the fight against coronavirus, antivirals are as important as a vaccine. Here’s where the science is up to

Third, like all drugs, dexamethasone has side effects that need to be monitored. Serious, but rare ones include: severe stomach or intestinal pain, sudden changes with vision, fits, significant psychiatric or personality changes, severe dizziness, fainting, weakness and chest pain or irregular heartbeat, and swelling of the face, lips, mouth, tongue or throat, which may cause difficulty in swallowing or breathing.

What happens next?

The results of the clinical trial are preliminary. So we need to wait for the full study data and scientific peer-review before we can make a definitive decision as to whether dexamethasone treatment is a worthwhile, and safe, addition to COVID-19 therapy in Australia.

Read more: What if the vaccine or drugs don’t save us? Plan B for coronavirus means research on alternatives is urgently needed

– ref. Dexamethasone: the cheap, old and boring drug that’s a potential coronavirus treatment – https://theconversation.com/dexamethasone-the-cheap-old-and-boring-drug-thats-a-potential-coronavirus-treatment-140932

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Carter, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney

In 2016, the mobile game Pokémon Go sent hundreds of millions of players wandering the streets in search of virtual monsters. In the process it helped popularise augmented reality (AR) technology, which overlays computer-generated imagery on real-world environments.

Now Pokémon Go is set to take AR to a new level. A new feature within the game will encourage players to create and upload 3D scans of real-world locations.

The game’s developer Niantic also just acquired the AR maps start-up 6D.ai for an undisclosed sum. Chief executive Jon Hanke announced the companies’ ambitions:

Together, we’re building a dynamic, 3D map of the world so we can enable new kinds of planet-scale AR experiences.

And it’s not just Niantic. In February, Facebook acquired Scape Technologies, an AR start-up that was creating a 3D map of the entire world, and Microsoft’s Minecraft Earth AR mobile game touts the same kind of planet-scale AR play.

These scans, and this type of data collection, will likely affect all of us in the near future.

Turning data collection into a game

One reason for Niantic’s huge success has been how it uses digital games to collect data about the world.

Niantic was initially formed as Keyhole Inc by John Hanke in 2001 with backing from the CIA’s tech venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. The company developed mapping technologies used by the US military in the early 2000s.

Keyhole Inc was acquired by Google in 2004, and was instrumental the development of Google Maps. In 2010, Keyhole was rebranded as Niantic and focused on games. It stayed part of Google until 2015, when it became an independent company again.

In 2012 Niantic launched a game called Ingress, which saw players photograph and upload millions of locations of interest that became “portals” within the game.

These portals became the underlying infrastructure that powers Pokémon Go and other games, but just as valuable was the data collected about how players moved around the world while playing.

Niantic’s latest game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, collects each player’s location every five seconds or so, which is often enough to recognise individual behaviour patterns and detect intimate details of their life.

Tech companies and investors think this kind of data is immensely valuable. In December 2019, Niantic raised funds at a valuation of USD$3.9 billion.

Read more: Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

The future of reality is augmented

The 3D scans Pokémon Go players are collecting are intended to create new possibilities in the game, but they will also give Niantic’s platform for AR developers an advantage over competitors.

Having a system that can recognise 3D environments around the world makes it easier for developers to make shared AR experiences and environments that “exist” even when the user logs off.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google are all developing AR products that are likely to depend on a technique called simultaneous localisation and mapping or SLAM to continuously scan – and collect data about – the users’s physical environment.

The next iPhone is rumored to have a powerful LiDAR scanner to create more detailed 3D scans, and better support Apple’s AR ecosystem.

Facebook acquired the virtual reality (VR) company Oculus in 2014 for USD$2.3 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg frames success with VR as being key to the company’s AR ambitions.

This is well exemplified in LiveMaps, a technology demonstrated by Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth at the 2016 Oculus Connect developer conference.

Any system like LiveMaps will demand constant collection of finely detailed data about the users’ home and everything in it:

AR glasses will scan the surroundings to create a live dynamic index amplified by crowd-sourced data, allowing the maps to recognise when things have changed and update automatically.

The implications of augmented reality

What will pervasive augmented reality mean? Beyond relatively benign possibilities such as more targeted advertisements, we need to think critically about the consequences of technologies like these before they are firmly entrenched.

As the Australian futurist Mark Pesce has argued;

“by virtue of the way they operate, augmented reality systems must simultaneously act as very sophisticated surveillance systems”.

Ever-growing unregulated collection of spatial data across the globe has the potential to create powerful systems of surveillance, control, and influence. We have examined this potential in detail in a recent report on the ethical implications of emerging mixed reality technologies.

Better to prevent than to cure

Like technologies such as facial recognition, granular spatial data might be used in order to dominate, oppress and discipline populations, and particularly the most marginalised in society. As awareness grows of the problems with facial recognition, companies such as IBM and Amazon have recently begun to distance themselves from the technology.

We are also already seeing the rapid growth of an AR industry which doesn’t (at least solely) sell to the commercial market, instead selling to workplaces, law enforcement, security agencies and the military.

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, the dangerous impact of emerging technologies is often only realised once they have done some damage.

If what we share on social media can be used to influence elections, what might the data about the contents of our home be used for? Or everything we encounter in a given day?

Let’s take these technologies for what they really are: not just for entertainment, but apparatuses for extracting data and accumulating power and profit.

Read more: We need to talk about the data we give freely of ourselves online and why it’s useful

– ref. Pokémon Go wants to make 3D scans of the whole world for ‘planet-scale augmented reality experiences’. Is that good? – https://theconversation.com/pokemon-go-wants-to-make-3d-scans-of-the-whole-world-for-planet-scale-augmented-reality-experiences-is-that-good-140636

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Griffin, Lecturer, La Trobe University

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

An Indigenous teenager is suing the state of NSW, alleging he was assaulted by police, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

But this is a rare example.

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and focus on Indigenous justice here in Australia, there have been increasing calls for police and authorities to be held accountable for the harm caused by their actions.

But this is usually voiced as the need for disciplinary action or criminal prosecution, alongside more systemic change like defunding the police.

Read more: Defunding the police could bring positive change in Australia. These communities are showing the way

There are few calls for victims or their families to take police to court to get compensation, even though this could provide a path to justice and accountability.

So, what are the grounds for suing the police or the state? And what are the chances of success?

Legal grounds to sue

There are several main avenues for taking police or prison officers to court, depending on the circumstances.

Situations where officers use physical force may constitute “battery” if there is non-consensual physical contact. Usually, this will only be worth suing for if the victim has been injured as a result.

Read more: Despite 432 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991, no one has ever been convicted. Racist silence and complicity are to blame

To make police liable, the physical contact also needs to go beyond what was legally authorised. For instance, earlier this month, the High Court ruled the use of tear gas on four teenagers at Don Dale youth detention centre in 2014 was battery. This was because the use of weapons against minors was beyond the powers given to police and prison officers under Northern Territory legislation.

Another option is “false imprisonment” if police detain someone without any legal authority, while threats of imminent non-consensual physical contact may be “assault”. Technically, this can be grounds enough for taking an officer to court, but assault is usually only worth suing for where it accompanies battery, or where it causes serious psychological harm.

In 2019, the Victorian Supreme Court found the 2015 arrest of Eathan Cruse during a terror raid was unlawful and the use of force was not necessary. Even after handcuffing Cruse, police continued to beat him, threatening that there was “more to come”, and told him “don’t fucking say a word”.

Cruse was awarded $400,000 in damages.

‘Negligence’ also an option

Once a person is in custody, they are owed a duty of care, and this duty can even require protecting them from harm by others or themselves.

This means another potential avenue for suing the police is “negligence”, which involves carelessness that causes harm.

Negligence is relevant, then, in situations where police or prison officers carelessly fail to seek medical assistance for a person in custody or ensure they are safe.

Where negligence leads to a victim’s death, family members can sue on their behalf – as in the case of 19-year-old Trent Lantry, whose mother sued the state of New South Wales in 2005. Prison officers involved were found to have been negligent by placing Lantry in a cell with easy access to a hanging point.

Challenges accessing justice

Despite the well-documented crisis of Indigenous deaths in custody, and criticism regarding the failure of governments to implement recommendations from the 1991 royal commission, civil cases against police or prisons are relatively infrequent and usually not well publicised.

To sue successfully, a victim needs to have access to evidence, and effective access to legal aid or resources to fund their own representation.

Read more: ‘I can’t breathe!’ Australia must look in the mirror to see our own deaths in custody

They must also act within statutory time limits. A claim for personal injury must usually be brought within three years from the time of the injury, but exceptions or extensions may apply.

The rigidity of these limits was demonstrated earlier this year, when the Federal Court dismissed Tamica and Edward Mullaley’s application for a time extension. The pair were hoping to sue the state of Western Australia for alleged police negligence causing them significant mental harm.

What can happen if successful?

If a plaintiff establishes liability, then the defendant is typically ordered to pay them a sum of money as compensation.

If the misconduct has been particularly bad, or has resulted in serious humiliation, then “exemplary’ or “punitive” damages may also be ordered. This was the outcome in the 1989 case of Henry v Thompson, in which police officers punched, kicked and urinated on the Indigenous victim.

But some jurisdictions, such as NSW, have laws preventing victims from being awarded compensation if the harm happened while, or just after, they committed a “serious offence” – unless the harm itself was also the consequence of a serious offence.

So there is more to be done

The legal community has pointed to a growing awareness of the option to sue police or the state for wrongdoing in custody. But it is still an under-utilised area of law.

Even in individual cases, it is typically the government department and not the individual police officer or prison guard who pays any compensation.

While this may mean a victim is more able to access compensation, it also means fewer consequences for the individual officer involved, and so less deterrence for other police.

If the departments who are paying see such claims as simply “the cost of doing business”, nothing will change.

These claims are therefore best thought of as part of a “regulatory web”, that sits alongside and boosts policy reform and other mechanisms of accountability.

If more victims can be supported to approach the courts and enforce their rights, then this area of law could help keep police and other authorities accountable in the ways they exercise force.

– ref. People are marching to stop deaths in custody. Could suing the police help? – https://theconversation.com/people-are-marching-to-stop-deaths-in-custody-could-suing-the-police-help-140427

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel J Cass, Research Affiliate, Sydney Business School, University of Sydney

Australia’s energy market is outdated. It doesn’t encourage competition and that’s holding back the transition to renewable energy. Important reforms to modernise the market are on the way, but big energy companies are seeking to use the cover of COVID-19 to prevent the change.

This is bad for consumers, and for climate action. Reform would help create a modern grid designed around clean energy, pushing coal-fired generators to retire earlier. Over time, it would also bring down power costs for households and business.

Renewable energy is the cheapest form of new electricity. It’s far better for the environment than coal and gas, and can deliver reliable supplies when backed by batteries and other energy storage.

Instead of delaying reform, Australia should be advancing it.

What’s this all about?

Regulators and governments recognise the need to modernise the rules governing the National Electricity Market. That market, established in 1998, supplies all Australian jurisdictions except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Reliable electricity requires that supply and demand be kept in balance. This balance is primarily provided by a system known as the wholesale spot market. Every five minutes, electricity generators bid into the spot market, specifying how much energy they will provide at a certain price.

An entire redesign of the market rules is scheduled for 2025. This should make the market work efficiently and reliably as coal retires and is replaced by renewable energy.

In the meantime, one important rule change is due to start in July next year, known as “5-minute settlement”.

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

Currently, electricity is sold and sent out from generators in 5-minute blocks. But the actual price paid for this electricity in the wholesale market is averaged every 30 minutes. This means there are six dispatch periods, each with their own price, which are then averaged out when the market is settled.

This strange design has enabled big electricity generators to game the market. One method involves placing high bids in the first interval, then placing low or even negative bids in the remaining five intervals. This ensures that electricity from the big generators is purchased, but that they and all other generators receive an artificially high average price for the whole 30-minute period.

In 2017, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) decided to replace 30-minute settlement with 5-minute settlement.

The commission says the current system was adopted more than 20 years ago due to technological barriers which have since been overcome. It argues moving to 5-minute settlement would better reflect the value to consumers of fast-response technologies, such as batteries storing renewable energy and so-called “demand response” (a concept we’ll explain later).

According to the AEMC, the rule change would lead to lower wholesale costs, cutting electricity prices for consumers.

But on March 19 this year, the Australian Energy Council, which represents most coal-fired power stations and the big three electricity retailers, sought to delay the reform. It wrote to federal energy minister Angus Taylor and his state counterparts, arguing the pandemic means energy companies must focus on “critical supply and reliabilty” issues, rather than implementing the rule change.

But energy consumption has barely changed during the pandemic, the Australia Institute’s national energy emissions audit shows. So delaying the reform to deal with supply and reliability issues appears unjustified.

Despite this, the Australian Energy Market Operator has proposed delaying the change for a year. Our submission, endorsed by energy and technology leaders, opposes the delay.

Moves by regulators to delay another 16 market reforms due to COVID-19 also seem to be afoot.

Change is possible

Last week, one big rule change to the National Electricity Market did proceed as planned. It allows “demand response” energy trading from 2021.

Demand response involves reducing energy consumption during peaks in demand, such as during heatwaves. Basically, the rule means big energy users, such as smelters and manufacturing plants, could power down in these periods, and be paid for doing so.

Technology pioneers such as battery entrepreneur Simon Hackett and Atlassian chief Mike Cannon-Brookes have backed this change.

Australia has successfully used demand response to provide emergency electricity capacity and other benefits. But it’s never been unleashed in the wholesale energy market.

The rule change doesn’t involve smaller users such as households. But it’s a promising start that creates new competition for fossil fuel generators and allows energy users to help make the grid more reliable.

Read more: New demand-response energy rules sound good, but the devil is in the (hugely complicated) details

Political warfare over climate policy has held back Australia, and the electricity market, for more than a decade. But energy reform that encourages greater market competition can readily be supported by political conservatives.

The demand-response rule change is a clear example: it has been championed by Taylor and his predecessors Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt.

Getting future-ready

Once the health crisis is over and economic recovery has begun, Australia will need the economic and social benefits of electricity market reform even more than before.

Such reform “stimulus” would help ready the grid for the inevitable retirement of coal-fired power stations, such as Liddell in 2023.

It would also align with state government investments in renewable energy, and boost private investment in new generation (which has recently slumped) and large-scale batteries.

Electricity remains Australia’s highest-polluting sector. Around the world, electricity markets are planning the transition from high to low emissions.

Delaying reform in Australia would be a major setback on the path to our essential energy transition.

Richie Merzian, Climate & Energy Program Director at The Australia Institute, contributed to this piece.

Read more: Putting stimulus spending to the test: 4 ways a smart government can create jobs and cut emissions

– ref. Energy giants want to thwart reforms that would help renewables and lower power bills – https://theconversation.com/energy-giants-want-to-thwart-reforms-that-would-help-renewables-and-lower-power-bills-140640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paige Gleeson, PhD Candidate, University of Tasmania

Scott Morrison says “we shouldn’t be importing” the Black Lives Matter movement. But in the 1800s, Australia imported plantation owners from the American South.

Prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, the American south produced almost all of the world’s cotton. As war threatened, plantation owners returned to England and English cotton mills ground to a halt.

A new source of cotton was required, and Queensland would be widely promoted as a cotton growing colony and the “future cotton field of England”. The colony government invited mill and plantation owners and workers to re-migrate and re-establish their industry in Queensland.

Under 1861’s “Cotton Regulations”, individuals and companies could lease land and receive the freehold title within two years if one-tenth of the land was used for growing cotton.

As early as June of that year – barely two months after the civil war officially began – the Muir brothers, Robert, Matthew and David, established the Queensland Manchester Cotton Company and initiated plans to send an agent to Queensland to begin the process of establishing plantations.

The brothers owned cotton plantations in Louisiana before returning to Manchester and then on to Queensland. The manager of the company, Thomas William Morton, also migrated from Louisiana to Queensland via England. His son Alexander went on to become the prominent curator of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

After an agreement was made between the government and shipping companies in 1863, thousands of “cotton immigrants” travelled to Queensland, and profits of American slavery were reinvested in Queensland’s new tropical plantation economy.

A colony for cotton

Disruption of the American slave trade didn’t only lead to the search for new fertile soil. Plantation owners also wanted cheap labour for the burgeoning Australian cotton industry.

The free labour of enslaved African Americans had generated immense profits, and Australian plantation owners were unable to induce sufficient numbers of white men to labour in the tropics on low wages.

(Popular medical theories also posited the physical unsuitably of white men for work in the tropics, conveniently maintaining racial hierarchy.)

Plantation owners turned to the Pacific Islands to ensure a steady supply of indentured labour.

Read more: Was there slavery in Australia? Yes. It shouldn’t even be up for debate

Under the indenture system, workers were bound to an employer for a specified length of time. These contracts were governed by Masters and Servants Acts with conditions set steeply in favour of plantation owners.

The work was physically demanding, and rates of death and injury were high. During a Pacific Islander’s first year of indenture, the death rate was 81 per 1,000 – especially startling given labourers were in their physical prime, usually between 16 and 35 years of age.

Most cotton plantations failed by 1866 due to flooding and crop disease. Owners reinvested in sugar and the labour trade grew to meet demand.

Between 1863-1902, 62,000 Islanders migrated to Australia.

An ongoing legacy

The Queensland colonial government established a tropical plantation economy which benefited from capital, workers and working conditions imported from the American south to the sugar fields of Queensland.

Labourers’ obligations to their employers were almost unlimited, and their rights were limited to the payment of wages.

The legal conditions of indenture made a worker’s refusal to comply with duties demanded by his or her master a prosecutable offence, no matter how small (or unreasonable) the task. Planters could bring charges in local courts against workers for absconding, “malingering”, or “shirking” (deliberately working slowly) – actions sometimes employed by Islanders as forms of resistance.

The Islander workers fought for increased rights, resisting Australian colonial society at times, while at other times adapting to it. The workers would be granted increased protections from “blackbirding” (recruiting labour via kidnapping, coercion or exploitation) under the Polynesian Labourers Act 1968, and later fought for their rights against deportation under the White Australia Policy.

Despite the harsh conditions, many South Sea Islanders returned to Queensland on multiple contracts, entering a pattern of “circular migration” from the islands of the Pacific to Queensland and back again. Others stayed on after their contracts had expired, became knowledgeable about the labour market and the value of their skills, and engaged in short term contracts on their own terms.

Many Islanders laid down permanent roots in Queensland, marrying Aboriginal and white Queenslanders, starting families and establishing homes.

These people are the ancestors of the contemporary Australia South Sea Islander community, who went on to have important roles in Australian society and advocate for recognition of their communities.

Australia doesn’t need to “import” protests against racism now: this importation happened centuries ago.

– ref. From Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave-owners started again in Australia – https://theconversation.com/from-louisiana-to-queensland-how-american-slave-owners-started-again-in-australia-140725

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona McGaughey, Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights Law, University of Western Australia

In the charged atmosphere of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently made the mistake of stating there was no slavery in Australia. Morrison later apologised for causing offence. He clarified that his comments related specifically to the colony of New South Wales.

Read more: Was there slavery in Australia? Yes. It shouldn’t even be up for debate

The relevance of slavery to the experience of First Nations and other communities was quickly and forcefully addressed. Robust evidence demonstrated that, of course, slavery did exist in Australia.

Research at UWA is exploring Australian links to historical slavery through the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) database.

Academic Clinton Fernandes has revealed the British Parliament granted compensation in the 1830s to former slave owners for the loss of their slaves (but not to those who had been enslaved). Some former slave owners used this compensation to settle in Australia.

It is hardly surprising, then, that First Nations peoples in Australia were forced into indentured servitude and had their wages stolen.

Another example of slavery was the practice of “blackbirding” Pacific Islander people for work on Australian sugar plantations. Today’s South Sea Islander community in Queensland have asked the prime minister to familiarise himself with their experience and its legacies.

Read more: Australia’s hidden history of slavery: the government divides to conquer

Slavery subsists

Global efforts to confront “modern slavery” challenge understandings of slavery as a purely historical experience. Modern slavery is an umbrella term used to describe human trafficking, slavery and slavery-like practices. It includes bonded labour, forced marriage and forced labour.

Just like historical slavery, modern slavery is a multi-billion-dollar industry. An estimated 40.3 million men, women and children are subjected to modern slavery around the world.

In Australia, we can look to contemporary labour mobility schemes to see the continued vulnerability of Pacific Islanders to modern slavery. Stories continue to emerge of worker exploitation in Australia.

Read more: Should Australia have a Modern Slavery Act?

About 15,000 people are subject to modern slavery in Australia, including sex trafficking, forced marriage and forced labour. Cases of forced labour predominantly occur in industries such as agriculture, construction, domestic work, meat processing, cleaning, hospitality and food services. Even more people are enslaved through the supply chains of Australian companies operating overseas.

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 marks an important development. It requires large businesses and Commonwealth entities to report on risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains, and actions to address those risks.

The first reports under the act are expected to be published this year and will be available for public scrutiny. Unfortunately, there are no penalties for non-compliance. An advisory group established to support implementation of the act lacks civil society and survivor representation.

Domination and exploitation.

Racist ideologies reflected in current events find their roots in colonisation and slavery. The broader issue of the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Australia is gaining renewed attention through the current protests. Indigenous Australians make up 28% of the Australian prison population, meaning they are the most incarcerated people on Earth. The high rate of Indigenous deaths in custody has also gained renewed attention.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth?

Experiences of over-incarceration and slavery are distinct and important in their own right. Yet such experiences are linked in how they reflect ongoing limitations and violations of civil and citizenship rights for First Nations and other communities in Australia.

For example, the over-incarceration of First Nations peoples contributes to their political disenfranchisement, as Australian electoral law politically silences those in prison.

Similarly, Pacific Islanders and others subject to modern slavery in Australia are often kept silent for fear of losing work and residency rights. The marginalisation of their experiences implicitly authorises their continued exploitation.

The capacity of our democracy to function equitably for disadvantaged communities is compromised by their lack of equal representation or involvement in law and policy-making.

Where to from here?

It is evident the scourge of racism and slavery is not confined to the past. Nor is it an issue that only affects other countries. It is here, it is now, and it must be tackled.

Political and legislative responses to modern slavery are encouraging. But significant gaps remain in the promotion and protection of Indigenous rights.

This is why the Uluru Statement From The Heart and its constitutional reform proposals are so important. The Uluru Statement calls for the constitutional protection and entrenchment of a Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission to supervise treaty-making processes and truth-telling initiatives.

The Voice to Parliament is in its design phase with Australian government and elected First Nation representatives. Now, more than ever, First Nations require a Voice to Parliament and for that voice to be heard, respected and protected. Its constitutional entrenchment would signal a momentous shift in Australia’s engagement with the justice demands of First Nations people.

Meaningful reconciliation is impossible while Indigenous rights and perspectives are oppressed. True progress calls for learning from the world’s oldest living cultures. Healing requires learning from the past and present.

– ref. Think slavery in Australia was all in the past? Think again – https://theconversation.com/think-slavery-in-australia-was-all-in-the-past-think-again-140543

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick O’Leary, Professor and Director of Violence Research and Prevention Program, Griffith Criminology Institute and School of Human Services and Social Work, Griffith University

Today is a far cry from what we hoped for and expected from 2020.

After Australia’s disastrous summer of bushfires, the unprecedented upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen serious social and economic effects for us individually and collectively.

Many of us have felt grief. And with grief can emerge feelings of hopelessness and resignation.

We tend to lose hope when we can’t see a pathway to our goals.

At a time like this, it’s important we rethink our goals to create and maintain hope.

Read more: Is isolation a feeling?

Why is hope important?

Hope provides a positive vision for the future about what’s possible, motivating us to look forward. While it’s an optimistic state of mind, hope can emerge from distressing and even tragic situations.

Research shows both mental and physical health deteriorate quickly when we don’t have hope.

Suicide is closely correlated with feelings of hopelessness.

Conversely, people with high levels of hope have better physical and mental health.

A lot of us are probably feeling a lack of hope right now

To have hope, it’s vital we feel a sense of meaning in our lives. Particularly during a crisis, having meaning or purpose can protect our mental health.

In recent months, two things that give our life meaning – work and connections with friends and family – might have been disrupted.

And while necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19, social distancing measures have meant many of the things we looked forward to – from holidays to going to the theatre to simply having dinner at a restaurant – were off, in favour of staying at home.

Read more: What are the characteristics of strong mental health?

Coronavirus restrictions have had more serious consequences for vulnerable groups. For example, some victims of domestic violence lost the safe refuge normally found in school or the workplace.

Meanwhile, we’re now in a recession. Many people have lost their jobs and businesses, and almost 1.5 million Australians are experiencing mortgage stress.

All of this brings uncertainty and throws our plans into jeopardy.

Adjusting our goals

To work through grief and hopelessness, we need to modify our goals to ensure they’re realistic within the “new normal”, and we have a clear pathway to achieving them.

For example, you might have been saving for a big family trip. But now – due to financial challenges, or travel restrictions, or both – it will be more realistic to plan a holiday in a nearby caravan park.

It’s important to focus not only on long-term hopes, but on the short term too. If we focus too much on the future, we can lose sight of what’s achievable and important to us now.

We should ask ourselves, what can we reasonably do this week or next month within current restrictions?

Things that are important to us – such as family, friends and career – are unlikely to change, but we may need to find new ways to connect with loved ones or feel accomplished in our jobs. For example, we might spend more time socialising using digital technologies rather than face-to-face.

We can even think about setting goals daily. How can we do something to enact our values each day? This could be as simple as a kind gesture towards a loved one or work colleague.

Read more: Predicting the pandemic’s psychological toll: why suicide modelling is so difficult

Navigating uncertainty

Even as restrictions ease, we worry about the potential for virus outbreaks.

Meanwhile, people in financial trouble won’t simply recover overnight, and may face added stress at the prospect of the government ending its support programs.

And people who have experienced mental health problems during the pandemic will need ongoing support.

Fear can get in the way of identifying pathways to achieving our hopes. So to nurture hope we must recognise, acknowledge and address our fears.

If this all feels like a lot, setting a goal such as going for walk during the day can give us space to reflect.

Further, research shows engaging in mindfulness meditation and focusing on the present can reduce our stress and increase our sense of hope.

Sharing hope

Sharing your hopes with trusted others means you’re supported not only to dream of exciting things, but also to make these things happen.

We’re actually programmed to share in each others’ hopes and dreams. Vicarious hope is the desire for something positive to happen to someone else. It switches our attention to how our actions might contribute to other people’s hopes as well as our own.

“Hope interventions”, whereby community and social services offer programs with the aim of improving people’s hope, can enhance well-being and reduce depression.

Read more: ‘Cabin fever’: Australia must prepare for the social and psychological impacts of a coronavirus lockdown

Despite the uncertainty associated with COVID-19, over recent months we’ve seen communities around the world generating hope.

In Europe, people played music on their balconies and collectively applauded health-care workers.

Here in Australia, volunteers established kindness armies to support vulnerable members of the community.

This speaks to a social world which feels an ongoing responsibility to focus on hope.

Throughout history, hope has risen from ruins. Out of this pandemic, too, we can be hopeful and even dream of a better world.

– ref. Feeling hopeless? There are things you can do to create and maintain hope in a post-coronavirus world – https://theconversation.com/feeling-hopeless-there-are-things-you-can-do-to-create-and-maintain-hope-in-a-post-coronavirus-world-140330

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Wilkinson, Professor, School of the Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney

The government’s HomeBuilder scheme allows certain home owners to apply for a tax-free grant of A$25,000 if they are spending between $150,000 and $750,000 renovating a home or building a new home. Eligibility criteria are strict.

The scheme has boosted renovation talk in some circles (although, as CoreLogic has pointed out, it may merely bring forward works that were already planned).

Here are some questions to ask yourself when trying to decide between renovating and moving – and how to add value to your existing home.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s HomeBuilder scheme is classic retail politics but lousy economics

What adds value to a house?

Property market observers advise updating or renewing bathrooms or kitchens – even small fixes such as replacing a cracked or dated splashback, replacing a bath or adding skylights can go a long way.

Think about easy repairs that create an invaluable good first impression – a fixed-up fence, a new carpet or resurfaced flooring or even good old decluttering.

But remember you’ll only qualify for HomeBuilder if you plan to spend at least $150,000 on an owner-occupied home worth no more than A$1.5 million (CoreLogic has listed which suburbs have the most owner-occupied properties under A$1.5 million).

Factors to consider if you’re thinking of renovating

How long till you retire? How secure is your employment? Thinking carefully about your earning potential between now and retirement will help you understand how what you can borrow and afford. If you are planning to stay, you will get the benefit and enjoyment of the renovations.

Do you need to stay close to school or work? If that’s a consideration, renovating may be worth more to you than buying further out.

Look closely at what your property is worth (there are plenty of online calculators) and keep track of how much similar local properties with one extra bedroom or bathroom sell for. That will give you a sense of the value-add to your home equity that a renovation might represent.

Be honest with yourself about the total cost of renovation. There are myriad expenses not always initially apparent. These may include:

• planning fees (the cost of getting a development assessed by council)
• the cost of architectural drawings
• consultants’ fees for environmental impact statements or arborists’ reports
• extra costs due to a heritage listing
• renting, if it’s not possible to live at home during renovation
• the cost of protecting underground public assets such as water or sewerage pipes
• extra costs caused by poor access or other limitations.

Consider the possible long-term savings of retrofitting your home to be more energy-efficient. Proper insulation, secondary glazing, draught excluders and solar PV energy are expensive upfront but will save on long term running costs. It’s likely, as energy costs increase, homes that are at least partially off grid will be more attractive and valuable over time.

And remember that for some, even with help from HomeBuilder, renovation won’t stack up economically.

Some older people may eschew home renovation to put money aside to help children get a foot on the property ladder.

Others may decide potentially expensive renovation is worth it to hold onto a family home to which children return as they get older. It might sound sentimental but the idea of Christmas in the family homestead is worth it, for some.

Tax considerations

Find out what tax breaks, if any, you might be eligible for if you renovate to divide the family home into a smaller space (if you’re keen to downsize, or enhance the accessibility of your home, for example) and adding a self-contained granny flat.

However, if the granny flat is leased out, this section of the home would be considered income-producing. Your “main residence” is generally exempt from capital gains tax when it comes time to sell, but you may not qualify entirely for this exemption if a section of the property is income-producing.

You may also consider remodelling the family home into a duplex and, depending on council planning laws, convert the title into dual occupancy. However, these suggestions may complicate eligibility for the HomeBuilder grant (which seems to exclude property investors, although there’s no mention of partly converting the main place into a dual occupancy).

The best option here is to seek advice from a tax specialist.

Factors to consider if you’re thinking of selling up and buying elsewhere

Use a stamp-duty calculator and cost-of-selling calculator to get a rough idea of those costs.

How important is proximity to work? Particularly if the coronavirus pandemic has opened your (or your employer’s) eyes to working remotely, would you consider a move to a more remote area where you can afford a bigger house?

Chat with a range of real estate agents and get into the habit of reading market media coverage. Have a sense of what houses sell for that featured your desired attributes (such as more bedrooms or off-street parking).

As a chartered building surveyor, I’d advise would-be downsizers to be cautious when buying a brand new high-rise apartment, due to risks of potentially costly defects that might become apparent over time.

And remember, even if you do sell and buy a new place, very few are able to find the perfect home. You may decide to make renovations anyway.

There are no easy answers. It comes down to your individual circumstances, your attitude to risk and ensuring you have a good grasp of the relative costs of each option.

Talk to a financial adviser, tax accountant, real estate agents, builders, architects and others who have been through each process about what they’d do differently next time.

Read more: Australia’s housing system needs a big shake-up: here’s how we can crack this

– ref. What adds value to your house? How to decide between renovating and moving – https://theconversation.com/what-adds-value-to-your-house-how-to-decide-between-renovating-and-moving-140627

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Logan, Lecturer of Civil Systems Engineering, University of Canterbury

Roads, cycleways and housing developments are among 11 projects announced this week as the first tranche of infrastructure developments to kickstart New Zealand’s economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Zealand is investing at least NZ$3.3 billion into “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, which will be fast-tracked under a new law currently going through parliament.

But this approach ignores an important aspect of recovery. In our research, we make the case that communities become more resilient to future crises when people have access to basic services such as supermarkets, hospitals and schools.

The people selecting recovery projects should ensure the projects prepare communities for future hazards and reduce future vulnerability.

Read more: We may live to regret open-slather construction stimulus

Vibrant communities

This first set of projects lacks a broad, cohesive vision for future communities; perhaps a consequence of the fast-tracking that limits feedback and innovation.

Instead, we should look at ideas such as Hamilton’s 20-minute city: a city where all residents are within 20 minutes of essential services, without depending on a car. Better yet, Paris and some of Britain’s cities have proposed 15-minute cities.

This is not a call for highways and on-street parking. Instead, it can be achieved by providing new facilities in deprived areas and through smart planning.

Housing projects can bring people back into community centres. Medium-high density and mixed-use housing developments, in or near community hubs, would stimulate local economies long after the projects themselves are completed.

This type of initiative adds incentives for family-owned stores and cafes to return downtown. For example, as Christchurch continues to rebuild after the 2011 earthquake, affordable medium-high density housing in the empty lots of the inner city would invigorate local shopping and hospitality while enhancing safety of the community centre.

So-called anchor projects (such as stadiums or pools) that bring only occasional pulses of activity continue to fail our communities.

Instead, projects that create higher-density housing near community centres should be funded. Housing projects that relegate people to far-flung sprawling suburbs should not.

Read more: How pandemics have changed American cities – often for the better

A modern approach to resilience

The challenge is to define what community resilience actually means. In the past, it has been characterised through two lenses: community capacity and infrastructure functionality.

Capacity-based resilience seeks to build a community’s ability to prepare, respond, recover and improve when faced with a hazard. The infrastructure functionality approach focuses on ensuring that infrastructure withstands disruptions and can quickly be restored afterwards. But this approach can be limited in its potential to enable necessary change.

Instead of these ideas, we argue that decision-makers should think about community resilience in terms of people’s access to amenities and opportunity. Fundamentally, communities need everyday services such as water, food, education, health care and employment to function.

Access to these resources, specifically equitable access, builds community cohesion, social capital and place attachment.

Read more: Drought, fire and flood: how outer urban areas can manage the emergency while reducing future risks

Evaluating future projects

Given the fast-tracking of consent processes, decisions should at least consider two aspects: hazard exposure and the equitable distribution of amenities.

Investment must consider hazard exposure. But given that essential infrastructure continues to be developed in exposed places – for example, the Buller hospital, Nelson airport and Napier airport are all built near sea level – there are major concerns about decision processes.

As much as NZ$14 billion worth of existing local government infrastructure, in New Zealand alone, is at risk from sea-level rise. Stimulus investment is an opportunity to reduce this exposure.

The second factor is community vibrancy, which can be achieved through equitable access to essential infrastructure and services. This brings benefits to community resilience, physical and mental health and local economic growth.

Today, we have the computational ability to evaluate and improve access and its equity. We can even evaluate how access changes during a disaster like Hurricane Florence, which struck Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2018. We can optimise the location of amenities like supermarkets to reduce food deserts and ensure they’re safe from future disasters.

Building resilience for people

This shift to a more contemporary, people-centric, thinking about community resilience should happen without needing the prompt of a global pandemic.

Before a disruption, we need to improve community well-being and health (the Māori concept of hauora) and social connectedness (whanaungatanga) through equitable access to services. In doing so, we foster the conditions necessary for resilience. It has been devastatingly evident during the Black Lives Matter protests how social injustices undermine community cohesion.

Following disruptions, we should focus on people’s access rather than solely on restoring infrastructure functionality. For example, providing generators may restore access to food or health care more rapidly than focusing on the electricity network.

Communities can be designed and retrofitted to achieve both lower exposure to natural hazards and improved equity in access. This is not the “green nirvana” NZ First MP Shane Jones opposes. Instead, it is a blueprint for invigorating and preparing communities for the next disruption, be that a drop in tourism, a global pandemic or a natural hazard.

– ref. ‘Shovel-ready’ projects ignore important aspects of community resilience – https://theconversation.com/shovel-ready-projects-ignore-important-aspects-of-community-resilience-139850