Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael James Walsh, Assistant Professor Social Science, University of Canberra

In the years since selfie sticks went global, it has become clear that the mobile phone has changed the way we travel. The ubiquity of social media means tourists can now produce content on the move for their networked audiences to view in close to real time.

Where once we shared slideshows post trip and saved prints and postcards as keepsakes, we now share holiday images and selfies from the road, sea or air — expanding the “tourist gaze” from the traveller to include remote audiences back home.

Read more: #MeTourism: the hidden costs of selfie tourism

Instagram-worthy

Travelling has gone from a solitary quest to a “social occasion”. As such, gazing is becoming inseparably linked with photography. Taking photos has become habitual, rendering the camera as a way of seeing and experiencing new places.

Travellers take selfies that present both locations and people in aesthetically pleasing and positive ways.

Indeed, the “instagrammability” of a destination is a key motivation for younger people to travel there – even if filters and mirrors have been used to create a less than realistic image.

This transforms the relationship between travellers and their social networks in three important ways: between tourists and destination hosts; between fellow tourists; and lastly, between tourists and those that stay home.

The urge to share travel imagery is not without risk. An Australian couple were released from detention in Iran in October, following their arrest for ostensibly flying a drone without a permit.

Other tourists earned derision for scrambling to post selfies at Uluru before it was closed to climbers.

Meanwhile, there is a sad story behind the newly popular travelgram destination Rainbow Mountain in the Peruvian Andes. It has reportedly only recently emerged due to climate change melting its once snowy peaks.

Testing the effects

To understand the way social media photography impacts travelling, we undertook an exploratory study of overnight visitors at zoological accommodation in lavish surrounds.

We divided 12 participants into two groups. One group was directed to abstain from posting on social media but were still able to take photos. The second group had no restrictions on sharing photos. Though the numbers were small, we gathered qualitative information about engagement and attitudes.

Participants were invited to book at Jamala Wildlife Lodge in Canberra. The visit was funded by the researchers — Jamala Wildlife Lodge did not sponsor the research and the interviewees’ stay at the Lodge was a standard visit. We then conducted interviews immediately after their departure from the zoo, critically exploring the full experience of their stay.

The study confirmed that the desire to share travel pictures in close to real time is strongly scripted into the role of the tourist; altering the way travellers engage with sites they are visiting, but also their sense of urgency to communicate this with remote audiences.

Pics or it didn’t happen

Participants Mandy and Amy were among those instructed to refrain from posting pictures to social media while at the zoo. They described having to refrain from social media use as a disappointment, even though it seemed to further their engagement.

Interviewer: Did you look at your social media throughout your stay or did you refrain?

Mandy: A bit yeah. But even then, probably not reading it as much as I often would. I don’t think I commented on anything yeah.

Amy: Even today when we put something up [after staying at the Zoo] about the things we’d done today and only a few people had liked it, there was that little bit of disappointment that ‘Oh more people haven’t liked my post.’ Where we didn’t have that for the previous 24 hours [because of the experiment] … because nobody knew about it.

The desire for social media recognition resumed after leaving the zoo. For Michelle, posting after the experience presented new concerns:

Interviewer: How did you feel about not being able to post?

Michelle: Spanner in the works! For me personally not being able to post was a negative experience because I wanted to show people what we’re doing, when we’re doing it.

And I also feel, like a couple of people knew we were going to the zoo, right, and knew that we couldn’t use social media. So, when I eventually post it, they’re going to go, ‘She’s been hanging on to those and now she’s posting them and that’s just a bit weird.’ Like, to post it after the event. Everyone normally posts it in real time.

Later, Michelle commented that withholding content from posting to social media also diminished a part of the experience itself:

I sort of feel like if we don’t share the photos it’s like a tree fell down in the forest and no one heard it, like, we’ve had this amazing experience and if I don’t share them, then no one’s going to know that we had this experience, you know, apart from us.

Centre Stage

Digital photography and social media transform the relationship between the travelling self and its audience, as individuals have an expanded — and potentially diversified — audience.

Selfies in tourist contexts reflect the tourist gaze back at the tourist, rather than outward.

The perfect digital postcard now incorporates the self centrestage. As one participant suggested:

Shannon: It almost feels like it’s kind of an expected behaviour when you are doing something touristy … We’ve actually had tour guides before … kind of a bit disappointed if you don’t take a photograph.

The purpose of photography has shifted from a memory aid to a way of sharing experience in the moment. There is tension now between the need to capture tourist experiences for digital sharing and individual engagement in the tourist activity. Decrying the desire to use photography as a way of communicating experience will not constructively address this tension.

To ensure tourism sustainability, and engagement with their target market, tourism providers need to explore better ways to manage travellers’ face-to-face and digital engagement.

Digital engagements have become a defining part of travel, and organisations should be encouraged to promote online sharing of experiences — phone charging stations and photo competitions were two suggestions offered by our interviewees.

In contrast, device-free days or activities could be another way to encourage face-to-face engagement and prompt tourists to be more considered with their online sharing.

– ref. #travelgram: live tourist snaps have turned solo adventures into social occasions – http://theconversation.com/travelgram-live-tourist-snaps-have-turned-solo-adventures-into-social-occasions-124583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Hill, Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria

A partial solar eclipse will occur across northern Australia on December 26. During the afternoon, the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, partially blocking the Sun’s bright light.

The eclipse will take place north of Geraldton (WA), Alice Springs (NT) and Townsville (QLD). These towns will barely witness the eclipse, as from their vantage point the Moon just skims past the Sun’s outer limb.

Further north, the Moon will hide more of the Sun. For Australia, Darwin will experience the greatest eclipse, with up to 31% of the Sun’s area blocked by the Moon.

However, there won’t be any noticeable effects to let you know that the eclipse is occurring. The daylight will appear just as bright – it doesn’t begin to dim until around 80% or more of the Sun is blocked out.

To view the eclipse, be sure to take the necessary precautions to see it safely, without risking your eyesight. Most importantly, never look directly at the Sun. The timings and appearance of the eclipse for other locations can be found at timeanddate.com.

Ring of fire

Australia’s experience of the eclipse is relatively modest because we lie on its outskirts. The main event is happening further north, in a narrow band stretching from Saudi Arabia, through southern India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and out to the island of Guam.

View the eclipse from within that band (including the city of Singapore), and you will see a special type of solar eclipse known as an annular solar eclipse.

During an annular solar eclipse the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun – as it does during a total solar eclipse – but in this instance, the Moon is too small to fully obscure the Sun from view.

Instead of eclipsing or hiding the Sun, the Moon turns the Sun into a spectacular ‘ring of fire’ that encircles the dark Moon.

It’s a quirk of nature that Earth has a moon that is the right size (about 400 times smaller than the Sun) and is at the right distance (about 400 times closer to Earth than the Sun is) for a total solar eclipse to occur.

But since the Moon follows an elliptical orbit around the Earth, its distance varies slightly throughout its monthly orbit. If the Moon happens to be at or near the most distant part of its orbit during a solar eclipse, then the Moon will appear slightly smaller in the sky leading to an annular solar eclipse.

How to see the eclipse

A way to see the eclipse – while protecting your eyesight – is to project an image of the Sun onto another surface. This also works as a great way to share the moment with others and to enable younger children to share in the experience.

Make a small hole in the bottom of a plastic cup (or piece of cardboard) and with your back towards the Sun, hold the cup so that sunlight passes through the hole and onto a flat surface such as a piece of paper or a wall.

The image of the Sun will be small and faint. But it is generally enough to show that the Sun is no longer a complete circle. It works especially well if you track the changing shape as the eclipse slowly progresses.

Specially designed eclipse glasses can be used to look at the Sun directly as they block out most of the light. Make sure they fit well and there are no scratches or other signs of wear or tear. Also it’s important to remember (especially for children) to look away from the Sun before putting on or taking off the glasses.

Eclipse glasses can also be used to look for large sunspots – dark spots or blemishes on the Sun’s surface that are slightly cooler than their surroundings because of strong magnetism. These spots appear quite small but are typically larger than the Earth – an incredible reminder of just how big the Sun truly is.

However, don’t be surprised if you see a blank Sun with no spots at all. We are currently in a deep solar minimum. As I write, the Sun has had no sunspots for over a month. In fact, 2019 has broken the known sunspot record – more than 270 days this year have featured a blank Sun, without any spots. That’s more than any other year since the Space Age began. You can follow spaceweather.com to track the daily sunspot count.

Save the date

This is the third solar eclipse for the year. But while they happen fairly regularly, you must be in the right location to have the full experience. For any specific location, it can be years between partial solar eclipses or centuries can pass between total solar eclipses.

Some may remember the total solar eclipse that occurred over Melbourne in 1976 or the more recent one over northern Queensland in 2012.

Australia’s last annular eclipse was seen in Western Australia in 2013.

The next total solar eclipse for Australia will occur in April 2023. The band of totality will just clip Australia near Exmouth at the tip of the North West Cape in Western Australia.

However, the eclipse worth waiting for will occur on July 22, 2028. Totality will stretch across Australia, from the top of Western Australia down through New South Wales, passing directly over Sydney. That will be an amazing sight to see.

– ref. Watch the Moon hide the Sun from northern Australia – http://theconversation.com/watch-the-moon-hide-the-sun-from-northern-australia-127819

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Lee, Research assistant, The University of Queensland

There’s an enourmous variety of sunscreens to choose from. Major supermarkets each sell more than 60 options. And one large pharmacy chain sells more than 100.

So how do you choose sunscreen that’s right for you?

Read more: Inducing choice paralysis: how retailers bury customers in an avalanche of options

The big 4 must haves

Sunscreens need to tick these four major boxes:

1. The sun protection factor, or SPF, should be at least 30, preferably 50. SPF describes how much UV gets to the skin. SPF50 allows just 1/50th (2%) of the UV to reach the skin

2. Go for broad spectrum protection, which filters the full UV light spectrum. UVB rays (290-320nm wavelengths) are responsible for most sunburn and DNA damage, but UVA rays (320-400nm) also cause DNA damage and accelerate skin ageing

3. Aim for water resistant formulations, which stay on longer in sweaty conditions, and when exercising or swimming. But no sunscreen is completely waterproof

4. Make sure the sunscreen is approved in Australia. Approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is the final must-have. All sunscreens for sale in Australia must meet the TGA’s requirements and will carry an AUST number on the packaging. They can only contain ingredients from an approved list that have been tested for safety and efficacy. And the SPF, water resistance and broad spectrum action must be established by testing on human skin. Sunscreens bought overseas don’t necessarily have these safeguards, so proceed with caution.

Once you’ve ticked off the big four, you can limit your options by how the sunscreen is delivered, its ingredients, and other factors.

Pump pack, roll-on or spray?

The sunscreen delivery system is more important than you might think. Sunscreen works best when you use lots — a teaspoon for each limb, a teaspoon each for your front and back, and a teaspoon for your face and neck.

This is easiest to achieve with pump packs or squeeze tubes. People apply far less sunscreen when they use a roll-on. Spray-on sunscreen is even worse; the TGA recommends you apply one-third of a whole can for proper coverage.

Look and feel, sensitive skin and kids

Now we get down to the finer choices in sunscreen, and they depend on your personal concerns and preferences. Here are a few common choices.

How to avoiding looking greasy

Greasiness is the most off-putting thing about sunscreen for many Australians.

But there are non-greasy formulations, often marketed as “dry-touch” or “matte finish”. These can be comparatively expensive, but worth it if greasiness is your main barrier to using sunscreen.

Your skin may still look shiny immediately after applying it. But it should return to a matte finish within 10-20 minutes as the sunscreen settles into the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin.

How about sunscreen for sensitive or acne-prone skin?

Sensitive skin is irritated by a wide variety of cosmetics, lotions and fragrances. So, you can use ones marketed as kids’ sunscreen because these tend to be fragrance-free.

You can also choose sunscreens with ingredients such as zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, which partially reflect and also absorb UV rays.

Those so-called physical blockers are very unlikely to cause allergic or irritant rashes. But they appear white on the skin, unless you chose an option with nano-sized particles, which are invisible to the eye.

If your skin is prone to acne, good options are lotions or gels, rather than creams, and products marked oil-free or non-comedogenic.

Sensitive and acne-prone skin is often limited to the face and neck, so it can be cheaper to have a specialist sunscreen for those parts and a cheaper one for the rest of your body.

Sunscreen allergies are rarer but do affect up to 3% of people. They’re generally caused by a single sunscreen component, usually preservatives or fragrances. A dermatologist can patch test individual ingredients, which you can then avoid by checking labels.

What’s the best sunscreen for my kids?

Parents worry about the effects of both UV exposure and chemical exposure. And of course, small children can be pretty anti-sunscreen.

All Australian sunscreen chemicals are approved by the TGA and are recommended for daily use, even on kids. Plus, many kids’ sunscreens are made with sensitive skin in mind, because skin sensitivity is more common in young children. If your child doesn’t have sensitive skin (skin that reacts with itching or burning sensations to a wide range of body care products), adult sunscreens are fine too.

However, babies under six months old need a physical blocker sunscreen.

What not to do

The Cancer Council and the TGA strongly recommend against homemade sunscreens.

Natural oils and other ingredients promoted in recipes found online generally have a low SPF. And, as they have not been tested for causing irritation, can react unpredictably with the skin.

Cosmetics that contain sunscreen, such as lipstick or foundation with an SPF rating, are not regulated as tightly as regular sunscreens in Australia.

Cosmetics with an SPF 30 or higher can have good protection when you first apply them. But like regular sunscreens, they need to be reapplied throughout the day. That’s not something we usually do, unless you’re going for the caked-on look.

Read more: Explainer: what happens to your skin when you get sunburnt?

– ref. How to pick the right sunscreen when you’re blinded by choice – http://theconversation.com/how-to-pick-the-right-sunscreen-when-youre-blinded-by-choice-125881

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gisela Kaplan, Emeritus Professor in Animal Behaviour, University of New England

How do magpies detect worms and other food sources underground? I often see them look or listen, then rapidly hop across the ground and start digging with their beak and extract a worm or bug from the earth – Catherine, age 10, Perth.

You have posed a very good question.

Foraging for food can involve sight, hearing and even smell. In almost all cases learning is involved. Magpies are ground foragers, setting one foot before the other looking for food while walking, called walk-foraging. It looks like this:

Finding food on the ground, such as beetles and other insects, is not as easy as it may sound. The ground can be uneven and covered with leaves, grasses and rocks. Insects may be hiding, camouflaged, or staying so still it is hard for a magpie to notice them.

Read more: Curious Kids: why is a magpie’s poo black and white?

Detecting a small object on the ground requires keen vision and experience, to discriminate between the parts that are important and those that are not.

Magpie eyes, as for most birds, are on the side of the head (humans and other birds of prey, by contrast, have eyes that face forward).

To see a small area in front of them, close to the ground, birds use both eyes together (scientists call this binocular vision). But birds mostly see via the eyes looking out to the side (which is called monocular vision).

This picture gives you an idea of what a magpie can see with its left eye, what it can see with its right eye and what area it can see with both eyes working together (binocular vision).

You asked about underground foraging. Some of that foraging can also be done by sight. Worms, for instance, may leave a small mound (called a cast) on the surface and, to the experienced bird, this indicates that a worm is just below.

Magpies can also go a huge step further. They can identify big scarab larvae underground without any visual help at all.

Scarab larvae look like grubs. They munch on grassroots and can kill entire grazing fields. Once they transform into beetles (commonly called Christmas beetles) they can do even more damage by eating all the leaves off eucalyptus trees.

Here is the secret: magpies have such good hearing, they can hear the very faint sound of grass roots being chewed.

We know this from experiments using small speakers under the soil playing back recorded sounds of scarab beetle larvae. Magpies located the speaker every time and dug it up.

So how do they do it? Several movements are involved.

To make certain that a jab with its beak will hit the exact spot where the juicy grub is, the magpie first walks slowly and scans the ground. It then stops and looks closely at the ground – seemingly with both eyes working together.

Then, holding absolutely still, the magpie turns its head so the left side of the head and ear is close to the ground for a final confirming listen.

Finally, the bird straightens up, then executes a powerful jab into the ground before retrieving the grub.

That is very clever of the magpies. Very few animals can extract food they can’t see. Only great apes and humans were thought to have this ability. Clever magpies indeed. And farmers love them for keeping a major pest under control.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do birds sing?

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

– ref. Curious Kids: how do magpies detect worms and other food underground? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-magpies-detect-worms-and-other-food-underground-125713

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annie Yuan Cih Wu, PhD Candidate in Geography, University of Sydney

A wedding is one of the biggest expenses in Timor.

The bulk of the cost comes from the “barlake”, a Tetum word which can be translated as “dowry”, or “bride price”, even though the exchanges are usually two-way between the bride and groom families.

The gifts take the form of cash, goats, pigs, buffalo, old coins, gold or silver discs, swords, statues of Catholic saints, coral necklaces, spices, wardrobes, beds, mattresses, and even houses.

Each has different purposes and are exchanged at recognised exchange rates.

Read more: East Timor, war, coffee and Australia’s debt of honour

The total expenditure on a traditional wedding, including the barlake, can reach $US5,000 to $US20,000, depending on the socioeconomic background of the couple’s families.

Timor’s minimum wage is US$5,152.

Much of the population is not in formal employment.

For most Timorese, going without a traditional wedding is unthinkable. It consolidates one of the most important social relationships and is the platform used to manage social debts.

A husband who married a bride from Los Palos in Southeast Timor described the obligations to me in this way:

My father-in-law gave me a “price list” that I would have to pay before marrying my wife, such as my wife’s education costs at university, which were 10 buffaloes.

We lived together for a few months before we were officially married, and that was 6 buffaloes, my boarding in their family house is 2 buffaloes, and others I could not remember.

Many Timorese postpone marriage, despite having children.

Seasonal work lifts status

Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program has played host to more than 2,000 workers from East Timor (and many more from other Pacific nations) since it began 2014.

Working in Australia for only six months, most send back to Timor between US$4,000 and US$8,000.

A study of seasonal workers who had returned to Timor found half rated “customary obligations” as one of the top five uses of the funds they sent back, along with starting a business, buying a vehicle, buying land and home improvements.

A worker who who had just completed a season told me:

I would like to get married, but the price is unaffordable. I could have worked for my father-in-law in the rice field for many years if I was not given the chance to get into Seasonal Worker Program. We have one three year old child already, it is just the wedding has not yet happened.

Funding a big wedding with remittances from Australia demonstrates financial capacity and status.

Remittances push up marriage rates among those who return and also allow them to marry partners who would normally be unattainable. Timorese parents ask more for high status marriages.

Read more: Why yet another visa for farm work makes no sense

Australian remittances enable participants to get the emotional bonds, security and business connections inherent in marriage they might otherwise miss out on.

And they enable them to “marry up”, at least personally breaking free from the confines of a class-ridden society.

– ref. Dili wedding. How Australian farm work nudges up Timor’s marriage rate – http://theconversation.com/dili-wedding-how-australian-farm-work-nudges-up-timors-marriage-rate-126771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Hunn, Lecturer, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

Traditionally, Boxing Day is a great day to go to the cinema in Australia. This year’s offerings include Hitler comedy Jojo Rabbit, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Cannes Film Festival hit Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Perhaps the strangest offering is Cats, the big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, itself based on T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems.

From the trailer, glimpses of a creepily transformed all-star cast (a sinisterly sibilant Judy Dench, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift to name but a few) and a darkly glamorous cat-fight vibe raised more than a few hackles – so much so, elements have been “subtly” reanimated. Reviews of the film have been overwhelmingly negative.

It remains to be seen whether Cats will land as deftly with film goers as it did in the theatre. But if nothing else, its release provides a timely reminder of how the big screen has gifted us many memorable feline performances.

Here are five of the very best.

Keanu (2016)

“That’s the cutest cat I’ve ever seen!”

No, it’s not a Disney movie or an internet meme; it’s a line that speaks for every adult male who crosses paths with the adorable tortoiseshell tabby kitten Keanu.

We first meet this eponymous feline amid the corpse-strewn detritus of a meth lab that has been shot up by two hefty gangster assassins.

Keanu’s escape to suburbia and subsequent kidnapping from his newly adopted human, the nerdy Rell (Jordan Peele) provides the catalyst for this delightfully idiotic buddy/action movie spoof.

Director Peter Alencio and writers Peele and Alex Rubens milk full comedic value from vicious killers turned into cooing, kitten kissing softies – and bumbling middle-class cowards Rell and Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) into badass, kitten rescuing heroes.

Viewers familiar with Peele’s directorial work will know he is no respecter of cuteness. Rest assured, a walk on the wild side only sees Keanu’s adorable qualities further enhanced by rocking a wicked black bandanna.

In a dream sequence, his voice is provided by some actor called Reeves.

Alien (1979); Aliens (1986)

Those with an attentive eye for cats on screen and/or for what makes feminist icon Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) tick won’t be surprised to see the trouble-making ginger Jonesy from the first two films in the Alien franchise on this list.

This (space) ship cat is no mere piece of fluff: he serves a significant plot function, raises tensions at key moments and importantly provides the first film’s only love interest.

Rescuing the moggy complicates Ripley’s escape and reveals a tender, protective side to her steely nature. This is even more powerfully highlighted in the sequel Aliens, even if Jonesy himself only makes a brief early appearance: “and you, you little shithead, you’re staying here”.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1962)

This iconic adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel frequently tops cat movie lists, but while I am more than happy to include Holly Golightly’s flatmate Cat, “poor slob without a name”, near the top of my list I must confess I’m no great fan of the film overall – a ham-fisted, sanitised Hollywood do-over.

Capote, as is well known, was not keen on the casting of Audrey Hepburn as drifter-turned-grifter Holly Golightly, apparently preferring Marilyn Monroe.

Little is known of his view of the casting of Orangey – an award-winning performer – as Cat, but for mine this handsome fellow is a far better actor than George Peppard, the film’s wooden, (Hollywood confected) male lead.

You don’t have to be a cat lover to know who Holly’s true soul mate is.

A Street Cat Named Bob (2016)

This adaptation of a best-selling book tells the true story of a homeless, heroin addict, James Bowen, (Luke Treadaway) who finds love and redemption when he meets Bob, a doughy but lovable ginger who chooses him as his human.

While James is busking or selling The Big Issue, Bob is perched on his shoulder and proves a magnet for punters. When Bob is injured in a fight, James takes on new responsibilities as provider and carer.

After a young friend dies from an overdose, James decides to get clean and is helped by the presence of the watchful, patient Bob.

Sure, it’s no Trainspotting, but there’s enough grit, vomit and despair to avoid the overly sentimental and Bob – played by none other than the real Bob himself – is a delight, exuding an aura of streetwise empathy to a kindred spirit, and adding a dash of mischief, too.

Kedi (2016)

Turkish director Ceyda Torun’s sublimely shot documentary focuses on Istanbul’s many thousands of street cats and the humans whose turf they share, who tend them and take solace in their company without seeking to constrain their freedom.

Torun skilfully intertwines the stories of several cats into the fabric of the places in which they (and, in some instances, their young) survive.

She captures them wandering through street markets, cafés, artists’ studios, workshops and patches of wasteland. We watch them hunting, scavenging and charming their way around fishing boats, riverbanks, tips, kitchens and jetties. They nip in and out of the windows of cramped, ageing flats, through backyards, shops and crowded alleys.

Kedi’s central message is that the centuries-long interdependence of human and feline – marked by easy tolerance, respect and not a little folklore and superstition – is a distinctive marker of Istanbul’s culture, one potentially under threat by the inexorable creep of high rise, urban redevelopment.

It should be cherished and preserved as a civilised and civilising point of pride.

– ref. The 5 best films for cat lovers (that aren’t the movie Cats) – http://theconversation.com/the-5-best-films-for-cat-lovers-that-arent-the-movie-cats-128128

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

There are so many stories flying around about the horrors already being wrought by climate change, you’re probably struggling to keep up.

The warnings have been there for decades but still there are those who deny it. So perhaps it’s timely to look at how climate change is affecting you, by wrecking some of the things you love.

1. Not the holiday you hoped for

We often choose holiday destinations with weather in mind. Sadly, climate change may see your usual destinations become less inviting, and maybe even disappear entirely.

Read more: Climate change will make fire storms more likely in southeastern Australia

But there’s more to think about than your favourite beach retreat being drowned, or the Great Barrier Reef decaying before you see it.

Now we have to worry that “extreme weather events pose significant risks to travellers”. The warnings here range from travel disruption, such as delayed flights due to storms, through to severe danger from getting caught in cyclones, floods or snowstorms.

Simply getting where you need to go could become an adventure holiday itself, but not a fun one.

2. Last chance to see some wildlife

There are more and more examples of animals falling victim to climate-change induced extreme weather events, such as the horror of mass “cremations” of koalas in the path of recent Australian bush fires or bats dropping dead during heatwaves.

On top of that, news of the latest climate-related animal extinctions are becoming as common as reports of politicians doing nothing about it.

3. History and heritage at risk

The Italian city of Venice recently experienced its worst flooding since the mid 1960s, and the local mayor clearly connected this with climate change.

Aside from the human calamity unfolding there, we are seeing one of Europe’s most amazing and unique cities and a World Heritage site devastated before our eyes.

Read more: Ignoring young people’s climate change fears is a recipe for anxiety

Climate change threatens more than 13,000 archaeological sites in North America alone if sea levels rise by 1m. That goes up to more than 30,000 sites if sea levels rise by 5m.

UNESCO is worried that climate change also threatens underwater heritage sites, such as ruins and shipwrecks. For example, rising salinity and warming waters increases ship-worm populations that consume wooden shipwrecks in the Baltic sea.

4. Taking the piste

Warming temperatures have already had negative impacts on the US snow sports industry since at least 2001.

In Australia, ski resorts are expected to see significant drops in snow fall by 2040 and, as temperatures warm, they will be unable to compensate for this by snow-making, because it doesn’t work if ambient temperatures are too high.

Perhaps recent efforts to make artificial snow will give us a few more years on the slopes, but I’m not holding my breath.

5. Too hot for sport and exercise

It’s not just snow sports that will be affected. As temperatures warm, simply being outside in some parts of the world will not only be less pleasant, but more harmful, causing greater risk of heat stress doing any sport or exercise.

Read more: What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?

That also means lower incentives for – and greater difficult in undertaking – incidental exercise, such as walking to the bus stop.

6. Pay more for your coffee

As the climate changes, your coffee hits will probably become rarer and more expensive, too.

A report by the Climate Institute in 2016 suggested coffee production could drop by 50% by 2050.

Given how rapidly negative climate predictions have been updated in the three years since, this might now be considered optimistic. Yikes.

7. You and your family’s health

As the climate changes, the health of your children, your parents and your grandparents will be at greater risk through increases in air pollution, heatwaves and other factors.

It can be heartening to see the strong, intelligent and positive action being taken by the world’s youth in response to the lack of climate action by many governments.

But the fact this is a result of literal, existential crises becoming a normal part of every day life for young people is utterly horrifying.

8. Home, sweet home

The recent bush fires in Australia and the United States reveal how dramatic and destructive the effects climate change can be to where you live. Hundreds of houses have already burned down in Australia this fire season.

Fires are getting more frequent and more ferocious. The seasonal windows where we safely used controlled burning to clear bushfire fuel are shrinking. It’s not only harder to fight fires when they happen, it’s becoming harder to prevent them as well.

Fires aren’t the only threat to homes. All around the planet, more and more houses are being destroyed by rising seas and increasingly wild storms, all thanks to climate change.

9. Not the wine, please!

Still not convinced climate change is wrecking things you love? What if I told you it’s even coming for your wine.

Less water, soil degradation and higher temperatures earlier in the season all lead to dramatic negative effects on grapes and wine-making.

One small upside is that disruption to traditional wine growing regions is creating opportunities to develop new wine growing areas. But there is no reason to believe these areas will maintain stable grape growing conditions as climate change progresses.

So, what now?

It’s easy to be sad. But to change our trajectory, it’s better to be mad. In the words of that great English singer songwriter John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), “anger is an energy”.

Read more: 3 ways cities can prepare for climate emergencies

So maybe use this list as motivation to think, talk and act. Use it as fuel to make small, large or a combinationof changes.

Share your concerns, share your solutions, and do this relentlessly.

What’s happening right now is huge, overwhelming, and also inevitable without concerted action. There’s no sugar-coating it: climate change is wrecking the things we love. Time to step it up a notch.

– ref. Nine things you love that are being wrecked by climate change – http://theconversation.com/nine-things-you-love-that-are-being-wrecked-by-climate-change-127099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Reese, Research Assistant, University of Melbourne

The 1927 Tariff Board inquiry into the import duty on gramophone records coming into Australia was about more than industry protection.

In fact the piano roll industry, which might be expected to be the one most concerned about the impact of imported records, wasn’t particularly worried.

But others were.

In the 1927 Tariff Board inquiry, a small group of wealthy white men laid bare their prejudices regarding the gender, class and aesthetic tastes of the Australian public.

The bottom line: the Australian consumer, typically regarded as female, could not be trusted with mass culture.

American jazz music was an agent of cultural and musical decline. It certainly didn’t live up to the standards of the musical establishment. It belonged to the modern department store, that emerging site of consumerism and commercialisation.

Australia was awash with recorded music

By 1925, mechanically-reproduced music was ubiquitous.

The local trade estimated that more than one million gramophones had been sold in Australia. That’s roughly one for every three households.

To walk down the street was to navigate a diverse and complex soundscape, completely different to a generation earlier.

Soldier-settlers doing it tough on the land, glitzy bohemians in city dancehalls, working families flocking to the expanding suburbs, Aboriginal people resisting colonialism on missions and reserves — the gramophone was ubiquitous.

A common sight on the streets of Melbourne was Amy Williams, a widowed mother who busked with her gramophone on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

She became a cause celebre in 1927. I told her story in a recent podcast.

Australia was host to a bustling and nationally-integrated recording trade.

By 1927, the country boasted four state-of-the-art record factories. They were owned by the biggest players in the global industry: the multinationals HMV, Columbia, Brunswick and Vocalion.

Their products were sold by a nationwide network of record dealers. Some 70% of the records sold in Australia were manufactured in Australia.

‘Men, money and markets’

Politically, those years were defined by conservative government and a focus on national reinvigoration after the horrors of war. The catchcry was “men, money and markets”.

“Men” referred to the need for increased migration to provide workers, “money” to the funds that would be needed to finance development, and “markets” to the countries that would have to be persuaded to buy Australia’s exports, especially minerals, wool and wheat.

It was an environment in which business elites took on the role of tastemakers.

Australia’s 1920s were anything but cocktails and the Charleston — our jazz age was muted. The depression lay around the corner. It was an anxious and uncertain time, and society was deeply riven along lines of gender, race and class.

And developments overseas were worrying Australian gramophone executives.

The new process of electrical recording had led to an explosion in variety.

A cacophony of new voices entered the global recording trade, selling modern music for seriously cheap prices.

In response, the major manufacturers successfully petitioned the Tariff Board for an increase in the import tariff on gramophone records. The entire gramophone fraternity gathered to stress its national importance.

The transcripts of the Tariff Board inquiry read like a courtroom drama.

The Board was made up of prominent businessmen tasked with advising on industry protection.

In reading the transcripts I discovered they had strong aesthetic opinions too.

Protecting morals through music

Board member Herbert Brookes asked the manufacturers:

Are you afraid that to allow these cheap records in is going to deprave the musical taste of the people?

Brookes wanted records to be expensive enough not to lower musical taste, but not so expensive that they might “put up the price of classical music, such as Beethoven symphonies”.

A record retailer presented him with this deeply sexist scenario:

A woman goes into a shop to buy dish clothes or towels, and she sees these records, and sees that they are cheap, and wastes her husband’s money by buying them although she really does not want them. That is how half of these cheap American records are sold.

Brookes interjected:

For the sake of the husbands, wouldn’t it be better if these records were kept out’ of Australia?

The implication was that the typical (female) consumer had only a shallow and passive relationship to music. She needed guidance from elites.

A music seller at the flashy Myer Emporium on Melbourne’s Bourke Street claimed there were “two distinct classes of people buying records” at his store:

One is the regular record buyer at four shillings and better prices … the better class of music, and the other class is the one who wants and will buy only a cheap record.

In case the distinctions weren’t clear enough, he said the two “classes” of records at Myer were physically segregated by a glass partition, so that genteel shoppers wouldn’t be corrupted by rambunctious jazz lovers.

Read more: Explainer: the history of jazz

Ultimately, the Tariff Board inquiry was a foregone conclusion. The tariff increase was carried into law in early 1928, and imports of records plummeted. The big four manufacturers further entrenched their hold on the Australian market.

But people still listened to jazz in their thousands.

The Tariff Board became the Industries Assistance Commission, which became the Industry Commission, which became the Productivity Commission. Its inquiries and the work of other official agencies might also reflect cultural assumptions. They’re easier to see from a distance.

– ref. Protecting Australian women from American jazz: the hidden aim of the 1927 tariff inquiry – http://theconversation.com/protecting-australian-women-from-american-jazz-the-hidden-aim-of-the-1927-tariff-inquiry-127522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Rossiter, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University

From the smell of chlorine to water bombing and a mixing of cultures – just some of reminiscences of 28 Australians in the book, The Memory Pool: Australian stories of summer, sun and swimming compiled by Therese Spruhan.

Contributors include star swimmers (Shane Gould, Priya Cooper, Daniel Kowalski), actors and comedians (Leah Purcell, Bryan Brown and Merrick Watts), and many others who, though less well known, have cracking stories to tell about their ocean, bay or inland “memory pools”.

Collections like this fly or falter on the quality and originality of the stories. Although some of these are rather matter of fact in the telling, there are some compelling stories here and some wonderfully evocative writing.

Spruhan’s own piece (Embracing the Glorious Kingtide) is lovely, and Watts (Disneyland in Broken Hill), Brown’s (Bumping into Life at Bankstown Baths) and Purcell’s (Dancing in the Water at Murgon) contributions are stand-outs: funny, place-rich and poignant.

Read more: What lies beneath: the bugs lurking in your swimming pool

The outdoor municipal pool is often seen by wild swimming enthusiasts as an impoverished experience. They might be taken aback by Purcell’s joy in the magical combination of “chlorine and hot chips!” or Brown’s declaration that “one of the greatest things about the Bankstown baths was the smell of chlorine”.

But they would likely find familiar Brown’s observation the pool was “a place of enormous life” where “you worked things out yourself and learned about friendship and loyalty”.

Similarly, Trent Dalton remembers growing up with Sandgate pool:

[…] a massive dugout filled with chlorinated water but what made it magical was you could do so much within it.

He recalls bombing competitions, stunts, parading, mingling, escaping parental scrutiny and, as he says, “getting into deeper water” with girls, cigarettes, booze and wagging school.

Some clouded memories

Despite the different environments, from ocean to paddock, as these adults look back on their experiences, there are common threads in their remembrances. An often-repeated claim is that pools are a democratic, egalitarian space of inclusion in which all comers are welcome.

It’s pretty easy to demonstrate this is not historically true. The 1965 Freedom Ride that exposed the exclusion of Aboriginal children from the Moree Pool is just the most famous example.

Body shaming, racism, other forms of bullying, prohibitive entry charges, and limits imposed by physical design have compromised the access to pools and the pleasure of some people and groups. What this collection shows, though, is that it is not a simple either/or.

One of the unexpected and really interesting aspects of some recollections in The Memory Pool is demonstration of how fluid the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at pools can be.

Purcell recalls:

[…] a few glances from some of the white mothers thinking, We’re in the same water as them, but looking back, the pool was the only place in town that it seemed okay for everyone to be just doing their stuff.

In a similar vein, there is nuance in Watts’ memories of South Broken Hill pool where he first met Aboriginal kids:

At the pool they just played like the rest of us and we played with them, and we didn’t give it any thought. I do remember a sense of separation though, but […] in that space people couldn’t afford to be bigoted or cruel for a minute, it was simply too hot.

In these lively fragments of swimming pool histories readers can glimpse the ways that “bumping into life” through pools can be abrasive and tough but also spiritedly expansive and hopeful.

Yusra Metwally is founder of Swim Sisters, a swimming support and training group for mainly, but not only, Muslim women. She shares fond memories of the “very lively and inclusive” Greenacre pool.

But then there’s a bad experience at Homebush Olympic Park where a lifeguard told her off for wearing a non-lycra top that gave her the “feeling of not being welcome at public pools”.

And now we read of her enjoyment in, among other swimming experiences, the freedom afforded by Auburn Ruth Everuss Aquatic Centre’s women-only swim sessions. Mick Thomas also nicely captures the sharing-space vibe of ethnic diversity of Geelong’s Eastern beach.

The community spirit

Whether they are in oceans, towns or paddocks, pools take up much more space than an area map would suggest. As Ellen O’Connor’s account of Saving Fitzroy Pool demonstrates, faced with pool closures, communities resist a lot more than the loss of facilities. Pools are not only for the community, but also of the community.

Many pools have been fund-raised and even physically built by local communities. Lily Sisa’s delightful narration of Dreaming Big in Lightning Ridge describes the community campaign for a pool and the initiative of the “committee of five girls aged between nine and 12”.

It’s a fabulous story of cake-stalls, raffles, donated labuor, media campaigns, a button-holed prime minister, of Gary Stone a local opal miner with big machines who dug the hole, and “Lightning Les who made things of foam and steel”.

Putting environmental questions to one side, I was completely captive to the explosive imagination of Kim Mettam’s grandfather who, near Trigg Island Beach in Perth saw an “extensive limestone reef”.

But he also saw the possibility of an enclosed swimming area safely holding sea creatures and humans and a “soft sandy beach” (the latter involving summers of grandkids moving rocks).

Mettam’s Pool involved 35 years of work and quite a lot of explosives. Now, it gets 4½ stars on Trip Advisor.

Read more: Community pool projects show how citizens are helping to build cities

Another piece that is simultaneously a story of building a pool and building community, is that of Lee Fontanini’s about her grandfather Archimedes Fontanini.

After clearing a swamp, Archie built a dam. Then, pressed by locals, and with his wife Lucy, he converted the dam into a public pool with diving board, flowers, refreshments, and trout.

It’s another reminder that ethnic diversity is not just a policy goal for contemporary pools, it’s also a poorly recognised component of Australian pool histories and cultures.

Fans of outdoor swimming, in both wild places and public pools, will enjoy The Memory Pool. But there is also something here for non-swimming readers interested in the small stories of ordinary people, about community, migration, class, family, making a life, and how we have and might live together in multicultural Australia.

– ref. Take a plunge into the memories of Australia’s favourite swimming pools – http://theconversation.com/take-a-plunge-into-the-memories-of-australias-favourite-swimming-pools-128928

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rheanna Mainzer, Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow (Statistics Tutor), University of Melbourne

Last Christmas, my family gathered to organise our Kris Kringle. My sister drew her husband, but they were already buying presents for each other, so we decided to draw again. No one in my family (except me) is particularly interested in mathematics or statistics, but my brother fatefully asked:

What are the chances that all the partners draw each other?

At the time, my family consisted of eight people: my mother and her partner, my older sister and her husband, my younger brother and his new girlfriend, my grandpa (widowed and never remarried), and me (I was single). So there were three sets of partners and two singles.

I started thinking out loud about how to answer my brother’s question. One way to find a probability is to calculate the fraction

The “event of interest” here is that all three partners draw each other’s names and, because there are no other possibilities, my grandpa and I draw each other. This can only happen in one way, so the top line of the fraction above must be 1.

What’s the bottom line?

Unfortunately, the bottom line is much trickier to calculate. You want to count the total number of ways that eight people can draw names from a hat, without drawing themselves. For example, one possible event outcome is: I draw my mum, who draws my brother, who draws my sister, who draws her husband, who draws my brother’s new girlfriend, who draws mum’s partner, who draws my grandpa, who draws me.

My brother’s new girlfriend interrupted my thinking by asking whether the answer isn’t simply eight factorial (which is written in mathematical notation as “8!”).

For those who aren’t familiar,

My family let out a collective “ooooooh!” at what they perceived as a challenge to my mathematical prowess from my brother’s new girlfriend.

Her guess was sensible but not quite right, because it included the outcomes in which someone draws their own name.

Without pen or paper handy I decided to file the problem away in the back of my mind and rejoin the conversation, which had swiftly moved on.

When in doubt, bring in the experts

I found the perfect place to resurrect this problem, at a recent MathsCraft event, which brought mathematicians, teachers and students together to explore problems like a research mathematician.

My University of Melbourne colleagues TriThang Tran, Sam Povall and Rhys Bowden are all experts in different mathematics research fields. I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to count things than these three – surely they must be able to answer my Christmas conundrum.

However, a short brainstorm session revealed that the Kris Kringle question is harder than initially expected.

But lo, a possible saviour was delivered unto us in the form of Professor Nigel Bean, an expert in applied probability. Like the star guiding the Three Wise Men, hopefully Nigel would be able to guide us puzzled mathematicians to the solution.

“That’s easy!” Nigel confidently announced. But seconds later, his face fell as he too came to the realisation that this problem is deceptively difficult.

We threw ideas around the table, our voices rising in excitement. This captured the attention of two secondary school maths teachers, Amy Xue and Callum Johnson, who came over to investigate. While Sam brought Amy and Callum up to speed, Nigel and Rhys worked on the whiteboard, drawing tables and defining notation to help them. TriThang took a different approach, working at the table and using pictures to illustrate different outcomes.

The solution

It took an hour and a half – and a coffee break – but Nigel, Rhys and (independently) TriThang finally arrived at the same solution. The chance that each of the couples in my family draw each other’s names in our annual Secret Santa is 1 in 14,833, or about 0.007%.

However, it was Callum who came up with the answer the fastest. Recalling the topic of derangements that he learned nine years ago at university and encountered again in the final question of the 2016 year 12 NSW Extension 2 maths paper, he produced his solution:

where the bottom line of this equation is just a particularly unusual way of writing 14,833 (the e refers to Euler’s number).

I was proud to finally reveal the solution to my brother: it was incredibly unlikely that all three partners would have drawn each other that night at dinner – about as unlikely as tossing a coin 14 times and coming up with 14 heads. However, he wasn’t quite as excited about knowing the answer as I was. (I told you my family aren’t particularly interested in maths.)

A Christmas twist

Here’s the thing, though: the Kris Kringle question is a known problem, related to the old hats problem. Why didn’t we just Google it?

Well, we all really enjoyed working on the problem. And Christmas is supposed to be fun. So I have to agree with Nigel when he asked: “Where is the fun in that?”

Thanks to all the mathematicians who worked on this problem, ACEMS for hosting the event that brought us together, and my family for coming up with the question.

– ref. Merry Christmaths: the statistics of Secret Santa – http://theconversation.com/merry-christmaths-the-statistics-of-secret-santa-127730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Jarden, Associate Professor, Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

Christmas can be a stressful time of year. You will blow your budget, your relatives will annoy you, and you’ll receive gifts that go straight to Vinnies, all in 40℃ heat.

Meanwhile, your friends post pictures on social media of their idyllic vacations, yearly accomplishments, and super happy toddlers and cats. You may feel extra stress from not accomplishing all the goals you set at the start of the year. You feel this stress in the face of other people’s overt jolliness.

So how can the science of gratitude help you not only cope with, but enjoy, the ups and downs of the festive season?

Read more: Ten tips to make your holidays less fraught and more festive

Remind me again, what is gratitude?

Gratitude, in short, is a strong feeling of appreciation towards someone who’s helped you. You can also feel gratitude when you make a habit of noticing and appreciating the positives in life. This might be feeling grateful for a cooling breeze on a hot day, appreciating your abilities in the kitchen or as a good friend.

Over the past 20 years or so, there has been quite a bit of research on gratitude.

Some of our own research shows older people are more grateful than younger people; suggests gratitude serves an evolutionary purpose by helping humans bond; and shows it’s possible to become more grateful with practice.

How can gratitude help me?

Practising gratitude often can have many positive impacts, including: an increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction; positive emotional functioning such as more pleasurable emotions and thoughts that life is going well; increased optimism; a sense of connectedness; improved relationships; and more and better quality sleep.

So all in all, researchers really get quite excited about all the positive things gratitude is related to.

Read more: Explainer: what is positive psychology and how can you use it for yourself?

There is also research indicating gratitude can help increase resilience and cope with everyday life stress, as well as with more major adversities.

Gratitude can help mental health – for instance, a depressed mood or post-traumatic stress disorder – and with coping well from loss after trauma.

Sign me up. How can I use it this Christmas?

So, if you want to buffer against those annoying relatives, blown budgets and be more resilient to life’s stressors, developing a greater sense of gratitude can help.

Among the many ways researchers have tested, you can:

• write a thank you note for a gift or behaviour you’ve appreciated. It doesn’t have to be a hand written letter. You can express gratitude via text, email or social media

• visit someone and thank them in person

• keep a daily journal of things you feel grateful for, such as noting down three things at the end of the day as well as your role in bringing about the three things

• spend time contemplating being grateful for certain activities, such as having a family or friends to spend Christmas with or opening presents with children. In other words, thinking about being grateful is also helpful, not just the act of being grateful.

Read more: More than words: saying ‘thank you’ does make a difference

Hang on a minute. Surely it’s not that simple

However, there are also a few tricks, twists and turns to be aware of:

• consider cultural nuances: someone’s culture can influence how they perceive and react to gratitude. For example, in East Asian and Indian cultures, receiving gratitude can be accompanied by feelings of indebtedness or guilt. This can put pressure on people to reciprocate. This can also be true, but not to the same extent, in Western cultures

• gratitude is not for everything: gratitude is not the panacea to all stresses of life; it helps, but it does not cure. It should also not be used to distract from real issues and problems, especially in interpersonal relationships

• think about when you use it: be purposeful and strategic about expressing gratitude and don’t overdose on it. Start with the people who help you the most and are the most meaningful to you

• don’t forget yourself: show gratitude towards yourself as well as others, such as being grateful for some of your strengths and capabilities.

If you can’t be grateful …

With all the best will in the world, it can be difficult to be grateful faced with the same present from Aunt Betty three years in a row. In this case, our only advice is to smile, and grin and bear it, rather than to pretend to be grateful. You will feel better and so will she.

Matthew Higgins, who has been admitted to the PhD program at Claremont Graduate University in the United States, co-authored this article.

– ref. Being grateful this Christmas benefits you even when your family’s driving you bananas – http://theconversation.com/being-grateful-this-christmas-benefits-you-even-when-your-familys-driving-you-bananas-124168

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Whitehead, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

In recent years, false claims have circulated that electric vehicles are “breaking our roads” because they don’t use fuel and so their drivers don’t pay fuel excise.

Heeding such concerns, both the Victorian and New South Wales governments are reportedly considering a new tax for electric vehicles. It follows a report by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia which recommended a per-kilometre tax for electric vehicles.

Read more: Don’t trust the environmental hype about electric vehicles? The economic benefits might convince you

But this shortsighted approach risks killing the golden goose of our transport system. Such a tax would limit the economic, health and environmental benefits promised by electric vehicles which, together, far exceed any loss in fuel excise.

Instead, Australia needs a mature public discussion about holistic road tax reform to find a fair and sensible way forward.

The problem is structural

Fuel excise is built into petrol and diesel prices, charged at around 40 cents per litre. For more than 20 years – well before the introduction of electric vehicles – net fuel tax revenue has been declining, largely due to improvements in vehicle efficiency, meaning engines use less fuel.

But if we take into account fuel tax credits – subsidies for fuel used in machinery, heavy vehicles and light vehicles on private roads – gross fuel tax revenue has actually increased in recent years.

This suggests the tax suffers from a structural problem. Simply applying a new tax to electric vehicles won’t fix it.

Read more: Australians could have saved over $1 billion in fuel if car emissions standards were introduced 3 years ago

It’s also worth remembering that while electric vehicle owners don’t pay fuel excise, they generally pay more in purchase taxes such as GST, because their vehicles tend to be more expensive to buy.

Benefits of electric vehicles

Electric vehicles help reduce our dependency on foreign oil and save owners over 70% in fuel costs by swapping petrol for electricity. Electric vehicles also lead to cleaner air, resulting in significant savings in health costs. They create new local jobs in mining and local energy, and importantly, are key to meeting global climate change targets.

Read more: Clean, green machines: the truth about electric vehicle emissions

An electric vehicle tax would increase costs for motorists, curb sales and may even encourage the purchase of cheap, fuel-efficient vehicles, driving fuel tax revenue down even further.

Congestion is the bigger problem

The proposed taxes will do nothing to tackle the biggest problem with Australia’s transport system: road congestion.

Sweden, where I lived for several years, offers a possible way forward. In 2006, the city of Stockholm introduced a congestion pricing scheme which charged vehicles for driving in and out of the city centre at peak times.

Read more: Traffic congestion: is there a miracle cure? (Hint: it’s not roads)

The scheme meant normal weekday traffic was considerably lighter. Low-emission vehicles were also temporarily exempted from the charge to encourage sales.

Unfortunately, despite the proven benefits, Australia is unlikely to introduce such a scheme due to a lack of public and political support.

Towards a sustainable road tax

The transport sector faces massive disruption in the near future, from electrified vehicles, automated vehicles, and the shift to shared vehicles.

Focusing solely on electric vehicles misses the broader point: we need to proactively prepare for the transition to a new transport system. This means ditching our unfair, outdated and unsustainable road tax model while reducing congestion.

Read more: Utopia or nightmare? The answer lies in how we embrace self-driving, electric and shared vehicles

Instead of simply penalising electric vehicle owners, I suggest an approach where electric vehicle owners could voluntarily opt-in to a new road tax model. Here’s how it would work:

• the tax would include a low per-kilometre fee for all travel, and an additional fee for inner-city travel during peak weekday periods

• in exchange for opting in, owners would be exempted from the old road tax system, that is: vehicle registration, stamp duty, import tax, luxury car tax, fringe benefits tax, fuel excise, and road tolls.

• to ensure a true financial incentive to opt-in to the new road tax model, a significant discount would initially apply. This discount would gradually be phased out as electric vehicle uptake increases, as has occurred with similar overseas schemes

• the new road tax model could easily be extended in the future to apply to automated vehicles, and to more accurately reflect the burden transport poses in terms of congestion and pollution.

Read more: Here’s why electric cars have plenty of grunt, oomph and torque

This is just one example of a balanced approach that would encourage both local adoption of electric vehicles, and public support for fairer road taxes.

Such holistic reform would enable a future transport system with less road congestion, quicker travel times, cleaner air, lower costs and a sustainable road revenue stream.

Let’s be smart and not miss this golden opportunity.

– ref. Wrong way, go back: a proposed new tax on electric vehicles is a bad idea – http://theconversation.com/wrong-way-go-back-a-proposed-new-tax-on-electric-vehicles-is-a-bad-idea-127608

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marg Rogers, Lecturer, Early Childhood Education, University of New England

It’s not always possible for families to be together during the Christmas holidays if one parent is working away for several days. They could be on a tour of duty for the Australian Defence Force or in a fly-in, fly-out mining position.

Other jobs, such as those in long-distance transport, firefighting, seasonal agriculture and other occupations, can also regularly take a parent away from home.

Such types of work can be challenging for those seeking a good work-life balance. The parent who works away misses out on time with family, which can be especially difficult with younger children.

Read more: Five ways parents can help their kids take risks – and why it’s good for them

But there are things families can do to support children when one parent is away.

Home alone

Previous research has found young children in military families repond in various ways to prolonged separation from a parent.

Physical responses include disturbed sleep (nightmares, unable to self-settle, taking longer to fall asleep) and regressions in toileting and feeding.

Read more: Having problems with your kid’s tantrums, bed-wetting or withdrawal? Here’s when to get help

Emotional responses can be an increase in tears, anger, outbursts and withdrawing to avoid further hurt.

Social responses include children struggling with daily routines. They might be less likely to cope with the normal frustrations that happen when playing with friends and siblings. Clingy behaviour with adults may also occur, which isolates children from their friends.

The good news is parents can support their young children in a number of ways to build resilience. Families shared these ideas in my research.

The power of narratives

Some programs recommend developing a family narrative. These narratives might be a simple sentence children can use when asked about their absent parent.

For example:

Mum went away on a plane. She is coming home on a plane three sleeps after Easter.

Here is a family narrative a 2.5-year-old child told me:

I miss my daddy. He in Afghanistan. I not go Afghanistan. Mummy not go Afghanistan. Only Daddy go Afghanistan.

Positive activities that nurture a child’s emotional connection with a parent who is away are also important.

This includes encouraging children to draw a picture of an activity they are looking forward to doing with their parent when they return, such as going swimming or visiting the local park.

The parent at home can help by writing down what the picture represents. This can be put in a parcel to send to the parent who is away. Keeping a copy of the drawing can help with communication between the child and the returned parent on reunion. They can discuss and plan family activities together.

With help, children can also write emails and postcards, even record voice or video messages about what they miss, how they feel and what they’re looking forward to doing when the parent gets back.

The parent who works away can also pre-prepare some short video stories about what they liked doing as a child, something they enjoy now and what they hope to do when they return. These can then be played at home when contact is not possible.

Homemade resources children can use to self-soothe when they are missing their parent are useful. These could include a small photo album of the parent and child, a recordable story book with their parent’s voice, or a video of the parent reading them some stories.

Make a time-line sticker chart children can personalise to count off the days. It could start with when the parent left, then include holidays and birthdays, and end when they will return.

Getting support

My research, which explored the experiences of children aged two to five in 11 Australian Defence Force families, found parents left at at home caring for children can feel unsupported.

There is a lack of available resources to help them have conversations with their young children about the parent working away.

One parent said:

Look, you are just on your own when the kids are young, before they go to school. There is nothing out there.

Read more: 5 reasons I always get children picture books for Christmas

To address this gap, I’ve created two free ebooks, based on the experiences of defence families: Waiting for Daddy and Now that I am big. Although defence-focused, they should be useful to any family that has a parent frequently away from home.

Social media support groups organised informally by parents and other organisations can help support families working in various industries. These include Mining Family Matters, Australian Mining, Defence Community Organisation, Defence Families Australia and Department of Defence.

Research shows good early intervention programs make a big difference to children’s healthy development and their ability to thrive.

– ref. How to support children whose parent works away for long periods – http://theconversation.com/how-to-support-children-whose-parent-works-away-for-long-periods-125641

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela McCarthy, Senior Lecturer in Theology, University of Notre Dame Australia

A 900kg baby Jesus statue in Mexico that looks remarkably like musician Phil Collins recently became a social media phenomenon. But in considering art history, we can gain some interesting insights into how we have come to this man-like baby.

The appearance of baby Jesus in art, along with his mother Mary, began after the Council of Ephesus in 431, which emphasised Mary was the Mother of God. We mostly see them together in paintings, although there are some famous images of Mary without her son.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, from around the sixth century until the present, the child Jesus looks like a little man. The idea behind this depiction is to take away one’s emotional response to the baby. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the more important understanding of the action of God in becoming human.

Part of the understanding of the church from the Council of Chalcedon (451) was Jesus’s state of being as fully human and fully divine. Some theologians interpreted this to mean he was fully formed from the beginning, with full knowledge of his godliness. This was difficult to portray in art and hence the man-child.

This interpretation of the two natures of Christ is not part of current teaching, but it dominated how the baby Jesus was depicted.

Many of those images are quite ugly. The art is not interested in naturalism but rather in theological expression.

In Western art throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, the influence of this theology was also evident with images of the baby Jesus either sitting up with a mature stance or tightly swaddled. The latter was an attempt to depict biblical references to a swaddled child or the shroud placed on Jesus after his death.

In the High Middle Ages in Assisi, Italy, St Francis altered the way the life of Jesus was viewed and experienced by creating dramatic events that showed in a realistic way how Jesus had come into this world. (In most art prior to this, the focus on Jesus had been his suffering on the cross and his divinity.)

Instead of Jesus being part of an austere God at a distance, St Francis introduced the life of Christ – particularly his birth – in a very realistic way, by staging street dramas re-enacting the birth of Jesus.

These were later shown in sculptural forms, becoming the first nativity scene. In these street dramas, re-enacted by local people, a real baby was placed in a crib to stand in as Jesus. It was felt people would be closer to God if they understood the humanity of Jesus.

Cherubic bambino

With the arrival of the Renaissance in Italy from the 14th century, the depiction of the baby became much more lifelike. This image of the “bambino” of great beauty has been evident in the centuries since.

In Italy, a rising middle class wanted family portraits with their babies looking natural and beautiful. The rise of naturalism and realism in art also radically changed depictions of baby Jesus.

Following the Renaissance, Baroque images of Jesus were very splendid and ornate. In the late Baroque, or Rococo style, these images became even more extravagant and sensual. A typical baby Jesus of this period reaches out to the world with arms outstretched, chubby faced and lying on gold-plated straw.

The eventual rejection of this extravagance by the church and cultural establishment from the late 1700s led to the development of neoclassicism, where a more moral and serious view of the world and religious notions became dominant. Mary and Jesus faded from view as subjects during this time.

One effect of the Reformation was the destruction of much art throughout Europe and a huge reduction in commissions for sacred works.

Into the modern period, secularism rose rapidly and the focus of art shifted towards non-religious subjects.

In the 19th century, most Christian art was either reproductions of earlier paintings or romanticised devotional art. Pretty images that had little symbolic content or religious relevance proliferated.

Going back

This huge new sculpture in a Mexican church has been placed on the wall behind the altar and totally diminishes everything else in the surrounding environment.

For the people who gather in this sacred space this would seem overwhelming: the altar is supposed to be the focus of worship but has been eclipsed by the sheer size of the work. Usually, a crucifix would be hanging on the wall behind the altar.

Perhaps most interesting is the way the huge adult face does not seem to match the body. We might laugh, but we could perhaps also ask: is this a deliberate return to the “little man”, a Jesus who was born a fully formed man?

– ref. Baby Jesus in art and the long tradition of depicting Christ as a man-child – http://theconversation.com/baby-jesus-in-art-and-the-long-tradition-of-depicting-christ-as-a-man-child-127812

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Maxwell, Senior Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland

I’m a geek. And as a geek, I love my tech toys. But over time I’ve noticed toys are becoming harder to understand.

Some modern toys resemble advanced devices. There are flying toys, walking toys, and roving toys. A number of these require “configuring” or “connecting”.

The line between toy, gadget and professional device is blurrier than ever, as manufacturers churn out products including drones for kids and plush toys with hidden nanny cams.

Read more: Looking for a high-tech gift for a young child? Think playgrounds, not playpens

With such a variety of sophisticated, and sometimes over-engineered products, it’s clear manufacturers have upped their game.

But why is this happening?

The price of tech

Toys these days seem to be designed with two major components in mind. It’s all about the smarts and rapid manufacture.

In modern toys, we see a considerable level of programmed intelligence. This can be used to control the toy’s actions, or have it respond to input to provide real time feedback and interaction – making it appear “smarter”.

This is all made possible by the falling price of technology.

Once upon a time, placing a microcontroller (a single chip microprocessor) inside a toy was simply uneconomical.

These days, they’ll only set you back a few dollars and allow significant computing power.

Microcontrollers are often WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, too. This allows “connected” toys to access a wide range of internet services, or be controlled by a smartphone.

Another boon for toy manufacturers has been the rise of prototype technologies, including 3D modelling, 3D printing, and low cost CNC (computer numerical control) milling.

These technologies allow the advanced modelling of toys, which can help design them to be “tougher”.

Read more: Not child’s play: The serious innovation behind toy making

They also allow manufacturers to move beyond simple (outer) case designs and towards advanced multi-material devices, where the case of the toy forms an active part of the toy’s function.

Examples of this include hand grips (found on console controls and toys including Nerf Blasters), advanced surface textures, and internal structures which support shock absorption to protect internal components, such as wheel suspensions in toy cars.

Bot helpers and robot dogs

Many recent advancements in toys are there to appease our admiration of automatons, or self operating machines.

The idea that an inanimate object is transcending its static world, or is “thinking”, is one of the magical elements that prompts us to attach emotions to toys.

And manufacturers know this, with some toys designed specifically to drive emotional attachment. My favourite example of this is roaming robots, such as the artificially intelligent Anki Vector.

With sensors and internet connectivity, the Vector drives around and interacts with its environment, as well as you. It’s even integrated with Amazon Alexa.

Another sophisticated toy is Sony’s Aibo. This robot pet shows how advanced robotics, microelectronics, actuators (which allow movement), sensors, and programming can be used to create a unique toy experience with emotional investment.

Screens not included

Toy manufacturers are also leveraging the rise of smartphones and portable computing.

Quadcopters (or drones) and other similar devices often don’t need to include their own display in the remote control, as video can be beamed to an attached device.

Some toys even use smartphones as the only control interface (used to control the toy), usually via an app, saving manufacturers from having to provide what is arguably the most expensive part of the toy.

This means a smartphone becomes an inherent requirement, without which the toy can’t be used.

It would be incredibly disappointing to buy a cool, new toy – only to realise you don’t own the very expensive device required to use it.

My toys aren’t spying on me, surely?

While spying may be the last thing you consider when buying a toy, there have been several reports of talking dolls recording in-home conversations.

There are similar concerns with smart-home assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, which store your voice recordings in the cloud.

These concerns might also be warranted with toys such as the Vector, and Aibo.

In fact, anything that has a microphone, camera or wireless connectivity can be considered a privacy concern.

Read more: Just like HAL, your voice assistant isn’t working for you even if it feels like it is

Toys of the future

We’ve established toys are becoming more sophisticated, but does that mean they’re getting better?

Various reports indicate in 2020, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will continue to be pervasive in our lives.

This means buying toys could become an even trickier task than it currently is. There are some factors shoppers can consider.

On the top of my list of concerns is the type and number of batteries a toy requires, and how to charge them.

If a device has in-built lithium batteries, can they be easily replaced? And if the toy is designed for outdoors, can it cope with the heat? Most lithium-ion batteries degrade quickly in hot environments.

And does the device require an additional screen or smartphone?

It’s also worth being wary of what personal details are required to sign-up for a service associated with a toy – and if the toy can still function if its manufacturer should cease to exist, or the company should go bust.

And, as always, if you’re considering an advanced, “connected” toy, make sure to prioritise your security and privacy.

– ref. Robots, AI and drones: when did toys turn into rocket science? – http://theconversation.com/robots-ai-and-drones-when-did-toys-turn-into-rocket-science-127503

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity

It took 400 years, but sometime in the early fifth century Christians transformed a tradition about Jesus’s miraculous virgin birth into a doctrine that inextricably connected sex with sin. It has plagued the church ever since, doing untold damage to generations of women in particular.

In its original context, the claim that Jesus was born to a virgin mother places his birth in a long line of miraculous biblical births. The Bible tells of numerous old women, barren women and young unmarried women (“virgins” in ancient terms) who surprisingly bore children. Their offspring were seen as a sign of God’s blessing of new life, often in the midst of suffering or hardship.

Read more: God made the rainbow: why the Bible welcomes a gender spectrum

The idea of original sin and its connection to sexual intercourse was popularised by African theologian Augustine. Not without controversy at the time, Augustine argued that humans were not born innocent, but rather sinful. His rationale was that sexual intercourse involves lust or sexual desire (a negative for him).

While Augustine tied this “original sin” back to Adam and Eve, the parallel focus on Mary’s perpetual virginity is relevant. If sexual intercourse produces sinful offspring, it was essential Mary be and remain a virgin so Jesus could, uniquely, be born sinless.

Such logic might seem absurd to many modern readers, but Augustine’s influence on Christian tradition cannot be overstated. In her book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Princeton Professor Elaine Pagels argues Augustine has left a legacy of problematic and complicated attitudes towards sex in the Christian tradition.

Attitudes, it is worth noting, that are not in the Bible. There is no suggestion in the biblical text that consensual sex is anything other than a gift from God. There is even an entire biblical book devoted to rather erotic poetry.

The idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin was already in circulation at this time, but the influence of Augustine’s thinking on original sin would lead the 19th-century Roman Catholic Church to adopt the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. This was the idea that Mary herself was immaculately conceived, so she could be a sinless vessel to carry the fetal Jesus. This move consolidated the association of purity and virginity, arguably leading to the Protestant Church’s purity culture movement in the 20th century.

The purity movement has its roots in 19th-century social movements that sought to abolish prostitution, raise the age of consent and limit pornography. Often led by women with the intention of protecting women, these movements appealed to men not to misuse their social and sexual power over women. However, the late 20th-century American purity movement looks quite different and has arguably done damage to women.

Read more: Jesus wasn’t white: he was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew. Here’s why that matters

In the 1990s, conservative American churches started focusing on a radical abstinence from sex, the nature of which would likely have appealed to Augustine. Known as “purity culture,” both men and women were expected to remain “pure”.

Women, however, inevitably bore the brunt of this teaching. Girls pledged their virginity and were given promise rings by their fathers, a placeholder for an engagement ring when their virginity would be promised to another man. Young women were taught that the most important thing they could offer their future husband was a body untouched by another male.

Much has been written about the culture of shame and sexual ignorance that has resulted from such an emphasis on sexual purity. There were two notable outcomes: sex outside of marriage became the worst form of sin and women who experienced sexual assault were often additionally traumatised by their church’s teaching about purity and shame.

The harm caused is now so widely acknowledged that a once vocal proponent of the no-dating purity culture, Joshua Harris, has recently apologised and retracted his views and his book on the topic.

Shame, purity and sexual ignorance continue to haunt Christian communities around the globe. In Melbourne, I have encountered Christians who abstained from anything except holding hands until marriage, only to find that the leap from total abstinence to sex in one night was painful, awkward and sometimes traumatising. If you have been told something is shameful your whole life, it takes more than a wedding ceremony to shift to a sex-positive mindset.

I’ve met Christian women who will not report a childhood rape because they fear being seen as “tainted goods” or “impure” to Christian men who might not want to marry them. The association of sex and sinfulness is so strong for some that a rapist’s sin can be internalised as their own.

Read more: How the ‘extreme abstinence’ of the purity movement created a sense of shame in evangelical women

In conservative Christian circles, sexual “sins” continue to be considered the worst kinds of sin. This legacy entrenches hierarchical gender roles, can push sexual activity underground as something hidden or secret, and arguably inhibits healthy sexual development in young people. Similarly, it diminishes any robust theology of sin and, alarmingly, it can create dangerous conditions for those vulnerable to sexual predation.

These centuries of thinking about virginity, sex and sinfulness have led us a long way from the woman whose child Christians celebrate at Christmas. Somehow, a virginal young woman became used by men to support claims that sex equals sin.

Yet, in the Christian tradition, Mary is best remembered as mother of God, prophet and faithful follower of Jesus. She has long been upheld as a model of faith for women in particular. And so she should be. Not because she was ever “pure” or remained a virgin, but because she exemplifies courageous faith.

– ref. From virgin births to purity movements: Christians and their problem with sex – http://theconversation.com/from-virgin-births-to-purity-movements-christians-and-their-problem-with-sex-118327

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Forgasz, Associate Professor, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University

The eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah begins Sunday, December 22. From Melbourne and New York to Berlin and Moscow, thousands of people will gather to light giant menorahs. In many places, these public ceremonies will be accompanied by music, street food and carnivals.

These events may primarily target Jewish communities but, given their prominent locations, many non-Jews will also participate.

In the US especially, Hanukkah has become a widely recognised holiday. As well as lighting the National Menorah in Washington DC, the president hosts an annual Hanukkah party in the White House. In big cities like New York, parents of Jewish children are often invited into elementary school classrooms to explain Hanukkah to students.

Hanukkah has even entered American popular culture. The classic children’s Hanukkah song “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel” has appeared in several episodes of South Park.

And comic Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” became a national obsession when it was first performed on Saturday Night Live in 1994. Sandler even found two words to (sort of) rhyme with Hanukkah in the refrain:

Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah! So much fun-akah, to celebrate Hanukkah!

But in the Jewish calendar, Hanukkah is of relatively minor religious significance compared with the biblical festival of Passover or the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

So why has it become the most widely known and publicly celebrated of all Jewish holidays, particularly in the US?

The origins of Hanukkah

Hanukkah commemorates a historical event that took place in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE, when the Seleucid Greek empire was the ruling power. In 168 BCE, the king Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed Jewish practice and defiled the Jewish Temple in the city by installing an altar to Zeus Olympios and sacrificing pigs.

A small army of Jews, known as the Maccabees, rebelled against this religious persecution. They regained control over the Temple, removed the symbols of Zeus and built a new altar so they could once again offer sacrifices in keeping with Jewish law.

Read more: Hanukkah’s true meaning is about Jewish survival

According to a legend recounted in the Talmud, a compilation of 3rd to 6th century Jewish teachings, a miracle occurred at this time.

There was only enough oil to keep the Temple’s menorah, one of its most important ritual objects, burning for one day. But the flame stayed alight for eight days, until a new supply of oil could be found – the basis for the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah.

An alternate version of history

Based on this version of events, Jews have seen the Maccabees as heroes who fought for religious liberty against a repressive regime.

But the historical record is more complex.

The most detailed accounts of the story of Hanukkah are recorded in First and Second Maccabees, historical books that describe the military and political events leading up to and following the Maccabean revolt. They are not included in the Hebrew Bible, but are part of the Catholic biblical canon.

According to First Maccabees,

lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us’. … [T]hey built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.

These “lawless men” were not the Seleucid rulers, but Jews who wanted to integrate aspects of Greek (Hellenistic) culture with Jewish tradition.

Hellenistic culture was based on the Greek language, literature, art and philosophy, as well as the distinctively Greek form of social and political organisation, the polis. But Hellenistic culture also involved the worship of Greek gods and social customs, such as athletic contests, that some considered incompatible with Jewish tradition.

These Hellenising Jews were the targets of the Maccabees’ vengeful attacks as much as the Seleucid Greek regime itself. As First Maccabees relates:

They organised an army, and struck down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety.

In this light, the Maccabees were not heroic liberators and defenders of religious freedom. Rather, they could be viewed as intolerant religious zealots, intent on stamping out any attempt to “modernise” Jewish tradition.

Today, most Jews would still consider the Maccabees to be heroes and defenders of Judaism. Certainly, it’s the story that children are taught in Jewish schools and synagogues. However, they would be surprised, and likely rather disturbed, by the religious fundamentalism of the Maccabees that is represented in the historical sources.

Remaking Hanukkah in the image of Christmas

Diane Ashton, an American religious historian, has traced the history of Hanukkah in the US and described how Jews have transformed Hanukkah in the past two centuries to reflect the evolving traditions of Christmas.

Inspired by children’s Christmas events in churches, American rabbis began introducing special Hanukkah celebrations for children at synagogues in the 19th century. They would tell the story of Hanukkah, light candles, sing hymns and hand out sweets. This was a way to entice children to attend synagogues, which otherwise offered little of interest to them.

Over time, Hanukkah became one of the only times of the year that many Jewish families engaged with Jewish tradition.

Read more: How Hanukkah came to America

In the early 20th century, with the commercialisation of Christmas well under way, more changes occurred. Gift-giving was never a feature of Hanukkah historically, but new Jewish immigrants from Europe began buying presents for their children as a way of signifying their economic success in the new world.

In more recent years, the public display of menorahs has also been promoted by Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement that aims to bring Jews closer to their own religion.

These displays, often alongside Christmas trees, have elevated the significance of Hanukkah in the minds of both Jews and non-Jews. They were even the subject of a US Supreme Court ruling in 1989, when the court rejected a request by the city of Pittsburgh to bar a large menorah from a public building, ruling it did not amount to a government endorsement of Judaism.

Over time, American Jews have thus remade Hanukkah in the image of Christmas. In doing so, they have been able to participate in the festive season in a way that is distinctly Jewish, balancing their desires to both assimilate and retain their unique cultural identity.

Read more: What Hanukkah’s portrayal in pop culture means to American Jews

Elsewhere in the world, while large-scale public menorah lightings have become more widespread, Hanukkah is mostly a time for families to come together. Fried food, to commemorate the miracle of the oil, features heavily in family celebrations, including the popular potato fritters called latkes and deep-fried, jam-filled doughnuts known as sufganiyot.

Giving small gifts to children has become common, though nowhere has Hanukkah reached the level of commercialisation and kitsch that it has in the US.

For any other Jewish festival, this might be seen as a corrupting influence. But given that Hanukkah remains, for most Jews, a relatively minor holiday, it is viewed with some bemusement as just another example of American meshugas (craziness).

– ref. The story of Hanukkah: how a minor Jewish holiday was remade in the image of Christmas – http://theconversation.com/the-story-of-hanukkah-how-a-minor-jewish-holiday-was-remade-in-the-image-of-christmas-127620

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Larissa McLean Davies, Associate Professor Language and Literacy Education, University of Melbourne

Alfred Tatum, a US education professor specialising in literacy for African American boys, coined the term “bookprint”. He said it’s something we all have – a list of books that have impacted how we see ourselves and the world.

What we read matters. Reading shapes the way we see the world, increases our understanding of others, and helps us imagine different narratives for ourselves.

School holidays are an ideal time for teenagers to expand their reading repertoire and pay attention to the bookprint they are creating (and is being created for them). It is important for young people to read literature that reflects their own life and also expands their experiences of the world.

Read more: Old white men dominate school English booklists. It’s time more Australian schools taught Australian books

In this spirit, we suggest five Australian texts that connect with diverse teenagers’ experiences and interests. This is not a quintessential list, but one designed to enhance any young person’s bookprint, at different ages and stages. These texts are by Australian writers, and written in the past five years.

1. Terra Nullius by Clare G. Coleman

Recommended for ages 16+

In Terra Nullius, Clare G. Coleman offers older teenagers the opportunity to immerse themselves in an imaginative response to colonisation.

Coleman’s creative representation holds both history and potential futures in tension, and an unexpected plot twist engages and provokes the imagination.

This book is an example of both climate fiction and speculative fiction. Climate fiction enables older teenagers to think about the implications of climate change from diverse perspectives, while speculative fiction encourages readers to use their imaginations to consider different futures or pasts.

The Tribe by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Recommended for ages 13+

The Tribe, by Arab-Australian writer, editor, teacher and community arts worker Michael Mohammed Ahmad, is short but powerful. It focuses on the experiences of Bani, an Arab-Australian boy, his family and their wider community.

The Tribe was Ahmed’s first work of fiction. It insightfully considers issues of identity, family, community, loyalty and love.

The text makes clear both the struggle and beauty at the heart of one immigrant family’s experiences of being Australian. The book is richly descriptive, and the reader is carried into the home that is the centre of Bani’s world.

Read more: Friday essay: how speculative fiction gained literary respectability

3. The Yield by Tara June Winch

Recommended for ages 16+

What does it mean to know the language of your country?

The question of language, lost and found, begins Tara June Winch’s latest novel. The Yield traces the history of a family in Massacre Plains on the banks of the Murrumby River.

After her grandfather’s death, August Gondiwindi returns to her family’s land. The story of her return is interspersed with the dictionary written by her grandfather before his death.

These complementary narratives reveal the complexity of place, voice, language and family in the Australian context and force a consideration of what has been lost.

While moments of violence and dispossession are central to the story, there is also tenderness and beauty in this novel by one of Australia’s most exciting authors.

4. Growing Up African in Australia, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Recommended for ages 15+

Growing Up African in Australia is this year’s addition to the popular and groundbreaking Growing Up series, which includes Growing up Queer in Australia and Growing up Disabled in Australia.

Growing Up African draws from a range of authors including disability advocate Carly Findlay, journalist and filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child star Kirsty Marillier, and many more.

Like the others in the Growing Up series, this compilation acts as an intersection at which we can reflect on the similarities and differences of young people growing up across the country.

One section of the anthology, named “The Body”, is particularly noteworthy, with a range of authors describing their experiences grappling with body difference and self esteem.

Read more: Growing Up African in Australia: racism, resilience and the right to belong

For some young readers this will provide a moment of “I thought it was just me”. It might help others to see cultural beauty standards – and the challenges of growing up within them – through another’s point of view.

5. Meet Me at the Intersection, edited by Rebecca Lim and Ambelin Kwaymullina

Recommended for ages 13+

Like the Growing Up series, this new collection offers much-needed new voices and perspectives for young adult readers.

Conceived as a collection of stories about marginalised people, told by people from these marginalised groups, Meet Me at the Intersection presents stories, poems, and memoirs from First Nations writers, writers living with a disability, LGBTIQA+ writers and writers from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Including a range of established and emerging writers, this collection reminds us identities are complex, created at the intersections of race, disability and sexuality, and that we are collectively a richer nation if all voices can be heard.

As our research has shown, contemporary Australian fiction, for a range of reasons, is often omitted in school curricula.

Historically underrepresented people including Aboriginal writers, writers of colour, migrant writers, queers writers and writers living with disability are particularly underrepresented.

Read more: Diversity, the Stella Count and the whiteness of Australian publishing

Yet, we know it is of paramount importance Australian teenagers are able to locate their literary imaginations locally as well as globally, and that reading texts by and about diverse Australians will change the ways all young people see themselves and their communities.

For a longer list of Australian texts both historical and contemporary, see the Reading Australia website. This resource is designed for teachers, but is also a great starting place for parents and teenagers.

– ref. 5 Australian books that can help young people understand their place in the world – http://theconversation.com/5-australian-books-that-can-help-young-people-understand-their-place-in-the-world-127712

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dorothy Ann Lee, Stewart Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity College, University of Divinity

Belief in the virgin birth comes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Their birth stories are different, but both present Mary as a virgin when she became pregnant with Jesus. Mary and Joseph begin their sexual relationship following Jesus’ birth, and so Jesus has brothers and sisters.

Catholic piety goes beyond this, with Mary depicted as a virgin not only before but also during and after Jesus’ birth, her hymen miraculously restored. The brothers and sisters of Jesus are seen as either cousins or children of Joseph by an earlier marriage.

In Catholicism, Mary remains a virgin throughout her married life. This view arises not from the New Testament but from an apocryphal Gospel in the second century, the “Protoevangelium of James”, which affirms Mary’s perpetual virginity.

From the second century onwards, Christians saw virginity as an ideal, an alternative to marriage and children. Mary was seen to exemplify this choice, along with Jesus and the apostle Paul. It accorded with the surrounding culture where Greek philosophers, male and female, tried to live a simple life without attachment to family or possessions.

This extolling of virginity, however unlikely when applied to Mary, did have some advantages. The option of becoming a celibate nun in community with other women gave young women in the early church an attractive alternative to marriage, in a culture where marriages were generally arranged and death in childbirth was common.

Yet belief in the eternal virginity of Mary has also inflicted damage over the centuries, particularly on women. It has distorted the character of Mary, turning her into a submissive, dependent creature, without threat to patriarchal structures.

She is divorced from the lives of real women who can never attain her sexless motherhood or her unsullied “purity”.

A strong minded leader

Yet in the Gospels, Mary is a vibrant figure: strong-minded and courageous, a leader in the community of faith.

As the first Christian, Mary proclaims a radical message of social justice, where the poor are exalted and the powerful overthrown. She initiates Jesus’ ministry at the wedding of Cana and follows him to the cross, despite the dangers. She is a vital presence at the birth of the church at Pentecost, sharing the divine vision of a world transformed.

In line with the New Testament, the early church also gave Mary the title of “God-bearer” (Theotokos), which became part of Christian orthodoxy, not tied to her perpetual virginity.

Material art portrayed her in some contexts as a priestly figure (as in an 11th century mosaic from Ravenna), with her own autonomy and authority, where she embodies the symbolic vocation of all Christians to “give birth” to the transforming presence of Christ.

Diminishing female sexuality

In contrast to these powerful images, the alternative picture of Mary, the perpetual-married-virgin, deprives women of a model not only of leadership and courage, but also of sexual desire and passion.

Simone de Beauvoir, the influential, early French feminist, observed that the cult of the Virgin Mary represented the “supreme victory of masculinity”, implying that it served the interests of men rather than women.

The ever-Virgin diminishes women’s sexuality and makes the female body and female sexuality seem unwholesome, impure. She is a safe and nonthreatening figure for celibate men who place her on a pedestal, both literally and metaphorically.

The contradiction

It is true that Catholic women across the world have found great solace in the compassionate figure of Mary, especially against images of a very masculine, judgmental God, and the brutality of political and religious hierarchy.

But for this women have paid a price, in their exclusion from leadership. Mary’s voice has been permitted, in filtered tones, to ring out across the church, but real women’s voices are silent.

In today’s context, the cult of the Virgin becomes emblematic of the way the church silences women and marginalises their experience.

Marian piety in its traditional form has a deep contradiction at its heart. In a speech in 2014, Pope Francis said, “The model of maternity for the Church is the Virgin Mary” who “in the fullness of time conceived through the Holy Spirit and gave birth to the Son of God.”

If that were true, women could be ordained, since their connection to Mary would allow them, like her, to represent the church. If the world received the body of Christ from this woman, Mary, then women today should not be excluded from giving the body of Christ, as priests, to the faithful at Mass.

The Virgin cult cuts women off from the full, human reality of Mary, and so from full participation in the life of the church.

It is no coincidence that in the early 20th century, the Vatican forbade Mary to be depicted in priestly vestments. She could only ever be presented as the unattainable virgin-mother: never as leader, and never as a fully embodied woman in her own right.

The irony of this should not be lost. A fully human Gospel symbol of female authority, autonomy, and the capacity to envision a transformed world becomes a tool of patriarchy.

By contrast, the Mary of the Gospels, the God-bearer and priestly figure – a normal wife and mother of children – confirms women in their embodied humanity and supports their efforts to challenge unjust structures, both within and outside the church.

– ref. How the cult of Virgin Mary turned a symbol of female authority into a tool of patriarchy – http://theconversation.com/how-the-cult-of-virgin-mary-turned-a-symbol-of-female-authority-into-a-tool-of-patriarchy-127806

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Quilty, Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University

This is one of our occasional Essays on Health, about one community’s attempt at closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous health in the Northern Territory. It’s a long read.

You can see the gap driving through the main street of Katherine in the Northern Territory.

The broken shop windows, the dust, the wheelchairs and crutches and bandaged bodies sing out poor health and inequity.

Overcrowding and homelessness are pervasive, and there is very little reprieve from the oppressive heat.

Like many towns of its size, Katherine has its own hospital. Here, social and environmental determinants drive hospital attendance.

For instance, the town has some of the highest rates of homelessness in Australia, in a jurisdiction with the highest incarceration rates, lowest life expectancy and the poorest educational outcomes. The gap in Katherine is a chasm.

Read more: Three reasons why the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians aren’t closing

Who’s who in the emergency department?

The hospital is a busy place, made even more so by the emergency department frequent attenders who come and go through a constantly revolving door of admission and discharge.

Frequent attenders fall into two broad categories.

Roughly one-third are very sick, wracked by illness or chronic conditions, almost all underpinned by great social challenges. Despite stereotypes, this is a group that rarely drinks alcohol.

By contrast, grog is a driving force for the other two-thirds, often as a direct result of alcohol and its complications. Once again, illness and social exclusion are pervasive.

Most frequent attenders are Indigenous. They come from around 30 different tribal nations, each with unique language. Most are just three or four generations away from the first wave of colonisation.

Just over two-thirds are homeless, a situation shaped by subtle and ongoing forces of colonisation and subsequent displacement.

Read more: Making space: how designing hospitals for Indigenous people might benefit everyone

Only one-fifth of frequent attenders have access to a car in a town with no public transport (other than school buses). This affects people’s health in the tropics where it’s a long, hot walk from where most Indigenous people live to the pharmacy.

It is really no wonder more than half of frequent attenders have not taken their medicines, contributing to their presentation to the emergency department.

For frequent presenters to Katherine Hospital, poverty and illness go hand in hand. When you are living in an over-crowded house, and the A$20 power card feeding the air conditioner expires on a 43℃ tropical day, when your heart, lungs and kidneys are chronically malfunctioning and the insulin in the fridge slowly warms, the only free number you can call for help is “000” for an ambulance trip to hospital.

These are some of the real-world challenges of closing the gap in Indigenous health. But these challenges can be overcome.

Here’s what worked

We have recently published evidence of how a locally driven program can make a difference.

When some of the town’s most vulnerable people attend the emergency department, the program connects them to primary care and other supports. It also tackles underlying drivers of hospitalisation such as homelessness or inadequate housing.

The referral point taps into a critical moment when people choose to turn up to hospital, asking for help.

This an opportunity to do things differently. As such, the program re-defines “help” beyond the biomedical paradigm, to both improve health and use limited resources more efficiently.

This contrasts with past approaches grounded in discipline and law that have failed to meaningfully help people who suffer the combined disharmony of sickness, homelessness and alcohol.

Among the 109 people supported in the first ten months of the program, there was a 23% reduction in emergency department presentations.

More GP visits

A Grattan Institute report found the most disadvantaged people living in the remotest areas are the least likely to see or have access to a GP.

In Katherine, many of the people presenting frequently to the emergency department with chronic diseases would benefit from being managed by their GP or other primary care provider.

As a result of the program, there was a 90% increase in GP attendance.

Read more: Why the housing shortage exacerbates scabies in Indigenous communities

Community support is vital

The program has been developed gradually over the past five years, first with an understanding of who the hospital’s frequent attenders are, and then getting the community on board.

Central to the program’s success is this community support. The four main partners include the hospital, the Wurli-wurlinjang local Aboriginal health service, the local Aboriginal housing organisation and Katherine Regional Aboriginal Health and Related Services.

Other partners including the first ever homeless hub in Katherine (a drop-in centre and community space for homeless people), as well as St John Ambulance, Mission Australia, Red Cross and the territory housing department.

Read more: Refugees in their own land: how Indigenous people are still homeless in modern Australia

The harsh reality of the town camp

Just off Katherine’s main drag is a patch of thick scrub that shields visitors from seeing the harsh realities of Warlpiri Transient Camp. This is where many people who frequently present to the emergency department live.

This “temporary” camp, set up over 40 years ago, houses some of the sickest people in what is one of the sickest towns in Australia.

Up to 20 people live in small dwellings bursting at the seams. These structures often provide meagre refuge to people on dialysis, with failing hearts from rheumatic heart disease, and to the elderly and frail.

Only a handful of these dwellings are air conditioned; some don’t even have electricity. Often it is sickness that drives people from ancestral lands into bigger towns like Katherine to access health services like kidney dialysis.

But housing is less available than dialysis. And the camp is not a destination of choice.

Read more: Want to improve the nation’s health? Start by reducing inequalities and improving living conditions

Our analysis of the program demonstrates some striking features of people who live in the camp and who frequently attend the emergency department.

First, they are very sick. Almost 10% had died before the end of the first year of the program. Participants had an average of 2.8 significant health problems, many fold higher than the Australian average.

Three out of five didn’t have reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food. Almost one-third had chronic kidney disease, and 10% were on dialysis. Of the 11 people needing dialysis three times a week, eight met the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of homelessness; three were living in a tent.

Needless to say, nowhere else in Australia is it imaginable that someone sick enough to require dialysis has to live in a tent in temperatures regularly above 40℃.

Read more: Explainer: what is chronic kidney disease and why are one in three at risk of this silent killer?

A safe home, a working fridge and a good education

Modern western medicine is the icing on the cake of a healthy and meaningful life. For people who do not have even the most fundamental building blocks of a normal urban existence, like the vast majority of people in this trial, applying western medicine is like icing a cake that has not yet been baked.

A safe home, a fridge that remains powered and relatively stocked, access to transport, and a good education, are ingredients that need to be slowly and systematically put together over a lifetime for western medicine to be an appropriate first step in resolving an individual health problem.

Applying a biomedical model of emergency care is nothing more than a very expensive band aid. But emergency departments can be structured in innovative ways to make a much bigger difference.

Read more: To close the health gap, we need programs that work. Here are three of them

– ref. How a rethink of emergency care is closing the gap, one person at a time – http://theconversation.com/how-a-rethink-of-emergency-care-is-closing-the-gap-one-person-at-a-time-127020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Carley, Principal Engineer, Water Research Laboratory, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW

Depending on definitions, the coast of New South Wales, Australia, has about 70 ocean pools, with most located between Newcastle and Wollongong. South Africa has a comparable number, but the rest of the world has only a handful.

Why are ocean pools not more widespread? It isn’t the cost – our research suggests the public benefits of NSW ocean pools greatly outweigh the investment in building and maintaining them. And these pools do hold a special place in the hearts of the communities that use them.

Read more: Community pool projects show how citizens are helping to build cities

Architect and artist Nicole Larkin says of ocean pools:

Geographically they are outliers of the built environment poised at the threshold of our nation’s boundary. Anchored to our iconic coastline, they facilitate intimate encounters with the landscape and reflect its importance in our national psyche.

Ocean pools were not the first structures built on the Australian coast. There is a prolific network of Aboriginal fish traps around Australia, with many existing structures dating back thousands of years. Any coastal structures more than 6,000 years old now lie under the sea, as global sea levels have risen 120 metres from 21,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago.

The Bogey Hole in Newcastle is usually claimed to be the first post-European-settlement ocean pool. Convicts built it in 1819.

Most of the first ocean pools involved local residents or surf lifesavers excavating suitable sections of rock shelves and enhancing them with concrete, with many further iterations until arriving at their present form.

The earliest ocean pools in Sydney’s eastern suburbs date back to the 1880s. Many of the 15 ocean pools on Sydney’s northern beaches were constructed or upgraded as job-creation projects during the 1930s Great Depression. Many Sydney beaches have an ocean pool at each end – some even have more than one.

Why does NSW have so many?

The prevalence of ocean pools in NSW arose from a confluence of many factors – geology, climate, culture and economics.

Geology

The southern two-thirds of the NSW coast generally consists of short to medium-length sandy beaches, nestled between rocky headlands. Where those headlands are sandstone, there is an ideal balance between a material that can be fairly easily excavated, yet is stable over human time scales. These headlands have allowed pools to be sited on a stable foundation where they don’t alter the shape of the surrounding beaches or fill with too much sand.

Ocean pools and magnificent sandstone buildings are two manifestations of Sydney’s moniker “Sandstone City”.

Climate

Mild to hot air temperatures and tolerable to pleasant water temperatures – fed by the East Australian (“Nemo”) Current – are conducive to swimming, bathing and surfing.

Read more: Can you surf the East Australian Current, Finding Nemo-style?

Beach and ocean culture

Beach, ocean, swimming and surfing cultures developed in the early 1900s. Despite its pleasures, the ocean can be a dangerous place. Many people drowned in the early days of surf bathing and drownings on unpatrolled beaches continue to this day.

Ocean pools offer the pleasure of saltwater bathing by the beach, free from sharks, large waves and rips. In his poem The Ocean Baths, Les Murray described the experience:

I am not in the sea but the sea’s television.

Read more: From segregation to celebration: the public pool in Australian culture

However, almost all ocean pools have dangerous conditions at times. The Water Research Laboratory at UNSW Sydney has recently applied contemporary coastal engineering techniques for estimating wave overtopping to ocean pools. This work has reconciled the theory with the expert opinions of lifeguards and surf lifesavers for a range of pools.

Economic prosperity

Population centres near the coast, economic prosperity, along with job-creation projects during downturns also drove the construction of ocean pools.

Improved sewage disposal schemes for Sydney in the early 1990s, as well as Newcastle and Wollongong, vastly improved water quality on the beaches, further increasing the attraction of ocean pools and coastal living.

What makes a good ocean pool?

We have polled many users of ocean pools and their opinions are fairly uniform. The best ocean pools have three elements:

• a lap swimming area (preferably 50 metres long)
• a separate wading/splash area
• a space for people to congregate, as these are community gathering places.

For many users, ocean pools complement other ocean activities, rather than replace them. For example, surf lifesavers or surfers often train in them when the ocean is too flat or too dangerous.

Waves washing into pools make for spectacular photos. These can enhance the sense of wildness, the connection with nature, and flush the pool with clean seawater. But waves can also make a pool dangerous and fill the pool with sand, seaweed and sometimes boulders. So a balance is needed.

Pools repay the investment

The potential costs of maintenance (cleaning and repairs) have been cited in opposition to new ocean pools. We have surveyed the asset managers for many ocean pools and found annual maintenance costs range from about A$10,000 to A$140,000, with a typical amount of A$80,000.

The aggressive location (the “wild edge”) means most pools are refurbished at intervals of 10 to 20 years. The budgets for this work range from A$200,000 to A$1.5 million.

Pool upgrades have allowed the walls of most pools to be raised over time. This has generally outpaced recent sea level rise, but accelerating rises will require serious redesign or abandonment of many pools. Some may join the ranks of existing “ghost” pools, such as those surrounding the present Dee Why ocean pool (Isa Wye Rockpool) or the headland between Bilgola and Newport. A keen eye can spot these on Google Earth.

Improvements in pump technology and economic prosperity have meant many ocean pools now use pumps to maintain water quality, rather than relying only on wave overtopping. This allows for safer pools.

In the age of “business cases” we recently combined data on beach/pool use with the economic benefits of an aquatic facility visit from studies by the Royal Life Saving Society. This indicates a typical ocean pool has a basic economic benefit of A$2 million a year and a combined economic and health benefit of A$6 million a year. A high-use ocean pool has a basic economic benefit of A$3.5 million a year and a combined benefit of A$10 million a year.

Thus, if physically suitable and environmentally acceptable sites can be found, the economic payback on investment in an ocean pool is rapid. The people of NSW have always loved their ocean pools, so these findings only confirm their status as highly valued community assets.

The author acknowledges the contributions of Ian Coghlan, Chris Drummond, Nicole Larkin, council staff, pool users, lifeguards and volunteer lifesavers.

– ref. The timeless appeal of an ocean pool – turns out it’s a good investment, too – http://theconversation.com/the-timeless-appeal-of-an-ocean-pool-turns-out-its-a-good-investment-too-127912

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

As anticipated, the Australian government downsized a number of its economic forecasts in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) released this week.

Also as anticipated, the federal government did everything it could to retain its forecast budget surplus for 2019-20. Having pinned its economic-management credentials to one single economic statistic – remember those hokey phrases from the May budget, “back in the black” and “back on track” – it was never going to be otherwise.

Read more: 5 things MYEFO tells us about the economy and the nation’s finances

One casualty of the updated numbers is the forecast, made in May, that Australia’s net government debt would be reduced to zero by 2030. MYEFO projects that net debt in 2030 will instead be about 2% of GDP.

That is, essentially, a trivial difference. But it reveals a lot about the federal government’s view of fiscal management.

Governments living within their means

An oft-repeated line from Scott Morrison – one he used when he was treasurer as well as now he is prime minister – is that the government is “living within its means”.

If one doesn’t think about it too carefully, that phrase makes a lot of sense. Do we want governments not to live within their means?

But there’s a lot hidden in the words “live” and “means”.

The way the Morrison government likes to tell it, Australia pays a lot of interest on its foreign debt. According to official figures, the interest payment on the debt in 2018-19 was about A$14 billion.

That sounds like a lot, particularly when compared with, say, the amount of money the federal government spends on schools – A$19.6 billion in the past budget year, and about A$20.9 billion this year.

Such comparisons are made by members of the Morrison government (such as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg) quite a lot.

Yes, our interest bill is in the same ballpark as the federal government’s spending on schools. But school funding is a state responsibility. The NSW government alone spent A$17.3 billion on schools in 2018-19.

So the comparison between interest and spending on schools is misleading at best and disingenuous at worst.

If they wanted to, ministers could compare the interest payment with the amount of money the government collects from tobacco taxes – A$17.3 billion. That comparison makes our interest bill sound pretty small.

Read more: Vital Signs: why governments get addicted to smoking, gambling and other vices

Spending as an investment

What’s missing is the broader point that when the government borrows money to invest in social and physical infrastructure it can often generate returns far in excess of the interest cost.

Currently the federal government can borrow for ten years at an annual interest rate of about 1%. Investing in nation-building like road and rail infrastructure, schools, preventive medical care, mental health and recreational facilities would almost certainly generate a return of more than 1% a year.

If the government was a business it would jump at the opportunity to borrow at 1% and generate higher returns year after year (such as for education).

Read more: Vital Signs: it’s time to borrow to build

But conservative governments – as political outfits – love the narrative of belt-tightening and living within one’s means.

Beware of boondoggles

To be fair, without some financial discipline low interest rates on government debt can also be used to justify every idiotic pork-barrel project imaginable. These routinely come up on both sides of politics. Think of the Rudd government’s disastrous “pink batts” scheme, or Barnaby Joyce’s inland rail scheme.

White elephants are easy to find when governments get involved in spending without proper cost-benefit analysis. I have proposed, with my colleagues Rosalind Dixon and Alex Rosenberg, a method for doing cost-benefit analysis more rigorously to take account of the broader social benefits of government spending.

Governments aren’t households

One very simple thing to remember is that governments are not like households.

You and I will will not be around forever. When we die our financial dealings will be tallied up. Most of us would like to pass on something to our children. If we have the means and the discipline, many of us do.

But governments don’t end. They represent a population that carries on indefinitely. Their success is not measured by what gets passed on at some end point. It’s measured by what they do for the public year after year.

Sometimes that can be improved by borrowing sensibly to invest in social and physical infrastructure.

Read more: Surplus before spending. Frydenberg’s risky MYEFO strategy

In 2020 I hope we will hear less from Scott Morrison and his ministers about balanced budgets and debt elimination, and more about another phrase of his – “good debt” versus “bad debt”.

Australia is desperately in need of investment by the government – and sensible, nation-building infrastructure is definitely “good debt”.

– ref. Vital Signs: Australia’s nation-building opportunity held hostage by the deficit daleks – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-australias-nation-building-opportunity-held-hostage-by-the-deficit-daleks-129000

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherine Fahd, Director Photography, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

We are used to being spectators of news events — viewing difficult images beamed to us from the other side of the world, the next state or the next suburb.

This spectator lens can start to feel so familiar that we become numb to what we are witnessing. News reports show us another scene of destruction, another disaster, another cry for help, another decline. We can look away from the paper, turn off the television or radio. But our social media marches on.

Instagram images of smoke, coloured orange by the bushfire sun, catch us off-guard. Social sharing of images like those of the current bushfires cuts through the resistance we’ve built up to the news cycle, chipping away at the degrees separating us from the event itself.

Bringing us closer to disaster, for better or worse.

The frame

For the most part, news images are taken by professional photographers trained to frame a decisive moment; the picture-perfect scene that will capture an “event”. Photographers know how to manipulate light and composition to create a great image. We are accustomed to seeing catastrophes through their expert eye.

Our newspapers feature stunning photographs, such as one captured recently by Sydney Morning Herald photographer Nick Moir. In it, two firefighters hold their hands to their heads while running through an apocalyptic, dizzying shower of fire.

SMH photo editor Mags King told us “images taken by professional photojournalists … still retain their visceral impact and trigger a deeper reaction or a lasting thought on the subject”.

She notes that the fire photos taken by Moir are “highly considered”.

The impact, judging by the feedback, has been tremendous. They are nightmarish, powerful, all encompassing. I think people can see that they are not snaps. These are the type of photos that make you feel and that is the skill of a photojournalist who understands the tenets of photojournalism.

Sometimes that consideration can push an image too far. In 2015, a significant number of entries (20%) were disqualified from the World Press Photo competition for excessive manipulation and post-processing.

The 2019 World Press Photo top prize went to John Moore of Getty Images for his capture of a simple image, devastating in its natural depiction of a Honduran toddler crying as she and her mother were taken into custody by US border officials in Texas.

The winning photo is framed at the height of the small child, while her mother and the official’s figures are cut at waist height. We can see the child’s emotional reaction to the events unfolding at the adult level above her.

Stop, look, read

In photojournalism, the proximity of the photographer to the event is key. Robert Capa, the photojournalist who founded Magnum Photos in 1947 with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, famously said “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.

Capa was so close to crisis that it cost him his life in 1954 when, at age 40, he stepped on a landmine while on assignment for Life in Northern Vietnam.

The task of the professional photojournalist — to distil a crisis artfully in an image that makes us stop, look and read — has never been more difficult. Exposure to images has reached unprecedented levels, while our trust in news has declined.

The proportion of Australians avoiding news increased from 57% in 2017 to 62% in 2019, and 28% say they are worn out by the volume of news. Meanwhile, social media analysts report 9,442,000 Instagram users in Australia in 2019, accounting for 37.2% of the country’s population.

Sharing, caring

Viewing images on Instagram offers a different, though linked, perspective to the photojournalist.

As the devastating bushfires ravage parts of New South Wales and Queensland, “ordinary” people are sharing, viewing, commenting on and “liking” images of the crisis engulfing the state.

Captured on smart phones, images posted on Instagram still frame the event as spectacle but from a different point of view. Proximity is still key, but it is gained via a different path. And the path images take to reach us is also different.

On Facebook and Twitter, news sharing from faceless sources is deemed responsible for the spread of fake news. Instagram (though owned by Facebook) is designed primarily so that images provide information. Caption plays a supporting role only.

The images are taken by amateurs and they are people we mostly know, or feel like we know, and follow on social media.

As Waleed Aly noted in response to photos on Facebook of the London Bridge attack in 2017, “images can be weaponised to evoke and reinforce existing narratives, confirm prejudices and galvanise a sense of shared outrage”.

A social stage

The algorithmic bubble that drives our social media feed, exposes us to images and sentiments that mirror our own. But increasingly, the public is suspicious of “spin” in news and images of crisis transmitted to us through news outlets that are owned by those with political biases, special interests and powers.

Researchers in Finland who studied issues of trustworthiness in amateur images in newspapers versus professional images, found that people tended to trust amateur ones more than the professional.

The amateur snaps were imbued with authenticity, and a lack of vested interests associated with news corporations.

That same authenticity might be available to us via Instagram, ironically the natural home of colour filters, selfies and silicon enhancements.

According to sociologist and social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, the ontology of the “social photo” — the fundamentals of its reason for being — is sharing.

“Social photos are not primarily about making media but about sharing eyes,” he writes.

Images shared among friends and followers fuel a “social process” as catalysts for dialogue. Like the newspaper once did, Instagram offers a communal conversation.

While Instagram is a brand that carries a slick aesthetic, the feature of sharing and commenting creates a collective cultural archive. News photography can affect change but our responses to these images have reportedly dimmed as we become inured to images of children like three-year-old Alan Kurdi caught up in the refugee crisis.

Instagram has become a repository that collects and organises images through its various tools of hashtags and geolocation. More than just the playground for “influencers” and their polished images, it is the contemporary family album that also features images from connections who act as “our man on the ground” photojournalist.

Read more: Ten photos that changed how we see human rights

Closer to home

One might encounter a stream of images in seemingly random succession: a hotel room in Cologne, a family pet, children playing in the suburbs, a duck-faced selfie, a red sun, an image of smoke obscuring the Sydney Opera House, a radio announcer posing with Samuel L. Jackson, a friend’s son ice-skating somewhere, riots in Hong Kong, the army approaching protestors angrily in Beirut, fresh paint on canvas.

The images in this eclectic stream catch the viewer off-guard: images of crisis are couched within images of everyday life with kids, cats, selfies and fires.

These are not news images that comply with the tenets of photojournalism; they are taken on a smart phone and shared immediately. The snapshot taken by your friend on Instagram, as compared to the framed shot by a professional photojournalist, has a different kind of “proximity”.

In the age of Instagram, being close enough to take the good picture — in Robert Capa’s terms — means not just proximity to the scene or event, but also proximity to a social network that will receive the post in their feed (unless posts are, in turn, re-purposed by a news outlet).

So when someone you follow — who is a friend — “reports” on the fire from their backyard, it stops you in your tracks. A picture of a tree fern covered in lurid pink fire retardant shows how close the fire came.

Looking back on the same friend’s feed to see a bucolic photograph of a similar tree fern amongst daisies, only enhances the tragedy by showing what was once there and what has been destroyed in the fires.

For the viewer of the image, proximity means closeness to the person who took the photograph. It is this social connection — “kinship” in anthropological terms — to the photographer that can impact the way we respond to that image.

In the social realm, care and concern turns spectatorship into an act of obligated looking. Such an ethical response means we resist the impulse to look away.

– ref. Friday essay: seeing the news up close, one devastating post at a time – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-seeing-the-news-up-close-one-devastating-post-at-a-time-128774

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

Dear Michael, Josh, David, et al

Sorry to have left you all without my guiding hand this week. But Jen and I really needed the break. And the girls too – it’s hard when you’re the kids of the nation’s Daggy Dad.

We were all exhausted. And then came that smoke over Kirribilli – last straw.

I’d hoped to keep my absence nice and private, especially from those quiet Australians fighting fires. (By the way, David, I saw you planned to join your local rural fire service. Great idea. Get yourself pictured fully kitted.)

Regrettably, despite best efforts, my press office wasn’t able to keep a lid on the story. How useless are they!! Just joking. Our media favourites played ball, but as for some others … and social media went mad. I was called such mean things.

TV found the old footage of my criticising then Victorian police chief Christine Nixon’s “bad judgment call” when she dined out during the Victorian fires. Lines for times, I say. As for Lara Worthington’s (née Bingle) “WHERE THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU???” tweet: Listen Lara, just leave being the smart aleck to me.

Albo didn’t join the pile on. Said it would be “cheap politics”. Clever Albo.

I do admit (in the privacy of this correspondence, which you leak at your peril) it wasn’t such a good look to be out of the country this week.

Still, you put it well on TV, Josh: “He’s having a well deserved break … He’ll be back at work shortly and then he’ll be off to India leading a delegation to advance Australia’s interests.” Made it clear I’ll be slaving in January.

Michael, I loved that as acting PM you celebrated running the country from Wagga. Not a man to get above his station, although a few eyebrows did go up when you said Wagga “is finally the nation’s capital”. Anyway, Wagga has had only a smidgeon of smoke. You could hardly see your hand in front of your face in the actual capital, so my staff told me.

Remember when Doug Anthony used to run the show from a caravan somewhere? Mind you, back then people were told Malcolm Fraser was on hols and even, I think, usually where he was. Often on a motor bike down at Nareen. John Howard loved holidaying at Hawks Nest – so Australian – until too many Aussie battlers started bugging him.

Josh, you did a great job with MYEFO. Those numbers look rather ominous, but you’re always a man of cheer. And Mathias is a rock. Thank goodness he’s denied the silly rumour about pulling the pin.

If he wasn’t there, who’d wrangle Pauline and Jacqui? Have a wine with Labor’s Penny Wong? And the odd beer with Centre Alliance’s Rex Patrick? Mathias certainly needs a holiday.

I’m praying the economic figures turn upwards soon. Otherwise the backbench could be in a funk. Like the Reserve Bank recently, with Phil Lowe talking his head off, often with messages I don’t want to hear. Too much independence. If they were the public service, they’d be to heel by now.

Anyway Joshie, we’ll be okay. If things get bad, if people don’t spend over Christmas, we’ll fit up Albo, blame Labor, and save the day with a stimulatory May budget. But if the economy is indeed at the “gentle turning point” the bank suggests in its rare sanguine moments, you and I will share the glory (just a little bigger slice for me).

Meanwhile do you, as deputy Liberal leader, have any ideas about Angus? I can’t shift him from energy, at least not for a while. But really, he’s a walking fire cracker. (By the way, Josh, some day you must tell me your own tales of Oxford.)

Were you ever a boy scout Josh? What about that cubs’ buddying system? Could we buddy Angus with someone? You perhaps? No? You’ve had enough of all that emissions stuff from Malcolm’s day?

Oh well, let’s all mull over the challenge. We’ll call it the “Taylor project”. Someone might think of something.

It can’t be harder than the religious discrimination project, the good-idea-at-the-time that’s testing Christian. I see Stuart Robert (how good a mate is Stewie!) told The Australian he reads the Bible “cover to cover every year”. Might be easier than reading our revised bill.

Christian, you won’t have an easy new year but, to adapt an old phrase, it will make a minister of you. After you finish with the prelates, you need to get Jackie’s vote on that union bill. My advice: fly to Tassie, source a good red, find the best pizza joint in town. Mathias will prep you.

David, I felt for you this week, trying to deal with state ministers shrieking like banshees at the possibility of changing water policy. Talk about herding wild boars! They’re impossible, all absurdly pursuing the narrow self-interests of their own states. Really, sometimes federalism just sucks. Pity Malcolm lost interest in that inquiry into it that Tony started.

But David, I must say it was a touch risky to promise those farmers yelling for more irrigation water that you’d hold this review into their grievance (even if it’s headed by an ex-cop and I agreed at the time).

Yes David, I know they were in very big trucks, which can be quite intimidating when they’re outside parliament house. But what if we can’t deliver to them? What if the states put their little feet down? The trucks could return.

Best to get some advice from your new head of department Andrew Metcalfe. You’ll be glad I brought him back to bubbleland. Good man, Metcalfe, with plenty of experience of tricky situations. Ran the immigration department when all those boats were arriving under Labor. Tony sacked him when we won in 2013 – he’d made a few unfortunate reflections on our policy – but all that’s ancient history.

It’ll be a great Christmas for Andrew, enjoying the glow of vindication. Not so good for the departmental secretaries I’ve just dismissed from the bubble. Still, that’s how the cookie crumbles, as they say. If Bill Shorten hadn’t been so hopeless, the quiet Australians could have ousted me.

Then I might have quit parliament and been looking for a post-politics career in the new year.

Back in tourism? Nah. Imagine selling Australia as a destination just now. Even I decided to holiday offshore.

Yours, with authority, Scott

P.S. I have selfies to share in cabinet. They’re classified top secret. For national security, AKA political, reasons.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Scott Morrison’s Christmas letter to the colleagues – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-scott-morrisons-christmas-letter-to-the-colleagues-129140

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Auckland

Last week Aung San Suu Kyi took the stand at the International Court of Justice to defend Myanmar against charges of genocide.

A 2017 military campaign against the Muslim Rohingya expelled more than 700,000 from Rakhine State into Bangladesh. Survivors recounted numerous mass executions, rapes and other atrocities. The ferocity and scale of this violence is based on longstanding denial of the Rohingya’s right to belong in Myanmar.

Nationalists have long derided the Rohingya as illegal Bengali immigrants. A 1982 citizenship law excluded them from a list of “national races” because they had not arrived in Myanmar before 1823.

The seeds of a similar situation have now been planted in India under an increasingly nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Like in Myanmar, the likely epicentre of a violent contest over who belongs and who does not is a remote state bordering Bangladesh: Assam.

This year, a statewide government program, known as the National Register of Citizens, verified the citizenship of all residents. It identified 1.9 million people as illegal immigrants.

Read more: India’s new citizenship act legalizes a Hindu nation

Excluding Muslims

As it became apparent that just as many Hindus as Muslims lacked adequate documentation, the BJP submitted a new bill to parliament, which was quickly passed by both houses. The Citizenship Amendment Act provides a path to citizenship for all Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis and Christians who can claim persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and arrived in India before 2014.

Muslims are conspicuously absent from the list, despite the persecution of Ahmadis and Shia in the three states. No mention was given of the neighbouring states with some of the worst violations of minority rights: China and Myanmar. The reason is clear – the persecuted groups there are Muslim.

Those excluded from the National Register of Citizens can appeal to specially created foreigner tribunals, but these are likely to be highly politicised. The next and final step of appeal is the Supreme Court, but this is beyond the financial means of most.

Detention will then await, just as in Rakhine. The Indian government is currently building a 3,000-person detention centre in Assam’s Goalpara district. Unrecognised as citizens by Bangladesh, these people will be rendered stateless, just as the Rohingya before them.

Read more: Tampering with history: how India’s ruling party is erasing the Muslim heritage of the nation’s cities

A volatile history

If Assam’s history is any guide, this repression will be accompanied by political violence. The last period of turmoil over illegal immigration, known as the Assam Movement of 1979 to 1985, saw widespread protests, strikes and insurgency.

Ignited by claims voting rolls contained the names of hundreds of thousands of non-citizens, the period involved extensive communal violence. The main targets were people the movement deemed to be immigrants, particularly those of Bengal-origin. In a single incident, the Nellie Massacre, a mob killed more than 2,000 people.

I have written elsewhere about recent anti-migrant massacres in Assam in 2012 and 2014 in which mobs killed several hundred members of the Bengali Muslim and Advivasi communities. Widespread protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act have broken out in the state in recent days, not at the exclusion of Muslims as elsewhere in India, but at the impending naturalisation of Hindus and other groups.

The dangers of violence in Assam are real. A former chief minister of the state described it as a powder keg of ethnic tensions.

Read more: In India’s Assam, a solidarity network has emerged to help those at risk of becoming stateless

Assam’s future in a nationalist India

The BJP president, Amit Shah, has stated that the National Register of Citizens will be conducted throughout India. During the April 2019 national election, Shah said:

Illegal immigrants are like termites. They are eating the grain that should go to the poor, they are taking our jobs.

He said that after coming to power, the party would throw the termites into the Bay of Bengal but would grant citizenship to every Hindu and Buddhist refugee. This is similar nativist and genocidal language to that used by the Myanmar army chief as the military began its campaign against the Rohingya:

The Bengali problem was a longstanding one which has become an unfinished job.

It seems unlikely violence on the scale perpetrated by the military in Rakhine State in Myanmar will occur in India. The militaries of the two countries have very different relationships with civilian political actors, and Muslims play an important political role in Assam and can therefore (to some extent) moderate the behaviour of nationalists.

But India has set itself on a nationalist trajectory under the BJP, and the end point is uncertain. There were warnings of impending genocide in Myanmar in the years before 2017. By the end of that year it was too late. There are now warnings of similar violence against Muslims in India, but there is still time to act.

– ref. A new law in India could put Muslims at greater risk of persecution, like the Rohingya – http://theconversation.com/a-new-law-in-india-could-put-muslims-at-greater-risk-of-persecution-like-the-rohingya-129075

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendon O’Connor, Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

The US House of Representatives voted today to impeach President Donald Trump, making him the third president in the history of the United States to be impeached.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump.

The first stated that Trump committed an impeachable offence by withholding $391 million in military aid from the Ukraine until its government announced an investigation into the activities of Joe Biden, a potential political opponent of Trump’s in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

Read more: Can Congress hold Trump accountable? 4 essential reads on a historic power struggle

The article states the president “abused the powers of the Presidency,” “betrayed the nation,” and remains an ongoing “threat to national security and the Constitution”.

The second article is worded just as strongly. It claims that Trump obstructed due process in pressuring government agencies and officials to defy multiple subpoenas issued by the congressional committees established to investigate the president’s actions in relation to the Ukraine.

Referring to Trump, it states:

In the history of the Republic, no president has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impede so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate “high crimes and misdemeanours” – the Constitutional standard justifying the impeachment of a sitting president.

These are obviously very serious charges.

Prior to today’s vote, impeachment has only happened twice in American history – once in 1868 when President Andrew Johnson was impeached for firing a cabinet colleague, and again in 1998 when President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about and covering up his relationship with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. President Richard Nixon resigned before being formally impeached over his involvement in Watergate.

Impeachment is a political act. Conviction is unlikely

Legal debates about what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanours” are ever present in these types of proceedings. But impeachment is ultimately a political act.

It requires a majority in the House of Representatives to impeach and a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate (67 Senators) to convict.

Democrats control the 435 member House of Representatives with 232 sitting members, giving them a clear majority. Republicans control the Senate 53-45 (with two independents).

That makes the likelihood of achieving 67 votes required for a conviction unlikely.

So far, events are unfolding as many predicted. The house voted largely along party lines to impeach the president on both articles, which means a legal trial will now be held in the Senate starting in January.

Given the Republican majority in the Senate, it is hard to see the president being convicted. As a result, Trump’s impeachment is anti-climactic because justice is likely to be thwarted by partisanship.

Just as worrying, Trump has demonstrated that the more corrupt and mendacious the behaviour of a candidate and then president is, the lower the expectations the public and their party has for them. How long lasting this corruption of basic democratic standards will be is hard to tell.

What to expect in 2020

Events will move fast next year: the Senate trial will be completed within the first few months of 2020, which means the country’s attention will then shift to the presidential race. If, as expected, Trump survives in office, what matters then is the court of public opinion.

Republicans prefer a quick trial, as public opinion has not shifted against the president as Democrats hoped it would as more information was revealed.

According to a recent CNN poll, support for convicting and removing Trump from office stands at 45%, which is down from 50% in a poll conducted in mid-November. When it comes to registered Democrats, 77% support conviction, but this too is down from 90% recorded in November.

When it comes to the swing states that could decide the next presidential election, citizens are split, with 46% wanting removal and 45% opposed.

These numbers do not provide a great deal of guidance as to whether impeachment is going to help or hurt Trump’s re-election chances in 2020.

Read more: Trump will cling to power — and Republicans will cling to him

Growing disengagement

One of the more troubling aspects to emerge from recent opinion polling is that there is a large minority of Americans who are disengaged from this whole process. Impeaching a president is a political act, but it is also the most serious action that can be taken against a sitting president.

As Richard Nixon put it, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

However, according to a new Washington-Post ABC News poll, while 62% of respondents said they were following events closely, 38% said they were either only paying modest attention, or not paying any attention at all.

This is troubling, for whatever one thinks about Trump’s policies, he is a populist president who sees democratic institutions as a hindrance to his rule.

When such a large minority expresses disinterest in his impeachment, it is a toxic mix of a leader eager to sideline democratic institutions and a large bloc of voters unable and unwilling to make a considered judgement on whether or not “their president is a crook.”

This, of course, may be symptomatic of the Trump era. One crisis – even one as grave as impeachment – is simply replaced by another crisis in due course, all of which, in more tranquil times, might have spelled the end of a presidency – but not so in the age of Trump.

It is as if the boundaries between right and wrong, between authoritarianism and democracy, between truth and lies, have become so blurred that citizens no longer know where to take their stand, or they simply retreat into a knee-jerk partisanship which no longer requires critical thought.

Next year will begin with the Senate trial of Trump. He will be most likely acquitted by the Republican majority.

Attention will then turn to the race for the White House. Trump’s approval numbers are not good, but they are salvageable. More twists and turns will surely follow impeachment proceedings. In the Trump era, we should expect nothing less.

Impeachment is not the end of the process for Trump.

– ref. Donald Trump has become the third president in US history to be impeached. He’s unlikely to be convicted – http://theconversation.com/donald-trump-has-become-the-third-president-in-us-history-to-be-impeached-hes-unlikely-to-be-convicted-128302

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

Julian Assange may be an odious character in the eyes of some. He may not be a journalist in the estimation of others. He may be regarded as a serial pest by his detractors, but his case in the British courts has become a cause celebre for free speech and civil liberties advocates.

In a London magisrate’s court on Friday, early shots will be fired in the Assange defence team’s efforts to block his extradition to the United States on 17 charges under the Espionage Act with a separate indictment under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Assange is facing a jail sentence of 175 years on alleged breaches of the Espionage Act, and further penalty under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Read more: Explainer: what charges does Julian Assange face, and what’s likely to happen next?

At issue, and separate from the extradition proceedings, is whether an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spied on Assange during his seven years in the Ecuador embassy, after taking refuge there in 2012.

He sought Ecuadorian diplomatic protection to avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual misconduct. Those charges have been cancelled.

British authorities arrested Assange in April this year after he was ejected from the embassy. Bail was refused on grounds he had absconded before.

Spain’s national court will hear evidence on whether Spanish surveillance company UC Global had provided transcripts, videos and other material from surveillance equipment secretly installed to monitor Assange’s private communications. It is alleged these were provided to the CIA.

Assange is due to give testimony via video link from Belmarsh prison outside London to the Spanish court, and in person, also by video link, at Westminster Magistrate’s Court.

Findings in this case will inform arguments against his extradition to the United States. Those extradition hearings are set to begin before a London magistrate’s court on February 24 2020.

Among extradition claims is that he coached former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning into cracking a password on the Pentagon computer to obtain top-secret material about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These became known as the “war logs” and included graphic video of an Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. This attack led to the deaths of two Reuters journalists.

The US application for extradition relates to Assange’s WikiLeaks activities before – not during – the 2016 presidential election. In those elections it’s widely believed he collaborated with Russia to publish leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to undermine Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump said more than once he “loved” WikiLeaks. However, within a year or so his administration was pursuing Assange for alleged breaches of the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

What happens now?

The Assange saga will drag on for months, if not years, before the UK courts, as his British lawyers fight the extradition proceedings tooth and nail.

This is a highly complex case – if it reaches the US court system, it will involve arguments about whether Assange was performing the role of a journalist or whistleblower and therefore entitled to First Amendment free speech protections.

In the first instance, his defence team will no doubt contend that his extradition is excluded under Britain’s extradition treaty with the US. This includes an exception for political offences.

In other words, the case has the potential, even the likelihood, of becoming a broader argument about the extraterritorial reach of the US. This leaves aside a free speech argument about the definition of what is, and what is not, journalism in a social media age.

The Obama administration had considered and then baulked at seeking Assange’s extradition, after concluding it would be perilous to charge him under the Espionage Act. This act does not make a distinction between journalists and non-journalists.

Read more: New indictments set up a confrontation between the US and Julian Assange

Obama-era Justice Department attorneys had also concluded that a First Amendment defence, questioning the definition of what constitutes journalism in the US, would vastly complicate attempts to convict.

American publications, including principally The New York Times, had collaborated with Assange in the publication of material from war logs whose disclosure embarrassed the US government.

In its reporting of the Assange matter, the Times has been assiduous in its defence of journalistic inquiry. The paper commented:

Though he is not a conventional journalist, much of what Mr Assange does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations like the Times do: seek and publish information that officials want to be secret, including classified national security matters, and take steps to protect the confidentiality of sources.

The above reflects widespread concern among American media about implications more broadly for reporting sensitive national security issues that might themselves become subject to the Espionage Act.

Other publications across the world, among them The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais, also cooperated with Assange. Newspapers in his native Australia published extensively from the leaked documents.

View from Assange’s homeland

In Australia, support for Assange has been patchy. The Australian government has gone through the motions in providing him with consular assistance.

However, in recent months a trickle of support for Assange has emerged. Politicians from both sides of politics have expressed their concerns about the possibility of him being extradited to the US on charges that would confine him to jail for the rest of his life.

The prospect of a life sentence would be very real.

As Assange’s case proceeds, it is likely support for him will build. In the process, this will pressure the Australian government to do more to persuade the Americans to back off.

A risk for Canberra is that inaction would be interpreted as being complicit in Assange’s removal to the US.

Australian journalism has been conflicted over the degree to which Assange should be supported, with arguments for and against. These have centred on his practice of simply dumping documents into the public domain without subjecting them to rigorous editorial processes.

However, what has not been properly addressed by those Australian journalists who have been quick to disavow him is whether Assange should be extradited for what amounts to a capital crime for leaking material that their own news organisations disseminated.

Perhaps we should leave the last word to former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, whose organisation collaborated with – then fell out with – Assange in the publication of the “war logs”.

Rusbridger defends Assange against attempts to extradite him on grounds that “whatever Assange got up to in 2010-11, it was not espionage”.

He alludes to perhaps the strongest argument against Assange’s removal to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act. This is that he is not a US citizen and his alleged crimes were committed outside the US. This is the extraterritorial argument.

Rusbridger quotes Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists who observed:

Under this rubric anyone anywhere in the world who publishes information that the US government deems to be classified could be prosecuted for espionage.

It is a good point.

– ref. As Assange faces court over extradition attempts, the case is complex and the stakes are high – http://theconversation.com/as-assange-faces-court-over-extradition-attempts-the-case-is-complex-and-the-stakes-are-high-128999

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Lueck, Professor of Tourism, Auckland University of Technology

Boeing has announced it will halt production of the beleaguered B737-MAX series from January. Boeing’s announcement this week follows the grounding of the aircraft after two fatal crashes.

After the first crash, of Lion Air in Indonesia in October 2018, people blamed poor maintenance and insufficient pilot training. When a second airliner, of Ethiopian Air, crashed in March 2019, similarities quickly transpired. There was no apparent external influence such as poor weather. Neither was there any interference with the flight decks, as in a hijacking.

In both cases the pilots could not keep the aircraft from nose-diving. Airlines and regulators around the world started grounding the MAX indefinitely. Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority prohibited any B737MAX aircraft in its airspace, followed by New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority.

Surprisingly, the last authority to clamp down was the US Federal Aviation Administration, the governmental body in charge of certifying aircraft.

At first, Boeing was optimistic the aircraft would re-enter service by the end of this year, but recertification has been delayed several times. Globally, 387 delivered and about 400 undelivered MAX aircraft are grounded. The production shutdown is expected to take several months, with ramifications for suppliers and thousands of jobs at risk.

Read more: Boeing 737 Max: The FAA wanted a safe plane – but didn’t want to hurt America’s biggest exporter either

Aircraft computer system likely at fault

The suspected cause of the problems on board the two doomed airliners was a system new to the latest iteration of the previously best-selling commercial aircraft – the B737. The MAX series, the fourth generation of the aircraft, entered service in 1968 in its first version (B737-100). The 737MAX is the latest version and started flying in 2018.

Boeing’s main competitor, Airbus, developed the A320 family in the same category of the B737, but included new, more fuel-efficient engines. Boeing was under pressure to counter this when it developed the MAX series.

It shifted its larger new engines to provide more ground clearance, but this changed the balance of the aircraft and it tended to pitch up. Boeing created a computer system called Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which would detect any unwanted upward pitch and automatically force the nose down.

Shortly after take-off, the Lion Air 737MAX pilots struggled to stay in the air. The aircraft kept pulling down despite the nose not pitching up. Similarly, the pilots of the Ethiopian flight were not able to control the continuous forcing down of the nose.

Crash investigations are yet to be completed, but information released so far points to Boeing’s computer system and a faulty gauge that measures the angle at which the aircraft is flying.

Since the grounding, Boeing has worked tirelessly on a software fix, but regulators found other issues. This includes problems with software affecting flaps and other flight-control hardware, and issues with rudder cables potentially affected by a so-called uncontained engine failure. In the latter, parts of the engine blades detach and may fly at high speed into the fuselage, severing these cables.

Read more: Boeing 737 Max: air safety, market pressures and cockpit technology

Cutting corners at cost of safety

It is becoming increasingly clear Boeing has cut corners, presumably under pressure from the performance of its Airbus competitor. Boeing has been accused of delivering the aircraft before it was ready to fly safely.

It has transpired that Boeing may have been aware of computer system problems even before the Lion Air crash, but delivered the aircraft without modification or information to airlines. Even after the crash, Boeing did not halt deliveries. Instead it worked to fix the software and told pilots there was a potential problem.

The Federal Aviation Administration did not intervene either, despite its own analysis showing that, without intervention, the plane was likely to crash about one or two times a year. Equally astonishing is that the pilot manual for the MAX did not mention the new system. Instead, training for pilots moving from the previous 737NG to the new 737MAX consisted of a 56-minute iPad video, but no training in flight simulators.

A Joint Authorities Technical Review found:

The lack of a unified top-down development and evaluation of the system function and its safety analyses, combined with the extensive and fragmented documentation, made it difficult to assess whether compliance was fully demonstrated.

Boeing taking on part of aircraft certification

In a hearing by the US House Transportation Committee, a whistleblower revealed he urged Boeing managers to halt production because of mistakes, errors and corner cutting, as well as an overworked workforce.

Of further concern is that the Federal Aviation Administration has shifted some of its work to the manufacturer. Boeing now does parts of the certification process. This is not in the interest of safety. Overseas regulators, such the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, have criticised this approach.

The MAX disaster has already cost Boeing billions of dollars. Prior to the grounding, it produced 52 aircraft per month. It has since reduced production to 40, all of which are now parked.

The production halt will have ripple effects on US suppliers, with tens of thousands of jobs at risk. The fallout is likely to affect the wider US economy and many suppliers in Europe and in China.

I have flown on many Boeing aircraft and never felt unsafe. But with recent problems with the Dreamliner, the MAX and most recently the 777X, I question if Boeing has shifted from a safety first philosophy to prioritising profits and dividends for its shareholders.

– ref. Grounded: what’s behind Boeing’s production shutdown of MAX aircraft – http://theconversation.com/grounded-whats-behind-boeings-production-shutdown-of-max-aircraft-129077

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

How did our galaxy form? How do galaxies evolve over time? Where did the Sun’s lost siblings end up?

Three hours north-east of Parkes lies a remote astronomical research facility, unpolluted by city lights, where researchers are collecting vast amounts of data in an effort to unlock some of the biggest questions about our Universe.

Siding Spring Observatory, or SSO, is one of Australia’s top sites for astronomical research. You’ve probably heard of the Parkes telescope, made famous by the movie The Dish, but SSO is also a key character in Australia’s space research story.

In this episode, astrophysics student and Conversation intern Cameron Furlong goes to SSO to check out the huge Anglo Australian Telescope (AAT), the largest optical telescope in Australia.

Read more: Darkness is disappearing and that’s bad news for astronomy

And we hear about Huntsman, a new specialised telescope that uses off-the-shelf Canon camera lenses – a bit like those you see sports photographers using at the cricket or the footy – to study very faint regions of space around other galaxies.

Listen in to hear more about some of the most fascinating space research underway in Australia – and how, despite gruelling hours and endless paperwork, astronomers retain their sense of wonder for the night sky.

“For me, it means remembering how small I am in this enormous Universe. I think it’s very easy to forget, when you go about your daily life,” said Richard McDermid, an ARC Future Fellow and astronomer at Macquarie University.

“It’s nice to get back into it to a dark place and having a clear sky. And then you get to remember all the interesting and fascinating things, the size, the grandeur and the peacefulness of being in the dark.”

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Read more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert: what science says about how to lose weight and whether you really need to

Additional audio

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Lucky Stars by Podington Bear from Free Music Archive.

Slimheart by Blue Dot Sessions from Free Music Archive.

Illumination by Kai Engel from Free Music Archive.

Phase 2 by Xylo-Ziko from Free Music Archive.

Extra Dimensions by Kri Tik from Free Music Archive.

Pure Water by Meydän, from Free Music Archive.

Images

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Cameron Furlong

Read more: Antibiotic resistant superbugs kill 32 plane-loads of people a week. We can all help fight back

– ref. ‘The size, the grandeur, the peacefulness of being in the dark’: what it’s like to study space at Siding Spring Observatory – http://theconversation.com/the-size-the-grandeur-the-peacefulness-of-being-in-the-dark-what-its-like-to-study-space-at-siding-spring-observatory-128998

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kira Westaway, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University

Imagine your child asked you “When did grandma die?” and you could only respond “It was probably a while ago, but it could have been quite recently.” Most likely your child would be unsatisfied with the reply.

This has been our situation regarding the ancient human species Homo erectus. We know these distant cousins of modern humans were alive almost 2 million years ago, but when did they die out? Probably a while ago, but perhaps quite recently.

A key site in our understanding of Homo erectus, at Ngandong, in Java, Indonesia, has until now defeated all attempts at reliable dating since it was first excavated more than 90 years ago.

With the aid of new techniques, we have now found that the Ngandong Homo erectus fossils are the most recent known specimens, dating from between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago.

This discovery will help us understand where they sit in the evolutionary tree, who they interacted with and why they became extinct.

Read more: A snapshot of our mysterious ancestor Homo erectus

The discovery at Ngandong

In 1931, a team of Dutch archaeologists made an unbelievable discovery at Ngandong when they unearthed 12 skulls and two leg bones of Homo erectus. Finding even one fossil human skull is remarkable, but finding 12 together is almost miraculous.

Other Homo erectus skulls have been found in Java and elsewhere, but the ones at Ngandong have the largest brain size and highest forehead of any of them.

This indicates an important evolutionary change, and knowing when it happened is crucial to our interpretation and understanding of these ancient cousins.

However, the nature of the site – where the fossils were buried in a deposit of sediment close to the Solo River – makes it difficult to determine how old the fossils are. Many attempts have been made to establish a timeline for the site, but until now none have been very successful.

Difficulties of dating

In 1931, when Ngandong was excavated, archaeologists relied heavily on the estimated age of the associated fossil fauna to date the Homo erectus remains.

By 1996, better dating techniques such as electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating were available. A team led by American geochronologist Carl Swisher applied these techniques to ancient buffalo teeth found at the Ngandong site.

Using the buffalo teeth dating, Swisher claimed that Homo erectus survived as recently as 27,000 years ago. This would overlap with the arrival of our own species, Homo sapiens, in the region.

However, examining the plans from the original excavation revealed the Dutch team had dug up and reburied an enormous area of ground. It turned out the buffalo teeth Swisher dated came from an area that had already been excavated and buried again.

This meant they could not have come from the same layer as the 12 Homo erectus skulls, so their ages were not related.

Despite the issues with Swisher’s dating, the theory that Homo erectus survived so recently has persisted in the literature and our understanding of Ngandong since 1996.

In 2011, at team led by Indonesian researcher Etty Indriati re-dated the site and obtained ages between 130 and 500,000 years. But again they focused mainly on dating the non-human fossil evidence and ignored the sedimentary context.

Consequently, the age range is too wide to provide much help in reconstructing the evolutionary significance of Ngandong.

Reading the river

Recently, we were part of a team of Indonesian, American, and Australian researchers led by Yan Rizal who tried a different approach. We worked on an understanding that the site is in a river deposit that is part of a sequence of floodplain steps called terraces.

Our study was based on how the Solo River system was created (landscape context), how the terraces were formed (terrace context), and how the fossils were deposited (fossil context).

To do this we first dated when the Southern Mountains in Java were formed – to define when the Solo River was diverted to the north to form the terraces. We then dated the sequence of river terrace sediments using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence dating, which provided the first ever sedimentary age for the site.

Finally, we conducted extensive excavations at Ngandong in carefully selected areas using maps from previous excavations. These new excavations revealed the same bone bed found by the Dutch in 1931 and provided evidence directly associated with the human fossils that could also be dated.

Read more: Old teeth from a rediscovered cave show humans were in Indonesia more than 63,000 years ago

A new age

The analysis resulted in 52 new ages that were modelled to precisely define the age of the original bone layer to 117–108,000 years ago. This is the youngest reliable age for Homo erectus in Indonesia, and the last appearance of Homo erectus anywhere in the world.

At this age, Homo erectus would not have encountered Homo sapiens, but they may have met other now-extinct human species such as the enigmatic Denisovans. First discovered in the cold caves of Russia, the Denisovans are mostly known from traces of their DNA in modern humans rather than actual fossils. The Denisovans might have been distributed as far as Southeast Asia.

The new age range now raises important questions about the interactions between the Denisovans and the Ngandong Homo erectus. Could interbreeding with Denisovans be the source of the evolutionary change and larger skulls in this late Homo erectus population?

This possibility is yet to be proven. But it is clear that this improved age for the Ngandong Homo erectus has opened new lines of investigation that can provide a window into understanding the complex world of human evolution.

We are finally ready to get to know our extended family.

– ref. When did _Homo erectus_ die out? A fresh look at the demise of an ancient human species over 100,000 years ago – http://theconversation.com/when-did-homo-erectus-die-out-a-fresh-look-at-the-demise-of-an-ancient-human-species-over-100-000-years-ago-126181

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

The final report of the Independent Review of the Australian Public Service is much more substantial than its interim report. That is hardly a high hurdle, but its 18-page bibliography suggests considerable reflection beyond the (mostly disappointing) submissions and commissioned papers.

However, the report still has an excessive amount of rhetoric and is not an easy read.

Broadly, its themes are:

• a united service

• partnerships beyond the APS

• embracing new technology

• investing in people and capability

• a more dynamic and responsive operational model

• improved leadership and governance.

There are many sensible recommendations, but detail is often missing and analysis weak. Some recommendations reveal a surprising lack of understanding of the public sector.

The central theme of a “united” service is overdone, notwithstanding the case for greater coordination today. The APS does not need “an inspiring purpose and vision” – the first objective set out in the Public Service Act 1999 is clear. It is:

to establish an apolitical public service that is efficient and effective in serving the Government, the Parliament and the Australian public.

The APS Values also define the role of the APS as an institution. The review might have made more of the High Court’s references to these in confirming the constitutional standing of the APS.

Read more: View from The Hill: Morrison won’t have a bar of public service intrusions on government’s power

The review is right to press for a better coordinated service today, retreating from the late 1990s devolution under the new public management model. That Australia went too far is very clear (particularly on pay and conditions). Public expectations in light of modern technology are also demanding much greater connectivity today.

But the review goes too far the other way. The APS performs a wide range of functions, each requiring specialist expertise.

The Secretaries Board is not like a private sector board. Cabinet and ministers are the primary decision-makers under the Constitution, and secretaries’ first responsibilities are within their portfolios, serving and advising their ministers and delivering services and implementing government policies. At the centre it will always be primarily the responsibility of the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) to do the administrative coordination, though necessarily in close consultation with secretaries and other agency heads.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the report relates to the application of new technology. It makes a convincing case for very substantial new capital investments over many years and for increasing allocations for minor capital investment. These, and the associated building of skills, are necessary for more citizen-centred services and a more digitally enabled administration.

The report is also on the right track with several other themes:

• invest in people and strengthen capability

• reduce hierarchy and promote more dynamic teamwork across the service

• improve governance and leadership, including by firmer merit-based approaches to appointments.

But the report pulls its punches about the causes of the problems. It could have been clearer about what needs to be fixed.

Why has strategic policy advising capacity declined and other expertise been lost? Why has evaluation activity and skills dropped away? Why has the APS become more risk-averse and hierarchical?

Thankfully, the Thodey Report does include recommendations aimed at strengthening the standing of the APS and clarifying relations with the government and the parliament. These include:

• the accountability and integrity of ministerial staff

• secretary and other agency head appointments and terminations, the respective roles of the APSC and secretary of PM&C, and the appointment of the APS commissioner.

Even if I disagree with some aspects, the report at least puts these things firmly on the table (see also my recent Parliamentary Library lecture).

On several other matters there is a disappointing lack of detail, despite the report often pointing in the right direction. These include:

• The discussion of the APS Values ends up proposing some new statement of “principles” to supplement the values. What is needed is to recast the values to reflect more directly the APS’s unique institutional role (and return “merit” to the list).

• The important discussion of place-management fails to set out the architecture required at community and regional levels, and how it might link with state government service delivery.

• The discussion on budgeting rightly highlights the importance of adequate capital investment, but overlooks the equally important issue of how running costs should be financed (without crude efficiency dividends).

The government’s response

Michelle Grattan correctly summarised the response as solidifying the power of the prime minister and rejecting any recommendations that would strengthen the standing and independence of the APS.

Sadly, the result will be that many of the recommendations ostensibly “agreed” by the government will not succeed because the drivers behind the reduced capability of the APS (and its risk-averse and hierarchical culture) will remain and will probably grow stronger.

The repeated references in the response to “consistent with the Secretaries Board’s advice” when a recommendation was not agreed is both odd and worrying. If the advice was as claimed, I can only surmise that it demonstrates to the rest of the APS the leadership’s lack of frank and fearless advice. Surely the Secretaries Board supports a more uniform pay and conditions framework, and a more robust process for their own appointments and terminations?

On a positive note, the government agrees with the majority of the recommendations, particularly those relating to digital technology. Most of the responsibility for proceeding will lie with the APS itself. Whether the government will eventually sign up to the capital funding the head of the review, David Thodey, believes will be needed (initially at least A$100 million a year after the audit is complete) is uncertain.

The government has so far agreed only to A$15 million over two years to start work on all the agreed recommendations.

Machinery of government

Aspects of the prime minister’s earlier announcement about machinery-of-government changes have merit. They include:

• reducing the separation of policy and administration by replacing DHS with an executive agency within the DSS portfolio

• re-establishing strong links between education, employment and training

• separating energy from the environment, recognising that the tensions between these major functions should be settled in cabinet.

But the failure to recognise such changes only work if aligned to ministry arrangements is extraordinary. The 1987 introduction of mega-departments was only partly to do with economies of scale. Mostly it was about streamlining cabinet: allowing cabinet to be small and manageable while still having every (portfolio) department represented, and allowing portfolio ministers to exercise, with their assistant ministers, more responsibility including over resource allocation.

Read more: Morrison cuts a swathe through the public service, with five departmental heads gone

The prime minister’s claim that his restructuring will ensure “congestion busting” and a much improved “line of sight” is contrived and almost certainly illusory. It cannot be achieved without “line of sight” between ministers and the public service. The new infrastructure department will have eight ministers, four in cabinet, several with responsibilities in other portfolios, and around 80 ministerial staff. This is hardly a recipe for a stronger focus on serving the public.

We do not know what, if any, advice the APS provided about these changes. My fear is that APS expertise in such matters has deteriorated greatly in recent years.

Apart from this misalignment between the ministry and the machinery of government, some of the details of these changes are wanting. In particular, there remains a serious problem about the separation of Medicare Australia from health policy.

Where to from here?

The Morrison government’s pronouncements over the past fortnight confirm its lack of real interest in the public service as an institution. Sadly, it seems much of the conservative side of politics has lost the sort of support of our institutions that Menzies and other traditionalists exemplified.

Equally, it would be wrong to rely on the other side of politics to pursue the directions in the Thodey Report that the Morrison government has ruled out. Not only would this ignore Labor’s contribution over the years to the current sorry state of affairs, but it would set up for partisan debate the appropriate governance and degree of independence of the APS, something inimical to what fundamentally must be non-partisan.

Instead, we need the parliament to intervene, if not in the immediate light of the Thodey Report and the government’s response, then before or shortly after the next election. A Senate select committee might be asked to undertake an inquiry into the relationship between the APS, the government and the parliament. It should examine:

• the constitutional role of the APS and how this is reflected in the Public Service Act

• the distinctive values of the APS in line with its constitutional role

• the corresponding distinctive values of other components of the Commonwealth, including within the executive, the legislature and the judiciary

• the processes for appointing and terminating secretaries and other APS agency heads

• the respective roles of the APS commissioner and secretary of PM&C

• the roles and responsibilities of secretaries, senior executives and the Secretaries Board

• the Members of Parliament Staffing Act and associated accountability arrangements.

This inquiry should consider Thodey’s recommendations and other options, and be asked to come up with its own concrete recommendations.

– ref. Report on public service overhaul a good start, but parliamentary inquiry is needed – http://theconversation.com/report-on-public-service-overhaul-a-good-start-but-parliamentary-inquiry-is-needed-127602

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katinka van de Ven, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Rural Criminology, HASSE, University of New England & Visiting Fellow, Drug Policy Modelling Program, SPRC, University of New South Wales, University of New England

Rural Australians are more likely than their city counterparts to drink alcohol at harmful levels. They’re also higher consumers of cannabis, ice and the prescription opioids oxycodone and fentanyl.

Drug-related deaths are also rising more rapidly in rural Australia, up 41% since 2008, compared with a 16% increase in major cities over the same period.

Several reports have also shown that the burden of alcohol and other drug use increases with remoteness.

Read more: ‘If you don’t have a beer you’re not a man’ – rural workplaces made more dangerous by drugs and alcohol

Our review of the international literature on rural opioid-related harms, published today, shows it’s not just the higher rates of drug use causing greater harms in rural and remote areas.

It also comes down to specific features of rural communities including poorer access to treatment and harm-reduction programs, and more conditions that promote alcohol and other drug use, such as economic hardship.

Our research focused on opioids, but the findings hold for other types of illicit drug use and alcohol abuse.

Why rural people suffer greater harms

Living in rural and remote areas shapes the risk of harm from opioids through four key influences:

1. economic conditions – many rural areas have experienced economic decline through the loss of manufacturing and other industries. This causes high levels of economic distress among some residents, particularly due to job losses

2. physical conditions – rural areas often lack infrastructure and public transport. Those who need alcohol and other drug services often have to travel greater distances for treatment. There are also fewer recreational activities, especially for young people

3. social conditions – the use of drugs as a recreational activity was linked with particular sub-cultures in rural areas. In small towns, a lack of anonymity and stigmatisation of people who use opioids can lead to people avoid seeking treatment. People in rural areas may also lack knowledge about treatment options or even what constitutes risky behaviour

4. policy conditions – rural areas often have limited coverage and availability of harm-reduction schemes such as needle and syringe programs, and residential and outpatient rehabilitation programs.

While a number of the above factors also apply to urban areas, rural environments have distinct, and often overlapping, physical, social, policy and economic features.

Invest in treatment facilities to reduce overdoses

Access to treatment and harm-reduction services are crucial to preventing drug-related harms, and in particular, overdose deaths.

One study found overdose rates tended to be higher in rural and remote areas where there was limited access to alcohol and other drug treatment services.

Read more: You don’t have to go off the grid to get treatment for drug dependence

Where rural treatment facilities and harm-reduction services operate, they tend to employ less qualified and experienced staff and have greater difficulties retaining specialised and high-quality staff.

The challenge of finding suitable treatment in rural and remote areas is magnified by poor infrastructure and costly and limited public transport options in these areas.

We’ve known for several decades that demand for alcohol and other drug support and treatment services is high and increasing in rural communities. But these services are still under‐resourced.

We need urgent government action, including sufficient funds, to improve service delivery.

Video services also have a role

While distance makes service delivery difficult, tele-health and tele-counselling may also help overcome some of these barriers.

Tele-health is where health services are delivered via live video-conferencing, while tele-counselling is a mental health service performed via phone or a secure video.

Technology can also help deal with concerns surrounding confidentiality in tight-knit communities. It allows people to receive drug and alcohol services from any location, including their home, as opposed to physically entering a drug treatment facility. This avoids the risk of being recognised by others and stigmatised as a person who uses drugs.

However, in some cases, tele-health will not replace physical services. Clean needles and syringes, for example, or drugs to prevent overdose (naloxone), require adequate funding and people on the ground to deliver them.

Read more: Weekly Dose: Naloxone, how to save a life from opioid overdose

Policymakers must also attend to the economic, physical, social and policy conditions which are shaping the risk of alcohol and other drug use in in rural communities. This might include:

• supporting more economic opportunities and recreational activities for young people

• investing in public transport

• providing adequate funding to attract and retain high-quality drug and alcohol workers.

These measures would help reduce some of the burden of drug and alcohol-related harm being borne by our rural communities.

Read more: Investing in rural health brings dollar returns to local economies (and improves health)

– ref. As drug deaths rise in rural Australia, we must do more to prevent overdoses – http://theconversation.com/as-drug-deaths-rise-in-rural-australia-we-must-do-more-to-prevent-overdoses-128229

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laurien Beane, Course Coordinator, Queensland Undergraduate Early Childhood, Australian Catholic University

Friendship is critical to a young person’s development. Recent research showed teenagers with just one close friend were better able to bounce back from stress than teenagers without one.

But we also know about the high prevalence of bullying in schools and may have, ourselves, had a negative early friendship that has affected us well into adulthood.

So, if you suspect your child – whether they are in early childhood education and care, primary or secondary school – has a questionable friend, here are some tips on how to deal with it.

Early Childhood (birth to five years)

Early childhood education and care centres enrol children from birth to five years old. One of the learning outcomes of the governing Early Years Learning Framework is to teach and assess if children can “learn to interact in relation to others with care, empathy and respect”.

Educators work to ensure interactions with your child, and the other child, meet the learning outcomes.

Educators in childcare centres are legally required to take regular written observations to record, interpret, analyse and plan the next steps in children’s learning journeys.

These written records are of interactions between individual children, and in small and large groups of children. These should be available for viewing and consultation by parents and caregivers.

You can request educators to keep you updated on interactions your child has with friends. This includes positive, neutral and negative interactions as they are all part of your child’s social development.

Read more: Childhood shyness: when is it normal and when is it cause for concern?

When children are young, they may not yet have the communication skills to explain their feelings. Instead, they may bite or hit another child. Some young children will never go through this stage, and others may take a little while to develop the skills to use their words for positive communication.

If your child comes home with bite marks, or you are regularly receiving incident reports about these types of interactions with the same child, this might signal an undesirable friendship.

You could make an appointment with the centre director to collaborate on possible changes. They may be able to provide support staff in the room at certain times.

The centre may also help you to make a plan to relocate to another room in the centre. Usually this means moving up to the next room with a slightly older age group, when there is a space. – Laurien Beane

Primary school

Peers play a key role in a child’s cognitive, social and emotional development at primary school. These influences can be both positive and negative.

Unhealthy friendships involve a breach of trust or damage to someone’s well-being. Some signs your primary-aged child may be dealing with a challenging friend is if:

• the person lies to your child on a regular basis

• they change best friend status depending on their mood for the day

• they control who your child can play with, which clothes they can wear or which interests they can have

• they bully your child through social exclusion, verbal put downs, rumour-spreading and/or physical intimidation

• they encourage or pressure your child to participate in antisocial or risky behaviours

• you have noticed a decline in your child’s self-esteem and overall well-being

• you have noticed an increase in withdrawn or aggressive behaviour in your child.

Research shows children are less likely to display antisocial or risky behaviour when their parents are aware of their friendship network. Parental monitoring and supervision can also decrease socialisation with these unhealthy peers.

But overly intrusive parenting can undermine a child’s autonomy. This could make the child more aggressive or rebellious and increase their socialising with unhealthy peers.

Young people are more likely to disclose peer issues to their parents if you:

• respond with empathetic advice based on lessons you learnt in your own life (“I understand how you might be feeling. When I was your age something similar happened to me […] I realised a true friend wouldn’t want me to hurt myself just because they thought it was funny. So I decided to make some new friends”)

• involve them in the problem-solving process by asking them to consider the options and potential consequences (“What do you think might happen if you stay friends with Sally and she keeps daring you to do XYZ? How could this hurt you or other people? What are some things you could do to protect yourself?”). Allow them to make their own decision.

If open discussion and collaboration in solving the problem doesn’t work, or it doesn’t have a positive result, it may be necessary for parents to intervene.

Subtle intervention could involve limiting your child’s availability by filling in weekends and afternoons with activities like visiting relatives. Eventually, this distance may enable the friendship to fade or run its course in a less confronting way.

Read more: Making friends in primary school can be tricky. Here’s how parents and teachers can help

Direct intervention may involve banning contact with the friend, even if this means relocating to a different school or area. This may seem drastic but it may be a necessary course to protect your child’s well-being.

Research shows associations with unhealthy or bullying peers as a child can have serious long-term effects like lowering academic self-esteem while increasing the chance of poor physical and mental health and risky behaviours (including substance abuse and unprotected sex into adulthood.

Counselling may also be required to help the child work through grief, rebuild self-esteem and seek healthier friendships. – Natasha Wardman

Read more: Making friends in primary school can be tricky. Here’s how parents and teachers can help

High school

Friendships influence a young person’s development. Happy and healthy relationships between young people can make the transition from primary to secondary school more successful and help shape future trajectories beyond school, even future economic success.

If you are worried your teenager is struggling with a challenging friendship, there are some ways you can help.

Research shows expressions of love and care, even if they are received with repulsion, will likely enhance your teen’s self-esteem and capacity for dealing with difficult friendships.

Saying “I love you” on a regular basis and showing physical affection can be a good habit to establish.

Read more: Teens with at least one close friend can better cope with stress than those without

Research also shows parents remain the most significant influence through the teenage years. Parents might consider talking with their kids about what the family values and whether those values might align with the behaviours and actions of friends.

For example, if you are concerned about what your child’s friend said about someone on social media, you might ask your child questions such as:

• “Is that what you would say on social media about others?”

• “Do those words reflect the person you want to be?”

• “Is this friendship going to bring out the best in you?”

Parents should also be wary of the dangers of overprotective parenting.

Usually, excessive supervision or intrusion in teenagers’ lives does not give them the chance to handle difficult situations competently.

It is usually a good idea to give teenagers some freedom in their decision-making and responsibilities.

You may wish to:

• encourage positive friendships. If you know friends who are a good influence on your teenager, try to make opportunities for those friendships to develop

• talk about the pros and cons of different friendships. Sometimes parents might use their own friendships as examples. Let your teenager know how you manage and support your friendships and why you manage them in different ways

• talk about the real consequences of friendships. Positive friendships can result in anything between good fun and deep development. Harmful friendships have the potential to result in sadness, confusion and stress, with the possibility of life-changing unwanted consequences.

A calm, adult-like dialogue and modelling good behaviours are more likely to elicit an adult-like response from your teenager than forcing them to do something against their will. This is especially true for the choices they make in forming friendships. – Michael Chambers

– ref. From childcare to high school – what to do if you don’t like your kid’s friend – http://theconversation.com/from-childcare-to-high-school-what-to-do-if-you-dont-like-your-kids-friend-126193