Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

The Queensland government’s proposed electoral laws risk being struck down by the High Court if they remain in their current form. This is because they hamper the ability of charities to advocate for their causes and limit the diversity of voices in political debate.

Charities are prohibited by law from supporting or opposing candidates or parties in elections, but they can still advocate for policy changes on behalf of those they aid. In doing so, they play an important role in supporting the equal participation in civil society of people who would otherwise be marginalised and excluded from it. They can raise social issues that may be relevant in elections.

Read more: Changing the Australian Constitution was always meant to be difficult – here’s why

Through their advocacy, charities are often critical of government policies, regardless of which party is in office. They become seen as nuisances, or even opponents, by political parties.

While governments prefer to keep their critics quiet, the High Court has stressed the importance of equal participation in political sovereignty and not allowing the rich to drown out the voices of others. So muzzling charities comes at a constitutional risk.

Silencing charities

Over the years, various means have been employed to silence charities from engaging in political communication, especially around election time. These include placing limits on their charitable status, banning them from using government funding for advocacy, and placing restrictions on the tax-deductibility of donations to them.

Another less visible, but equally effective, method is to impose excessive administrative burdens upon them if they engage in the kind of advocacy that might influence voting in an election. This means the only responsible choice for charities is to stay silent so as not to waste their resources on administration or legal advice.

This occurred in New South Wales in 2012, when a law was passed so political donations could only be made by people on the electoral roll. The consequences for charities were they could not join together and donate funds to a peak body to run an issues campaign for them, because a charity is not a person on the electoral roll.

The law also required charities to certify that every donation used for electoral communication was from a person on the electoral roll. The administrative burden was impractical and unaffordable. The person wearing a koala suit on the street could not whip out a copy of the electoral roll and check the identity of a person every time they put some money in the bucket.

This law was struck down by the High Court when challenged in 2013. The court accepted that third parties such as unions, corporations and charities play a legitimate and significant role in the freedom of political communication required by the Constitution.

The Commonwealth proposed a similar approach in 2018. This time it was in the context of preventing foreign donations from influencing elections. Charities spending money on political advocacy over the disclosure threshold would have had to get statutory declarations from donors, witnessed by a Justice of the Peace (JP), declaring the donor was an “allowable donor”, not a foreign citizen.

So the person in a koala suit with a bucket would have needed to trail around with a JP and a pile of statutory declaration forms, while insulting donors by questioning their citizenship or visa status. This wasn’t really feasible.

Fortunately the Commonwealth government changed its approach after concerns were raised before a parliamentary committee. To its credit, the government narrowed the definition of political expenditure. This meant it was less likely to pick up advocacy by charities, and removed the requirement for third parties to register, unless they engaged in very high levels of electoral expenditure. It also significantly reduced the administrative burdens on charities and other third party campaigners before the bill was passed.

The proposed changes in Queensland

Queensland’s recent proposed electoral reforms have a worthy aim. The bill will reintroduce caps on both political donations and electoral expenditure for political parties, candidates and third party campaigners. This is a good step towards reducing the corrosive effect of money on elections.

But one significant flaw in the bill is its burdensome effect on small third party campaigners such as charities and other community groups.

The bill would require third parties to register with the Queensland Electoral Commission if they spend as little as A$1,000 on electoral expenditure during the 12 months prior to an election.

A registered third party must have its own agent, who is subject to serious penalties if any rules are broken. Third parties that are volunteer community groups will find it extremely difficult to get someone to take on such risks.

Read more: New electoral law could still hobble charities

A registered third party must also set up a separate state campaign account into which it must pay any donation made to it for the purposes of incurring electoral expenditure. Such donations have to be accompanied by a “donor statement” setting out the purpose of the donation and the particulars of the donor and the recipient.

This is all very well when large donations are being made for electoral expenditure purposes. But it’s a serious burden for charities that rely on lots of small donations and spend a relatively small amount of money on advocacy that may be intended to influence voting.

The effect is to cause charities to silence themselves to avoid the cost and the bother of complying with all the rules.

Those few charities that can rely on a small number of large donations are also disadvantaged. A maximum of $4,000, received over four years, from any one donor can be spent on electoral expenditure. In contrast, corporations and other third parties that do not need to rely on donations can spend what they like on electoral campaigns, up to a cap of $1 million.

This exacerbates the inequity in Australian political debate, allowing the voices of the wealthy to drown out the voices of charities that advocate for the disadvantaged. This is precisely the problem that has led to previous electoral laws being struck down in New South Wales.

Will it succeed?

If the Queensland bill were enacted in its present form and challenged in the courts, there is a risk the High Court would regard it as an unconstitutional burden on freedom of political communication. If so, the offending provisions would be struck down as constitutionally invalid.

It would be preferable for the Queensland government to revise its proposed laws to limit their impact on issues advocacy by charities. Charities are already subject to exacting legislative requirements to ensure they’re accountable to their members and are limited in their political activity. There is no need to replicate or extend such constraints at the state level.

Reviewing the definition of electoral expenditure to exclude most charitable advocacy, easing the limits on the use that can be made of donations by charities and raising the minimum amount of electoral expenditure that triggers the registration requirements would be a good start.

– ref. Proposed Queensland laws silencing charities risk breaching the Constitution – https://theconversation.com/proposed-queensland-laws-silencing-charities-risk-breaching-the-constitution-130528

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare M. Cooper, Design Lecturer, University of Sydney

Editor’s note: Today, on Trust Me, I’m An Expert, we hear from Clare Cooper, design lecturer at the University of Sydney, on how futuring techniques can help us think collectively about life under a drastically hotter climate. Her accompanying essay is below.

Australians, no matter where we are, are coming to acknowledge that our summers – and our autumns, winters and springs – are forever changed.

We are, bit by bit, reviewing our assumptions. Whether we need to radically rethink our calendars, or question where and how we rebuild homes and towns, we face a choice: collective, creative adaptation or increased devastation.

How might this time next year feel – anxious, hot and sticky? How might it smell – like bushfire smoke? How might it taste – would seafood and berries still be on the menu in future summers as our climate changes? (One of my favourite placards at a recent climate rally was “shit climate = shit wine”).

When we think about this time next year, are we freaking out, or are we futuring?

Read more: Why we should make time for remembering the future

Collaborative futuring in a climate crisis

“Futuring” is sometimes called futures studies, futurology, scenario design or foresight thinking. It has been used in the business world for decades.

Futuring means thinking systematically about the future, drawing on scientific data, analysing trends, imagining scenarios (both plausible and unlikely) and thinking creatively. A crucial part of the process is thinking hard about the kind of future we might want to avoid and the steps needed to work toward a certain desired future.

But futurists aren’t magical people who sweep in and solve problems for you. They facilitate discussions and collaboration but the answers ultimately come from communities themselves. Artists and writers have been creatively imagining the future for millennia. Futuring is a crucial part of design and culture-building.

My research looks at how futuring can help communities work toward a just and fair transition to a drastically warmer world and greater weather extremes.

Collaborative futuring invites audiences to respond to probable, possible, plausible and preposterous future scenarios as the climate crisis sets in. This process can reveal assumptions, biases and possible courses of action.

Read more: How we forecast future technologies

Getting creative

Futuring is not predicting futures.

It’s a way of mixing informed projections with imaginative critical design to invite us to think differently about our current predicaments. That can help us step back from the moment of panic and instead proactively design steps to change things for the better – not 20 years from now, but from today.

If you peeked into a futuring workshop with adults, you might see a lot of lively conversations and a bunch of post-it notes. For kids, you might see them making collages, or creating cardboard prototypes of emerging technology.

You might have done some futuring today, talking with friends and family about changes you might make as it becomes obvious our summers will grow only hotter.

I’ve seen futuring occur at my daughter’s school, where children are invited to imagine being on the other side of a difficult problem, and then work out the steps needed to get there.

Read more: ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief

Futuring a just transition to a warmer world

When we are imagining this time next year, are we limiting our (mostly city-dwelling) thinking to how we avoid the conditions we faced in this summer?

For example, are we thinking about staying away from bushfire-prone areas, or buying air purifiers and face masks? For those who can afford it, are we thinking about booking extended overseas holidays?

Or are we challenging each other to think beyond such avoidance strategies: to imagine a post-Murdoch press and a post-fossil fuel lobby future? Can we imagine ways to respond to extreme weather beyond individual prepping?

Including a diverse range of voices, especially Indigenous community members, is crucial to a just transition to a warmer world. We can’t allow a changed climate to mean comfortable adaptation for a wealthy elite while everyone else suffers.

Many of us have joined climate protests in recent months and years.

But more work needs to be done and bigger questions asked. What steps are needed to meet demands for public ownership of a renewable energy system: more support for those battling and displaced by bushfires? How do we work toward First Nations justice, including funding for Indigenous-led land management, jobs on Country, and land and water rights?

It is not enough to pin an image of our future to a wall and pray we get there.

Short term fixes in the form of drought or emergency relief won’t address the fact that extreme weather events are not going away.

Responsible, useful futuring mixes equal parts of imagination and informed projections. It’s not wild speculation. Futuring practitioners draw on scientific and social data, and weave it with the stories, concerns and desires of those present to find new ways into a problem.

Read more: What would a fair energy transition look like?

Speaking of catastrophe to avoid it

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating last year criticised the Morrison government for what he saw as a lack of vision:

If you look, there is no panorama. There’s no vista. There’s no shape. There’s no talk about where Australia fits in the world.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s performance during the unfolding bushfire horrors – widely perceived as lacklustre – suggests growing thirst for bolder vision on dealing with “the new normal.”

In their book Design and the Question of History, design scholars Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot and Susan Stewart argue that we should speak of catastrophe “in order to avoid it”.

Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote

prophesying the advent of that catastrophe as passionately and vociferously as we can manage is the sole chance of making the unavoidable avoidable — and perhaps even the inevitable impossible to happen.

We owe it to those worst affected by the climate crisis – and to ourselves – to dedicate time to collaborative futuring as we rethink life in an increasingly hostile climate.

The next time you’re having a chat about this time, next year, are you collectively fretting or collaboratively futuring?

New to podcasts?

Everything you need to know about how to listen to a podcast is here.

Additional audio credits

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Not Much by Podington Bear, from Free Music Archive

Above Us by David Szesztay, from Free Music Archive

Pshaw by Podington Bear, from Free Music Archive

Podcast episode recorded and edited by Sunanda Creagh.

Lead image

Shutterstock

– ref. ‘Futuring’ can help us survive the climate crisis. And guess what? You’re a futurist too – https://theconversation.com/futuring-can-help-us-survive-the-climate-crisis-and-guess-what-youre-a-futurist-too-130538

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Longden, Research Fellow, Australian National University

One of the most confronting impacts of climate change is the risk of more deaths from hot weather. Heat stress can exacerbate existing health conditions including diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease. Older people are particularly vulnerable.

It may then surprise you to learn a few recent studies have suggested climate change will decrease temperature-related deaths in Australia. And a related study published in The Lancet found the cold kills more people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane than the heat.

But my research, published in Climatic Change, disputes these results.

Using a similar methodology as that used in the study published in The Lancet, I found the majority of deaths related to temperature in Australia are caused by heat.

As temperature-related deaths are one of the main measures we use to assess the effects of climate change, it’s important we measure them accurately and consistently.

Read more: Hot and bothered: heat affects all of us, but older people face the highest health risks

How do researchers measure temperature-related deaths?

An important part of the process is estimating the proportion of deaths that occurred during cold weather and hot weather.

To determine this many studies use a reference (or baseline) temperature. This reference temperature should be a day where people in a region feel comfortable and their health is unlikely to be affected by cold or heat. Temperature-related deaths falling below this temperature are classified as cold-related, and deaths above will be heat-related.

We use statistical techniques to distinguish temperature-related deaths from deaths due to unrelated causes.

For example, estimates should adjust for the severity of seasonal factors, including flu seasons. Flu and pneumonia deaths do rise in winter, but they’re not directly caused by the cold.

Temperature-related death estimates vary depending on the underlying assumptions made, and the modelling techniques used. But a key issue causing a discrepancy between results is the use of different reference temperatures. This influences the proportion of deaths classified as being related to cold and heat.

Read more: How rising temperatures affect our health

The importance of the reference temperature

The relationship between temperature and death can be shown as a curve of the risk of death from high/low temperatures in relation to the reference temperature.

The figure below shows how the estimated curves, called temperature-mortality curves, can differ when the reference temperature is changed. It compares temperature-mortality curves from my latest study (the bottom row), to those from the study published in The Lancet (the top row).

Red and blue shading show the parts of the curve defined as heat and cold. Arrows point to the reference temperature used to estimate the curves.

Numerous studies, including the Lancet study, have estimated the number of deaths attributable to heat and cold using what’s called a minimum mortality temperature (MMT) as the reference temperature.

The MMT is the lowest point of a temperature-mortality curve and is often interpreted as the daily average temperature at which there’s the lowest risk of death.

Based on the findings for Australia, I’m concerned the reference temperature (the MMT) used in The Lancet study was too high. For example, a reference temperature of 22.4°C (shown in the figure above) meant almost 90% of Melbourne’s historical daily average temperatures were classified as cold. This could be equivalent to a day with a maximum of 31.4°C and a night minimum of 13.4°C.

I’ve used a different reference temperature in my latest study. I used the median of historical daily average temperatures as the reference temperature. For example, in my study cold days in Melbourne are those below a daily average temperature of 14.7°C. All daily average temperatures above 14.7°C are considered hot.

Using the median as the reference temperature creates a 50/50 split between what’s considered hot and cold.

Comparing the results

As well as using a different reference temperature, I used national death record data to estimate temperature-related deaths for six climate zones. They range from areas with a “hot humid summer” in the north and areas of “mild/warm summers and cold winters” in Tasmania, the ACT and parts of NSW and Victoria.

The other studies I mentioned used data for many cities from around the world, but only included the three largest Australian capitals (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane).

In my study, I estimated 2% of deaths in Australia between 2006 and 2017 were due to the heat.

In the three warmer climate zones this number was higher, ranging from 4.5% to 9.1% of deaths. However, as the majority of the population lives in the second coldest climate zone (warm summer, cold winter), this brings down the national estimate.

In the coldest climate zone, 3.6% of deaths were due to the cold and the heat was less dangerous.

These estimates are notably different to those in The Lancet study where the total for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane had 6.5% of deaths associated with cold temperatures, but only 0.5% of deaths due to the heat.

Read more: Car accidents, drownings, violence: hotter temperatures will mean more deaths from injury

The difference between these results suggests the need to explore alternative approaches for estimating temperature-related deaths.

Future research should assess whether changing the reference temperature impacts the estimates of temperature-related deaths for other countries.

Finally, accounting for climate zones is another important factor that will affect the balance between the danger of cold and heat.

– ref. Heat kills. We need consistency in the way we measure these deaths – https://theconversation.com/heat-kills-we-need-consistency-in-the-way-we-measure-these-deaths-120500

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Bailes, ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology., Swinburne University of Technology

One of the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is that any spinning body drags the very fabric of space-time in its vicinity around with it. This is known as “frame-dragging”.

In everyday life, frame-dragging is both undetectable and inconsequential, as the effect is so ridiculously tiny. Detecting the frame-dragging caused by the entire Earth’s spin requires satellites such as the US$750 million Gravity Probe B, and the detection of angular changes in gyroscopes equivalent to just one degree every 100,000 years or so.

Read more: Explainer: Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

Luckily for us, the Universe contains many naturally occurring gravitational laboratories where physicists can observe Einstein’s predictions at work in exquisite detail. Our team’s research, published today in Science, reveals evidence of frame-dragging on a much more noticeable scale, using a radio telescope and a unique pair of compact stars whizzing around each other at dizzying speeds.

The motion of these stars would have perplexed astronomers in Newton’s time, as they clearly move in a warped space-time, and require Einstein’s general theory of relativity to explain their trajectories.

General relativity is the foundation of modern gravitational theory. It explains the precise motion of the stars, planets and satellites, and even the flow of time. One of its lesser-known predictions is that spinning bodies drag space-time around with them. The faster an object spins and the more massive it is, the more powerful the drag.

One type of object for which this is very relevant is called a white dwarf. These are the leftover cores from dead stars that were once several times the mass of our Sun, but have since exhausted their hydrogen fuel. What remains is similar in size to Earth but hundreds of thousands of times more massive. White dwarfs can also spin very quickly, rotating every minute or two, rather than every 24 hours like Earth does.

The frame-dragging caused by such a white dwarf would be roughly 100 million times as powerful as Earth’s.

That is all well and good, but we can’t fly to a white dwarf and launch satellites around it. Fortunately, however, nature is kind to astronomers and has its own way of letting us observe them, via orbiting stars called pulsars.

Twenty years ago, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope discovered a unique stellar pair consisting of a white dwarf (about the size of Earth but about 300,000 times heavier) and a radio pulsar (just the size of a city but 400,000 times heavier).

Compared with white dwarfs, pulsars are in another league altogether. They are made not of conventional atoms, but of neutrons packed tightly together, making them incredibly dense. What’s more, the pulsar in our study spins 150 times every minute.

This mean that, 150 times every minute, a “lighthouse beam” of radio waves emitted by this pulsar sweeps past our vantage point here on Earth. We can use this to map the path of the pulsar as it orbits the white dwarf, by timing when its pulse arrives at our telescope and knowing the speed of light. This method revealed that the two stars orbit one another in less than 5 hours.

This pair, officially called PSR J1141-6545, is an ideal gravitational laboratory. Since 2001 we have trekked to Parkes several times a year to map this system’s orbit, which exhibits a multitude of Einsteinian gravitational effects.

Mapping the evolution of orbits is not for the impatient, but our measurements are ridiculously precise. Although PSR J1141-6545 is several hundred quadrillion kilometres away (a quadrillion is a million billion), we know the pulsar rotates 2.5387230404 times per second, and that its orbit is tumbling in space. This means the plane of its orbit is not fixed, but instead is slowly rotating.

How did this system form?

When pairs of stars are born, the most massive one dies first, often creating a white dwarf. Before the second star dies it transfers matter to its white dwarf companion. A disk forms as this material falls towards the white dwarf, and over the course of tens of thousands of years it revs up the white dwarf, until it rotates every few minutes.

In rare cases such as this one, the second star can then detonate in a supernova, leaving behind a pulsar. The rapidly spinning white dwarf drags space-time around with it, making the pulsar’s orbital plane tilt as it is dragged along. This tilting is what we observed through our patient mapping of the pulsar’s orbit.

Read more: We’ve detected new gravitational waves, we just don’t know where they come from (yet)

Einstein himself thought many of his predictions about space and time would never be observable. But the past few years have seen a revolution in extreme astrophysics, including the discovery of gravitational waves and the imaging of a black hole shadow with a worldwide network of telescopes. These discoveries were made by billion-dollar facilities.

Fortunately there is still a role in exploring general relativity for 50-year-old radio telescopes like the one at Parkes, and for patient campaigns by generations of graduate students.

– ref. Warp factor: we’ve observed a spinning star that drags the very fabric of space and time – https://theconversation.com/warp-factor-weve-observed-a-spinning-star-that-drags-the-very-fabric-of-space-and-time-130201

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Hewat, Associate Professor in Speech Pathology and Assistant Dean International, University of Newcastle

How do our voices come out of our mouths? Ziggy Miles, age 4, from Springwood NSW

Hi Ziggy, what a great question!

We can all communicate in lots of different ways – using our hands to gesture or sign, writing letters, typing text messages, drawing pictures or even sending emojis.

But if we want to communicate by speaking then we need to use our voice.

Our voice makes sound when we use air from our lungs to vibrate our vocal cords, which sit inside your voice box.

To find your voice box, feel for the bony lump at the front of your throat. We sometime call this an “Adam’s apple” in men.

The air from the lungs causes the vocal cords to move really quickly. This is called vibration and feels a bit like buzzing.

See if you can vibrate your vocal cords, like this boy in the photo. Try saying “ahh” – then, gently place your fingers on your throat.

You should be able to feel the vibration of your vocal cords.

Picture this

Another way to think about this process is to imagine your lungs are a balloon, full of air.

Now imagine the opening of the balloon is your vocal cords.

When the balloon is tied up, vocal cords are closed and no air escapes.

When the balloon isn’t tied, the vocal cords are open, and all air comes out. That’s like breathing out.

But if you stretch the opening of a balloon sideways, you can control the amount of air that escapes. The opening vibrates, and it makes a noise.

That’s similar to what your vocal cords do when they vibrate.

Then what happens?

The voice continues to vibrate as it travels up through your throat and into your mouth and/or your nose.

You can then control the flow of air using your lips, tongue, teeth, and the roof of your mouth to make different sounds.

When you say “ahh”, for example, you’re making your vocal cords vibrate with your mouth wide open and using the roof of your mouth to stop air escaping out through your nose.

If you say “eee” or “ooo”, the air still vibrates in your mouth but because you change the shape of your mouth, you make a different sound.

Read more: Curious Kids: how do babies learn to talk?

Some sounds are different

Some sounds that we use to produce speech don’t use the voice from our vocal cords.

Compare the sounds “sssss” to “zzzzz”, for example.

The shape of the mouth and position of tongue, lips, teeth and roof of the mouth are the same but the “s” sound doesn’t use our voice, and the “z” sound does.

Try saying “sssss” and then “zzzzz” out loud and feel the difference in vibration on your throat.

We also use our voice differently when we whisper. We don’t vibrate our vocal cords at all, we just use air from our lungs and move our mouth, tongue and lips.

Read more: Curious Kids: how did spoken language start?

– ref. Curious Kids: how do voices come out of our mouths? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-voices-come-out-of-our-mouths-130286

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol

Australia’s recent bushfire crisis will be remembered for many things – not least, the tragic loss of life, property and landscape. But one other factor made it remarkable: the deluge of disinformation spread by climate deniers.

As climate change worsens – and with it, the bushfire risk – it’s well worth considering how to protect the public against disinformation campaigns in future fire seasons.

Read more: Scientists hate to say ‘I told you so’. But Australia, you were warned

So how do we persuade people not to be fooled? One promising answer lies in a branch of psychology called “inoculation theory”. The logic is analogous to the way a medical vaccine works: you can prevent a virus spreading by giving lots of people a small dose.

In the case of bushfire disinformation, this means exposing, ahead of time, the myths most likely to be perpetrated by sceptics.

Bushfire bunkum

Disinformation can take many forms, including cherry-picking or distorting data, questioning of the scientific consensus by presenting fake experts, and outright fabrication.

On the issue of bushfires in Australia, there is little scientific doubt that human-caused climate change is increasing their magnitude and frequency. But spurious claims on social media and elsewhere of late sought to muddy the waters:

• bots and trolls disseminated false arson claims which downplayed the impact of climate change on the bushfires

• NewsCorp reported more than 180 arsonists had been arrested “in the past few months”. The figure was a gross exaggeration and distorted the real numbers

• The misleading arson claim went viral after Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, tweeted it. A UK government minister, Heather Wheeler, also repeated the false claim in the House of Commons

• NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro, among others, wrongly suggested a lack of hazard reduction burning – the fault of the Greens – had caused the fires

• Conservative commentators claimed the 2019-20 bushfires were no worse than those of the past.

Where will it go next?

Climate science clearly indicates Australia faces more dangerous fire weather conditions in the future. Despite this, organised climate denial will inevitably continue.

Research has repeatedly shown that if the public knows, ahead of time, what disinformation they are likely to encounter and why it is wrong, they are less likely to accept it as true.

This inoculation involves two elements: an explicit warning of an impending attempt to misinform, and a refutation of the anticipated disinformation.

Read more: Merchants of misinformation are all over the internet. But the real problem lies with us

For example, research has shown that if people were told how the tobacco industry used fake experts to mislead the public about the health risks of smoking, they were less likely to be misled by similar strategies used to deny climate change.

It is therefore important to anticipate the next stage of disinformation about the causes of bushfire disasters. One likely strategy will be to confuse the public by exploiting the role of natural climate variability.

This tactic has been used before. When natural variability slowed global warming in the early 2000s, some falsely claimed that global warming “had stopped”.

Of course, the warming never stopped – an unexceptional natural fluctuation merely slowed the process, which subsequently resumed.

Natural climate variability may bring the occasional mild fire season in future. So lets arm ourselves with the facts to combat the inevitable attempts to mislead.

Here are the facts

The link between human-caused climate change and extreme weather conditions is well established. But natural variability, such as El Niño and La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean may at times overshadow global warming for a few years.

The below video illustrates this. We used historical data from Adelaide to project the expected incidence of extreme heatwaves for the rest of the century, assuming a continued warming trend of 0.3℃ per decade.

The top panel shows the distribution of all 365 daily maximum temperatures for a year, with the annual average represented by the vertical red line. As the years tick over, this distribution is moving up slowly; the red line increasingly diverges from the average temperature observed before the climate started changing (the vertical black line).

The bottom panel shows the expected incidence of extreme heatwaves for each year until 2100. Each vertical line represents an intense heatwave (five consecutive days in excess of 35℃ or three days in excess of 40℃). Each heatwave amplifies the fire danger in that year.

The analysis in the video clarifies several important aspects of climate change:

1. the number and frequency of extreme heatwaves will increase as the climate continues to warm

2. for the next few decades at least, years with heatwaves may be followed by one or more years without one

3. the respite will only be brief because the inexorable global warming trend makes extreme fire conditions more and more inevitable.

Looking ahead

When it comes to monster bushfire seasons, the link to climate change is undeniable. This season’s inferno is a sign of worse to come – even if it doesn’t happen every year.

Educating the public on climate science, and the tactics used by disinformers, increases the chance that “alternative facts” do not gain traction.

Hopefully, this will banish disinformation to the background of public debate, paving the way for meaningful policy solutions.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

– ref. We have the vaccine for climate disinformation – let’s use it – https://theconversation.com/we-have-the-vaccine-for-climate-disinformation-lets-use-it-130008

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Isa Hafalir, Professor, Economics, University of Technology Sydney

Australian governments should consider giving parents and children greater choice of public schools through a transfer system that promotes exchange across catchment areas and prioritises disadvantaged students.

Most big cities in Australia use “catchment areas” for assigning students to public schools. Most public school students attend a school in their catchment area.

This system effectively limits public school enrolment to where people can afford to live. Schools in disadvantaged areas often suffer poor resourcing or other issues. This entrenches disadvantage and makes it more difficult for families to break out of the cycle of poverty.

Countries like the US and the UK use transfer systems to ensure children in lower socio-economic areas have better access to schools of their choice. We have developed a model of how this could work in Australia.

Why students need options

Parents and students might prefer a school that isn’t their local for many reasons. These include being close to work or grandparents, wanting access to specialised programs in areas such as sport or drama, or better safety along with higher academic results.

Currently, students can apply to attend a public school outside their catchment area by providing a valid reason. This could be that the school in their catchment is full or they need specialised education which is not available in their catchment school.

But schools’ processes of considering these applications are not transparent and there is no regulated mechanism to ensure consistency.

Read more: Choosing a school for your kid? Here’s how other Australian parents do it

In Australia, local public schools enrol around 60% of all students. As a 2016 Centre for Policy Development report argued, school equity in Australia is in decline

especially in metropolitan areas, and among secondary schools. A child’s background is having a greater impact on their ability to succeed at school.

A more regulated and carefully balanced exchange process could address this problem and avoid exacerbating inequalities.

My colleagues Professor Fuhito Kojima from Stanford University and Associate Professor M. Bumin Yenmez from Boston College and I have developed a new system for school transfers that would improve the ability for students to transfer across catchment areas.

How it would work

Under our system, a centralised authority, such as an education department, would use admission rules that assign students to schools based on specific policy goals, such as increasing diversity and enhancing student welfare.

Parents and children interested in attending a school other than their catchment school can apply to a central register and list their preferred schools. The register would include information about the student’s socio-economic status and diversity, as well as other potential qualifiers such as having a sibling at the school.

The system would identify the places available at the schools of choice and allocate these according to admission rules. Each student would be either matched with one of their preferred schools or their catchment school. This way, no student would be worse off by participating.

Read more: To reduce inequality in Australian schools, make them less socially segregated

This system would create a balanced (or near balanced) exchange so each school would receive the same (or similar) number of students it would send to others. This would ensure a school’s funding, which is based on student numbers, doesn’t drop.

Other countries do this

Public school systems give parents a greater say in other countries such as the UK and US. There are often up to four or five local schools in a catchment area and families have the opportunity to enrol their kids across school districts.

More than 40 US states use inter-district school choice programs that provide bussing between different districts. These successful programs ensure minority students have priority access to in-demand schools in higher socio-economic areas.

This system applies across many big cities in the US. These include New York City (which began in 2003), Boston (2005), New Orleans (2012), Denver (2012), Washington DC (2013) and Newark (2014). New systems have also been developed in England, Amsterdam, a number of Asian cities and elsewhere.

Read more: Educational disadvantage is a huge problem in Australia – we can’t just carry on the same

The Achievement and Integration Program in Minnesota compares the percentage of minority students in neighbouring districts. When a district and one of its adjoining districts have a difference of 20 percentage points or higher in the proportion of minority students, the district with the higher percentage is required to participate in the program.

Government policymakers in Australia should consider the potential to implement a fair, transparent and equitable school transfer system to increase school choice and provide better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.

– ref. Want to send your child to a school outside your zone? This system could give you the choice – https://theconversation.com/want-to-send-your-child-to-a-school-outside-your-zone-this-system-could-give-you-the-choice-130527

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Teh, Sessional Lecturer and Tutor, College of Business, RMIT University

Total global waste is expected to double from nearly 2 billion tonnes in 2016 to an estimated 4 billion tonnes by 2050 as consumer-oriented urban populations grow. As population growth increases consumption and waste, managing this waste is becoming an ever greater challenge. The Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to develop smarter and more effective ways of managing and reducing waste.

IoT is a monitoring technology, which enables accurate tracking and collection of real-time data. It can help with problems such as timing of waste collection, and waste treatment and disposal.

Read more: The next great leap forward? Combining robots with the Internet of Things

How a smart city manages waste

IoT can enable automation, through cyber-physical systems, that changes the way waste management takes place. Some cities are already using a combination of IoT and sensors to operate smart waste management systems.

For example, Songdo in South Korea is a purpose-built smart city that uses a combination of IoT and sensors to operate its waste management system. Songdo aims to recycle 76% of its waste by 2020, through its highly efficient and convenient waste management system.

The city is connected by a truck-free waste management system. Automated waste disposal bins are located throughout the city. Pneumatic pipes suck waste directly from premises into an underground network of pipes and tunnels.

The system connects to a central waste-processing facility called the “Third Zone Automated Waste Collection Plant”. Waste is automatically sorted and recycled, buried, or burned for energy. Some of the key reported benefits are greater energy efficiency and reduced landfill and energy costs.

Read more: While governments talk about smart cities, it’s citizens who create them

World is ‘off track’ on SDGs

In 2018, 4.2 billion people, or 55% of the world’s population, lived in cities. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s people will be urban. Increasing urbanisation has serious environmental sustainability implications and creates significant burdens on infrastructure, including waste management.

Sustainability planning is critical – it includes investing in public transport systems, creating green public spaces and improving urban planning and waste management. The scale of the problem of urban waste makes smarter approaches to recycling and resource recovery essential.

Read more: Business as usual? The Sustainable Development Goals apply to Australian cities too

Managing waste is a major challenge for cities worldwide. At the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit last September, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be accelerated.

The summit formally adopted a new sustainable development agenda and 145 SDG acceleration actions. Forty-two of these actions are related to SDG11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.

Australia’s waste crisis

Australia, with a fast-growing population population of about 25.5 million, is struggling with a waste crisis.

Read more: Another COAG meeting, another limp swing at the waste problem

Australia’s fastest-growing city is Melbourne in Victoria. The state has doubled the amount of waste it generates in the past 20 years. Problems have mounted in New South Wales and Queensland too.

In August 2019, SKM Recycling, which has operations in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, went into receivership. The company received a A$10 million government bailout to pay for repairs and maintenance of waste-sorting machines. Nevertheless, councils were forced to send their recycable materials to landfill after the Environment Protection Authority ordered the company’s glass recycling service to stop operating.

Read more: Don’t just blame government and business for the recycling crisis – it begins with us

Infrastructure Victoria has proposed a six-bin rubbish collection system to reduce contamination of recyclable wastes. Single-use plastic bags have been banned since November 1 2019. The ban is part of state government measures to reduce plastic pollution and the amount of waste going to landfill and to strengthen Victoria’s recycling industry. Similarly, e-waste is banned from landfill.

The state government has invested A$135 million in creating a stable and productive waste and resource recovery sector.

Melbourne continues to modernise its waste management. The city council installed CleanCUBE solar-powered waste compactors in high-density parts of the city in 2018.

Besides reducing the footprint of public litter bins by 49%, the city has greatly reduced the average number of waste collections and therefore of waste trucks roaming the streets. This has eased traffic congestion and reduced carbon emissions. But will such measures be enough to cope with urban population growth?

Read more: How recycling is actually sorted, and why Australia is quite bad at it

What more can be done?

Infrastructure Victoria is advising the state government on how to create a strong and sustainable recycling and resource recovery industry. Its preliminary report proposes several options, including:

• tackle food waste, which makes up more than one-third of household rubbish going to landfill
• push manufacturers to use more recycled products
• reform the landfill levy to create an incentive to reduce disposal of waste to landfills and encourage greater re-use and recycling of resources, with funds raised by the levy able to be used to the support recycling and resource recovery sector
• ban single-use plastics.

The report also proposes a “waste-to-energy” policy – converting food waste to low-emissions electricity.

We suggest Melbourne (and other Australian cities) can further develop its waste-management strategy and policy to promote resource efficiency with IoT. Having IoT embedded in waste-management systems will improve resource efficiency, tracking and measurement. IoT also acts as an accountability mechanism (for waste management governance and reporting) for cities’ waste management.

Using IoT in this way will strengthen recycling industries and specifically enable Australia to be at the forefront of implementing the SDG 2030 agenda.

– ref. As cities grow, the Internet of Things can help us get on top of the waste crisis – https://theconversation.com/as-cities-grow-the-internet-of-things-can-help-us-get-on-top-of-the-waste-crisis-127917

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gaurav Khemka, Senior Lecturer in Actuarial Studies, Australian National University

Among the topics being investigated by the government’s retirement incomes review is whether compulsory super contributions should be lifted from 9.5% to 12%.

Our research has identified two uncomfortable truths. One is that there is no “one-size fits all” correct contribution. The other is that 9.5% will be enough for most people, unless the aim is to replace the age pension.

It queries the need to lift lifting the contribution rate to 12%, and also the idea of having uniform compulsory contributions.

What our study did

We used what is known as a stochastic life-cycle model to calculate the optimal level of super contributions for Australians at nine different income levels (ranging from A$30,000 to $150,000), applying existing tax, super and pension rules.

While necessarily limited, it is an advance on previous modelling that does not balance the loss of pre-retirement spending power against the income subsequently gained post-retirement. Household status, gender, assets outside of super and home ownership status also matter a lot, but are not directly modelled.

For each income group, we considered different income objectives for retirement including the Ausralian Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia’s “comfortable” and “modest” standards. We examined different retirement ages, life expectancies, super returns and effective employer contributions.

How much you need

The model produced a wide range of estimates.

Depending on income and other assumptions, the right amount of super contributions can be anywhere between about 3% up to 20%, although the higher levels typically assume away the age pension.

This table presents selected findings.

Some optimal super contributions by income level and objectives

Two conditions could justify a higher contribution for all

One condition that would justify a higher superannuation contribution would be a policy objective of replacing the age pension as far as possible. Our modelling reveals that even compulsory contributions of 12% might not even be enough to achieve this objective.

The second is where super is used as a sort-of self-insurance mechanism in case things don’t go as planned. This could be because someone retires earlier than expected, lives longer than expected or gets lower than expected returns.

Early retirement poses the biggest threat because it stops income before the pension becomes available, forcing retirees to use savings. The career breaks common among women have similar effects, although they have the chance to catch up on contributions later and may receive some income support during the break.

Read more: Productivity Commission finds super a bad deal. And yes, it comes out of wages

The problem with saving more “just in case” is that it can result in over-saving if the feared risks don’t eventuate, unnecessarily forcing down pre-retirement living standards.

There are other ways to addressing these risks, including through social security and various forms of insurance. The pension is one such mechanism, annuities are another. We would prefer to see policy makers explore insurance against risk rather than forcing everyone to save more.

The key point is that a “one-size-fits-all” contribution is a very blunt instrument, and an asymmetrical one.

Employees can currently do nothing about an compulsory contribution rate that is set too high for them, but can add more if it is set too low.

A higher compulsory contribution could help some if it was genuinely additional to wage increases and was paid for by employers (as is legally the case) rather than coming out of take-home pay via lower wage rises (as is often practically the case).

We have no strong opinion on where the extra contributions would come from, but we note that the evidence is far from straightforward that employers will necessarily bear the cost.

The retirement income review might try to find out. It might also like to consider our work, which calls into question the whole idea of a single contribution rate.

Read more: 5 questions about superannuation the government’s new inquiry will need to ask

– ref. The uncomfortable truth about super: there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ contribution – https://theconversation.com/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-super-theres-no-one-size-fits-all-contribution-130193

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Sydney

In a series marking the 250th year of his birth, we analyse the significance of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In the centre of Bonn, a bronze statue stands on a pedestal in the Münsterplatz.

The figure is dressed in typical early 19th-century garb, cravat and jacket visible beneath a heavy outer cloak. Protruding from the rough folds, the left hand clutches an open notebook. The right hand holds a pen at arm’s length, the gesture suggesting action momentarily suspended by thought. Above the collar, a face framed by a shock of hair frowns into the middle distance.

This memorial to Bonn’s greatest musical son has been in place since 1845, a reminder that paying tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), whose 250th birthday is celebrated this year, is a practice with its own lengthy history.

The Bonn statue, the first erected to any musician in Germany, was unveiled on the 75th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. It would not be the last statuary tribute to the composer, whose reputation grew ever greater as the 19th century advanced. Thirty-five years later, his adoptive city of Vienna unveiled an even more substantial Beethoven monument.

This was followed by Max Klinger’s 1902 sculpture for the Viennese Secession, in which the bare-torso composer is literally enthroned. Today, 3D representations in the form of busts and even action figures are widely available.

The ubiquity of Beethoven imagery reflects his status as a true icon, one of a handful of creative personalities whose achievements have become bywords for the supreme capacities of the human spirit. As he turns 250, Beethoven has been lauded as “not just […] history’s greatest composer, but also one of its greatest human beings”.

Overcoming tragedy

Even before we try to grasp what makes Beethoven’s musical creations so special, the fact that he continued to write music in spite of his worsening hearing has enshrined him in the broader cultural imaginary as a martyr-magician.

Beethoven’s deafness may have contributed to his legend, but several of works have achieved iconic status in their own right, often spawning complex reception traditions of their own. Some of the most popular, including the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, trace a struggle-to-victory trajectory, on one level a musical metaphor for the way the composer triumphed over his disability.

The Ninth Symphony begins in a dark D minor, and concludes with a D-major setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, usually seen as a paean to universal brotherhood. As such, it was a fitting choice for a historic December 1989 concert to celebrate the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Yet this work has also been interpreted as a celebration of violence, as was brilliantly but subversively brought out in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Powell’s novel).

Equally ubiquitous is the Fifth Symphony, famous for its opening da-da-da-DAH, which is obsessively pursued throughout the first movement.

The coincidental relationship of this motif to the morse-code pattern for the letter “V” — dot, dot, dot, dash — linked it to Churchill’s two-fingered “V for Victory” salute. This led the BBC to use a version of Beethoven’s motif for timpani at the start of their broadcasts to Europe during the second world war, a blatant challenge to the Germans who otherwise might have seen Beethoven as their property.

In less fraught times, this four-note motif acquired the text le-che con PAN (milk with bread) in the Spanish-speaking world. Whether intended or not, this serves as fitting commentary on how Beethoven has become the staple diet of orchestras throughout the world.

Straddling the romantic-classical divide

While Beethoven’s position in the musical pantheon is well-entrenched today (in 2019, he was once again voted Australia’s favourite composer in an ABC Classic poll), matters were more equivocal during his lifetime.

The premiere of the breakthrough Eroica Symphony in 1805 left audiences divided: according to a contemporaneous report, some believed this was Beethoven’s “masterpiece, […] the true style for high-class music”, while others felt that it illustrated “a completely unbounded striving for distinction and oddity, which, however, has produced neither beauty nor true sublimity and power”.

The idea that Beethoven was “difficult” was only strengthened by the works he produced in the last decade of his life, which (with the exception of the Ninth Symphony) have lagged in popularity behind earlier masterpieces such as the Third to Eighth Symphonies, the Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas for piano, the Violin Concerto and so forth.

However, for cognoscenti and many performers, late works such as the last five piano sonatas and the last five string quartets have a special place as rarefied exhalations of the human spirit.

In his celebrated 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote that “Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable”. This becomes even more true when we consider the titanic fugue that concludes the ‘Hammerklavier’ Piano Sonata, Op. 106 (1818), or the Heiliger Dankgesang movement from the String Quartet in A minor No. 15, Op. 132 (1825).

Hoffmann’s essay also made the important claim that Beethoven was

fully the equal of Haydn and Mozart in rational awareness, his controlling self detached from the inner realm of sounds and ruling it in absolute authority.

This was a notable departure from the critical consensus of the day, which viewed Beethoven’s music as a byword for quasi-improvisatory freedom. Hoffmann’s analysis demonstrated that the apparently unbridled emotionalism of the Fifth Symphony was actually underpinned by a rigorous logic of construction. In the intervening two centuries, Beethoven has become a textbook exemplar of formal mastery. Glenn Gould, no uncritical admirer of the composer, neatly summarised these two sides of his art in a 1967 pre-performance talk:

Beethoven is a kind of living metaphor for the creative condition. In part he is the man who respects the past, who honours the traditions [from] which art develops, and while never other than intense and constantly gesticulating with those rather violent gestures which are so peculiarly his own, this side of his character leads him to smooth off the edges of his structure sometimes, to be watchful and even painstaking on occasion about the grammar of his musical syntax.

And then there’s this other side, the fantastical romantic side of Beethoven, which draws from him those unapologetically wrongheaded gestures, those proud, nose-thumbing anti-grammatical moments which, in the context of tradition [and] against the smooth and polished edges of classical architecture, make him unique among composers for the sheer devil-may-careness of his manner. But in the end this sort of amalgam exists for every artist, really; within every creative person there is an inventor at odds with a museum-curator.

This captures the productive tension that existed between Beethoven the classicist and Beethoven the romantic. Without his tendency to strain against the norms of his day, his music would lack that transgressive thrill and the feeling that he was taking the art forward. But without his mastery of structural control, his muse would have risked incomprehensibility. The two are crucial to Beethoven’s achievement, the synthesis he achieved between expressive individuality and formal balance.

An (overly?) dominant presence

Significant anniversaries of major composers are typically marked by an uptick in the number of performances of their music. However, the Beethoven market is already close to saturation point.

An Australian composer, Ian Whitney, noted back in 2016 that Beethoven made up 11% of the repertoire put on by the seven major Australian orchestras in that year, where the entire sum of Australian works heard amounted to only 6%. His witty analysis of 2020 shows that the disproportion is even more marked in this anniversary year.

The total eclipse of all things by Beethoven is not uniquely an Australian problem. Back in 2014-15, in cosmopolitan San Francisco, Beethoven outmatched the combined totals of the second- and third-most played composers (Stravinsky and Mozart respectively) in the local Symphony’s programs. The vain wish to avoid such saturation led Andrea Moore in the Chicago Tribune to call for a year-long moratorium on Beethoven performances, to be replaced with new music.

While one might have sympathy for the living, squeezed out of the picture by the long dead, a ban on Beethoven is never going to be the answer. Much better is the solution followed by the Opus Now collective, which in recent years put on a series of 16 concerts pairing a Beethoven string quartet with avant garde compositions.

A series of this sort accomplishes much: it resists the ghettoisation of contemporary music into cliquish events and serves to remind both Beethovenians and devotees of new music how radical Beethoven’s works were — and indeed, still are. More than a century after it was written, the Grosse Fuge Op. 133 was described by Igor Stravinsky as “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever”.

The lesser-known Beethoven

Moreover, when we dig down into the matter, can we really say we know Beethoven all that well? Some of his works have been played to the point of overexposure, but there are plenty of other discoveries to be made. Thankfully the ABC is running a year-long series of weekly broadcasts with the aim of covering the entirety of Beethoven’s output, pairing major masterpieces with curiosities like his music for mandolin, or for mechanical clock.

One underrated gem that deserves to be better known is the Fantasie Op. 77 (1809). Scholars think this captures something of Beethoven’s legendary improvisations at the keyboard. Beginning with a precipitate descending scale, answered by a soulful melody, the music continually changes style, tempo and key in the first half: now jaunty, now stormy, with busy passage-work alternating with melancholy Adagio moments and occasional hints of imitation between the hands. Eventually, order emerges from the chaos in the form of a set of variations on a theme in B major.

Beethoven’s instrumental music tends to dominate our perceptions, meaning that his vocal music is comparatively less well known (with the arguable exception of his single opera, Fidelio). One piece that is underperformed in the anglophone world is the 1816 song cycle [An die ferne Geliebte [To the distant beloved], Op. 98] A compact set of six Lieder lasting only a quarter of an hour, Beethoven’s sole song cycle is very different in both size and organisation from the famous later cycles by Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise), Schumann (Frauenliebe und -leben, Dichterliebe) or Wolf (Italienisches Liederbuch).

In the first poem by Alois Isodor Jeitteles, the protagonist expresses his yearning for his beloved. Poems 2 through 5 address the clouds, woods and hills separating the two, while poem 6 bids her “accept these songs, beloved, which I sang to you”.

This final song returns to the key and, from halfway through, the music of the first song, giving it a satisfying feeling of coming home. Moreover, unlike his successors, Beethoven binds his cycle into an unbroken whole by writing brief transitional passages between songs. Thus, while the individual songs have a folk-like simplicity to them, the collection as a whole is satisfyingly subtle in its organisation.

When it comes to Beethoven’s orchestral works, if one were looking for alternatives or supplements to the great series of symphonies, overtures and solo concertos that are concert-hall fixtures, one might reexamine the so-called Choral Fantasy, Op. 80 (1808), a piece that begins as a solo piano fantasy, turns into a concerto proper and ends as a dry run for the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Another curiosity (whose existence many would prefer to forget) is Wellington’s Victory (The Battle of Vittoria), Op. 91 (1813). Sometimes called Beethoven’s Battle Symphony, it has rightly been kept apart from the canonic nine numbered symphonies. This is not just a matter of puritan distaste for the very vivid musical pictorialisms (there is, for instance, more cannon fire here than is found in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture), but also because Beethoven deliberately chose not to follow the layout proper to a multi-movement symphony of the era.

Beethoven took some well-known themes as his material: Wellington’s forces are represented at the outset by Rule Britannia, and in victory by God save the King, while the French are identified by “Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” (a French folk tune generally sung in English to the words “the bear came over the mountain”).

While the piece as a whole falls short of the level of compositional craft one finds in the numbered symphonies, the “victory” section has plenty of moments of interest (including a fugue on a hyper-accelerated version of the British anthem), and the unprejudiced ear will recognise its rhetorical kinship with the finale of the Fifth Symphony.

Happy birthday

And so, 250 years after his birth, Beethoven remains important, and not just for the listening public. The past two centuries are unthinkable without the stimulus his music gave to other musicians: not only was his oeuvre the touchstone for virtually every symphonic and instrumental composer who followed in the 19th century, even today he continues to inspire the creation of new music.

There should be no begrudging him his place in our concert halls, where an imaginative live performance can render even works as beloved as the Moonlight Sonata, the Seventh Symphony or the “Emperor” Piano Concerto fresh and interesting.

Whether we stick with old favourites, or try to make new discoveries, let 2020 be a year in which we unashamedly indulge in the output of a composer who more than any other has shaped the classical musical landscape we know today. For, as Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer first asked in his funeral oration for Beethoven: “He was an artist, and who shall stand beside him?”

– ref. Friday essay: Beethoven – an icon at risk of overexposure? – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-beethoven-an-icon-at-risk-of-overexposure-128628

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

The government’s defence of Bridget McKenzie and the prime minister’s call for advice from the head of his department reveal a remarkable misunderstanding (or, less surprisingly, a remarkable misrepresentation) of the respective roles of ministers and administrators.

In defending the actions of his deputy, Bridget McKenzie, National Party leader Michael McCormack said:

if we only ever do what bureaucrats tell us, we don’t meed ministers.

The Attorney-General Christian Porter backed him up:

what I fundamentally don’t accept is that ministers should not be involved in final approval of projects. That’s their job.

On Wednesday at the National Press Club, Prime Minister Scott Morrison spelled out what he saw as the strengths of ministers and politicians as decision-makers, saying that in contrast to public servants,

at the end of the day politicians, members of parliament are elected. We face our electors. We are part of our communities. We live in them. We engage there every day.

A former Coalition sports minister, Jackie Kelly, has been less diplomatic. She used an appearance on ABC’s The Drum to deride “unaccountable public servants” who she said had “their own axe to grind”, unlike elected members of parliament who understood community needs and were accountable to their electorates.

Public servants are entirely accountable

My fear is that these statements reflect misunderstanding – not just wilful misrepresentation – both of the respective roles of ministers and public servants and of respective accountability arrangements.

Of course ministers – if legally authorised to decide on grants – may exercise discretion and are not required to accept the recommendations of public servants.

However, their first role is setting the criteria for the allocation of the funds: sometimes by introducing legislation, and other times by articulating the objectives of programs which form the basis for public service decisions or advice.

Read more: View from The Hill: Politicians not bureaucrats are the ones in touch, Morrison claims in sports affair

Having set up frameworks, ministers may be legally empowered to make final decisions (depending on the legislation involved), but can be expected to be constrained by those frameworks just as much as public servants. They will also be required to give reasons, consistent with the frameworks, for rejecting public service recommendations.

The public service is accountable for the advice it provides and the decisions it makes. The Audit Office would quickly highlight a finding that advice was not consistent with the framework the parliament or the government had established.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s ‘resilience’ speech overshadowed as McKenzie crisis deepens

Where authority for decisions does lie with the public service, the public service is subject not only to the provisions of the Public Service Act (including impartiality) and those of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act (including value for money and performance management) but also to administrative law.

This includes the provisions in the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act (which effectively define “impartiality”), the capacity for decisions to be subject to legal review, and the requirements under the Freedom of Information Act that ensure (with identified exceptions) public access to documentation.

Ministerial advisers, scarcely at all

Under the Constitution, ministers are responsible for the administration of departments. But for a long time, perhaps since Federation, the convention has been not to hold them personally accountable for their department’s administrative failures unless they are personally involved.

This makes the idea of an “unaccountable” public service a figment of the imagination of some politicians and their advisers. If there is a group within the executive arm of government that is unaccountable, it is ministerial advisers, not the public service.

A return to greater independence of the kind recommended in December by the independent review of the public service conducted by David Thodey, but dismissed by the government, would in no respect reduce accountability.

Rather, it would clarify the respective roles of ministers and the public service and reinforce the values that underpin the distinct role of the public service.

Among these are the merit principle, impartiality and non-partisanship.

Alhough the Sports Commission does not come under the Public Service Act, it has articulated similar values, including “integrity”, and the parliament has given it even greater independence, requiring any directions its minister gives it to be in writing.

Servants should not investigate masters

This brings me to the question of whether the head of the department of prime minister’s department, in this case Philip Gaetjens, is the appropriate person to advise whether a minister has behaved consistently with the prime minister’s guidelines on ministerial behaviour.

Malcolm Turnbull set the precedent by referring the behaviour of his ministers Barnaby Joyce and Stuart Robert to the head of his department for advice.

There seem to me two possible ways to apply the prime minister’s ministerial standards.

One is to regard them, to the extent they go beyond strict legal requirements, as essentially political, articulating the prime minister’s view of appropriate ethical behaviour.

Investigations are a job for someone else

Under this approach (which seems unlikely to pass the famous “pub test”), the prime minister really needs no independent advice but might choose to seek advice from a respected political ally to lend credibility to his decision.

A suitable source might be a former minister or his chief of staff, but certainly not the secretary of his department, who is required to be apolitical under the Public Service Act.

The second approach is to give the standards a firmer status, in which case a more independent assessment of possible breaches would be appropriate.

Read more: So the government gave sports grants to marginal seats. What happens now?

But again, the secretary of the prime minister’s department is not the appropriate person to undertake it. This is particularly so given the more recent practice of prime ministers personally appointing people to the role with whom they have personal relationships (most clearly the case with Gaetjens).

The most appropriate body under this second approach would be a parliamentary integrity officer or organisation, either an anti-corruption authority or a conflict of interest and ethics commissioner of the kind that exists in Canada.

– ref. The ‘sports rorts’ affair shows the government misunderstands the role of the public service – https://theconversation.com/the-sports-rorts-affair-shows-the-government-misunderstands-the-role-of-the-public-service-130796

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Mude, Public health lecturer, CQUniversity Australia

As Australian students returned to school this week, they were met with conflicting and changing advice from federal and state governments on the coronavirus outbreak.

The outbreak, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei province, has killed more than 170 people and spread to at least 16 countries – seven people have been identified with the infection in Australia.

What’s the official advice?

The Australian government’s initial advice was that any child who had been in contact with an infected person be excluded from school for 14 days. But schools shouldn’t exclude children who were well and who had not had any exposure to an infected person that may have come back from China.

This position was updated on Wednesday afternoon when the chief medical officer asked people who have returned from Hubei province, or have had contact with someone who has a suspected or confirmed case of the virus, to stay at home for 14 days.

This update came as four people attending a conference in Germany contracted the virus from a Chinese national who did not show any symptoms until 24-48 hours later.

Read more: How contagious is the Wuhan coronavirus and can you spread it before symptoms start?

The Victorian government also updated its advice to match the federal government’s.

The NSW government, however, requested children who had visited any part of China in the last two weeks not to attend school or childcare services until 14 days have lapsed from their date of departure from China.

How contagious is the virus?

While the World Health Organisation is meeting to see whether to consider the outbreak a global emergency, it is important to note the risk of a child at school or childcare in Australia being infected remains very low.

The WHO believes for every one person infected with coronavirus, up to 2.5 others can become infected (this is how experts estimate contagion). There have only been seven confirmed cases in Australia so far and the government has put in place strict quarantine strategies to ensure they don’t infect others.

A person with seasonal flu is estimated to infect around 1.28 people, but there are thousands of infections during flu season. Unless a child has been in close contact with someone who has coronavirus virus, they are far less likely to catch it from school or childcare than they are to catch the flu during an outbreak.

The novel coronavirus belongs to the same family of coronaviruses as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) but current evidence shows it is not as infectious. A person infected with SARS was reported to infect up to five others.

Read more: The Wuhan coronavirus is now in Australia – here’s what you need to know

During the SARS outbreak, the WHO advised all contacts of suspected or probable cases be placed under active surveillance for ten days and directed to observe voluntary isolation for at least ten days.

With the current coronavirus, WHO advises people to take caution and for countries to implement temperature checks of travellers coming from the affected areas. This is a lesser response than with SARS.

Who decides who goes to school?

During disease outbreaks, authorities are particularly concerned about schools and childcare centres for several reasons. Children are often in close contact with each other and are less likely to adhere to public health messages (such as washing hands and not sharing water bottles).

Children in childcare, especially those younger than two years, are particularly vulnerable because many of them still haven’t finished their vaccinations.

This is why following an outbreak, authorities would make decisions to isolate children who might have come in contact with a person with a suspected transmittable disease. Authorities consider several factors when making decisions to isolate people following an outbreak. These include the risk of infection, its modes of transmission and how aggressive it is.

Each Australian state and territory has its own disease surveillance and control branch which develops public health recommendations based on the scientific evidence relating to an outbreak. But some public health messages can also be influenced by political factors.

For instance, the NSW health minister admitted the government’s advice was not “medically necessary” but that the government has acted in line with community expectations to ensure the safest possible environment for students.

Read more: Wuhan coronavirus: we still haven’t learned the lessons from SARS

Decision makers can use something called the “precautionary principle” when issuing advice. This states when there is a serious risk to human health, lack of scientific evidence should not be used to postpone preventive measures.

An independent review set up to investigate the handling of the SARS outbreak in Toronto found decisions were delayed because decision makers felt they didn’t have enough evidence to make them. The commission stressed the “importance of the precautionary principle that reasonable efforts to reduce risk need not await scientific proof”.

In Australia, there was only one case of SARS, in NSW, in a visitor who caught the infection in their home country. The state’s health department advised those who suspected they had been infected not to go to school or public places and seek medical treatment.

Victoria’s advice during a SARS outbreak is that

All suspected, probable and confirmed cases will be excluded from school and work until clearance is obtained from the department.

Close contacts of cases or returned travellers from regions of SARS outbreak, as defined by the department, will be allowed to attend school provided that they remain completely asymptomatic.

This advice is less urgent than the current messaging.

In Toronto, three schools were closed during the SARS outbreak but 24 people had died of it there within three months.

Health officials making the decision to close schools during an outbreak weigh the potential benefits of reducing transmission against economic and social costs, difficult ethical issues (such as potential xenophobia) and the disruption of education.

Although the risk to human health is always prioritised, these considerations make decisions difficult, especially when the number of cases is still low.

– ref. Will my child get coronavirus at school? Here’s some perspective for Aussie parents – https://theconversation.com/will-my-child-get-coronavirus-at-school-heres-some-perspective-for-aussie-parents-130782

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Sacks, Associate Professor, Deakin University

This year’s Australian of the Year, Dr James Muecke, is an eye specialist with a clear vision. He wants to change the way the world looks at sugar and the debilitating consequences of diabetes, which include blindness.

Muecke is pushing for Scott Morrison’s government to enact a tax on sugary drinks to help make that a reality.

Such a tax would increase the price of soft drinks, juices and other sugary drinks by around 20%. The money raised could be used to fund health promotion programs around the country.

The evidence backing his calls is strong.

Read more: A sugary drinks tax could recoup some of the costs of obesity while preventing it

Taxes on sugary drinks work

Several governments around the world have adopted taxes on sugary drinks in recent years. The evidence is clear: they work.

Last year, a summary of 17 studies found health taxes on sugary drinks implemented in Berkeley and other places in the United States, Mexico, Chile, France and Spain reduced both purchases and consumption of sugary drinks.

Reliable evidence from around the world tells us a 10% tax reduces sugary drink intakes by around 10%.

The United Kingdom soft drink tax has also been making headlines recently. Since its introduction, the amount of sugar in drinks has decreased by almost 30%, and six out of ten leading drink companies have dropped the sugar content of more than 50% of their drinks.

Read more: Sugary drinks tax is working – now it’s time to target cakes, biscuits and snacks

In Australia, modelling studies have shown a 20% health tax on sugary drinks is likely to save almost A$2 billion in healthcare costs over the lifetime of the population by preventing diet-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease and several cancers.

This is over and above the cost benefits of preventing dental health issues linked to consumption of sugary drinks.

Most of the health benefits (nearly 50%) would occur among those living in the lowest socioeconomic circumstances.

A 20% health tax on sugary drinks would also raise over A$600 million to invest back into the health of Australians.

So what’s the problem?

The soft drink industry uses every trick in the book to try to convince politicians a tax on sugary drinks is bad policy.

Here are our responses to some common arguments against these taxes:

Myth 1: Sugary drink taxes unfairly disadvantage the poor

It’s true people on lower incomes would feel the pinch from higher prices on sugary drinks. A 20% tax on sugary drinks in Australia would cost people from low socioeconomic households about A$35 extra per year. But this is just A$4 higher than the cost to the wealthiest households.

Importantly, poorer households are likely to get the biggest health benefits and long-term health care savings.

What’s more, the money raised from the tax could be targeted towards reducing health inequalities.

Read more: Australian sugary drinks tax could prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes and save 1,600 lives

Myth 2: Sugary drink taxes would result in job losses

Multiple studies have shown no job losses resulted from taxes on sugar drinks in Mexico and the United States.

This is in contrast to some industry-sponsored studies that try to make the case otherwise.

In Australia, job losses from such a tax are likely to be minimal. The total demand for drinks by Australian manufacturers is unlikely to change substantially because consumers would likely switch from sugary drinks to other product lines, such as bottled water and artificially sweetened drinks.

Despite industry protestations, an Australian tax would have minimal impact on sugar farmers. This is because 80% of our locally grown sugar is exported. Only a small amount of Australian sugar goes to sugary drinks, and the expected 1% drop in demand would be traded elsewhere.

Myth 3: People don’t support health taxes on sugary drinks

There is widespread support for a tax on sugary drinks from major health and consumer groups in Australia.

In addition, a national survey conducted in 2017 showed 77% of Australians supported a tax on sugary drinks, if the proceeds were used to fund obesity prevention.

Myth 4: People will just swap to other unhealthy products, so a tax is useless

Taxes, or levies, can be designed to avoid substitution to unhealthy products by covering a broad range of sugary drink options, including soft drinks, energy drinks and sports drinks.

There is also evidence that shows people switch to water in response to sugary drinks taxes.

Read more: Sweet power: the politics of sugar, sugary drinks and poor nutrition in Australia

Myth 5: There’s no evidence sugary drink taxes reduce obesity or diabetes

Because of the multiple drivers of obesity, it’s difficult to isolate the impact of a single measure. Indeed, we need a comprehensive policy approach to address the problem. That’s why Dr Muecke is calling for a tax on sugary drinks alongside improved food labelling and marketing regulations.

Towards better food policies

The Morrison government has previously and repeatedly rejected pushes for a tax on sugary drinks.

But Australian governments are currently developing a National Obesity Strategy, making it the ideal time to revisit this issue.

We need to stop letting myths get in the way of evidence-backed health policies. Let’s listen to Dr Muecke – he who knows all too well the devastating effects of products packed full of sugar.

– ref. Don’t believe the myths – taxing sugary drinks makes us drink less of it – https://theconversation.com/dont-believe-the-myths-taxing-sugary-drinks-makes-us-drink-less-of-it-130694

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Fabri Blacklock, UNSW

The Versace fashion house recently announced it had stopped using kangaroo skins in its fashion collections after coming under pressure from animal rights group LAV.

Kangaroo meat and skin has an annual production value of around A$174 million, with skins used in the fashion and shoe manufacturing industries.

There are legitimate questions regarding the ethical manner in which kangaroos are killed. But Indigenous people have long utilised the skins of kangaroos and possums. Versace’s concerns may have been allayed by understanding more about our traditions and practices.

Reviving skills

There has always been concern around how native animals are treated while alive and how they are killed to cause as little distress, pain and suffering as possible. Campaigners say 2.3 million kangaroos in Australia are hunted each year. Official sources cite this figure as the national quota, but put the number actually killed at around 1.7 million.

Australian Aboriginal people have for many thousands of years utilised native animals, predominantly kangaroos and possums. Consciously and sustainably, every part of the animal was used. The kangaroo meat was eaten, the skins used to make cloaks for wearing, teeth used to make needles, sinew from the tail used as thread.

The cloaks were incised with designs on the skin side significant to the wearer representing their totems, status and kinship. Cloaks were made for babies and added to as the child grew into adulthood, and people were buried in their cloaks when they died.

Aboriginal women from New South Wales and Victoria have begun reviving the tradition of kangaroo and possum skin cloak-making to pass down knowledge of this important practice to future generations. Interestingly, possum skins can only be purchased from New Zealand for these crafts. As an introduced species, they have wreaked havoc on NZ animal populations and the environment, but are a protected species in Australia.

Culls and trade

In Australia, kangaroos are not farmed but are harvested for meat and fur in the wild under a voluntary code of conduct. The code is difficult to monitor and enforcement is complicated by federal and state sharing of responsibility. This code is currently under review.

The export and import of wildlife is regulated under Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 Act.

In practice, kangaroos are shot in the wild by professional licensed shooters with an intended single shot to the head to kill them quickly.

There are concerns over whether shooters should be trained better and whether nighttime shoots with poor visibility result in the killing of alpha males or mothers with joeys in their pouches.

If mothers are accidentally shot, the code dictates the joey should be shot too. Sometimes the shot does not kill them instantly and they are then clubbed over the head. Traditionally, Aboriginal people speared kangaroos. This was unlikely to kill them instantly, so they were swiftly killed with a blow to the head by a boondi (wooden club).

Why kangaroo?

Kangaroo skin is extremely strong and more flexible than other leathers, including cow hide.

It is routinely used in the production of soccer boots as they mould to the feet extremely well and don’t need to be worn in like harder leathers. This has led to an increase in the use of kangaroo.

LAV reports Italy is the biggest importer of kangaroo leather in Europe, where it is used to produce soccer shoes and motorbike suits. They are lobbying brands Lotto and Dainese to stop using kangaroo, arguing that shooting animals is not sustainable given the estimated 1 billion creatures killed in bushfires this season.

In terms of environmental sustainability, kangaroos cause less damage to the environment than cattle. Cows contribute methane gas, their hard hooves destroy the earth, they eat the grass to a point that it does not regenerate. Kangaroos eat the grass leaving a small portion to re-flourish, they bounce across the land without causing damage to it, and don’t produce methane gases.

The use of kangaroo skins in fashion can be done ethically if the code is reviewed in consultation with Aboriginal people and enforced properly. The industry has the potential to produce and support sustainable business opportunities for Aboriginal communities.

While celebrities are shamed for wearing fur fashion, this relates to the unregulated and inhumane treatment of coyotes, chinchillas, foxes, mink, rabbits, and other fur-bearing animals. In contrast, scientists consider kangaroo harvest as “one of the few rural industry development options with potential to provide economic return with minimal environmental impact”.

Only natural

Versace, along with most fashion retailers across the high-end to ready-to-wear spectrum, use synthetic fibres in their fashion products. Such materials eventually cause more damage to the environment than natural fibres and skins. They don’t biodegrade and many of these fibres end up in landfill, our oceans or in the stomachs of fish.

Animal skins will always be used in fashion and other products because of the unique properties the skins bring to design and function.

While the bushfires have killed millions of Australian native animals, kangaroo culls are managed to have limited impact on the population.

We should focus our energy on saving Australian native animals that are close to extinction and lobbying for a stricter ethical code for shooters that can be legally enforced to ensure kangaroos are killed humanely.

– ref. Riding on the kangaroo’s back: animal skin fashion, exports and ethical trade – https://theconversation.com/riding-on-the-kangaroos-back-animal-skin-fashion-exports-and-ethical-trade-130207

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Cohen, Associate Professor, Western Sydney University

It appears we have missed another close call between two satellites – but how close did we really come to a catastrophic event in space?

It all began with a series of tweets from LeoLabs, a company that uses radar to track satellites and debris in space. It predicted that two obsolete satellites orbiting Earth had a 1 in 100 chance of an almost direct head-on collision at 9:39am AEST on 30 January, with potentially devastating consequences.

LeoLabs estimated that the satellites could pass within 15-30m of one another. Neither satellite could be controlled or moved. All we could do was watch whatever unfolded above us.

Collisions in space can be disastrous and can send high-speed debris in all directions. This endangers other satellites, future launches, and especially crewed space missions.

As a point of reference, NASA often moves the International Space Station when the risk of collision is just 1 in 100,000. Last year the European Space Agency moved one of its satellites when the likelihood of collision with a SpaceX satellite was estimated at 1 in 50,000. However, this increased to 1 in 1,000 when the US Air Force, which maintains perhaps the most comprehensive catalogue of satellites, provided more detailed information.

Read more: You, me and debris: Australia should help clear ‘space junk’

Following LeoLabs’ warning, other organisations such as the Aerospace Corporation began to provide similarly worrying predictions. In contrast, calculations based on publicly available data were far more optimistic. Neither the US Air Force nor NASA issued any warning.

This was notable, as the United States had a role in the launch of both satellites involved in the near-miss. The first is the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), a large space telescope weighing around a tonne and launched in 1983. It successfully completed its mission later that year and has floated dormant ever since.

The second satellite has a slightly more intriguing story. Known as GGSE-4, it is a formerly secret government satellite launched in 1967. It was part of a much larger project to capture radar emissions from the Soviet Union. This particular satellite also contained an experiment to explore ways to stabilise satellites using gravity.

Weighing in at 83kg, it is much smaller than IRAS, but it has a very unusual and unfortunate shape. It has an 18m protruding arm with a weight on the end, thus making it a much larger target.

Almost 24 hours later, LeoLabs tweeted again. It downgraded the chance of a collision to 1 in 1,000, and revised the predicted passing distance between the satellites to 13-87m. Although still closer than usual, this was a decidedly smaller risk. But less than 15 hours after that, the company tweeted yet again, raising the probability of collision back to 1 in 100, and then to a very alarming 1 in 20 after learning about the shape of GGSE-4.

The good news is that the two satellites appear to have missed one another. Although there were a handful of eyewitness accounts of the IRAS satellite appearing to pass unharmed through the predicted point of impact, it can still take a few hours for scientists to confirm that a collision did not take place. LeoLabs has since confirmed it has not detected any new space debris.

But why did the predictions change so dramatically and so often? What happened?

Tricky situation

The real problem is that we don’t really know precisely where these satellites are. That requires us to be extremely conservative, especially given the cost and importance of most active satellites, and the dramatic consequences of high-speed collisions.

The tracking of objects in space is often called Space Situational Awareness, and it is a very difficult task. One of the best methods is radar, which is expensive to build and operate. Visual observation with telescopes is much cheaper but comes with other complications, such as weather and lots of moving parts that can break down.

Another difficulty is that our models for predicting satellites’ orbits don’t work well in lower orbits, where drag from Earth’s atmosphere can become a factor.

There is yet another problem. Whereas it is in the best interest of commercial satellites for everyone to know exactly where they are, this is not the case for military and spy satellites. Defence organisations do not share the full list of objects they are tracking.

This potential collision involved an ancient spy satellite from 1967. It is at least one that we can see. Given the difficulty of just tracking the satellites that we know about, how will we avoid satellites that are trying their hardest not to be seen?

Read more: Trash or treasure? A lot of space debris is junk, but some is precious heritage

In fact, much research has gone into building stealth satellites that are invisible from Earth. Even commercial industry is considering making satellites that are harder to see, partly in response to astronomers’ own concerns about objects blotting out their view of the heavens. SpaceX is considering building “dark satellites” the reflect less light into telescopes on Earth, which will only make them harder to track.

What should we do?

The solution starts with developing better ways to track satellites and space debris. Removing the junk is an important next step, but we can only do that if we know exactly where it is.

Western Sydney University is developing biology-inspired cameras that can see satellites during the day, allowing them to work when other telescopes cannot. These sensors can also see satellites when they move in front of bright objects like the Moon.

There is also no clear international space law or policy, but a strong need for one. Unfortunately, such laws will be impossible to enforce if we cannot do a better job of figuring out what is happening in orbit around our planet.

– ref. Two satellites just avoided a head-on smash. How close did they come to disaster? – https://theconversation.com/two-satellites-just-avoided-a-head-on-smash-how-close-did-they-come-to-disaster-130794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

US President Donald Trump’s “vision” for Israelis and Palestinians is not a realistic peace plan to end a decades-old conflict. Rather, it’s more like a real estate deal in which one side is a recipient of a low-ball offer.

In the meantime, the other side is continuing to expand its hold on property to which it does not have the title deeds under international law. This is not the “deal of the century”, as Trump claims, but an invitation to Israel to assert its sovereignty over swathes of territory seized in the 1967 war.

Read more: Fifty years on from the Six Day War, the prospects for Middle East peace remain dim

In return, the Palestinians are being offered a “Swiss cheese” arrangement in which what is left of territory under their nominal control is pock-marked with settlement enclaves that will remain subject to Israeli military occupation.

This does not represent a two-state solution, or even a half-a-state solution. The Trump plan is a recipe for endless occupation of a stunted Palestinian entity with little or no prospect of achieving statehood, or even a basic autonomy free from military occupation.

The latest peace plan will likely join other failed initiatives, like rusting ordnance in the desert after Middle East conflicts.

It will do nothing for regional peace and stability. On the contrary, it will provide a rallying call for extremists across the Middle East who have no interest in reasonable compromise that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in neighbouring entities.

The fact that Palestinian representatives were not involved in negotiations on a future outlined by the president of the United States and accepted with alacrity by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most nationalistic and uncompromising leaders in Israel’s history, tells its own story.

The Palestinian leadership severed official contact with the Trump administration in 2017 when Washington recognised Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem and shifted its embassy there from Tel Aviv.

The Palestinians can reasonably be criticised for pulling back from direct dealings with the administration, but given Washington’s biases towards Israel, this boycott is hardly surprising.

The Trump plan amounts to not much more than a series of talking points, apart from the green light it gives to Israeli supporters of annexation. In addition, the Palestinian leadership is being asked to agree to terms that fall far short of what had been negotiated in previous peace efforts dating back to the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Under Oslo, a “Palestinian Self-Governing Authority” would be established for a five-year transitional period, leading to a permanent two-state solution settlement based on United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

These called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in war.

Sadly, the Oslo process was stillborn due to toxic internal politics on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. An opportunity was squandered. That was a quarter of a century ago.

Under the Trump plan, the so-called two-state solution is dead for the foreseeable future given that Israel is allowed to annex territory under its control, including the Jordan Valley.

Israel has said it will move ahead with annexation as soon as this coming Sunday.

At the same time, the Trump administration has validated Israel’s settlement-building on Palestinian land in the West Bank by reversing longstanding US policy that regarded these settlements as a breach of international law.

The Trump “vision” should also be viewed in the context of the US administration’s unprecedented accommodation of an ultra-nationalist Israeli government’s priorities.

No Palestinian representatives attended the unveiling in Washington of the Trump plan celebrated by a US president under threat of impeachment and an Israeli prime minister charged with corruption.

Arab attendees came from those countries in the Gulf that could be regarded as American clients: Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. Representatives of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were not present. Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries to have peace treaties with Israel.

While Cairo’s response – like that of Riyadh – to the Trump plan has been muted, it is unlikely leaders of these two countries will risk demonstrations that would likely follow overt acceptance of arrangements inimical to Palestinian interests.

Read more: US can no longer be counted on to end Israel-Palestinian conflict

In all of this, the year 1995 should be regarded as the reference point for any discussion of what lies ahead for the Palestinians and Israelis. That was the year a Jewish zealot assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The so-called peace process effectively died that day.

Rabin’s death and Netanyahu’s subsequent election effectively stymied efforts to encourage a more constructive atmosphere in which compromise might be possible.

A combination of Netanyahu’s obduracy and a weak and divided Palestinian leadership has meant prospects for peace have gone backwards since Oslo in 1993. The handshake on the White House lawn between Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is a distant memory.

The Trump plan is highly unlikely to reverse a continuing drift away from reasonable compromise. It risks making things worse, if that’s possible.

– ref. Trump’s Middle East ‘vision’ is a disaster that will only make things worse – https://theconversation.com/trumps-middle-east-vision-is-a-disaster-that-will-only-make-things-worse-130697

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Dyer, Associate Professor, RMIT University

Understanding how humans learn is one key to improving teaching practices and advancing education. Does everybody learn in the same way, or do different people need different teaching styles?

The question may sound straightforward, but assessing and interpreting learning performance remains elusive. It is one of the most widely debated educational topics of today, especially for learners who have unique ways of demonstrating their understanding.

Bees learn

We looked for answers in what might be an unexpected place: among honeybees. In a new study published in the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, we use the bees as a model to understand how different individuals acquire information.

Using animal models to understand learning has a long and proud history. The Nobel Prize winner Ivan Pavlov famously trained dogs to associate a sound with a food reward. Eventually Pavlov demonstrated that the dogs began to salivate at the sound.

Pavlov’s experiment revealed the core theory behind how we understand associative learning in education, society and popular culture. (Think of how Gringott’s dragon was conditioned in Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows.)

Much of what we know about the physiology of memory formation comes from the seminal work of the Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. Kandel used the simple sea slug (Aplysia californica) to investigate how connections between neurons in the brain enable learning.

Bees are surprisingly good learners and recent research shows individuals can learn faces, add and subtract and even process the concept of zero. Bees learn complex tasks through trial and error, where a reward of sugar water is provided for correctly solving a problem.

Teaching bees arithmetic

We were very interested to discover whether all individual bees would learn complex tasks in a similar way. Would each individual show similar learning performance throughout training, or would individuals demonstrate different learning strategies?

Read more: We taught bees a simple number language – and they got it

One foundation math skill we all learn at about preschool age is how to add and subtract numbers. Arithmetic is not a trivial task. It requires long-term memory of rules associated with particular symbols like plus (+) or minus (–), as well as short-term memory of what particular numbers to manipulate in a given instance.

When we trained bees to add and subtract, we evaluated how many trials it took each bee to acquire the task, and summarised the data examining how individuals learn in a video.

We were surprised to see that all bees did not learn the task at the same stage of training. Instead, different individuals acquired the capacity to solve the problem after a different number of trials.

There was no common learning stage throughout the trials where bees achieved success. Rather the task required bees to try different strategies to see what worked. In particular, the opportunity to learn from mistakes was critical to enabling the bees to learn maths-based problems.

This finding suggests that when brains have to learn multi-stage problems involving different types of memory, an opportunity for exploratory behaviour is what nature prefers.

What does this mean for education?

Humans and bees last shared a common ancestor about 600 million years ago. However, we share a large number of genes and it is likely we have some similarities in how we process information.

We know that bees and humans have a common way of processing numbers from one to four, for instance, suggesting that learning processes may be linked to evolutionary conserved mechanisms. So bees’ improved results when learning maths problems in an individual exploratory fashion suggests this may be how humans too are wired to acquire new skills.

Indeed, some recent research in learning and learning difficulties in children has found evidence that individuals frequently see and learn in different ways depending on environmental context.

Our biology may be programmed to encourage exploratory learning, rather than trying to acquire information in a set prescribed way. If so, our education systems should take this into consideration.

This idea may not be new, but may face challenges if computer-based learning is increasingly adopted as there is a risk that limited programming could limit learning styles.

On the other hand, the clever use of exploratory learning environments – digital or physical – may enhance learning outcomes.

We should not shy away from examining how our evolutionary history impacts learning and using this to our advantage. Understanding evolutionary principles could help in designing learning environments best suited to encouraging exploration for optimal learning, for example.

– ref. Bees learn better when they can explore. Humans might work the same way – https://theconversation.com/bees-learn-better-when-they-can-explore-humans-might-work-the-same-way-129439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, The University of Queensland

Diplomacy and hostage negotiation are both subtle businesses. The training, culture and professional instincts of diplomats and negotiators make them inclined to operate behind the scenes to solve problems.

Better to work relationships to sort things out quietly, they argue, than get all shouty in public where the messaging can get out of hand.

So it is with the case of Australian-British academic, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who has been in Ward 2-A of Iran’s notorious Evin prison since October 2018, where she is serving a 10-year sentence for “espionage”.

Read more: As pressure on Iran mounts, there is little room for quiet diplomacy to free detained Australians

The Australian government unequivocally rejects the charges as baseless. Asked by reporters what his government was doing to get her out, Prime Minister Scott Morrison vaguely said

we’re doing everything that we can do to bring her home.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne wasn’t much more forthcoming. In response to a question about Moore-Gilbert, she said recently,

Our view is that we don’t accept the charges upon which she was detained, held, charged and convicted, and we want to ensure the conditions in which she is held are appropriate.

But if, after almost a year and a half since her detention, things are still dire for the Middle East specialist, the strategy has failed spectacularly.

‘In the midst of a serious psychological problem’

In a series of handwritten letters smuggled out and published last week by the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, the academic said her “health has deteriorated significantly” and

I think I am in the midst of a serious psychological problem, I can no longer stand the pressures of living in this extremely restrictive detention ward anymore.

She describes being held in solitary confinement, with the lights on 24 hours a day and without medical attention, adequate food or phone calls to her family. In another note to the prosecutor, she points out that under Iran’s own laws, after being convicted she must be moved to a “normal” prison ward.

The Washington Post journalist Jason Rezian, who was himself held on charges of spying in the same prison wing run by the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), called it “a place beyond government oversight”.

Her situation is much more dire than the (Australian) government is letting on.

So, when the traditional methods have failed so dismally to improve anything about Moore-Gilbert’s situation, surely the time has come to shift gears and get shouty to ramp up public pressure on both Australian diplomats and Iranian politicians.

Public pressure can mobilise government action

Whether they admit it or not, governments everywhere tend to respond to public uproar. In 2015, after I was released from a prison in Egypt where I had been held on terrorism charges for 13 months, I asked a European diplomat what my colleagues and I should be doing to free other colleagues who remained in jail. He responded:

Keep up the protests and the lobbying from human rights groups. Get on Twitter and Facebook; give interviews to TV and radio stations. Stay noisy.

My response was that Egyptians don’t “give a damn” about Twitter, Facebook or Human Rights Watch.

And he said,

But I and my colleagues do. And by keeping the fire burning under our backsides, you not only keep us focused, you also give us the tools to say to the Egyptians, ‘we can’t move on to other business until you sort this situation out’.

It is risky to draw direct comparisons between our case and Moore-Gilbert’s. But it was clear that in our campaign, the extraordinary public pressure gave then-Foreign Minister Julie Bishop the political weight she needed to mobilise more muscular diplomatic and consular resources than usual.

It pushed both her and the Prime Minister Tony Abbott to speak publicly and forcefully in favour of our release. The attention pushed the Egyptians to keep us in better conditions than other “terrorists”. It created space for a more coordinated international response. And in the end it proved too much for Cairo to resist.

Read more: Peter Greste released: good news from the Middle East

The dangers of negotiations

To be clear, it is always difficult for governments to balance their responsibility to help a citizen in trouble in a foreign land against broader national interests, particularly when it involves a strategically important country like Iran.

But if the Australian government is involved in any negotiations or “bargaining” to free Moore-Gilbert, it risks validating the Iranian strategy and encouraging more hostage-taking.

In this case, we still don’t know why Iran is holding Moore-Gilbert or what it might be asking for in exchange for her release. But given the escalating tensions between Tehran and the West, she is almost certainly being used as a bargaining chip.

If her family, colleagues and the public continue to heed the diplomats’ advice and remain quiet, and if Morrison and Payne keep tiptoeing around the issue, it is almost certain nothing will change.

– ref. The Australian government needs to step up its fight to free Kylie Moore-Gilbert from prison in Iran – https://theconversation.com/the-australian-government-needs-to-step-up-its-fight-to-free-kylie-moore-gilbert-from-prison-in-iran-130591

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Larissa Schneider, DECRA fellow, Australian National University

Climate change and bushfire may exacerbate recent mercury pollution and increase exposure to the poisonous neurotoxin, according to our study published in the Journal of Paleolimnology.

Mercury stored in plants is released during bushfires, suggesting Australia is particularly at risk.

Our study in the Venezuelan Andes examined how mercury deposits responded when the world warmed by about 3℃ between 14,500 and 11,500 years ago. (Scientists call this period the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene).

We found the amount of mercury deposited in the environment at this time increased four-fold.

A dangerous neurotoxin

Mercury is a naturally occurring but dangerous neurotoxin that, in sufficient amounts, can cause impaired motor skills, breathing difficulty and memory problems in humans.

Once in the environment, mercury builds up in the bodies of animals. The build-up is magnified when those animals are then eaten by other animals, and so on. This process is called bioaccumulation and biomagnification.

Read more: Australia emits mercury at double the global average

Industrial activities such as mining, fossil fuel combustion and cement production release mercury into the environment.

Over the past 150 years, humans have tripled the amount of mercury in the atmosphere. It can remain there for months, and be transported by wind to even the most remote ecosystems on Earth.

Climate change unlocks mercury deposits

Average global temperatures have increased by 0.8℃ since 1880 , with two-thirds of this warming occurring since 1975. Understanding how mercury responded to past known climate change may help us forecast future mercury exposure as the climate warms.

The Last Glacial Maximum (also known as an ice age), and the start of the Holocene (the present period), occurred between 19,000 and 11,700 years ago.

Read more: Another problem with China’s coal: Mercury in rice

It was not a smooth transition; global climate oscillated between warm and cold at this time.

Abrupt returns to cold, glacial-like conditions occurred during two periods of time called the Older Dryas and the Younger Dryas. These climate oscillations provide a unique opportunity to understand how mercury in our environment responds to rapid climate change.

Looking in lakes

Layers of sediment settle to the bottom of lakes over thousands of years. By collecting sediment cores, scientists can precisely date each layer and reconstruct past climates. Lake sediment also provide a good historical of mercury contamination.

We examined how mercury deposits in a small lake – the Laguna de Los Anteojos in the Venezuelan Andes – changed as the ecosystem shifted with the climate.

We found the amount of mercury in the lake increased rapidly as temperature increased – which doesn’t bode well for us.

It suggests human-caused global warming might drive a similar increase in the amount of mercury deposited in remote ecosystems, even if emissions are reduced.

As the climate warmed, we found, more mercury entered water systems. Once in the aquatic system, it can be absorbed by plants or consumed by animals, and pass on up the food chain in ever-increasing amounts.

Bushfires dump more mercury into the environment

Plants can store a significant pool of mercury from the atmosphere, which is good – until fires occur.

Unfortunately, mercury stored by vegetation is released during burning. This is particularly the case in contaminated areas, where plants store significant quantities of mercury emitted from human activities such as mining.

Given the recent catastrophic fires engulfing large tracts of land in Australia, that’s a worry.

There’s a dearth of mercury studies in Australia (a fact acknowledged even by the United Nations) so it’s not yet possible to estimate mercury emissions from the recent Australian bushfires.

One thing we do know, however, is the number of bushfires in Australia is not expected to decrease.

Read more: Many of our plants and animals have adapted to fires, but now the fires are changing

It sounds bleak, but Australian researchers are working hard to better understand how mercury behaves as our ecosystem changes.

The more we know, the better our chances of mitigating mercury pollution and the risk it poses to humans and wildlife.

– ref. Plants safely store toxic mercury. Bushfires and climate change bring it back into our environment – https://theconversation.com/plants-safely-store-toxic-mercury-bushfires-and-climate-change-bring-it-back-into-our-environment-129788

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW

Last year there was substantial hand-wringing over Australia’s declining results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. Ideas for how to reverse this decline were coming from far and wide, thick and fast.

Federal Minister for Education Dan Tehan declared Australian education needed to go “back-to-basics” while influential commentators pointed out PISA tests are focused on “problem-solving” and this is what we need more of in Australian schools.

Of course, both views are correct. The problem is they are often framed as mutually exclusive, when in fact we can effectively teach the basics and optimise problem-solving at the same time.

Read more: PISA doesn’t define education quality, and knee-jerk policy proposals won’t fix whatever is broken

Our recent research suggests “load reduction instruction” is one way to do this. To explain load reduction, we must first explain a bit about memory.

Short and long-term memory

There are two key parts of the human memory system: working memory and long-term memory.

Working memory is the in-the-moment component that receives and sends information to long-term memory. It is limited and estimated to hold information for about 15-20 seconds, with a capacity about the size of a phone number.

Long-term memory has vast capacity and indefinite duration. The teacher needs to help students build up their long-term memory such as fundamental facts and rules (times-tables) as well as concepts and procedures needed for performing more complex tasks (difficult algebra).

Teachers need to teach in a way that reduces the burden on students’ working memory when they are learning new content or skills. If working memory is overloaded, students may misunderstand information or not understand it at all.

Read more: I had an idea in the 1980s and to my surprise, it changed education around the world

Explicit instruction is a good way to ease this burden when students are learning the basics. Here, for example, a teacher clearly and systematically shows the students what to do and how to do it.

Once students understand the basics, they can take on more complex information. In fact, research has shown if students are not moved onto problem-solving opportunities after they have learnt the basics, their learning can decline (this is called the “expertise reversal effect”).

Fostering problem-solving can be done through guided inquiry-oriented learning. Here the teacher may assign a more open-ended or complex task students complete on their own using, or inferring from, the information and skill they gained in the explicit instructional phase. It is “guided” because the teacher still has a role in monitoring progress and assisting as appropriate.

Read more: Explainer: what is inquiry-based learning and how does it help prepare children for the real world?

What is load reduction instruction?

Load reduction instruction aims to integrate explicit instruction and guided inquiry with the following five principles:

1. make tasks simple enough to suit the students’ existing knowledge or skill level at the start of the learning process. The teacher could do some pre-testing to understand what the students already know and then present information and tasks at a level of difficulty that matches the students’ ability

2. instructional support from the teacher through the task. The teacher could provide a task for students to do in steps and work closely with them through each one

3. structured practice and repetition. After working through a task with students, the teacher could give similar tasks where students can practise what they know or can do

4. feed-back and feed-forward. The teacher could provide corrective information (if correction is needed) and specific suggestions for the student to apply or to improve on the next task

5. guided independent practice, problem-solving and inquiry-oriented learning. The teacher could provide a more complex task students do on their own and that may involve more than one path to a solution or more than one solution. The teacher’s guidance is minimal (such as reminding students of the likely steps involved or providing some hints when students get stuck), but always available.

The first four principles may be considered the “back-to-basics” parts of load reduction instruction and rely on the more traditional explicit approaches. Then, as core skill and knowledge develop, the fifth principle is emphasised: problem-solving.

How we know it works

We have conducted two studies exploring load reduction instruction in class. The first study involved 393 high school students in 40 maths classrooms.

Students rated their maths teacher on five aspects of each of the five principles described above.

Students also reported on their own motivation and engagement in maths, their academic buoyancy in maths (how well they bounce back from academic setback), and their maths achievement. We found the more the teacher was reported to implement load reduction instruction, the higher their students’ levels of motivation, engagement, academic buoyancy and achievement.

Read more: Don’t just solve for x: letting kids explore real-world scenarios will keep them in maths class

In a second study (currently under peer review), students from more than 150 science classrooms rated their science teacher using the five principles. Students also rated their own engagement in science (how much they enjoyed and participated in class) and completed a brief science test.

Our analyses revealed students who were taught using load reduction principles had higher levels of engagement in science and higher levels of science achievement.

Back-to-basics and problem-solving should go hand in hand. The success of one is inextricably tied to the success of the other. But the order in which things are done is critical. Explicit instruction must first be used to ease the load on students as they learn the basics. Then, when some expertise has developed, students move to guided inquiry to nurture their problem-solving capacity.

– ref. Kids learn best when you add a problem-solving boost to ‘back-to-basics’ instruction – https://theconversation.com/kids-learn-best-when-you-add-a-problem-solving-boost-to-back-to-basics-instruction-129008

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

Bushfires have killed 33 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 houses across Australia so far this fire season. Canberra is under threat right now.

It isn’t only houses. Significant commercial buildings have been destroyed, among them Kangaroo Island’s iconic Southern Ocean Lodge.

In New South Wales alone, 140 schools have been hit. Many require extensive work.

The National Construction Code provides false, and dangerous, hope.

It requires new homes (Class 1 buildings) built in declared “bushfire-prone” areas to be built to either Australian Standard 3959, the National Association of Steelframed Housing standard “Steel Framed Construction in Bushfire Areas”, or a “performance solution”, which could be anything that in the opinion of a qualified person complies with the performance requirements of the code.

It also applies to Class 2 buildings (apartments) and Class 3 buildings (hotels and guesthouses) in bushfire-prone areas.

Disturbingly, the code does not apply to community buildings, such as schools.

The standard does not fireproof buildings

The definition of “bushfire-prone” varies from state to state, as do the procedures for enforcing it.

Confused? So are many construction professionals.

The sad truth is that any practical building that is exposed to an intense bushfire will probably burn down, whether it complies with Australian Standard 3959 or not.

Worse still, the available evidence suggests there is a significant risk that the people sheltering in it will not survive without an effective refuge, which Australian Standard 3959 does not mandate or consider.

The standard speaks for itself:

Although this Standard is designed to improve the performance of buildings when subjected to bushfire attack in designated bushfire-prone areas, there can be no guarantee that a building will survive a bushfire event on every occasion. This is substantially due to the unpredictable nature and behaviour of fire and extreme weather conditions.

More importantly, while a building constructed to Australian Standard 3959 might be less likely to burn down, Standard 3959 in its current form might not protect the people within the building.

Worse, it might not protect people

The highest aim of any system of building regulation ought to be life and safety, followed by the protection of adjoining properties and then, a long way back, by the protection of the property itself.

In the case of bushfire, the Australian Building Codes Board and its political masters appear to have put the protection of buildings first, when it should be last.

If a house is under threat by bushfire, the best advice is to evacuate early, whether it complies with Australian Standard 3959 or not.

Read more: Our buildings aren’t made to keep out bushfire smoke. Here’s what you can do

By encouraging people to believe they can defend a structure compliant with Australian Standard 3959 we could be putting more people at risk than if we simply told them to evacuate.

Residents and firefighters defending houses have accounted for a large percentage of the deaths this fire season.

It’d be better to rethink where we build

We may need to have difficult conversations about whether our subdivision practices are appropriate. Allowing people to build in areas that are bushfire-prone, particularly where buildings are effectively built into the bush, might be creating unmanageable problems for the future.

If there is no such thing as a bushfire-proof house, as Australian Standard 3959 seems to concede, we might need to focus on evacuation and shelters.

In the United States, rather than requiring houses to resist tornadoes or wildfires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency encourages the provision of shelters. State and local authorities often make these mandatory.

People are more important than buildings

Having attended one funeral for a person killed defending their home this fire season, I have had enough. We should not be worrying about protecting buildings until we have worked out how to protect human life.

The Building Ministers’ Forum and the Australian Building Codes Board should either embrace a policy of early evacuation or mandate fire shelters in bushfire-prone areas for both new and existing houses.

Read more: Australian building codes don’t expect houses to be fire-proof – and that’s by design

The board and the states should also make every effort to regulate to ensure all buildings and places designated as refuges of last resort can properly fulfil their intended function, whether they are new or not.

If we are going to have another fire season similar to this year, and so far the CSIRO predictions on this have been totally accurate, we will need to sort this out quickly, preferably before next summer.

– ref. Building standards give us false hope. There’s no such thing as a fireproof house – https://theconversation.com/building-standards-give-us-false-hope-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-fireproof-house-130165

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Duncan Cook, Senior Lecturer in Geography, Australian Catholic University

Disastrous fires, ongoing drought, and heat extremes have refocused Australians’ attention on the human contribution to climate change.

For decades experts have known (and warned) of the consequences for Australia, but for many, there is a realisation that our environment has shifted beyond “normal” boundaries, and that humans have played some part in this. This is fertile ground for the idea we occupy a new human-dominated phase of planetary history: the Anthropocene.

Use of the term Anthropocene (the root “anthropo” means human, the suffix “-cene” signals a geologic time epoch) has been growing for more than a decade. No longer the exclusive domain of geoscientists, it has jumped from academic journals to pop culture while many are still asking “the what now?”

Read more: Blue Acceleration: our dash for ocean resources mirrors what we’ve already done to the land

A very short history

It has been 20 years since Dutch Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and colleagues used the term to describe the human modification of the planet since the industrial revolution. However, the concept dates back to at least the mid- to late-19th century when Italian Catholic priest, geologist and palaeontologist Antonio Stoppani proposed an “anthropozoic era”.

There has been a push in the last decade to have the Anthropocene formally recognised as the current piece of Earth history.

Last year, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) agreed to a proposal for a formal Anthropocene period with an onset marked by the distinct chemical signatures of mid-20th century atomic bomb fallout that we can detect worldwide.

Some scholars have questioned the need for an Anthropocene epoch at all. Others recognise its usefulness but debate when between the mid-18th and mid-20th century AD the period started.

Read more: Enough ‘Anthropocene’ nonsense – we already know the world is in crisis

While there are good arguments for such a recent start date, it potentially excludes the impact of thousands of years of human deforestation, agriculture, and building that are the environmental antecedents of the world we see today (a so-called Early Anthropocene, or a Palaeoanthropocene model).

Re-writing the past

One issue here is that our knowledge of human impacts in the distant past is being rapidly re-written. Take the Maya lowlands of Central America, where our research team used the term Mayacene to describe early Anthropocene deforestation, agriculture and urbanisation. In a new paper, my colleagues have shown Pre-Columbian Maya wetland agricultural systems in present-day Belize were five times larger (and older) than previously thought.

We are only now beginning to understand the long history of human modification, in tropical forests and elsewhere, that may have increased greenhouse gas emissions and altered climate long before the industrial revolution.

History tells us trying to pin down when (and where) major human disturbance first occurred is a great challenge. The stratigraphic (and historical and archaeological) evidence suggests an Anthropocene that is time-transgressive, with many different beginnings (and some declines) globally. We can say it had transformed much of the planet by 3,000 years ago.

Escape from acadaemia

An undecided start date has not prevented the Anthropocene idea spreading rapidly through many academic disciplines.

Highly regarded journals, such as Anthropocene and Anthropocene Review, publish an expanding body of human-impacts research.

Across the humanities and social sciences, the Anthropocene has become an important frame for re-examining human-environment relationships. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay, for example.

Offshoot Anthropocene ideas have sprouted, including the Technoscene (the influence of technology), the Capitalocene (the influence of economies), and (my favourite) the Chthulucene that imagines a future re-worlding where multispecies groups learn to live in harmony with nature.

Despite the viral spread and mutation of the term, what remains is the recognition of the enormity and permanence of human environmental modification, and the (usually) negative consequences.

The 2010s were marked by important Anthropocene books, documentaries and movies, marking the spread of the term into the public discourse.

In 2014, Anthropocene was added to the Oxford English Dictionary; six years later, Google’s search engine shows some 6.4 million internet hits on the term. In The Atlantic last year, science writer Peter Brannen wondered whether the concept was an arrogant human folly:

The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations.

The cultural impact of the Anthropocene is seen in major art projects and museum exhibitions, and you can now find the word (and the ideas) in many songs and albums. Canadian musician Grimes’ announced her upcoming release Miss Anthropocene is a “concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate change”.

On social media, Anthropocene has become a byword for the severe human impacts on the environment we see around us – in posts about bushfire smoke, plastic beach flotsam, and expanding farmlands.

Lasting impact

It’s not often ideas and terminology from the geosciences escape and find a home in society, so the journey of the Anthropocene, from neologism to global catch phrase and environmental rallying point is fascinating.

The Anthropocene is not (yet) a formally defined geological unit, and so for now, we continue to live in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene epoch.

The Anthropocene has arguably become a “charismatic mega-concept”. It brings together the sciences, humanities, and the public realm, stimulating ongoing debate and new research.

Read more: Friday essay: thinking like a planet – environmental crisis and the humanities

Perhaps this is the “global awareness” ANU’s Will Steffen and colleagues anticipated in their 2007 Anthropocene model?

Time will tell if this shared terminology and understanding can translate into action, to repair (or at least slow) millennia of human impacts on the Earth.

– ref. How the term ‘Anthropocene’ jumped from geoscience to hashtags – before most of us knew what it meant – https://theconversation.com/how-the-term-anthropocene-jumped-from-geoscience-to-hashtags-before-most-of-us-knew-what-it-meant-130130

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

As the suspense over Bridget McKenzie’s future continues, Scott Morrison on Wednesday argued that in allocating public money, it’s politicians rather than officials who understand the community.

Previously, Morrison has highlighted that all the grants then sports minister McKenzie decided upon – overriding the ranking worked out by officials according to the program’s criteria – were “eligible” under the sports scheme.

Answering questions at the National Press Club, he elevated another line.

He recalled when he was social services minister his department had allocated the grants under a program and the result was some “wonderful community organisations” were defunded. He and the then prime minister had to intervene and fix things.

“On other occasions, departments have made decisions which had stripped money from Foodbank, and I’ve had to reverse those decisions,” he said.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s ‘resilience’ speech overshadowed as McKenzie crisis deepens

In contrast to officials, “politicians, ministers, members of parliament, we’re part of our community. We know what’s happening in our community. We’re in touch with our community. We know the things that can make a difference in our community. And it’s important because we’re accountable to those people in our communities for getting stuff done that’s going to make a difference in their communities”.

Later he elaborated. “It’s not a question of either/or. It’s a question of the two working together. And my best experience as a minister and a prime minister is where you just worked together closely with your public officials and you make decisions.”

Despite Morrison saying how much he respected the “professionalism”, “expertise” and “skills” of the public service, his remarks won’t be lost on federal bureaucrats who already feel somewhat under siege from the PM.

On a literal reading of Morrison’s analysis, McKenzie gets protection on two grounds. The politically-based grants she made were “eligible” and politicians know best anyhow.

This suggests if McKenzie is to be dumped it will have to be on the ground of her failure to disclose her membership of a gun club she funded, rather on the propriety (or rather, impropriety) of her doling out money skewed to marginal seats – which is the more serious sin.

Around the government, there is some bewilderment that Morrison hasn’t dealt with the McKenzie situation before this (which of course does involve Nationals leader Michael McCormack).

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Bridget McKenzie has made herself a sitting duck

It’s impossible to believe Phil Gaetjens, secretary of Morrison’s department, could not have finished his assessment of whether McKenzie had breached ministerial standards days ago if the PM had been minded to take a quick decision.

Whatever method there is in dragging this out isn’t obvious even to some in the Nationals, where McKenzie doesn’t have a great deal of support. It was noticed that on the ABC on Wednesday Victorian National Darren Chester, active in gathering the numbers for McKenzie’s election to the party’s deputy leadership, would not say whether she had his backing.

With parliament returning next week, Morrison can’t dally much longer.

He again played down his office’s part in the sports grants affair, saying “all we did was provide information based on the representations made to us, as every prime minister has always done”.

He also hinted he might make reparations to those organisations that were high on the officials’ list but missed out on grants, and are now squawking.

“There are many, many, many more worthy projects in this area … I will work with the Treasurer to see how we can better support even more projects in the future.”

But beware the fine print in his words. “On any grants program, however it’s done, there will always be many applicants whose projects are very worthy and they’re unable to be accommodated by the budget that we’ve set.

“We’re a responsible government that manages public money carefully.”

The nub of the McKenzie affair is that the government was being “careful” about the politics in how this money was “managed”. For all Morrison’s public rationalisations, the voters understand this – and the PM must know they do. As he said, politicians “are part of our communities – we live in them – we engage there every day”. And no doubt they are hearing loud and clear the community feedback about the sports rorts.

– ref. View from The Hill: Politicians not bureaucrats are the ones in touch, Morrison claims in sports affair – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-politicians-not-bureaucrats-are-the-ones-in-touch-morrison-claims-in-sports-affair-130795

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Professor and Chair in the Economics of Disasters, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

One way to count the cost of the Wuhan coronavirus is by how many people catch it, and then how many die. Another is the direct financial costs of public health measures to treat those infected and contain its spread.

Yet another is the wider economic cost. But how to calculate this?

Some suggest a neglible impact on the global economy if the death toll is less or similar to the SARS outbreak in 2002-03.

Read more: What we know suggests the economic impact of Wuhan coronavirus will be limited

But the economic impact is not directly tied to the number of people who get sick (morbidity) or die (mortality). It almost wholly depends on the indirect effects of the decisions that many millions of individuals make to minimise their chance of catching the virus, and the decision of governments on how to react to the threat.

This means the Wuhan outbreak could directly affect relatively few people, compared to past pandemics, yet still pack an intense punch in a more interconnected global economy.

Learning from SARS

We can draw lessons from the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) experience, the first epidemic of the 21st century.

SARS was another coronavirus. As the Wuhan virus emerged in late December from an animal market, SARS originated from animal markets in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in November 2002.

Zoonotic epidemics – diseases emerging from animal hosts – are not new. But they are becoming more common with closer proximity between wild animals, domesticated animals and people; and they spread more rapidly due to increased movements of people within and between countries. Their economic risk is also likely to increase.

Read more: Wuhan coronavirus: we still haven’t learned the lessons from SARS

SARS spread to infect individuals across 26 countries in a matter of weeks. Fortunately it was then contained relatively rapidly. Ultimately about 8,500 people caught it. The mortality rate was about 11% with fewer than a thousand deaths.

The SARS outbreak was, of course, devastating to its victims and their families. But its public-health impacts were relatively limited and short-lived. It nonetheless had significant economic impacts. Though fewer than 10,000 people were directly infected, tens of millions of individuals changed their behaviour out of fear of catching the virus.

Overestimating risks

These behavioural changes were partly driven by government directives, but more importantly by personal judgments about risks.

Behavioural studies suggest individuals typically overestimate the risks that are memorable, vivid or generate fear, while underestimating more common risks. Thus shark attacks are feared more than traffic accidents.

In a survey of 705 people in Hong Kong at the height of the SARS epidemic, 23% of respondents feared they were likely to become infected with SARS. The actual infection rate was only 0.0026%. In the US, where 29 people were infected and no one died, 16% of survey respondents felt they or their family were likely to get infected with SARS.

Read more: How contagious is the Wuhan coronavirus and can you spread it before symptoms start?

Such fears led to observed economic effects. Disproportionately affected were leisure venues (restaurants, cinemas, bars and clubs) and businesses associated with domestic and international tourism.

The economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were hardest hit. At the height of the epidemic, international visitor arrivals fell dramatically in these four countries. According to World Bank research, GDP losses to these countries amounted to US$13 billion

In Beijing, the losses to the tourism sector were estimated to be 300 times the direct cost of medical treatment for SARS in the city.

Panic is easy to spread

A complete tally of the cost of SARS has never been undertaken, but what we do know about the SARS experience is most likely a good guide to what the costs of the Wuhan outbreak might be. It will be the reactions of governments and individuals to the perceived threat of the virus, and not the virus itself, that will have the biggest economic costs.

The Chinese government has imposed a mandatory curfew on more than 30 million people. It’s possible hundreds of millions more are changing their plans willingly or because they are being instructed to do so.

Examples include Hong Kong and other countries now hesitating to allow in Chinese tourists, and citizens of other nations being advised to avoid travelling to China. The US Centers for Disease Control, for example, has recommended against all non-essential travel to China, including areas far from Wuhan.

Read more: Coronavirus outbreak: WHO’s decision to not declare a global public health emergency explained

We do not yet know enough about the virulence of this coronavirus, though the preliminary evidence suggests its mortality rate is much lower than that of SARS.

But with social media, panics can also spread more rapidly and further. All signs point to a global overreaction to this crisis, and therefore to an amplified economic impact. Even highly reputable media outlets such as The New York Times have not proven immune to sensationalism, promoting stories with dramatic headlines such as “Alarm Grows as Markets Tumble and Death Toll Rises”.

We should all, therefore, rely as much as possible on verifiable information. Preventing the contagious spread of inaccurate and exaggerated information comes a close second to our responsibilities to prevent the spread of the virus itself.

– ref. Fear spreads easily. That’s what gives the Wuhan coronavirus economic impact – https://theconversation.com/fear-spreads-easily-thats-what-gives-the-wuhan-coronavirus-economic-impact-130780

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roslyn Petelin, Course coordinator, The University of Queensland

High-profile author Philip Pullman tweeted on Sunday about the new 50 pence English coin due for release by the Royal Mint on Friday, January 31.

“The ‘Brexit’ 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,” he said.

An Oxford comma is the comma inserted before “and” or “or” in a list to separate the final item in a list from the items that go before it.

Sir Philip lives in Oxford, which voted to remain in the European Union. He has written several bestselling books, including the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. He argues that the commemorative coin requires a comma between “prosperity” and “and” – a very controversial opinion.

When The Guardian republished his tweet in an article, hundreds of responses were posted within hours. Moderators removed many comments – presumably the most heated ones.

Exciting passions

The mention of the Oxford (or Harvard or serial) comma unfailingly attracts passionate advocates (of which I am one) and determined detractors.

As Comma Queen Mary Norris, former copy editor at The New Yorker, says:

Nothing, but nothing — profanity, transgender pronouns, apostrophe abuse — excites the passion of grammar geeks more than the serial, or Oxford, comma. People love it or hate it, and they are equally ferocious on both sides of the debate. Individual publications have guidelines that sink deep into the psyches of editors and writers. The Times, like most newspapers, does without the serial comma. At The New Yorker, it is a copy editor’s duty to deploy the serial comma, along with lots of other lip-smacking bits of punctuation, as a bulwark against barbarianism.

Although its use is widespread in North America, the Oxford comma is not as widely used in Australia and the UK.

The Australian government’s Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers merely says “sometimes a comma is placed between the last two items to ensure clarity” and doesn’t use it in the manual’s title.

The UK National Curriculum authority warns students will be penalised if they use a serial comma in a list of simple items such as “apples, cheese, and milk”.

Many of the detractors say: “I was taught at school not to use it.”

To them I would say: “Well, you were taught wrong!”

As one poster on The Guardian article comments:

The use of the Oxford comma is not standard practice [in the UK], merely because of the ignorant, narrow-minded grammar school teachers we had.

Many believe it should be used only to avoid ambiguity, as in Robert Fulford’s example of a blooper that occurred in a newspaper reporting on a documentary about Merle Haggard: “Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.”

My argument is deciding whether or not to use the Oxford comma is an unnecessary burden. I advocate using it at all times, although most journalists aren’t fans of the comma – perhaps because they can save a couple of spaces by omitting it.

Read more: Grammarians rejoice in the $10 million comma

The 50p coin

To return to the quote on the coin in question, “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations”, placing an Oxford comma after “prosperity”, as Pullman advocates, doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion, to sort out the problem with the quote.

The intent of the quote seems to apply “with all nations” to the three nouns, but by parsing out each section we can see this does not work.

Does “Peace with all nations” make grammatical sense? No.

Does “Prosperity with all nations” make grammatical sense? No.

Whatever committee adapted US President Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration principles “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations” by merely deciding to drop the Oxford comma and echo the rest of his words has resulted in this egregiously inept wording.

As admirable (or pedantic, depending on your feelings about the Oxford comma) as Pullman might be in advocating for the use of the Oxford comma on the coin, it’s clear this coin has committed more than one crime against the rules of grammar.

– ref. Comma again? Philip Pullman’s Oxford comma rage doesn’t go far enough – https://theconversation.com/comma-again-philip-pullmans-oxford-comma-rage-doesnt-go-far-enough-130699

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

Chronic constipation is incredibly common. Around one in four people worldwide report symptoms, while in Australia and New Zealand, it’s around one in seven.

Lots of things can trigger constipation: being out of your usual routine (think holidays, illness or injury), having a low fibre intake, not drinking enough water and inactivity.

Certain medications can also cause constipation including iron supplements, painkillers, diuretics (to help you get rid of sodium and water), and other drugs to treat heart disease, mental health conditions and allergies.

Read more: Health Check: what causes constipation?

Constipation is more common in older adults and in women, due to hormonal changes that slow bowel motility – the time it takes for your body to digest food and expel the waste products (stools or bowel motions). Pregnant women are particularly prone to constipation.

How do you know you’re constipated?

Symptoms include:

1. lumpy or hard stools
2. feeling that your bowels haven’t emptied completely or your anus is blocked
3. straining to pass a bowel motion
4. manipulating your body position to try and pass a bowel motion
5. having fewer than three bowel motions per week.

If over a three-month period you answer yes to two or more of these symptoms most weeks, then you have “constipation”.

The good news is it can be treated and then prevented.

If your bowels are so packed you can’t pass any bowel motions at all, see your GP. You may need treatment with specific laxatives to clear your bowels before you can start on a prevention plan.

Here are four things that research shows improve bowel function, which refers to the time it takes for food to move through your digestive system and be expelled as a bowel motion (called gut transit time), the frequency and volume of bowel motions, and stool consistency.

1. High-fibre foods

Dietary fibres are complex carbohydrates that aren’t digested or absorbed in the gut.

Different types of dietary fibres improve bowel function through the following processes:

• the fermentation of fibre in the colon produces water and other molecules. These make stools softer and easier to pass

• absorption of water into stools stimulates the gut to contract and makes bowel motions softer

• a higher fibre intake creates bigger stools, which pass more quickly, resulting in more regular bowel motions.

Read more: Health Check: are you eating the right sorts of fibre?

A good source of fibre is psyllium. It forms a viscous gel, which gets fermented in the colon, leading to softer bowel motions. Psyllium is the main ingredient in Metamucil, which is commonly used to treat constipation.

A review comparing the effect of psyllium to wheat bran in people with chronic constipation found psyllium was 3.4 times more effective at increasing the amount of stool passed.

This is important because having a bigger bowel motion waiting in the colon to be passed sends signals to your gut that it’s time to expel the stool – and it helps the gut contract to do just that.

The review found both psyllium and coarse wheat bran had a stool-softening effect, but finely ground wheat bran had a stool-hardening effect.

Other foods rich in fermentable carbohydrates include dark rye bread and legumes (chickpeas, lentils, four-bean mix, red kidney beans, baked beans); while wholemeal and wholegrain breads and cereals are high in different types of dietary fibres.

Read more: Multigrain, wholegrain, wholemeal: what’s the difference and which bread is best?

2. Kiwi fruit

Kiwi fruit fibre absorbs about three times its weight in water. This means it helps make stools softer and boosts volume by increasing the amount of water retained in bowel motions. This stimulates the gut to contract and moves the bowel motions along the gut to the anus.

In a study of 38 healthy older adults, researchers found adding two to three kiwi fruit per day to their diets for three weeks resulted in participants passing bowel motions more often. It also increased the size of their stools and made them softer and easier to pass.

Kiwi fruit are also rich in the complex carbohydrate inulin a type of fructan. Fructans are a prebiotic fibre, meaning they encourage growth of healthy bacteria in the colon.

But fructans can also aggravate symptoms in some people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). If you have IBS and constipation, check in with your GP before upping your fructan intake.

Read more: Explainer: what is irritable bowel syndrome and what can I do about it?

If you don’t like kiwi fruit, other vegetables and fruit high in fructans include spring onion, artichoke, shallots, leek, onion (brown, white and Spanish), beetroot, Brussels sprouts, white peaches, watermelon, honeydew melon and nectarines.

3. Prunes

Prunes are dried plums. They contain a large amount of sorbitol, a complex carbohydrate that passes undigested into the colon where bacteria ferment it. This produces gas and water, which triggers an increase in bowel movements.

Eating prunes is even more effective than psyllium in improving stool frequency and consistency.

One study of adults with constipation compared eating 100 grams (about ten) prunes a day for three weeks to those who ate psyllium. The prune group passed an average of 3.5 separate bowel motions per week compared to 2.8 in the psyllium group.

The prune group’s stools were also softer. They rated, on average, 3.2 on the Bristol stool chart compared to 2.8 for the psyllium group, meaning their bowel motions were more toward smooth to cracked sausage-shaped motions rather than lumpy ones.

If you don’t like prunes, other foods that contain sorbitol include apples, pears, cherries, apricots, plums and “sugar-free” chewing gum and “sugar-free” lollies.

4. Water

Not drinking enough water is the strongest predictor of constipation. When your body is a bit dehydrated, there’s less water for the fibre in your colon to absorb, meaning your bowel motions also become dehydrated and harder to pass.

Aim for around 1.5 to two litres of fluid per day, which can include liquids such as tea, coffee, soup, juice, and even jelly and the liquid from stewed fruit.

Read more: Health Check: what your pee and poo colour says about your health

Putting it all together

Start by increasing the amount of water or other liquids you drink. You should be drinking enough that your urine is the colour of straw.

Next, add in psyllium. Start with a tablespoon once a day with breakfast cereal.

Psyllium forms a gel as soon as it comes into contact with liquids so to make psyllium more palatable, mix it with a small amount of stewed fruit or yoghurt and eat it straight away. If needed, increase psyllium to twice a day.

At least once a day, have some prunes (either dried or canned) or kiwi fruit and a variety of other foods high in fibre, fructans, sorbitol and fermentable carbohydrate.

If your bowel habits don’t improve, see your GP.

– ref. Had constipation? Here are 4 things to help treat it – https://theconversation.com/had-constipation-here-are-4-things-to-help-treat-it-123364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

There is growing evidence that Earth’s systems are heading towards climate “tipping points” beyond which change becomes abrupt and unstoppable. But another tipping point is already being crossed – humanity’s capacity to adapt to a warmer world.

This season’s uncontrollable bushfires overwhelmed the nation. They left 33 people dead, killed an estimated one billion animals and razed more than 10 million hectares – a land area almost the size of England. The millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide the fires spewed into the atmosphere will accelerate climate change further.

Humans are a highly adaptive species. In the initial phases of global warming in the 20th century, we coped with the changes. But at some point, the pace and extent of global warming will outrun the human capacity to adapt. Already in Australia, there are signs we have reached that point.

Wine woes

For Australia, the first obvious tipping point may come in agriculture. Farmers have gradually adapted to a changing climate for the last two decades, but this can’t go on indefinitely.

Take wine grapes. In the space of just 20 years, a warming climate means grape harvest dates have come back by roughly 40 days. That is, instead of harvesting red grapes at the end of March or early April many growers are now harvesting in mid-February. This is astounding.

The implications for wine quality are profound. Rapid ripening can cause “unbalanced fruit” where high sugar levels are reached before optimum colour and flavour development has been achieved.

Read more: In this new world of bushfire terror, I question whether I want to have kids

To date, wine producers have dealt with the problem by switching to more heat-tolerant grape varieties, using sprinklers on hot days and even adding water to wine? to reduce excessive alcohol content. But these adaptations can only go so far.

On top of this, the recent fires ravaged wine regions in south-eastern Australia. Smoke reportedly ruined many grape crops and one wine companies, Tyrrell’s Wines, expects to produce just 20% of its usual volume this year.

At some point, climate change may render grape production uneconomic in large areas of Australia.

The Murray Darling crisis

Farmers are used to handling drought. But the sequence of droughts since 2000 – exacerbated by climate change – raises the prospect that investment in cropland and cropping machinery becomes uneconomic. This in turn will negatively impact suppliers and local communities.

The problems are most severe in relation to irrigated agriculture, particularly in the Murray–Darling Basin.

In the early 1990s, it became clear that historical over-extraction of water had damaged the ecosystem’s health. In subsequent decades, policies to address this – such as extraction caps – were introduced. They assumed rainfall patterns of the 20th century would continue unchanged.

Read more: Australia’s bushfire smoke is lapping the globe, and the law is too lame to catch it

However the 21st century has been characterised by long periods of severe drought, and policies to revive the river environment have largely failed. Nowhere was this more evident than during last summer’s shocking fish kills.

The current drought has pushed the situation to political boiling point – and perhaps ecological tipping point.

Tensions between the Commonwealth and the states have prompted New South Wales government, which largely acts in irrigator interests, to flag quitting the Murray Darling Basin Plan. This may mean even more water is taken from the river system, precipitating an ecological catastrophe.

The Murray Darling case shows adaptation tipping points are not, in general, triggered solely by climate change. The interaction between climate change and social, political and economic systems determines whether human systems adapt or break down.

Power struggles

The importance of this interplay is illustrated even more sharply by Australia’s failed electricity policy.

Political and public resistance to climate mitigation is largely driven by professed concern about the price and reliability of electricity – that a transition to renewable energy will cause supply shortages and higher energy bills.

However a failure to act on climate change has itself put huge stress on the electricity system.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

Hot summers have caused old coal-fired power stations to break down more frequently. And the increased use of air-conditioning has increased electricity demand – particularly at peak times, which our system is ill-equipped to handle.

Finally, the recent bushfire disaster destroyed substantial parts of the electricity transmission and distribution system, implying yet further costs. Insurance costs for electricity networks are tipped to rise in response to the bushfire risk, pushing power prices even higher.

So far, the federal government’s response to the threat has been that of a failed state. A series of plans to reform the system and adapt to climate change, most recently the National Energy Guarantee, have floundered thanks to climate deniers in the federal government. Even as the recent fire disaster unfolded, our prime minister remained paralysed.

The big picture

Australia is not alone in facing these adaptation problems – or indeed in generating emissions that drive planetary warming. Only global action can address the problem.

But when the carbon impact of Australia’s fires is seen in tandem with recent climate policy failures here and elsewhere, the future looks very grim.

We need radical and immediate mitigation strategies, as well as adaptation measures based on science. Without this, 2019 may indeed be seen as a tipping point on the road to both climate catastrophe, and humanity’s capacity to cope.

Read more: Scientists hate to say ‘I told you so’. But Australia, you were warned

– ref. Humans are good at thinking their way out of problems – but climate change is outfoxing us – https://theconversation.com/humans-are-good-at-thinking-their-way-out-of-problems-but-climate-change-is-outfoxing-us-129987

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

Scott Morrison will use his first major 2020 speech to press his plan for more federal government power to intervene directly when there are natural disasters, including by deploying the defence force without requests from the states.

In his speech titled “An even stronger, more resilient Australia”, Morrison on Wednesday will flag that a bigger role for the military in fires and other disasters will also have implications for the structure and training of the force.

But the Prime Minister’s hope for clear air for his messages is being stymied by the crisis around deputy Nationals leader Bridget McKenzie, triggered by the damning Australian National Audit Office report on the then sports minister’s handling of grants to sporting organisations.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Bridget McKenzie has made herself a sitting duck

More damaging information

On Tuesday Morrison again left her situation hanging, as more damaging information emerged against her in the sports rorts affair.

The ABC reported the agency meant to administer the sports grant scheme, Sport Australia, wrote to McKenzie’s office before the election expressing concern it was being compromised by political interference.

Sport Australia assessed applications for grants but its listing was overridden by McKenzie’s decisions, which favoured marginal seats. The ABC also obtained a spreadsheet from December 2018 prepared by the minister’s office. The spreadsheet had grants colour-coded according to the political complexion of seats.

Notably non-committal about the future of McKenzie, now agriculture minister, Morrison told a news conference in Blayney, where he was announcing more drought assistance, he had not yet received advice from the secretary of his department, Phil Gaetjens, on whether she had breached the ministerial guidelines.

Read more: Scott Morrison orders probe into whether Bridget McKenzie breached ministerial code

In his National Press Club address, an extract of which was released ahead of delivery, Morrison will say there is now “a clear community expectation” for the federal government to have greater power to respond in a national emergency or disaster, particularly through the use of the defence force.

“After this fire season and before the next one, this is an area where we need to get clarity and make some decisions, including changing the law where necessary,” he will say.

While Morrison called out defence force reserves to help with the fire effort, he says he is aware of stretching the federal government’s powers as defined in the constitution.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Bridget McKenzie has made herself a sitting duck

Issues for the the royal commission

He will outline three issues to be considered by the royal commission he proposes in the wake of the fires. These are:

• the constitutional and legal framework that would allow the federal government to declare a national state of emergency, enabling it to act on its own initiative, including deploying the military

• the legal interface between federal and state and territory governments in preparing for and responding to national natural disasters and emergencies

• enhanced national accountability for natural disaster risk management, resilience and preparedness. This would include targets and transparent reporting, with improved national standards.

Morrison will say “an enhanced, more proactive role for our defence force in response to domestic natural disasters will have implications for force structure, capability, command, deployment and training”.

He will argue that too often findings from inquiries into past disasters have been forgotten.

“One of the first tasks of a royal commission will be to audit the implementation of previous recommendations.

“As the years pass, the bush grows back and fuel loads increase, people move in still larger numbers to live in fire-prone areas and dangerous fires occur again in a cycle which must be broken.

“We must continue to learn from this fire season so we are better prepared for the next one. Whether that be the deployment of the ADF, local hazard reduction, access to resources such as aerial firefighting equipment, consistency of disaster recovery arrangements or resilience in the face of a changing climate.

“And we must learn from Indigenous Australians and their ancient practices on how to improve our resilience to these threats.”

Read more: Forest thinning is controversial, but it shouldn’t be ruled out for managing bushfires

Morrison has previously stressed the importance of more emphasis on hazard reduction and holding states accountable for their performance in that area.

“Hazard reduction is as important as emissions reduction. Many would argue even more so, because it has a direct practical impact on the safety of a person going into a bushfire season,” he said recently.

Defence has confirmed the heat of the landing light of a defence reconnaissance helicopter that landed in Namadgi National Park is believed to have started the fire now raging near the outskirts of Canberra. It is the worst fire Canberra has faced since the disastrous 2003 burn.

– ref. Scott Morrison’s ‘resilience’ speech overshadowed as McKenzie crisis deepens – http://theconversation.com/scott-morrisons-resilience-speech-overshadowed-as-mckenzie-crisis-deepens-130700

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernardo Figueiredo, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University

Seniors may not enjoy the stereotype of struggling with technology, but undeniably many older people do have difficulty mastering their devices.

A 2016-17 Deloitte survey of Australian consumers found 78% of seniors aged 65-75 owned a smartphone, as well as 82% of those aged 55-64.

My colleagues and I recently conducted a survey of 750 older Australians (mostly over 70). We found high levels of digital device ownership, but only “moderate” levels of confidence in using them.

Many seniors who struggled with digital devices felt they lacked support. In particular, they said their own families often displayed a “can’t be bothered explaining” attitude.

Unsurprisingly, this attitude is very unhelpful. There is plenty all of us can do to help the seniors in our lives get connected.

Unhelpful children

Our survey found seniors were most comfortable using computers and had the most difficulty with tablets. More concerningly, we discovered that seniors who go looking for advice often face serious obstacles.

Among those who asked for tech advice, 44% were most likely to approach their adult children first. A further 23% listed their children as their second choice. But they weren’t always helped with a smile.

Many respondents said their adult children didn’t have the patience or willingness to help. Follow-up interviews with older Australians revealed that explaining new apps and constantly evolving technologies to someone who isn’t a digital native can carry a lot of emotional tension.

Some survey participants didn’t want their older parents to have more technology, because they thought this would result in more work for them.

As one participant, Mary, related:

My daughter wouldn’t allow me to have a computer. She said I didn’t need it!

On the other hand, some older people simply didn’t want to ask for help because they didn’t wanted to demonstrate their independence and not seem technologically inept.

In some cases, people avoided asking for help so as to avoid conflict or maintain family relationships.

Grandkids are friendlier

We discovered grandchildren were generally more eager to give advice, but only 7% of older people went to them first. Seniors saw grandchildren as more willing to help, and sometimes willing to trade technology advice for other kinds of help such as swimming lessons.

When asked about this, 72-year-old Jenny said:

My grandchild is far more tolerant than my grown-up adult children are.

But while their hearts are in the right place, grandkids tend to fix a specific problem with a device without actually teaching their grandparent how to do it themselves.

Other options

After their own children, the next most common place for seniors to turn was professionals. Fifteen per cent of older people said they would go to professionals first, and 21% said the pros would be their second option.

However, professionals in retail outlets were not well trusted, and were seen to have a sales agenda that pushed unwanted products.

Around 13% of seniors surveyed reported asking their spouse or partner first for advice, while 8% asked friends their own age. However, in both cases the advice was not always helpful and sometimes plain wrong.

What can you do?

There are a few simple ways you can help your older friends and relatives reach across the digital divide.

First, try to make an effort to invest some time in helping a senior use their device. While it’s constructive to teach them a specific task, it’s also about boosting their overall confidence and helping them live more independently.

Also, send them links to instructional videos on YouTube. Our study found that once older people are past a certain knowledge threshold, they can independently search for information on how to use technology.

Read more: What younger people can learn from older people about using technology

YouTube turned out to be one of seniors’ biggest allies for learning new digital skills. It allows them to search for content and watch at their own pace, as many times as needed.

As 77-year-old Peter explained:

YouTube is good because you can run a YouTube, and as you’re running it, you can stop it, do what you’ve got to do, and then come back and run it a bit more, and do the next part of it.

We found seniors also profited from collective computer classes, such as those held at the University of the Third Age, seniors’ computers clubs, and local libraries. These classes gave them a chance to learn the skills themselves in an open, social environment.

It removed the pressure from learning, while retaining their cherished autonomy.

While some seniors are very savvy with a tablet – after all, it was Boomers who led the computer revolution we now enjoy – the rapid pace of technological change combined with an ageing society presents a serious issue.

To face this issue, as a first step we should ask ourselves – as children, grandchildren, spouses and friends – what’s our role in helping those older than us keep up with technology?

– ref. Seniors struggle with technology, and often their kids won’t help – http://theconversation.com/seniors-struggle-with-technology-and-often-their-kids-wont-help-130464

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Senior Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

While political parties in both Australia and Britain have recently moved towards leadership contests that give more say to ordinary party members, nothing matches the democratic scale of the American process to nominate presidential candidates.

The Democratic nomination contest, which begins on Monday with the Iowa caucuses and then continues with the New Hampshire primary on February 11, looks and feels a lot like the presidential election that will be held in November.

In 2016, 57.6 million voters participated in the primaries or caucuses to choose the Republican and Democratic candidates, which was just shy of the record turnout in the 2008 contests.

The amount of money now invested in these nominating contests is staggering, as is the attention focused on them by the media.

Read more: In the Democrats’ bitter race to find a candidate to beat Trump, might Elizabeth Warren hold the key?

When did primary voting begin?

Americans have not always chosen presidential candidates this way. Throughout the early days of US politics, state party leaders chose candidates at the national conventions in a deal-making process mostly hidden from ordinary citizens.

A few states adopted primaries early in the 20th century as part of the progressive revolt against elite control of all institutions. Party leaders still made the final choice, but primaries served as a useful “beauty contest” to test a candidate’s viability in the presidential election.

The turning point came with the Democratic National Convention of 1968, a violent affair at the height of the Vietnam War. The vast majority (80%) of the votes in the 13 state primaries that year had gone to anti-war candidates, but party leaders swung the convention to the pro-war vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t contested the primaries and went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon.

Read more: Two dozen candidates, one big target: in a crowded Democratic field, who can beat Trump?

This bitter and divisive event led to reforms in the Democratic Party that made primaries the main means of selecting candidates. Republicans quickly followed suit, and by 1976, primaries and caucuses decided the nominees for both major parties.

In another quirk of the process, candidates are awarded a certain number of delegates depending on how they fare in these nominating contests. The final vote for the nominee takes place among these delegates at the national party conventions in July and August.

Technically, the delegates decide, but they nearly always affirm the results already decided in the primaries.

Declining influence of the parties

Despite this democratic reform, the party elites didn’t entirely lose power.

An landmark study published in 2008 examined the importance of the “invisible primary” before voting even begins. In this process, party leaders effectively vet candidates and choose a front-runner to support during the actual primaries and caucuses.

When party leaders coordinate with each other, the authors found, they nearly always get their preferred candidate.

This model has been highly influential, but has required serious re-evaluation since the 2016 election when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination despite fierce opposition from party elites.

Trump’s nomination showed the weakness of the party “establishment” compared to the sheer force of celebrity. His ability to command media attention far outweighed endorsements from party leaders during the nominating process.

The power of Iowa and New Hampshire

As in presidential elections, the outcome of the nominating contests is determined state by state, not by a single popular vote. And as in presidential elections, not all states are created equal.

States vote at various times between February and June, and a huge amount of attention is given to the states voting first.

Iowa comes first with its caucuses (small gatherings of voters that discuss candidates and choose delegates), followed soon after by New Hampshire with its primary (a straightforward ballot election). South Carolina and Nevada round out the voting in February before the Super Tuesday contests on March 3, when more than a dozen states vote.

With a large field of candidates, Iowa and New Hampshire play a crucial role in giving some candidates momentum, while denying others a pathway to the nomination. It’s not unusual to see candidates drop out after these contests, despite the fact there are still 48 states left to vote.

Read more: The secret origins of presidential polling

To make matters more complicated, every state and territory has its own rules on how primaries and caucuses are conducted.

Iowa earned its first-place status because its unique process takes so long. Iowans will meet at more than 1,600 caucus sites on Monday to choose delegates to go to county conventions. Those representatives will then select delegates for the state convention, where it will be decided how Iowa’s delegates to the national convention will be divided up.

This system was devised to give more power to grassroots activists. It often results in chaos. In 2016, there were ties at some caucuses with results decided by games of chance, and the Iowa Democratic Party unilaterally changed one result.

The Democratic National Committee has since imposed new rules to make the process clearer and more transparent.

The problem of race

Another problem is that Iowa and New Hampshire are both whiter and more rural than the rest of the country. Both states are particularly unrepresentative of the Democratic Party electorate, which is more than 40% non-white.

Though Iowans are proud of giving Barack Obama a crucial, early win in 2008, no African-American or Latino candidates gained enough traction in these early states this time around to even make it to the voting.

Julián Castro, one of those minority candidates who has already dropped out, said last year that Democrats can’t

complain about Republicans suppressing the votes of people of color, and then begin our nominating contest in two states that hardly have people of color.

Castro is not alone with this complaint, though others have argued that white and non-white Democratic voters have similar preferences this time around.

There have been attempts since the 1970s to reduce the importance of these two states in the nominating process, but they have fiercely resisted change.

New Hampshire has enshrined in law that it must hold its primary before any other state. And even without Republican challenger to Trump this year, the Iowa Republican Party is still holding its laborious caucuses.

In the words of the state’s Republican chairman,

we cannot go one year without Iowa first-in-the-nation or we are done.

Little momentum for change

The nominating system, then, is a huge and unwieldy monster. Other than the reforms of the 1970s, there has been little conscious design of nominating institutions.

Instead, haphazard bargains have hardened into historical legacies. The constitution also has nothing to say about political parties and provides no guidance on how nominations could or should be done.

There may be widespread dissatisfaction with the length and expense of primary campaigns, the outsized influence of early states and the ugly conflicts primaries cause before the real election even begins.

But major reforms are unlikely in the near future. As a result, those who want to succeed must master an arcane system, not try to change it.

– ref. The US presidential primaries are arcane, complex and unrepresentative. So why do Americans still vote this way? – http://theconversation.com/the-us-presidential-primaries-are-arcane-complex-and-unrepresentative-so-why-do-americans-still-vote-this-way-129759

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Noble, Education Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Many providers of early childhood education and care are charging above the cap for government subsidies and parents are being forced to meet the additional costs. This is according to recently released data.

This has been the situation for some time. But the data confirms a trend and means parents are facing increasing costs for education and care.

And despite significant government investment in early learning, governments spend less than half the amount per child in early childhood education compared with what they spend per child in school. Parents are making up the difference.

Noting early childhood is a private market, education minister Dan Tehan encouraged parents to “shop around” to ensure they’re getting value for money. But many families already shop around and still face major barriers balancing care and work. And for others – especially those living in disadvantaged areas – shopping around is not a realistic option.

The illusion of choice

Some families are fortunate enough to secure places in high quality, early childhood services close to home, and can meet the cost of care. But many face the almost impossible challenge of finding close, available, quality, cost-efficient services.

Many families in rural and regional areas have their choice limited by having too few early education and care providers.

For metropolitan families, the choice can appear greater. However, according to the Australian government’s Child Care Finder website, a family living in Preston (Melbourne) requiring care five days a week for their two-year-old child could choose from 33 long day care centres.

Of these, 12 have adequate availability, but only nine meet or exceed the government’s National Quality Standard. Only three services with fees listed have availability, meet quality standards and charge below the government’s hourly rate cap of A$11.77.

Of 24 centres available to a family living in Ascot, Queensland, only seven have adequate availability and only six of these meet quality standards. Only three services with fees listed have availability, meet quality standards and charge below the government’s hourly rate cap.

Unlike Australian schools and universities, which are not allowed to accumulate profits, childcare is delivered by a combination of private for-profit and not-for-profit providers. This means market drivers, like demand for places, have a large influence on the cost to parents.

A 2014 Senate inquiry into the future of Australia’s childcare sector found costs tend to be higher in communities with fewer vacancies and longer waiting lists.

In other words, the market drives costs up where it can, and families are unlikely to find much lower fees if they travel to the next suburb or town.

How to exercise choice, if you have any

Cost and location are important to parents, but they aren’t necessarily the most important for children’s learning and development. Choices can also include the type of care (long day care, family day care, occasional care), educational philosophy, facilities and educators’ skills and experience.

All government-registered services are assessed on a range of quality measures that rate how well they support children’s learning and development. These measures include relationships with children, health and well-being, educational programs and partnerships with families. Service ratings are published on the Australian government’s Child Care Finder website.

Research shows these quality indicators are important to a child’s learning and development and they impact a child’s outcomes in school and later in life.

Research also shows the quality of adult-child engagements is the most important driver of overall quality. This means warm and responsive relationships with educators are particularly important for children’s development.

Parents should check which quality standards the service has been rated on most highly. A service with a great educational program and relationships with children will deliver the best learning.

There is also no substitute to watching how educators talk and play with children, and how well they incorporate learning into everyday moments as they go about their daily work.

Less choice in disadvantaged areas

Research shows children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have the most to gain from accessing quality early learning. But while many families on lower incomes can access higher levels of subsidies for early childhood education and care, their choices are often limited, and the quality of service provider may be lower than for those on higher incomes.

Our research shows children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to access high quality services compared with children from more advantaged backgrounds. Data shows services in the most disadvantaged areas are 10% less likely to meet quality standards compared with services in more advantaged areas.

Early childhood education and care is a vital stage of learning and can help reduce inequality. It provides a social hub not just for children, but also for parents and families, establishing lasting relationships and community connections.

Early childhood education and care also has long term benefits to the economy. Research from The Front Project and PwC has found for every dollar invested into preschool, the economy receives a return of A$2. There is a clear rationale for ensuring every family can afford quality services.

The onus shouldn’t be on parents to pay more, shop around and accept second best. Instead, it’s the responsibility of all governments to work together to ensure families can access high quality services in their communities.

– ref. Not all Australian parents can access quality childcare and preschool – they can’t just ‘shop around’ – http://theconversation.com/not-all-australian-parents-can-access-quality-childcare-and-preschool-they-cant-just-shop-around-130369

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

Summer in Australia is getting hotter. Extreme heat events, with daytime temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius, are becoming more common and we are getting more of these days in a row.

We all need to prepare ourselves, our homes and our neighbourhoods for hot and very hot days. Since 2016, the Cooling the Commons research project has been working with people living in some of Sydney’s hottest neighbourhoods to learn how they cope with heat.

Read more: Keeping the city cool isn’t just about tree cover – it calls for a commons-based climate response

Discussion groups with residents across hotspots in Western Sydney, including Penrith, Cranebrook and St Marys, highlighted a wealth of things we can do to manage heat. We published some of the following tips in a recent flier.

Why can’t we all just rely on air conditioning?

Official advice for extreme heat is often to stay inside and turn on the air conditioning. While air conditioning can play a role, not everyone can afford it. Low-income and older households can be especially vulnerable to bill shock and are more likely to feel the impacts of extreme heat.

Read more: High energy costs make vulnerable households reluctant to use air conditioning: study

There is also the risk that running air conditioners uses energy resources that contribute further to global warming. More immediately, hot exhaust air from air-conditioning units can make the local environment hotter. This means keeping one home cool can make it harder for neighbours to keep their homes cool and make being outside even more uncomfortable.

Air conditioning in private homes creates a cool refuge for only some. Unless those homes have an open-door policy on hot days, many of us will need to find other ways to keep cool. If you do have air conditioning, think about how you could share your air with those near you who might really need it.

Read more: How people can best make the transition to cool future cities

Prepare before the heat hits

Shade is important for creating more comfortable living spaces.

Identify which parts of your home get the most afternoon sun in summer. Can you plant trees or vines, or move a pot plant outside the window to create a green screen? Can you attach awnings to shade the windows?

Low-cost temporary solutions can include attaching light-coloured shade cloth outside the window using removable hooks, or installing heavy drapes or blinds inside. Blankets or even aluminium foil are a low-cost creative way of keeping heat out.

Open up to let in cool air at night

Can you open the windows and doors overnight to let in cooler air? If you are concerned about security, look for options for locking the windows in an open position, or using flyscreens and security grilles on windows and doors.

A low-cost option to keeping flying insects at bay on hot nights is a mosquito net over the window or around the bed.

Use low-cost resources to prepare in advance.

Ceiling or portable fans are one of the best ways to cool your body when it’s hot. But remember fans don’t cool rooms, so turn off the fan when you leave the room or you’re just burning electricity.

Find ice trays and containers to freeze water – cake tins and storage containers are a good option. Putting these in front of a portable fan will mean the fan blows cool air.

Putting a wet face cloth on the insides of your wrists, around your ankles or on the back of your neck will bring down your body temperature. Hanging damp sheets in doorways or in front of a fan will help keep the temperature down – although the trick with the sheets won’t work if it’s a really humid day.

How to stay cool and comfortable on hot days

Morning is likely to be the coolest time of the day. Open up your windows and doors to let in the cooler morning air.

It’s the best time to be active – walk the dog, take the kids to the park, go for a swim. If possible, do your cleaning, cooking or outside work now. Plan meals that don’t require an oven.

Close up as it heats up.

As the day starts to get hot, close the house up – shut windows, blinds and curtains. This could be as early as 9am on really hot days. If you are heading out to work, do this before you leave home.

Closing internal doors can help to keep the heat in one part of your home. You need to close doors to any parts of the home that get hot before the day gets hot.

Stay hydrated.

Drink plenty of water throughout the day. Put a jug of tap water in the fridge and remember to top it up.

Don’t forget to move pet water bowls and day beds out of the sun. If you live in a dry area, it can’t hurt to put out extra water bowls for needy wildlife!

Find a cooling refuge.

If your home gets uncomfortably hot, find the closest cooling refuges in your neighbourhood. These are places where you can go to cool down. Good examples that won’t break the bank are the local swimming pool or library.

Some local councils provide lists of cooling centres on their websites.

Save air conditioning for when it’s most needed.

Try to save air conditioning for the hottest parts of the day. It will be most effective and cheapest to run if your home is well insulated and you’ve closed it up for the day.

Look after neighbours.

Remember to check on elderly or frail neighbours. Along with the very young, they are usually more affected by the heat and may need to cool down sooner than you do.

If your neighbours are in need, consider inviting them into your home to cool down. When it’s hot, let’s think of our cities as social commons rather than a collection of private spaces.

Read more: When the heat is on, we need city-wide plans to keep cool

– ref. How to cope with extreme heat days without racking up the aircon bills – http://theconversation.com/how-to-cope-with-extreme-heat-days-without-racking-up-the-aircon-bills-128857

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nadia Zainuddin, Senior Lecturer, University of Wollongong

In Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Netflix series, The Goop Lab, Paltrow explores a variety of wellness management approaches, from “energy healing” to psychedelic psychotherapy.

Goop has long been criticised for making unsubstantiated health claims and advancing pseudoscience, but the brand is incredibly popular. It was valued at over US$250 million (A$370 million) in 2019.

The alternative health industry is worth A$4.1 billion in Australia alone – and projected to grow.

A key driver of the industry is increased health consciousness. With easier access to information, better health literacy, and open minds, consumers are increasingly seeking alternatives to managing their well-being.

Goop has capitalised on the rise in popularity of alternative health therapies – treatments not commonly practised under mainstream Western medicine.

Health systems in countries such as Australia are based on Western medicine, eschewing traditional and indigenous practices. These Western systems operate on measurable and objective indicators of health and well-being, ignoring the fact subjective assessments – such as job satisfaction and life contentment – are just as important in evaluating quality of life.

This gap between objective measures and subjective assessments creates a gap in the marketplace brands can capitalise on – not always for the benefit of the consumer.

The Goop Lab fails to engage with the cultural heritage of traditional health and well-being practices in any meaningful way, missing an important opportunity to forward the holistic health cause.

Read more: Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Goop Lab is an infomercial for her pseudoscience business

The uncritical manner in which these therapies are presented, failure to attribute their traditional origins, absence of fact-checking, and lack of balanced representation of the arguments for and against these therapies only serve to set back the wellness cause.

New to the West, not new to the world

Many of the historical and cultural origins of the therapies in The Goop Lab are not investigated, effectively whitewashing them.

The first episode, The Healing Trip, explores psychedelic psychotherapy, suggesting this is a new and novel approach to managing mental health.

In reality, psychedelics have been used in non-Western cultures for thousands of years, only recently enjoying a re-emergence in the Western world.

In the second episode, Cold Comfort, the “Wim Hof Method” (breathing techniques and cold therapy) is also marketed as a novel therapy.

The meditation component of Hof’s method ignores its Hindu origins, documented in the Vedas from around 1500 BCE. The breathing component closely resembles prāṇāyāma, a yogic breathing practice. The “Hof dance” looks a lot like tai chi, an ancient Chinese movement practice.

Whitewashing these alternative therapies represents a form of colonisation and commodification of non-Western practices that have existed for centuries.

The experts showcased are usually white and from Western cultures, rather than people of the cultures and ethnicities practising these therapies as part of their centuries-old traditions.

Rather than accessing these therapies from authentic, original sources, often the consumer’s only option is to turn to Western purveyors. Like Paltrow, these purveyors are business people capitalising on consumers’ desire and pursuit of wellness.

Only the rich?

Paltrow describes Goop as a resource to help people “optimise the self”. But many of these therapies are economically inaccessible.

In The Health-Span Plan, Paltrow undergoes the five-day “Fast Mimicking Diet” by ProLon – a diet designed to reap the health benefits of fasting while extremely restricting calories. The food for the treatment period costs US$249 (A$368) (but shipping is free!). The average Australian household spends just over A$250 on groceries weekly.

Paltrow also undergoes a “vampire facial”, where platelet-rich plasma extracted from your own blood is applied to your skin. This facial is available at one Sydney skin clinic for between A$550 and A$1,499.

These therapies commodify wellness – and health – as a luxury product, implying only the wealthy deserve to live well, and longer.

This sits in stark odds with the goals of the World Health Organisation, which views health as a fundamental human right “without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition”.

A right to live well

Companies like Goop have a responsibility to explain the science and the origins of the methods they explore.

Given their profit-driven motive, many absolve themselves of this responsibility with an easy disclaimer their content is intended to “entertain and inform – not provide medical advice”. This pushes the burden of critically researching these therapies onto the consumer.

Governments should seek to fund public health systems, such as Medicare, to integrate traditional health practices from other cultures through consultation and working in collaboration with those cultures.

Read more: Traditional medicines must be integrated into health care for culturally diverse groups

Perhaps this will give everyone access to a wellness system to help us live well, longer. This way, citizens are less likely to be driven towards opportunists such as Goop seeking to capitalise on our fundamental human right to live well.

– ref. Marketing, not medicine: Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab whitewashes traditional health therapies for profit – http://theconversation.com/marketing-not-medicine-gwyneth-paltrows-the-goop-lab-whitewashes-traditional-health-therapies-for-profit-130287