Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Miller, Professor of Violence Prevention and Addiction Studies, Deakin University

Over recent weeks, the alcohol industry has been drumming up media discussion around Australia’s new drinking guidelines.

Australia’s guidelines on alcohol consumption are under ongoing review by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with new draft guidelines expected to be released in November.

The alcohol industry has labelled the current guidelines (two standard drinks per day and four in any heavy episode of drinking) as harsh, and voiced concern the guidelines may be tightened further.

Read more: Politicians who become lobbyists can be bad for Australians’ health

The global alcohol industry has been increasingly proactive in trying to undermine the ever-improving science on the harms associated with the product they make money from manufacturing, promoting and selling.

This is somewhat unsurprising given the industry would be significantly less profitable if we all drank responsibly.

Drinking guidelines

Panels of scientists develop drinking guidelines around the world by assessing the best and most up-to-date evidence on alcohol and health, and determining consumption levels which might put people at risk.

They then provide the information to health professionals and the public to allow people to make informed decisions about consumption. The guidelines are neither imposed nor legislated.

The current 2009 Australian guidelines recommend healthy adults should drink no more than two standard drinks per day to reduce their lifetime risk of alcohol-related disease or injury. They recommend no more than four standard drinks on one occasion to reduce a person’s risk of injury and death.

So how are the industry players trying to protect our drinking culture from such “harsh” guidelines?

Alcohol Beverages Australia: who they are and what they’re claiming

Alcohol Beverages Australia (ABA) is an industry body for global alcohol producers and retailers, including Asahi Brewers from Japan, Diageo Spirits from the UK, Pernod Ricard from France, Coca-Cola Amatil from the USA, and many others. Bringing together multiple industry groups to lobby government was a key strategy developed by the tobacco industry.

The NHMRC review of Australia’s drinking guidelines was open to public submissions on the health effects of alcohol consumption until January 2017. At this time, the ABA submitted a report claiming drinking alcohol carries health benefits including a reduced risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. They requested the review take this into account in drafting any new guidelines.

In their communications with the media this month, the ABA resurfaced their 2017 submission to the process. It seems they have not updated the information to reflect the latest evidence.

Read more: Ten reasons some of us should cut back on alcohol

The most up-to-date evidence has shown previous research was substantially flawed in terms of the relationship between alcohol consumption and heart disease, blood pressure, breast cancer and overall mortality.

We know consuming any type of alcohol increases the risk of developing cancer of the bowel, mouth, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus, liver and breast. The World Health Organisation has classified alcohol as a class 1 carcinogen, along with asbestos and tobacco, for decades.

Any health benefits the ABA demonstrated evidence for is outweighed by the risks.

Alongside claiming the benefits of drinking alcohol need to be considered, to make their case, the ABA have compared drinking guidelines across different countries. In doing so, they are seeking to highlight Australia’s guidelines are ‘stricter’ than those of most other countries.

In making sense of these figures, the difference in drink driving levels is worth considering. It takes the average male four standard drinks to reach 0.05 in two hours and around seven standard drinks to reach 0.08. This is a big difference for most of us.

Those countries with 0.08mg of alcohol per L of blood as the legal limit are willing to accept more than triple the risk of having a car accident than Australia’s 0.05.

We need to ask whether these are countries whose health and safety models we want to follow.

Read more: Health check: is moderate drinking good for me?

This is not a new problem

The industry is using language like “harsh” and “strict” to ferment public opposition to any tightened guidelines.

This spin strategy is predictable. The alcohol industry has been fighting for many decades to preserve profits over public safety, disregarding consumers’ rights to know the contents of their products, and the harms associated.

They fought against the 0.05 drink driving limit in the 1950s, and have successfully stopped Australian governments telling us about the cancer risk associated with alcohol consumption. For example, while policymakers have proposed warning labels with information about cancer risk be placed on alcoholic drinks, this is yet to eventuate.

The ABA is currently resisting a push to explicitly warn consumers drinking is harmful to unborn babies by means of mandatory labelling on all alcohol containers, suggesting it’s “too much information”.

These examples show how the industry continues to actively muddy efforts to educate the public of the harms of alcohol consumption.

Read more: Alcohol increases cancer risk, but don’t trust the booze industry to give you the facts straight

Notably, we’ve seen all of this before, particularly in the tobacco industry, or “big tobacco”, which has previously employed strategies to minimise health concerns and delay effective legislation.

So it’s hard not to wonder if the ABA are worried about the bottom line of their corporate masters, and therefore trying to influence deliberations through a media campaign, similar to those previously used by the tobacco industry.

– ref. How big alcohol is trying to fool us into thinking drinking is safer than it really is – http://theconversation.com/how-big-alcohol-is-trying-to-fool-us-into-thinking-drinking-is-safer-than-it-really-is-125309

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ronald F Pol, Senior researcher NZ, La Trobe University

Money laundering rarely gets as literal as the case in Thailand last week, where police raided homes of a ring suspected of laundering a billion baht (about A$48 million) of drug proceeds and found millions stashed in a washing machine.

Stories about money laundering, and efforts to prevent it, are rife.

In just the past week there were reports about Swiss bank UBS agreeing to pay a €10 million (about A$16 million) penalty to end an Italian money laundering case; a New Zealand company, Jin Yuan Finance, being fined NZ$4 million (about A$3.7 million) for not complying with anti-money laundering laws; and calls in Australia for a royal commission after leaked CCTV footage from Melbourne’s Crown Casino showed a man in a tracksuit exchanging “bricks of cash” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for gaming chips in one of the casino’s high-roller rooms.

Read more: The Crown allegations show the repeated failures of our gambling regulators

In the latter case, Crown Casino defended itself on the basis of having a “comprehensive” Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing program overseen by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC). But federal parliamentarian Andrew Wilkie called the situation a catastrophic “multinational, multi-jurisdictional and multi-agency” failure by politicians, state regulators, police and AUSTRAC.

He’s right, at least in part.

The deeper problem isn’t that national anti-money laundering laws are being flouted. It’s that the global anti-money laundering system is a failed experiment.

We need to have an honest conversation about what’s wrong with it, including the possibility that much of it is a waste of time, and some of it might be doing more harm than good.

99% design failure

Don’t get me wrong: money laundering controls do good things too. Suspicious transactions trigger alerts, offenders are arrested and assets seized.

But the amount of criminal funds intercepted is scarcely a drop in the bucket. The system is designed to catch some criminals. It has almost no impact on crime.

The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has estimated that just 0.2% of the proceeds of crime are seized. My update of the UN’s estimate (in research not yet published) suggests the figure might now be 0.1% or less. Either way, in practical terms the “success rate” of money laundering controls is scarcely an accounting rounding error in criminal accounts.

There are many reasons for anti-money laundering’s failure, but a big problem is the emphasis on activity and effort rather than results. It’s the same mindset that focuses on the number of hours spent at work rather than what’s achieved, or how many speeding tickets are issued instead of whether harm from accidents is reduced.

Reforms to the global anti-money laundering system, rolled out from 2014, were meant to address this problem. They didn’t. Though the language of “outcomes” and “effectiveness” was used, it meant something different to the impact and effect of regulations on reducing crime and its harms.

In other words, the new measures were mislabelled “outcomes”. They continued to measure effort and activity, such as the number of money laundering prosecutions, instead of the impact (if any) on crime. (I explain this in detail in a paper in the Journal of Money Laundering Control, freely available until January 2020).

Frenetic activity

Frenetic compliance activity helps obscure the harsh reality of poor results. Casinos and banks conform to complex rules designed like a giant stack of colanders to catch water, continually adding new ones to “fix gaps”. New “compliance solutions” doggedly rake over the same ground covered by those that catch less than 1% of transactions.

The upshot is that companies can show they comply with anti-money laundering laws (Crown’s response is straight out of the compliance textbook) and countries can show they comply with international standards.

But does it stop crime? Who knows? The system isn’t designed to demonstrate its impact on crime. Jin Yuan Finance, for example, was fined because it breached anti-money laundering laws, not because there was necessarily laundering or any other crime.

A criminal mastermind given the chance to rewrite anti-money laundering rules might just keep what we have, on the basis it keeps the authorities ineffectually busy.

Good intentions and ‘voluntary coercion’

The problems with the system can be traced to the rushed and flawed way it was set up.

The modern anti-money laundering experiment started in 1989, at a G7 summit in Paris. The seven big industrialised nations bypassed treaty-based consensus to establish a “Financial Action Task Force” to help prevent drug trafficking. The task force – known as FATF – later targeted money laundering associated with other profit-motivated crimes and terrorism financing.

After a sluggish start, with few nations signing up to its compliance model, FATF made an offer governments couldn’t refuse – ironically echoing a famous line from The Godfather.

FATF rated countries’ anti-money laundering regimes and issued “black lists” and “grey lists” publicly naming those not meeting its “recommendations”. Banks did the rest. Treating the ratings and lists as a proxy for risk, access to the financial system became difficult for many countries. FATF’s intention (in its own words) was to “pressure” countries to comply, “to maintain their position in the global economy”.

Risking exclusion from financial markets, 205 countries and jurisdictions “voluntarily” joined the anti-money laundering movement. The system depends on a set of self-declared “best-practice” standards. This means each national anti-money laundering regime reflects the flaws of the international standard.

Read more: With increased anti-money laundering measures, banks are shutting out women

At the UN General Assembly last month, leaders from small and large countries railed against the perceived unfairness and damage caused by blacklists and financial sanctions.

Such protests might be more easily dismissed as self-serving if the anti-money laundering system worked. But it doesn’t.

Complicated laws, armies of regulators and costly compliance tasks give the comfort of activity and feeling of security, but they don’t make us safe from serious crime and terrorism. To resolve it, we must frankly confront the reality of its failure.

– ref. A criminal asked to design anti-money laundering laws would probably keep our current ones – http://theconversation.com/a-criminal-asked-to-design-anti-money-laundering-laws-would-probably-keep-our-current-ones-125143

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wilfred Wang, Lecturer, Communications & Media Studies, Monash University

The Australian society has changed significantly since cemeteries in Victoria were planned and designed 150 years ago. But there haven’t been any major redevelopment or review of the community’s changing requirements for what happens to our bodies when we die.

The Australian population is ageing, with around 15% of Australians aged 65 and over in 2017. About a third of older people in Australia were born overseas, with most coming from a non-English speaking background.

Read more: Buried beneath the trees: a plan to solve our shortage of cemetery space

This has implications for our rituals for death and memorialisation, as well as for existing and future cemeteries.

In a new collaborative research project taken from survey responses and in-depth interviews with members of different communities, we found cemeteries have ongoing significance to Australians, although its meaning and function are changing.

More than half of the 380 survey respondents said they still visit a cemetery once a year or more, and 23% visit once a month or more. But the interview data reveal a more complex and dynamic picture.

We found people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities tend to visit the cemetery more than their Anglo counterparts, and prefered to be memorialised in cemeteries to preserve a sense of belonging.

Anglo-Australians, on the other hand, generally prefer to be cremated and often choose to scatter ashes in places other than a cemetery. In one participant’s case, that meant scattering remains in a French vinyard, an island volcano and their local beach.

Calling Australia home

The cemetery remains an important site of cultural ritualisation and expression to most CALD interviewees.

Interviewees from the CALD communities – especially those from an Asian cultural background – had positive experiences with cemeteries in Australia. When comparing Australian cemeteries with those in Malaysia, Jenny (60s, Malaysian Chinese) said:

In Malaysia, the cemeteries are not like this […] they are all overgrown […] and we were taught that graves are places where the gangsters will hide out, the thieves will hide out, people will come and rob you, so we don’t go.

The perceptions that Australian cemeteries are more open, greener, better managed, more accessible, and not as scary as those in their original countries made many Asian migrants felt more willing to visit a cemetery here.

Besides the aesthetic contrast, for many CALD interviewees, the cemetery offers a space that embraces their culture and gives them a sense of belonging in Australia.

Tony (30s, Tongan) would love to have a traditional Tongan way of burial in Australia, which involves bone picking (removing the bones from the grave), and grave re-using for future generations. These traditions strengthen their inter-generational connections.

Australian regulations mean these ritual practices are not possible here. But Tony was prepared to make a compromise.

Instead of following the ritual, he insisted on being buried in Australia because his children and family live in Australia. The inter-generational connections can prevail here. They call Australia home.

Read more: Housing the dead: what happens when a city runs out of space?

Participants from the CALD communities generally shared Tony’s idea. They believed having a physical place in Australia (either a grave or a plot for the ashes) gave them a sense of belonging and settlement for themselves and their families.

A library of local history, not a ‘resting place’

On the other hand, people from an Anglo-cultural background no longer see cemeteries as just a space for memorialisation and mourning. From our interviews, many see it as a “library” or a “depository” of the local history and family genealogy.

Cemetery visits, in this sense, contrast between fulfilling one’s cultural duty of memorialisation, and obtaining historical knowledge for self-learning, reflection, and development.

Alfred’s (50s, Anglo-Australian) cemetery visits had been driven by his interest in his family history. Family history can give someone “an explanation” about the kind of person they are, and:

how the attitudes were passed on to the next generation so you can learn a tremendous amount, multi-generation through a family history search.

Yet, while many Anglo interview participants appreciated the historical and cultural values of the cemetery, they became less enthusiastic when considering the cemetery as their “resting places”.

We believe this corresponds with the nationwide trend since 2012 of more Australians preferring cremation to traditional full-body burial.

We found 56% of our survey respondents preferred cremation, 32% indicated preference for a ground burial and 12% were undecided.

In any case, our research indicated many people prefer to be memorialised at a place or site that’s meaningful. This might include their favourite beach or the park where they spent time with their children, rather than in a cemetery, which is outside their social, family spaces.

Read more: During the holidays, giving gifts to the dead can help you cope with grief

Tina (50s, Anglo-Australian) embarked on a global journey to fulfil her late husband’s wishes as he wanted his cremation remains (called cremains) scattered in three locations he loved: a vinyard in Burgundy, France, a volcano in Reunion Island, and the family’s local beach in Williamstown, Melbourne. Tina did all three.

Planning your body disposal

More people have started pre-planning what happens to their body when they die. The quantitative data shows 64% of people have already discussed their end of life-related wishes with close friends or family, and 11% have pre-paid for a funeral service.

In an earlier study, we found Chinese Australians, for example, tended to pre-purchase their funeral services and grave sites before they died.

As previously mentioned, this might enhance their sense of cultural belonging in Australia.

On the other hand, people from an Anglo cultural background would “talk about it”, but few actually “lock things in”.

Interviews from the present study revealed people with an Anglo cultural background had a strong desire of “flexibility”. Many didn’t wish to decide at the time of their interview, as they were still exploring possibilities and opportunities outside the conventional modes of body disposal and memorialisation.

Read more: Life after death: Americans are embracing new ways to leave their remains

In other words, the idea of being memorialised outside the cemetery was an emerging rather than established idea.

Understanding the contemporary and future funeral needs of the culturally diverse Australian population is important to policy makers, as well as the cemetery and funeral industries.

With increasingly limited access to usable land suitable for burial practices – particularly in metropolitan areas – planning must consider the funeral rites of the ageing population and incoming migrant groups. They are likely to make end of life choices in the coming decades.

– ref. Migrant communities keep our cemeteries alive as more Anglo-Australians turn to cremation – http://theconversation.com/migrant-communities-keep-our-cemeteries-alive-as-more-anglo-australians-turn-to-cremation-124180

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine Shaw, Conservation Biologist, The University of Queensland

This year, five of the seven Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science were awarded to women. While this is a welcome development, the great majority of awards and prizes for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in Australia still go to men.

Our research has identified some of the key barriers to greater diversity among prize recipients and found ways those barriers can be removed.

Why awards aren’t just awards

In STEM, prizes and awards can make careers. They inform recruitment, probation reviews, promotions and grant success.

Yet STEM award recipients in Australia generally do not represent the diversity of the broader Australian STEM population. This contributes to slower career progression of people from under-represented groups, and means less diverse visible role models for future generations of STEM professionals.

Across current prominent award and prize schemes in Australian STEM, men dominate, even in recent years.

This imbalance is less pronounced among early career prizes, but grows over time.

To better understand the causes of this lack of diversity, we ran a series of facilitated workshops with early and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) working in STEM in Australia to investigate their attitudes to awards and prize schemes. We identified a number of barriers and discussed how they might be overcome.

Improving diversity

The first step is to identify where diversity is restricted.

A lack of diversity in award recipients may reflect the pool of applicants, which could be due to a lack of diversity within the discipline itself and/or a failure to reach all eligible people when promoting the award.

Read more: Take it from us: here’s what we need in an ambassador for women in science

Applications should at least reflect the proportion of women and minority groups within the eligible cohort. As a starting point, it has been proposed that awards should aim for at least 30% of applicants to consist of women and members of minority groups.

Alternatively, if applicants are diverse but recipients are not, it suggests a failing in how winners are chosen (such as the selection criteria, how success is measured, or how decisions are reviewed).

Identifying the barriers

Reach

People who don’t know about an award can’t apply for it, so reaching the whole target audience is vital. Prizes and awards – like other key elements in career progression such as job openings, funding schemes and opportunities for collaboration or promotion – are often discussed via informal networks. But these networks themselves often have limited diversity.

Time

Applications can be time-consuming, and women in STEM often have additional time pressures and responsibilities. What’s more, women are more likely to work part-time, which means they have less time to devote to seemingly less essential tasks like award applications. Women in STEM are also more likely to be expected to act as role models and mentors and participate in committees and outreach activities.

Streamlined application forms can cut the time involved. Current automated methods of collecting information (such as Expert Connect) could be utilised more efficiently. Submission dates for award applications should not coincide with dates for major grant or funding applications. In Australia, major grant rounds usually fall in the period of December to March.

Advertising

Many awards and prizes are named after pioneers within the discipline – often older white men – and their names and images are used in advertising. This can discourage applicants who may feel they don’t “fit” with the scheme.

One way to address this is to showcase mentors and champions in the advertising campaign to demystify the application process, particularly if past winners are diverse. Organisations should encourage senior scientists and past award recipients to act as mentors and actively seek out junior scientists to apply.

Application process

The common requirement for third-party nominations, rather than self-applications, and referees’ letters, can also be significant barriers. Another is the way age and career interruptions are treated.

To address these barriers, awards can take simple steps like only asking for referees’ reports from short-listed applicants and including a standard field for career interruptions that all applicants need to fill in.

Selection process

Traditional metrics such as numbers of publications, citations and citation indices can be rigid and exclude scientists with diverse career paths, and also disadvantage interdisciplinary researchers and those with career interruptions.

There are a number of ways to remove to this barrier.

Read more: Women still find it tough to reach the top in science

Diverse selection panels can limit bias and unconscious bias. Organisations should be transparent, disclosing the selection criteria and the identities of panel members. Criteria should include non-traditional metrics including research impact, outreach activities, industry engagement, patents, policy, software, mentorship, supervision, teaching, advocacy and committee service.

It’s clear a scientist’s success contributes to further success. Awards lead to more awards.

Too often, an institution will choose a single woman to promote for awards and honours and feel they’ve done their bit for diversity. Instead, institutions should look more broadly at their pool of potential applicants.

Sector-wide change is required to increase diversity among award and prize recipients. Lack of diversity even in smaller prizes can impact other levels, which then perpetuates the lack of diversity across the STEM sector.

– ref. Science prizes are still a boys’ club. Here’s how we can change that – http://theconversation.com/science-prizes-are-still-a-boys-club-heres-how-we-can-change-that-124995

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

Scott Morrison seized the opportunity of his Jakarta weekend visit for Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s inauguration to obtain a meeting with Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan.

Morrison told a news conference he had come out of the discussion “pleased that there is, I think, a very clear understanding of where Australia is coming from, our commitment to the relationship”.

“It was a chat that we had very much in the spirit of the partnership that we have, and very much inoculated from all of the assessments that are made about the relationship,” he said.

The meeting comes after Morrison’s description, while in the United States, of China as a “developed” economy, which China rejects. More generally, the relationship between the two countries has been very cool, with tensions on several fronts including Australia’s strong legislative stand against Chinese interference.

The discussion with Wang did not see an invitation for Morrison to visit China. The Prime Minister said Wang was an envoy of President Xi Jinping and not in a position to issue any invitation.

Wang, speaking at the start of their discussion, made it clear Australia had sought the meeting and Xi had given his approval for it. The discussion went for almost double the half hour scheduled.

Read more: Define the boundaries in new phase of Australia-China relationship: Wong

Morrison told reporters he’d made the point “which was well received, that Australia is an independent, sovereign nation.

“Yes, we are very much proud of our Western liberal democratic tradition, our open economy and our engagement with the rest of the world and that gives us a set of eyes that look into the world very much from our perspective.”

But he had also stressed “that we will never feel corralled into any sort of binary assessment of these relationships” – assessments that said “pro-United States or pro-China”.

Meanwhile a Lowy Institute report, released Monday, warns that without an increase in its total aid budget Australia could be increasingly at a strategic disadvantage in the Pacific.

The research, which focuses on China’s expanding role there, concludes that so far “China has not been engaged in such problematic debt practices in the Pacific as to justify accusations of debt trap diplomacy”. But the scale of its lending and recipient countries’ lack of strong mechanisms to protect their debt sustainability mean there are clear risks, the paper says.

In contrast, Australia’s infrastructure lending plans contain rules to protect the sustainability of borrowing countries.

Read more: Vital Signs: Why can’t Australia be friends with both US and China?

Making a strong call for a rethink of the overall Australian aid budget, the paper argues: “Today, Australia’s strategic goal of doing more in the Pacific is boxed in by a limited aid budget, the desire to avoid cutting back on other important development priorities (such as health and education, or aid to countries outside the Pacific), and the need to avoid causing debt sustainability problems by relying too heavily on non-concessional lending.

“If Australia want to do more, one of these constraints needs to be relaxed. Increasing the overall aid budget would be the most desirable option,” the paper says.

Also, “China might itself begin providing substantially more grant financing in the Pacific. In that case, a stagnant aid budget would increasingly place Australia at a geostrategic disadvantage”.

The paper, titled “Ocean of debt? Belt and Road and debt diplomacy in the Pacific”, has been prepared by Roland Rajah, the head of the Institute’s international economy program, Alexandre Dayant, and Jonathan Pryke, the head of Lowy’s Pacific Islands program.

The work draws on data from the Institute’s Pacific Aid Map, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank to examine China’s development finance in the Pacific.

It says China is the single largest creditor in Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu, although only in Tonga does it account for more than half outstanding debt. “With the important exception of Tonga, China is currently not a dominant creditor in the Pacific.”

But the analysis finds: “there are significant risks of future debt sustainability problems under a business-as-usual scenario for bilateral Chinese lending”, pointing in particular to the situations of Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

“China will therefore need to reconfigure its approach significantly if it wants to disprove the debt trap accusations made by its critics,” the paper says, while noting it has taken some steps in this direction.

“Protecting debt sustainability in Pacific countries will also require Australian loans to be as concessional as possible, given elevated debt risks and the often limited economic viability of many infrastructure projects in the Pacific,” the paper says.

The competition among major powers gives Pacific countries an opportunity to press for advantageous financing and better project management, it says.

For their part external players should avoid “geopolitically-driven” assistance aimed at “short-term wins” at the expense of the reforms and improved governance the countries need.

– ref. Morrison says China knows ‘where Australia is coming from’, after meeting Chinese vice-president – http://theconversation.com/morrison-says-china-knows-where-australia-is-coming-from-after-meeting-chinese-vice-president-125553

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

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, people around the world were regularly reassured by election experts that Donald Trump was too outrageous to be elected president.

Reflecting this conventional wisdom, Hilary Clinton campaign’s central message seemed to be: “seriously?”.

In other words, we were constantly told that Trump was too offensive, ignorant and dangerous to be chosen to lead the US. But this political interpretation tended to miss how American popular culture had created the conditions for a character like Trump to upend the mannered and formulaic presidential selection process.

In many ways, the Trump campaign was politics catching up with popular culture.

Trump’s embrace of the worst parts of pop culture

In my new book, Anti-Americanism and American Exceptionalism, I argue that it is a mistake to see Trump as unique or his success as something that could only occur in America.

Trump-like behaviour is all around us. His narcissism, bullying, misogyny, racism, populism and tendency to play the victim is all too commonplace – and these are certainly not just American problems.

What is exceptional is that American politics tends to be more pretentious and has a greater sense of self-importance than politics elsewhere.

Read more: How the impeachment inquiry might affect Trump’s 2020 re-election chances

Trump snubbed the pretentiousness and faux politeness of the US political system with a devil-may-care attitude, and in so doing made presidential politics more like Westminster parliamentary politics with its name-calling and bravado.

Trump has also taken the worst lessons from popular culture and used them to his advantage.

He turned the second presidential debate, for instance, into a version of The Jerry Springer Show by inviting three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to sit in the audience.

Over 4,000 episodes, Springer had used traumatic cases like these to entertain and distract daytime television viewers. This is far from just an American ploy as radio shock-jocks like Alan Jones in Australia are well-practised at using victims for their own purposes.

In the wake of the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump drew from Springer’s playbook and turned one of the most important testing grounds in American politics into a crass reality television drama. By inviting Clinton’s accusers, his intention was to make this claim: Hillary’s husband is worse than I am.

Hardly caring to answer the serious questions posed during the debate, Trump also ventured that Hillary Clinton “would be in jail” if he was president, echoing the notorious “lock her up” chants at his rallies.

This mocking campaign style – which has continued throughout his presidency – has had real and grave consequences. However, it was far more in touch with the spirit of the times than is usually admitted.

Read more: 8 reasons why impeaching Donald Trump is a big risk for the Democrats (and 3 reasons why it’s not)

A symptom of widespread cultural malaise

Trump’s constant self-promotion and trolling of opponents is not only utterly familiar, it’s emblematic of narcissistic 21st century culture. He is certainly more culturally familiar than Hillary Clinton with her lifelong dedication to public service and understanding of complex public policy issues.

The Trump phenomenon is politics subsumed by popular culture. During the 2016 campaign, he lived by the entertainment industry maxim that you can get away with almost anything as long as you’re not boring.

Part of the media’s watchdog role relies on accountability, ethics and the law being central to politics. However, this understanding is undermined when politics is reduced to a popularity contest and increasingly resembles the anything-goes ethos of popular culture.

If we view Trump as a product of popular culture, then he is clearly a symptom of a cultural malaise rather than a radical departure from it.

Given this, it has been intriguing to watch The New York Times, CNN and other traditional media outlets react with endless shock and horror to Trump, as if they had never seen anything like him.

One of the other many curiosities of the Trump era is that the oldest person ever to be elected US president quickly mastered the dark arts of Twitter and has strong appeal with a tech-savvy male youth subculture, which has made shock, conspiracies, misogyny, racism, trolling and bullying supposedly funny and transgressive.

New information technologies haven’t just fuelled greater understanding in the world – as some of the utopian founders of the internet had hoped – they have also given more power to the obnoxious and ill-informed.

Once you engage with this online culture, it is clear that Trump is part of a disturbingly widespread cultural backlash rather than being a unique phenomenon.

Read more: Is the United States on the brink of a revolution?

One sign of this is how much less critical Trump has been of white nationalists than any president in the post-civil rights era. By delaying and obfuscating his criticisms, he has encouraged those on the alt-right to believe their voices are being heard.

How we got to this sorry place is that the shock culture that pervades right-wing talk radio hosts, Fox News and 4Chan all made Trump’s alt-right presidency possible.

With the next presidential election looming, it is time to take these popular but often insensitive cultural and political developments that helped Trump come to power very seriously. These cultural trends are on the rise and require resistance as they degrade our personal lives and politics culture.

– ref. The Trump presidency should not be shocking. It’s a symptom of our cultural malaise – http://theconversation.com/the-trump-presidency-should-not-be-shocking-its-a-symptom-of-our-cultural-malaise-125054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Leask, Professor, University of Sydney

Your neighbour is telling you about his new baby. He feels nervous about vaccinating, and says he’s considering delaying Lucy’s vaccines.

Your mother’s group is chatting about vaccines. One mother tells the group Jimmy isn’t vaccinated, and she’s using the Immune-Strengthening Diet instead.

In a Facebook parenting group, someone comments we shouldn’t trust pharmaceutical companies because they’re covering up studies showing vaccines cause autism.

These and similar scenarios may sound familiar. So what do you do when you’re faced with someone who questions vaccination? Do you try to convince them to vaccinate? Do you ignore them? Or might something else work?

Read more: Six myths about vaccination – and why they’re wrong

Talking about vaccination can be really difficult. Vaccination touches on strong values, like protection of children, social responsibility, and respect for science.

So, if you’re a vaccination supporter, you may feel perplexed, even angry, when people don’t vaccinate their children. If you’re a parent who has overcome minor worries and vaccinated your child, it can be galling when another parent dismisses vaccination, putting others at risk.

But talking about vaccination can also present pitfalls. Attempting to convince someone with strong views they’re wrong can strengthen their commitment to their position.

Read more: Australians’ attitudes to vaccination are more complex than a simple ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ label

Our work, with a team of researchers, clinicians and the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, shows the best way to respond depends on the situation. Your approach will be very different with a person who has fixed negative views on vaccination, compared with someone who is cautious. How you respond also depends on what is most important in your relationship.

Here are some options.

1. Don’t go there

This approach is handy if you encounter a person with fixed beliefs. They may say, “I’ve done my research.”

Your automatic response may be to counter their claims, saying “The science is clear. Vaccinate your kids.”

But if the relationship with this person isn’t important to you, or their emphatic pronouncements are unlikely to do harm, then little is gained by engaging. People with fixed beliefs don’t budge much.

Read more: A short history of vaccine objection, vaccine cults and conspiracy theories

You may encounter active opposition to vaccination on social media. A small number of anti-vaccination activists colonise online forums.

So avoid protracted conversations. Facebook’s algorithm privileges posts with high engagement, so your interactions may bring them even more attention. Energised by the response, anti-vaccination activists may coordinate and bombard you or your organisation.

This is what happened to US clinic Kids Plus Pediatrics in Pittsburgh. The clinic eventually produced a guidebook on how to handle anti-vaccination attacks.

Increasing the visibility of anti-vaccination posts can have other drawbacks. Onlookers may come to see vaccination as riskier, and vaccine refusal as more popular than it really is (in reality, only about 2% of Australian parents decide not to give their children some or all vaccines).

But countering anti-vaccine views can also bring benefits: it can diminish these negative effects, and affirm vaccination for hesitant onlookers or “fence-sitters”.

So which option is best? If this person’s posts are getting exposure anyway or they are influential, then you may decide that responding is worth the risk. Just keep any interactions brief, factual and polite. Otherwise, don’t go there.

2. Agree to disagree

Agreeing to disagree may be an option when you are with friends and family who hold firm views and whose relationship is important to you.

There could be a family get-together with your cousin who steadfastly rejects vaccination and the topic comes up in conversation. Family members start debating it. With strong views on either side, this could be explosive. Here you could say, “This is a topic we all have strong views about. We could just argue, but I propose that we leave this one alone.”

Discussing vaccination would not change your cousin’s mind. Her views are deeply held. Don’t let arguments get in the way of these relationships.

3. Affirm vaccination and move on

This option can be useful when you want to avoid conflict, but also advocate for vaccination.

Parent group situations might warrant this approach. For example, a couple at your antenatal class declare their plan to delay vaccination. While you might feel annoyed, try to focus on a strategic goal: showing other parents it’s not a group norm to delay vaccination.

You could say, “We are planning to vaccinate our baby. We think it’s really important.” While this probably won’t persuade the couple, it may reduce their influence on others.

4. Listen, affirm and recommend

This approach may be suitable when you are with family and friends who are hesitant about vaccinating. For example, your daughter and son-in-law are hesitant about vaccinating their child — your grandchild.

Read more: Everyone can be an effective advocate for vaccination: here’s how

These relationships may be important to you, and you probably want to encourage them to vaccinate.

We and others recommend several steps:

Understand people’s concerns and motivations

Listen to what people say and ask clarifying questions. This helps you better understand their reasons. Avoid the temptation to jump in, and keep a check on your emotions.

Affirm them as parents

This means acknowledging their concerns, as well as their care as parents. A person who feels respected is more likely to listen to your viewpoint. It’s how we all like to be treated. You could say, “I can see you are trying to do your best.”

Offer to share information

Sharing information means giving factual information relevant to that person, explaining your view, and why you believe it. Use quality information, such as via the World Health Organisation’s Vaccine Safety Net portal. Personalise it: “I believe vaccination is important because …”

Close with a plan

This creates opportunities for future conversations. Some parents review their decisions, such as during a localised outbreak or when the child is older. It’s also good to have an exit strategy because vaccination discussions can go on and on. You might ask, “Can we talk about this again some time?”

Decide how you want to spend your energy

Responding to people who question vaccination can be hard. So be judicious about where you spend your energy.

If you truly want to make a difference, avoid the temptation to reflexively correct what you believe is wrong and getting embroiled in lengthy vaccination debates or games of scientific ping pong.

Jump in without thinking, and you risk wasting your time, affecting relationships with family and friends, or even inadvertently amplifying anti-vaccine views. Instead, assess that person’s position on vaccination, your goals and what is most important in your relationship.

Information for parents who have questions about immunisation is available here.

– ref. 4 ways to talk with vaccine skeptics – http://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-talk-with-vaccine-skeptics-125142

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fenner, PhD Candidate (Equine Training and Welfare), University of Sydney

This weekend saw protests at Caulfield racecourse, following a shocking report last week on the ABC’s 7:30 program on the fate of thousands of racehorses in Australia.

It is a confronting wake-up call for an industry already struggling to maintain its social license to operate.

Dozens of horses were recorded killed at a Queensland abattoir during a single week, some in distressing circumstances. Appalling footage has prompted many to ask how horses that have earned so much money for their breeders and owners end up being slaughtered at abattoirs or knackeries – and why there are so many horses facing this fate.

Read more: Why horse-racing in Australia needs a social licence to operate

The core problems here are enforcement of existing rules, the sheer volume of horses being retired from racing and the difficulty of tracing these horses to ensure proper treatment.

Enforcing existing rules

While there are rules in place to protect retiring racehorses, these rules are obviously neither being met nor enforced. This is a huge problem that needs to be addressed immediately.

There are no mandatory welfare standards for racehorses and so legal protection is limited to the minimal requirements under state based animal welfare legislation. The industry is largely self-governed through state-based racing authorities.

The Australian Racing Board manages horse racing in Australia with each state’s racing authority agreeing to follow, and enforce, the Australian Rules of Racing. These rules state that during their racing careers, horses are not to be euthanised or destroyed unless a vet surgeon has certified in writing that this is necessary on welfare or safety grounds, or otherwise under extreme circumstances and with subsequent vet confirmation.

Different jurisdictions may have different rules for post-career welfare. New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory all require owners or trainers notify their relevant authority when a horse is retired.

Queensland’s racing authority has no specific rules around retiring horses. However the Queensland Racing Integrity Commission, an independent body created in 2016, has guidelines for rehoming retired racehorses that say:

For owners, it is your responsibility to provide for the continued welfare of your horse after retirement.

In New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, regulations also require the seller supply the new owner’s details and indicate the new location meets basic welfare standards – and that horses not be sent to an abattoir, either directly or indirectly.

Under these rules, horse managers and owners are responsible for finding homes for these horses. Such homes may include breeding purposes, equestrian, working, pleasure or companion horse situations, or other options approved by an authority.

In the absence of a coherent national policy for retiring racehorses, it’s not immediately clear which rules are being broken by whom – although the Queensland abattoir in the 7.30 Report received many horses from other states, including NSW. However, it is apparent something is going terribly wrong.

There are more retiring horses than suitable homes

The next problem relates to the sheer number of horses that need homes after racing careers, and the number of suitable homes available. While we don’t have exact numbers, the RSPCA estimates some 800 racehorses retire in Australia each year.

Racing NSW established an Equine Welfare Fund in 2016, which receives 1% of all prize money from Thoroughbred races in NSW, as well as public donations. They suggest owners wanting to re-home horses advertise the animals online, on sites such as Gumtree and Horsezone. They also advise setting a minimum price of at least $500, to “reduce interest from knackeries and abattoirs”.

Racing Victoria also has a welfare fund that receives 1% of prize money in that state.

The problem is that horses are large, potentially dangerous animals and require expert – and expensive – handling and care. When horses are bought by people who lack the expertise, facilities or financial support required for careful re-training the outcome for the horse is poor, and usually results in the torturous journey through the sale yards to the slaughterhouse.

A big risk to welfare is the perceived zero value of the post-racing Thoroughbred. These horses are treated very differently when they are making money.

Tracing the horses

One obvious and immediate solution is more funding to better enforce existing regulations. This could involve cracking down on owners who move horses across state borders to avoid stringent regulations, for example.

But another problem is following up with horses to check their post-racing welfare. If a former racehorse is sold in good faith to a new owner who does not realise the level of care or expense in retraining their new animal to be a riding companion, there is currently no way to ensure the horse is sold on to a more suitable owner.

Advocates are already arguing for a National Horse Traceability Register to prevent beginner riders ending up with potentially dangerous horses. The benefits of a national traceability register include improvements in animal welfare and biosecurity, as well as transparency and integrity in horse trade.

Last week, researchers at the University of Sydney (including one of us) launched a program and app called the Equine Behavior Assessment and Research Questionnaire (E-BARQ). E- BARQ is set up so racehorse breeders and owners around the world can enter data on their horses from birth, and owners and trainers of racehorses can submit results on the same horse on a six-monthly basis.

Read more: Is your horse normal? Now there’s an app for that

E-BARQ will provide rich data to researchers, breeders, owners and trainers on how these horses are adapting to their new environments. We expect it will confirm that measures to assure retiring racehorses’ future welfare need to be implemented at the beginning of their careers, not the end.

– ref. Who’s responsible for the slaughtered ex-racehorses, and what can be done? – http://theconversation.com/whos-responsible-for-the-slaughtered-ex-racehorses-and-what-can-be-done-125551

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Pawson, Associate Director – City Futures – Urban Policy and Strategy, City Futures Research Centre, Housing Policy and Practice, UNSW

Low-income tenants in Australia are increasingly likely to be trapped in rental stress for years. New evidence from the Productivity Commission shows almost half of such “rent-burdened” private tenants are likely to remain stuck in this situation for at least half a decade.

Rental stress is where a low-income tenant faces housing costs that leave them without enough income for food, clothing and other essentials. The scale of the problem – commonly defined as when rent eats up more than 30% of income – is usually presented as a “point in time” or snapshot statistic.

Read more: City share-house rents eat up most of Newstart, leaving less than $100 a week to live on

As the Productivity Commission report reveals, the snapshot number in this situation has increased from 48% of low-income renters in 1995 to 54% in 2018. That’s around 1.5 million people pushed into poverty by high housing costs.

For some, of course, this will be only a temporary problem. On this basis, it is sometimes argued that concerns over Australia’s high rate of rental stress are overstated.

However, the Productivity Commission report, Vulnerable Private Renters: Evidence and Options, highlights longitudinal survey evidence showing that a low-income tenant’s experience of rental stress is increasingly likely to be long-term – not a passing problem. As the commission notes:

[…] a growing number of households find themselves stuck in rental stress.

What is the evidence for this?

This conclusion stems from a comparison of two different tenant cohorts experiencing rental stress as revealed by survey data for 2001 and 2013. Less than a third (31%) of the 2001 cohort remained in stress five years later. But almost half (46%) of the 2013 cohort were.

So, it’s not just that more low-income earners are paying unaffordable rents at a particular point in time. This is increasingly a situation that affected private tenants cannot escape.

Beyond the obvious welfare impacts, recent work argues that excessive rent burdens may also damage human capital and, as a result, reduce economic productivity.

The commission’s findings seem to suggest the ongoing restructuring of Australia’s labour market and housing system is eroding socioeconomic and/or housing mobility. The report notes the significant fall in the numbers who manage to move from renting to owning – from 13.6% of renters in the period 2001-04 to 10.0% from 2013-16.

Perhaps slightly more surprising is the commission’s explanation for the rising rate of (point in time) rental stress for all low-income tenants. According to the report, this results not from increasing unaffordability for the private renter cohort specifically, but from the growing dominance of private rental housing as the tenure in which low-income households live.

Read more: Private renters are doing it tough in outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne

This, of course, results from the post-1990s failure of Australian governments to expand the supply of social housing to match population growth. By 2018, well over two-thirds (71%) of low-income tenants were renting in the (relatively expensive) private market – rather than from a (rent-limiting) social landlord. Back in 1996, barely half (52%) of them were renting privately.

What does this mean for policy?

The report presents some useful discussion of possible policy directions.

For example, while dismissing rent control as liable to advantage existing tenants at the expense of potential tenants, the report is implicitly critical of residential tenancy laws in most states and territories.

The report advances the broad case that tenancy law reforms, “if well designed”, can enhance tenant welfare “without substantially increasing the cost of renting”. Longer notice periods are particularly favoured because these will “provid[e] vulnerable families more time to find new accommodation and prepare for the move”.

Slightly more controversially, the commission strongly hints at support for outlawing no grounds evictions. The landlord power to end a tenancy without any need to justify the move persists across most states and territories. Discussing this power the report states:

It increases the bargaining power of landlords […] and decreases that of tenants. Landlords’ incentives to carry out obligations, such as repairs and maintenance, decrease when no grounds evictions are available, since this provides them with an avenue to terminate leases in the event of a dispute.

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

However, having highlighted a private rental affordability problem that is both growing in scale and becoming demonstrably more entrenched, the report is timid on solutions beyond modestly improving tenancy conditions.

It argues in general terms for an increase in Commonwealth Rent Assistance but – beyond tentatively floating a 10% rise in maximum payments – advances no specific proposal.

Expanding the social housing stock as part of the broad-ranging housing strategy Australia badly needs is scorned as “an expensive option”. This is a reference to the narrowly scoped analysis in the commission’s 2017 Human Services report. It favoured market solutions to provide low-income housing – on efficiency grounds.

The “expensive option” assertion is out of line with the more broadly framed analysis of the Productivity Commission’s predecessor, the Industry Commission. The latter concluded:

Public housing and headleasing [when social housing providers sublease private rental properties] are assessed to be more cost-effective than cash payments and housing allowances.

While the Industry Commission report admittedly dates from 1993, the subsequent failure of overwhelmingly private provision for low-income renters surely presents compelling reasons to revisit the investment case for social housing.

Read more: Australia’s social housing policy needs stronger leadership and an investment overhaul

– ref. Growing numbers of renters are trapped for years in homes they can’t afford – http://theconversation.com/growing-numbers-of-renters-are-trapped-for-years-in-homes-they-cant-afford-125216

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

In line with his usual practice, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backed Donald Trump over the World Trade Organisation, criticising of China’s status in it as a “developing country”.

Critics of the intervention have pointed out that being a “developing country” doesn’t provide China with many benefit, and that Australia would be better off not taking sides.

But the debate, to use the cliché, is like arguing about the deck chairs on the Titanic.

In the absence of a surprising reversal from Trump, the World Trade Organisation will cease to exist as it has been in a matter of weeks.

More likely than not, it will never be revived.

The demise has been a long time coming.

Higher than heaven…

The WTO was established to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade at the end of the long Uruguay round of trade talks in 1995.

Its establishment coincided with the peak of market liberal triumphalism, exemplified by such books as Fukuyama’s The End of History and Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

It embraced the hubris of the times.

Its mission, according to one of its director-generals Renato Ruggiero, was “writing the constitution of a single global economy”.

In that context it felt free to override national governments on any issue that might affect international trade, most notably environmental policies.

Most famously, the WTO overrode US laws that required tuna and shrimp sold in the US (whether by US firms or importers) to follow practices that protected dolphins and turtles in decisions that were eventually reversed.

Read more: Myth busted: China’s status as a developing country gives it few benefits in the World Trade Organisation

Unsurprisingly, it became a symbol of the way democratic governments were becoming powerless to resist the forces of the global economy. Popular resistance, including demonstrations and riots, boiled over at the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle.

Although tight security prevented a recurrence of the “Battle of Seattle” in later years, the WTO never recovered its aura of invincibility.

…too close to the sun

The Doha round of negotiations, launched in 2001, broke down over attempts by developed countries to push the so-called “Singapore issues” that would have extended the free trade agenda to government procurement, investment, and competition. They would have mandated the adoption of free-market policies throughout the world, and so met vigorous resistance.

After limping along for a decade or more, the negotiations petered out in a limited agreement reached at Bali in 2013.

Meanwhile, the United States, which had been the primary promoter of the worldwide rules-based WTO model, shifted its focus to one-on-one agreements unencumbered by rules, such as the Australia-US FTA, where it could take advantage of its superior bargaining power.

Read more: A decade on, is the Australia-US FTA fit for the 21st century?

In all these agreements, including the Australia-US agreement, the US gave hardly any ground on issues such as agricultural protection, while extracting concessions on intellectual property and special treatment for US investors.

The culmination of the process was going to be the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement which had the geopolitical goal of keeping China out of important trading agreements.

This deal, lauded by Hillary Clinton as the “gold standard” of international agreements, was dumped by Trump. It was resurrected by the remaining parties, but is largely pointless without the participation of the US.

We’re entering a world with few rules…

As in other areas of policy, Trump’s tariff wars are often characterised as a radical break with the past, but they can also be seen as a continuation of long-standing trends.

Trump’s attempts to exploit the greater size of the US economy to extract concessions isn’t new. The problem is that his chosen targets, China and the European Union, have been big enough to resist, using the WTO.

His response has been to cripple the WTO by refusing to appoint new judges to its appellate panel.

By December only one judge will be left and the WTO will be unable to take on new cases.

To prepare for this likely outcome, the EU has set up structures that would allow it to retaliate against the US on a far larger scale than WTO rules would allow.

Read more: Are Trump’s tariffs legal under the WTO? It seems not, and they are overturning 70 years of global leadership

China is attempting to do the same thing using Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), in which Australia – but not the US – would be a member. And it is going beyond trade restrictions, warning Chinese tourists and businesses against travelling to the US.

The recent thaw in the trade war might halt the escalation for a while, but it’s unlikely to reverse it.

…for which we’ve few plans

If Trump is re-elected in 2020, the World Trade Organisation will be, for all practical purposes, finished.

The rules will revert to those of the earlier General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which give large countries like the US much more scope to do what they want.

Even if Trump is defeated, it is unlikely Humpty Dumpty can be reassembled. Likely Democratic alternatives such as Elizabeth Warren are not free-traders.

And, having rearmed in response to the US, other countries aren’t likely to put down their weapons.

Read more: A no-deal Brexit won’t end the uncertainty for business

It raises interesting questions for advocates of a “hard Brexit” who are relying on Britain relying on WTO rules.

UK trade minister Liz Truss says she is backing Trump in his campaign to “reform” the WTO, but the reform he is talking about will make its universally-applied rules weaker. By the time the UK emerges alone into the world market, it is likely to find there is little to protect it from the trading practices of the US, China and EU, whether they are fair or not.

The same points apply in spades to Australia. In backing Trump against China, our government is a (presumably unwitting) partner in the dismantling of the rules-based order we have previously defended.

It would be nice to imagine that we have plans for what comes next, but there is little to suggest we do.

– ref. Arrogance destroyed the World Trade Organisation. What replaces it will be even worse – http://theconversation.com/arrogance-destroyed-the-world-trade-organisation-what-replaces-it-will-be-even-worse-125321

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristal Spreadborough, Casual Academic, University of New England

As the Australian premier season of The Masked Singer draws to a close, fans are listening hard to guess which celebrities remain behind the weird and wonderful costumes.

Although the celebrities throw listeners a few cryptic clues, the main giveaways for guessing the identity of the masked performer are found in their voice. Do they sound big or small, male or female, old or young? Is their voice strong, emotive, controlled?

As singer Deni Hines said when unmasked last week: “With this, it was purely the voice.”

The sound of the voice – referred to as vocal quality or vocal timbre in singing – is highly characteristic and distinctive.

Making noise

A number of factors contribute to each singer’s individual vocal quality.

Body shape plays a role, impacting the length of our vocal tract, the size and shape of our resonating chambers (the mouth, chest, and nasal cavity) and articulators (the lips, teeth, tongue, jaw and palate) and our lung capacity for breath.

Our voice changes with age, narrowing in frequency and dynamic range.

These variables affect how high and low one can sing, the quality of their timbre, and dynamic range.

Society and culture also influence vocal quality. A singer’s speaking style can impact on their vocal quality, especially in popular and contemporary music styles.

Vocalists have a long history of methodically altering their singing style to achieve desired vocal effects such as the twang of country and western or the vibrato of opera.

Listen up

Listeners respond to a large number of vocal cues in predictable ways.

Take emotion. Vocalisations are heavily influenced by a person’s emotions. This has been examined in linguistics, where emotion in vocalisations have been reliably decoded across listeners and emotion has been found to influence emotional perception of words.

Similar results have also been found in singing, with listeners reliably decoding and having their perception of lyrics impacted by emotional content in vocal quality.

In my research, my colleague and I presented 20 listeners with happy and sad vocal timbres followed by happy and sad words. Participants heard words in matched conditions (happy vocal timbre with happy word), and mismatched conditions (happy vocal timbre with sad word). We then asked participants to judge as quickly as possible if the word they heard was happy or sad.

The results showed timbre conveys emotional meaning and were consistent for the listeners studied.

One reason for such vocal cues being so salient is because of the multitude of physiological mechanisms used by speakers and singers. One famous example of this is our ability to hear a smile.

Body language (in this case, smiling) impacts vocal quality by altering body shape (tightening muscles that shorten the length of vocal tract, altering the tension of the vocal chords and shape of resonating chambers).

A second reason is singing is closely linked to our everyday experience of vocalisations. When listening to a singer, we feel we know what to do.

Listeners have a lived experience of how it feels to produce vocal sounds and may unknowingly embody this lived experience when hearing a vocal performance.

Right on cue

One frame of reference we use when interpreting a singer’s vocal cues is called ecological listening. Listeners respond to vocal cues because they have a plethora of everyday vocal experiences on which to draw.

Listeners go beyond the literal meaning of words; understanding a tremulous voice might signal distress or a rough vocal quality might convey anger. The precision and flexibility of this send-and-receive dynamic is highly evolved in human communication compared to other species.

Audiences of The Masked Singer reliably draw information from the voice such as likely physical characteristics or emotional state. The show also reveals another layer of meaning attributed to the voice – identity.

When Adam Brand was revealed as the Dragon on The Masked Singer, news articles explained the chest infection behind Brand’s “less than stellar critiques from the judges”. Such explanations were necessary because Brand did not sound as we expected a singer to sound.

Songbirds

Changes in a singer’s voice alter listeners’ perception of them. This plays out in the careers of the ageing superstars, who – thanks to long term vocal strain and ageing voice (presbyphonia) – find it increasingly difficult to stage performances that live up to the legacy of their recordings.

During their recent tour of Australia, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVin’s vocals with Fleetwood Mac were described as lacking the “vocal ranges of their younger selves”.

Whether it be Brand’s dragon-costumed performances on television or Fleetwood Mac’s live tour 50 years after their inception, a singer’s vocal quality plays a key role in our understanding of their identity.

The Masked Singer demonstrates the distinctive and evocative nature of the voice, highlighting the weight ascribed to vocal timbre and identity. This is just as important for guessing the identity of a masked celebrity as it is for us in our everyday lives.

– ref. The voice unmasked: how we hear image, emotion and identity – http://theconversation.com/the-voice-unmasked-how-we-hear-image-emotion-and-identity-125126

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Leigh Sullivan discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan. They talk about Alan Jones accusing Prime Minister Scott Morrison of failing the immediate needs of drought-striken farmers, the IMF projecting growth rates for Australia to 1.7%, and the report from Democracy 2025 which revealed how politicians view the trust divide in politics.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the government’s drought policy – and the trust divide in politics – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-governments-drought-policy-and-the-trust-divide-in-politics-125499

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anita Parbhakar-Fox, Senior Research Fellow in Geometallurgy/Applied Geochemistry, The University of Queensland

Last month, scientists uncovered a mineral called Edscottite. Minerals are solid, naturally occurring substances that are not living, such as quartz or haematite. This new mineral was discovered after an examination of the Wedderburn Meteorite, a metallic-looking rock found in Central Victoria back in 1951.

Edscottite is made of iron and carbon, and was likely formed within the core of another planet. It’s a “true” mineral, meaning one which is naturally occurring and formed by geological processes either on Earth or in outer-space.

But while the Wedderburn Meteorite held the first-known discovery of Edscottite, other new mineral discoveries have been made on Earth, of substances formed as a result of human activities such as mining and mineral processing. These are called anthropogenic minerals.

While true minerals comprise the majority of the approximately 5,200 known minerals, there are about 208 human-made minerals which have been approved as minerals by the International Mineralogical Association.

Some are made on purpose and others are by-products. Either way, the ability to manufacture minerals has vast implications for the future of our rapidly growing population.

Modern-day alchemy

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face. While governments debate the future of coal-burning power stations, carbon dioxide continues to be released into the atmosphere. We need innovative strategies to capture it.

Actively manufacturing minerals such as nesquehonite is one possible approach. It has applications in building and construction, and making it requires removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Read more: Climate explained: why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth’s climate

Nesquehonite occurs naturally when magnesian rocks slowly break down. It has been identified at the Paddy’s River mine in the Australian Capital Territory and locations in New South Wales.

But scientists discovered it can also be made by passing carbon dioxide into an alkaline solution and having it react with magnesium chloride or sodium carbonate/bicarbonate.

This is a growing area of research.

Other synthetic minerals such as hydrotalcite are produced when asbestos tailings passively absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, as discovered by scientists at the Woodsreef asbestos mine in New South Wales.

You could say this is a kind of “modern-day alchemy” which, if taken advantage of, could be an effective way to suck carbon dioxide from the air at a large scale.

Meeting society’s metal demands

Mining and mineral processing is designed to recover metals from ore, which is a natural occurrence of rock or sediment containing sufficient minerals with economically important elements. But through mining and mineral processing, new minerals can also be created.

Smelting is used to produce a range of commodities such as lead, zinc and copper, by heating ore to high temperatures to produce pure metals.

The process also produces a glass-like waste product called slag, which is deposited as molten liquid, resembling lava.

Once cooled, the textural and mineralogical similarities between lava and slag are crystal-clear.

Micro-scale inspection shows human-made minerals in slag have a unique ability to accommodate metals into their crystal lattice that would not be possible in nature.

This means metal recovery from mine waste (a potential secondary resource) could be an effective way to supplement society’s growing metal demands. The challenge lies in developing processes which are cost effective.

Read more: Wealth in waste? Using industrial leftovers to offset climate emissions

Ethically-sourced jewellery

Our increasing knowledge on how to manufacture minerals may also have a major impact on the growing synthetic gem manufacturing industry.

In 2010, the world was awestruck by the engagement ring given to Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, valued at about £300,000 (AUD$558,429).

The ring has a 12-carat blue sapphire, surrounded by 14 solitaire diamonds, with a setting made from 18-carat white gold.

Replicas of it have been acquired by people across the globe, but for only a fraction of the price. How?

In 1837, Marc Antoine Gardin demonstrated that sapphires (mineralogically known as corundum or aluminium oxide) can be replicated by reacting metals with other substances such as chromium or boric acid. This produces a range of seemingly identical coloured stones.

On close examination, some properties may vary such as the presence of flaws and air bubbles and the stone’s hardness. But only a gemologist or gem enthusiast would likely notice this.

Diamonds can also be synthetically made, through either a high pressure, high temperature, or chemical vapour deposition process.

Creating synthetic gems is increasingly important as natural stones are becoming more difficult and expensive to source. In some countries, the rights of miners are also violated and this poses ethical concerns.

Medical and industrial applications

Synthetic gems have industrial applications too. They can be used in window manufacturing, semi-conducting circuits and cutting tools.

One example of an entirely manufactured mineral is something called yttrium aluminum garnet (or YAG) which can be used as a laser.

In medicine, these lasers are used to correct glaucoma. In dental surgery, they allow soft gum and tissues to be cut away.

The move to develop new minerals will also support technologies enabling deep space exploration through the creation of ‘quantum materials’.

Quantum materials have unique properties and will help us create a new generation of electronic products, which could have a significant impact on space travel technologies. Maybe this will allow us to one day visit the birthplace of Edscottite?

Read more: How quantum materials may soon make Star Trek technology reality

In decades to come, the number of human-made minerals is set to increase. And as it does, so too does the opportunity to find new uses for them.

By expanding our ability to manufacture minerals, we could reduce pressure on existing resources and find new ways to tackle global challenges.

– ref. Our ability to manufacture minerals could transform the gem market, medical industries and even help suck carbon from the air – http://theconversation.com/our-ability-to-manufacture-minerals-could-transform-the-gem-market-medical-industries-and-even-help-suck-carbon-from-the-air-123853

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kiera Lindsey, University of Technology Sydney

One spring morning in 1850, over 8,000 Sydneysiders marched through town to protest the resumption of transportation – the act of sending British criminals to Australia.

It was the largest protest in Australia thus far, an event Henry Parkes (later Premier of NSW) described as “the birthday of Australian democracy”.

Transportation ceased in New South Wales in 1840. Over the following decade, colonists worked hard to transform their penal colony into a respectable civil society.

By the late 1840s, people like Parkes believed they were on the brink of not only greater self-government but perhaps even democracy.

However, Henry George Grey – Colonial Secretary in charge of all the United Kingdom’s colonial dependencies – had been planning to resume transportation. In 1849, he decided to test the waters by sending out a boat of convicts. When the vessel sailed into Sydney Harbour, thousands rushed to Circular Quay to prevent it from docking.

The people had been triumphant and confident they had sent a firm message.

They were, therefore, deeply outraged in 1850 when they discovered Grey was so indifferent to their protests, he was planning to send another boat.

Read more: Stain or badge of honour? Convict heritage inspires mixed feelings

Rallies and petitions were organised throughout NSW, including two, the press snidely described as “ladies petitions” in Sydney.

Of the 36,589 signatures collected, 9,189 were from Sydney women – at least 42% of Sydney’s female population at the time.

These were delivered to the NSW Legislative Council, then the UK House of Commons and Queen Victoria.

While historians have typically focused on the male orators and agitators of this age, these “ladies petitions” challenge the narrative of colonial democracy as created by men for men. These documents also suggest women could not have been completely confined to the domestic sphere, nor entirely excluded from politics.

For me, they also promised a rare encounter with voices difficult to hear within the colonial archive.

Reading the petition

Although the right to petition the monarchy had been enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, in the 19th century petitions were regularly used to galvanise the masses and give voice to those excluded from political processes.

By the time colonial women put ink to paper in 1850, over 10,000 petitions were tabled to British parliament each year.

While most petitions of this era were destroyed once submitted, a few survived. Much to my delight, after weeks of searching the stacks, Rosemary Sempell, archivist at the New South Wales Parliamentary Records, found the original 207 pages from the “female inhabitants of Sydney.”

The opening address describes the “deep anxiety and alarm” these “wives and daughters of the citizens of Sydney” felt in regards to transportation and how it would prevent them fulfilling their “sacred and responsible duties [regarding the] moral instruction” of the colony and their children.

Most of all, these women were furious Grey had repeatedly ignored the colony’s “solemn and unanimous” rejection of transportation.

Ultimately, it was this disrespect for due process and local authority that compelled these women to petition the Queen directly.

The petition was signed by a broad range of Sydney women: members of the colonial elite such as Lady Eleanor Stephens, middle-class mothers who feared the corrupting influence of convicts, and those who signed their names with a simple cross that suggested they may have had firsthand experience of transportation.

A rising of ‘sister politicians’

When this petition was tabled in Legislative Council, it was described as “the first of its sort” in Australia and conservative politician William Wentworth was quick to question whether members of the council should consent to such political activity.

He warned husbands “would have their dinners far better cooked, their shirts better washed” if their wives were not “political ladies”.

He also predicted such activity would encourage other petitions “praying for the rights of women”, perhaps even lead to “some Mary Wollstonecraft” rising up to instruct “sister politicians” to stop tending “to their husbands” altogether.

Although the Australian suffragist movement did not begin in earnest for another 30 years, Wentworth may have been correct in connecting this moment of female activism with all that would unfold. At the very least, these petitions proved colonial women could unite against a common enemy.

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

A role for women

The women who signed this petition did so because they believed the colony was ready to chart its own course, and they wanted to be part of the process.

It might be telling that in the final sentence of the address the word “particularly” has been crossed out and replaced with “patriotically”. Although this may have been an editorial error, I think it suggests Parkes was correct: 1850 did represent a new spirit of “local feeling”. One that mattered to these women and was effective in finally putting an end to transportation to NSW – as resolved in the UK House of Commons the following month.

The colonial archive has encouraged us to assume only men were involved in the push for greater political freedoms in Australia. These “ladies petitions” confirm that thousands of Sydney women were not only present at the birthday of Australian democracy, but determined to play a role in its future.

In this first foray into the political domain, Australian women also proved they could have their voices heard: not only by other colonists and the British Parliament, but even, the Queen herself.

The author would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for sharing their expertise in the search for these petitions: Edith Ho, State Library of NSW; Bonnie Wilde, State Records of NSW; and Rosemary Sempell, Parliament of NSW Archives.

– ref. Sydney’s 9,189 ‘sister politicians’ who petitioned Queen Victoria – http://theconversation.com/sydneys-9-189-sister-politicians-who-petitioned-queen-victoria-124274

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John M Clarke, Team Leader, Regional Projections, CSIRO

Last month we lost Dr Penny Whetton – one of the world’s most respected climate scientists and a brilliant mentor to the next generation of researchers. Penny will also be remembered as a passionate environmentalist, artist, photographer and champion of the transgender community.

Penny was at the forefront of climate change projection science for more than three decades. She played a key role in putting CSIRO, and Australia, on the map as a world-leading centre for climate change research. Her groundbreaking scientific work was among the first to raise awareness of the challenges of a warming world, laying the groundwork for possible solutions.

Penny was a strong believer in the power of each person to make a difference, at work and elsewhere. Her professional career is a great example. She also encouraged those around her to seek out challenges that could benefit the world. That creative energy continues to flow through everybody who was close to her.

A global climate science pioneer

Penny’s work focused on understanding the emergent threat of a changing climate on Australia and the region. She authored papers and reports that have become fundamental to our understanding of how climate change would affect us.

Penny was recruited to the CSIRO’s new climate impacts group in 1990, after completing a doctorate at the University of Melbourne. She rapidly established a reputation for high quality science and innovative thinking.

Penny was a senior leader for much of her career and managed many large collaborative projects with colleagues in CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. After retiring in 2014, Penny became an honorary research fellow at CSIRO and the University of Melbourne, where she continued to be involved in climate research, advisory panels and consulting work.

Read more: Climate projections show Australia is heading for a much warmer future

Over her 25 years at CSIRO, Penny drove innovation in making climate projections useful to decision makers. Her clear grasp of the science and its impact led to novel ways of communicating many complicated concepts.

One of Penny’s many great ideas was to combine historic climate observations with future projections in a single timeline of data – creating a seamless path from past to future. This visualisation method is now a standard part of the climate projections toolkit.

Penny led the development of national climate change projections for Australia in 1992, 1996, 2001, 2007 and 2015. The 2015 projections remain the most comprehensive ever developed for Australia. They are widely used by the private sector, governments and NGOs and were one of Penny’s proudest achievements.

Penny’s science was renowned internationally as well as at home. She spoke at dozens of international conferences, and workshops and journalists sought her out regularly for interviews.

She was a lead author for three climate change assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on the subject. Penny’s work was recognised many times, including with a Eureka Prize in 2003 and internationally as part of the IPCC team that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

More recently, Penny provided scientific assurance on the external advisory board for the European Climate Prediction system, a project strongly influenced by methods and thinking developed under her leadership in climate projections for Australia.

Generous collaborator and mentor

Penny was instrumental in forging links between researchers in CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and universities. This led to several collaborative, high-impact reports on climate change projections.

Penny was generous with her time and guidance – committed to developing the next generation of climate change specialists. Always with a smile on her face, she combined a great intellect and strongly held opinions with a receptiveness to the ideas of others.

Read more: Can art put us in touch with our feelings about climate change?

Many of us writing this were mentored by Penny at various stages in our academic careers. Anyone who’s studied for a Masters or PhD knows meetings with academic supervisors can be stressful. But meetings with Penny were quite the opposite – she was friendly, but academically rigorous. Collectively we owe her an immense debt of gratitude.

Penny’s diverse knowledge and skills – including geology, geography, meteorology, climate, history, carpentry, painting and photography – gave her unique perspectives to draw on when tackling the wicked problems posed by climate change.

Penny made our lives richer

Penny was a real friend to many. Students became colleagues, colleagues became friends, and all of us were invited to be part of her life in a diverse extended family. We were pleased to support Penny in her own gender affirmation, and for many LGBTIQA+ scientists, Penny was both role model and supportive friend.

Read more: Getting projections right: predicting future climate

Penny had a wonderful knack for making inclusive conversation, whether at work or over dinner. Her contributions were insightful and grounded in truth, very often tinged with humour, and always kind and understanding.

We all assumed there would always be another dinner, and another opportunity to enjoy her company and be fascinated by her conversation. Sadly, and shockingly, this possibility has been taken from us.

Penny made our lives richer, more interesting and more human. Her absence leaves a massive hole in our community and our lives.

Penny Whetton is survived by her wife Janet and adult children John and Leon.

The following people contributed significantly to this article:

Aurel Moise (Bureau of Meteorology), Barrie Pittock (retired), Chris Gerbing (CSIRO), Craig Heady (CSIRO), David Karoly (CSIRO), Debbie Abbs (retired), Dewi Kirono (CSIRO), Diana Pittock (retired), Helen Cleugh (CSIRO), Ian Macadam (University of New South Wales Sydney), Ian Watterson (CSIRO), Jim Salinger (University of Florence, Italy), Jonas Bhend (MeteoSwiss, Switzerland), Karl Braganza (Bureau of Meteorology), Kathy McInnes (CSIRO), Kevin Hennessy (CSIRO), Leanne Webb (CSIRO), Louise Wilson (Bureau of Meteorology), Mandy Hopkins (CSIRO), Marie Ekström (Cardiff University, UK), Michael Grose (CSIRO), Rob Colman (Bureau of Meteorology) and Scott Power (Bureau of Meteorology).

– ref. Penny Whetton: A pioneering climate scientist skilled in the art of life – http://theconversation.com/penny-whetton-a-pioneering-climate-scientist-skilled-in-the-art-of-life-124093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona R Martin, Senior Lecturer in Convergent and Online Media, University of Sydney

One of the basic tenets of the ABC Act is independence from government. Yet once again, in contravention to that principle, the federal government is trying to push through major, unnecessary changes to the ABC’s governing laws.

The changes themselves might seem innocuous, even positive. They seek to ensure the ABC devotes more resources to covering regional Australia, and to mandate that its news reporting is “fair and balanced”.

Yet, they come at a time when the ABC has less funding than ever, in relative terms, to deal with the bureaucratic burdens these measures would impose.

If passed, these measures will also expose the organisation to political claims that it’s not doing its job. And they represent blatant political interference in how the ABC determines its objectives and what it spends its money on.

More emphasis on regional reporting

On July 31, with little fanfare, the Coalition government introduced the first of three proposed changes to the ABC Act. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Amendment (Rural and Regional Measures) Bill 2019 requires the ABC to:

• contribute to a sense of “regional” identity as well as “a sense of national identity”

• reflect “geographical”, as well “cultural diversity”

• establish a Regional Advisory Council that the ABC Board will have to consult “before making a [significant] change to a broadcasting service in a regional area”. The ABC also has to report annually on these consultations.

The bill suggests the council will cost $100,000 per year, while “other measures … are expected to have no financial impact”. But this is a ludicrous notion given the potential cost of expanding local services across the country.

This regional push by the Coalition government is no benign shepherding of the ABC back to its core duties. It’s actually designed to tie the corporation up in red tape and shift its attention away from national coverage – and the machinations of federal government.

The House of Representatives debated the proposed changes last month, splitting along party lines. A vote is likely in the house early next week. And unless there is significant public opposition, the bill could potentially be passed before the end of the year.

The legislation has been before parliament in various forms since 2015, but failed to get through. It has been the subject of two Senate investigations, most recently in 2018, with Coalition senators supporting its reintroduction to parliament.

However, dissenting reports from Labor and the Greens noted the ABC was already committed to regional coverage and couldn’t provide more without a funding increase.

Another mandate for ‘fair and balanced’ reporting

The second amendment due to be introduced during the spring sitting is similarly unnecessary. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Amendment (Fair and Balanced) Bill, which is yet to be tabled, is a sop to One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson for her support with the Coalition government’s 2017 media ownership legislation.

This proposal, too, was debated and rejected in parliament in 2017.

As many critics noted when it was rejected, the legislation duplicates existing balance and fairness provisions in the ABC’s editorial policies, and has the potential to constrain coverage of contentious issues.

It is unclear why the Coalition is putting up this bill again, except as an attempt to keep Hanson on side in the Senate.

Increased pressure on public broadcasting

We have to read the political intent of these changes in light of the ongoing pressures on the ABC. In recent years, the broadcaster has been faced with

These latest proposals to amend the ABC Charter raise bigger questions about how we deal with media law reform. Crucially, to be effective and sustainable, it needs to be strategic, not ad hoc and politicised.

Ever since the ABC was established, one of the country’s most important public policy objectives has been ensuring regional media services. So, rather than tinkering with the ABC, or even granting private owners more concessions, what we need is a comprehensive analysis of media and communications services for regional, rural and remote communities.

The ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry gave us important insights into the complexity of national media policy in a global environment and recommended stable, adequate budgets for the ABC and SBS.

Pointedly, the ACCC said they are not yet funded

to fully compensate for the decline in local reporting previously produced by traditional commercial publishers.

No amount of changes to the ABC Charter will fix that.

– ref. ​The Coalition government is (again) trying to put the squeeze on the ABC – http://theconversation.com/the-coalition-government-is-again-trying-to-put-the-squeeze-on-the-abc-122037

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Orsola De Marco, Astrophysicist , Macquarie University

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

How are stars made? –Zali, age 8, Karkoo, South Australia.

How are stars made? Well, stars are not made, they make themselves! Or maybe I should say: they come into existence because of a powerful force of nature called gravity.

Galaxies are where new stars are born. In galaxies, there are very large and fluffy clouds of gas and dust called nebulae.

Gravity makes clumps inside these fluffy clouds – like raisins in a cake. When one of these clumps start to get tightly compacted and squished together, we say its density goes up. Density means how tightly something is compacted, or squished together.

These dense clumps of gas also get hotter and hotter in the centre. When the gas in the centres of a clump reaches a certain temperature (millions of degrees), something quite special starts happening inside the clump: hydrogen atoms come together to form helium.

(As I am sure you know, atoms are like tiny building blocks that make up everything around us. You, me and all the gas and space dust – it’s all made of atoms).

When hydrogen atoms come together to form helium, it’s called nuclear fusion. This process releases a lot of energy (it’s the opposite, yet similar process that happens when a nuclear bomb goes off). And this is how a star begins its life.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do stars twinkle?

The life and death of a star

Just like us, stars are born, they live and then they die. Curiously, the length of a star’s life depends on its birth weight. Light, low mass stars live very, very long lives.

Our Sun, as you probably know, is actually a star. It is about 4.5 billion years old, and is in the middle of its life. In another five billion years it will get much, much bigger but then it will start to shrivel. After that, it will die. Its nuclear power source will switch off and it will just sit there, cooling, like a burnt out piece of charcoal in a barbecue.

Stars that are many times heavier than our Sun live much shorter lives. The most massive stars, live for only a million years or so. Their deaths are much more spectacular than the quiet shrivelling of Sun-type stars. They go out in a bang. Scientists call them “supernovae”.

You’re made of star dust

Have you ever heard the saying “we are all made of star dust?” It’s actually true. Inside a star, helium atoms combine to make carbon, which is at the root of chemicals that you and all living things are made out of.

There is plenty we still do not understand about the mysterious lives of stars. Fortunately, we have large telescopes and space satellites to get better and better pictures. All we need is smart people like you to come and help figure out the puzzle!

Read more: Curious Kids: can Earth be affected by a black hole in the future?

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 are stars made? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-are-stars-made-122787

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gita Mishra, Professor of Life Course Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland

All women know to expect the time in life when their periods finish and they reach menopause. Many might even look forward to it. What many women don’t know, however, is they will also experience symptoms in the time leading up to menopause. This is known as perimenopause.

On average perimenopause lasts for three to four years, usually starting in the mid to late 40s. Some women may experience it for only a few months, but for others it can be as long as a decade and can start as early as the mid-30s. During perimenopause a woman’s menstrual cycle will become irregular, they may experience lighter or heavier than normal bleeding, and intermittent spotting.

Women who have never given birth, and those with early puberty, or short menstrual cycles are more likely to experience earlier perimenopause.

What’s happening to my hormones?

The ovaries produce the female hormones oestrogen and progesterone, which control menstruation and ovulation (when an egg is released from the ovary).

From a woman’s late-30s, the number of eggs left in the ovaries decreases more quickly. Leading up to menopausal transition, the level of oestrogen changes, dropping rapidly around two years prior to menopause and stabilising around two years afterwards.

Progesterone also decreases towards menopause as it is produced only if an egg is released. Lack of progesterone can result in irregular, heavier, and prolonged menstrual periods during perimenopause.

Read more: Chemical messengers: how hormones change through menopause

Common symptoms

Women can experience a range of symptoms during perimenopause including:

• hot flushes (a sudden feeling of warmth or intense heat that spreads over the face and upper body)

• night/cold sweats

• anxiety, depressed mood, or mood swings

• sleep disturbance and fatigue

• vaginal dryness; discomfort during sexual intercourse

• frequent or urgent urination.

In the last one to two years of perimenopause, women are more likely to complain of low-oestrogen-associated symptoms, in particular vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and night sweats) and vaginal dryness.

Some groups of women are also more likely to experience menopausal symptoms, including those who are: overweight or obese, smokers, of low socioeconomic status, and those with anxiety, depressive symptoms, or who feel stressed.

Weight gain

A recent US study found the menopausal transition is accompanied by accelerated gains in fat mass and simultaneous losses in lean mass, and these changes in body composition continue until two years after menopause. It was found weight gain began in premenopause and increased steadily during perimenopause (around 0.4 kg per year).

A lack of exercise, unhealthy eating, lower levels of education, insufficient sleep, the number of births a woman has had, and a family history of obesity may substantially contribute to weight gain in midlife.

Treatment

For women who seek medical advice for their symptoms, menopausal hormone therapy (MHT, also known as hormone replacement therapy) is the most commonly prescribed treatment. Hormone therapy can help to relieve symptoms by replacing oestrogen levels that fall naturally during perimenopause.

GPs should discuss the short-term (up to five years) and long-term benefits and risks, before women decide to use hormone therapy, according to the college of obstetricians and gynaecologists.

If hormone therapy is not suitable, there are other non-hormonal treatments that can be discussed with the GP. This includes changing lifestyle factors such as improvements in diet, regular physical activity, optimal weight management, and quitting smoking.

Read more: We don’t know menopausal hormone therapy causes breast cancer, but the evidence continues to suggest a link

Perimenopause in the workplace

For some women, menopausal symptoms such as vasomotor symptoms and fatigue can impact their performance at work. The Australasian Menopause Society recommends the following improvements to working conditions for women going through menopause which are based on the guidelines produced by the European Menopause and Andropause Society:

• raise awareness

• allow disclosure of troublesome symptoms

• review workplace temperature and ventilation

• reduce work-related stress

• allow flexible working arrangements

• provide easy access to cold drinking water and toilets.

Read more: How to make work menopause-friendly: don’t think of it as a problem to be managed

Contraception during perimenopause

Women still experience menstrual cycles during perimenopause and can fall pregnant, so contraception remains important. Contraception is required for two years after the last menstrual period in women aged under 50 years and one year in those over 50.

The use of combined hormonal contraceptives (such as pills, patches, or vaginal rings) until the age of 50 is acceptable if women are not at risk of heart disease or thrombosis. Risk factors include smoking, being overweight or obese, or having high blood pressure.

Hormonal contraceptives should not be used alongside hormonal treatments for menopause. Instead barrier methods (condoms or caps) or other methods (spermicides, implant or intrauterine devices).

– ref. What is perimenopause and how does it affect women’s health in midlife? – http://theconversation.com/what-is-perimenopause-and-how-does-it-affect-womens-health-in-midlife-122186

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney

Since ancient times, horse behaviour, and the bond between horses and humans, has been a source of intrigue and fascination.

The horse-lore that has accumulated over the centuries is a rich mix of both useful practice (approaching horses from their left side, making them slightly less reactive) and unsubstantiated myth, such as the one that chestnut horses are especially difficult to deal with.

That’s why my colleagues and I at the University of Sydney are launching a global database of horse behaviour. Both vets and owners can log a horse’s physical, mental and social development, creating an evidence base on what constitutes normal and abnormal equine behaviour, and what defines good, effective and humane training.

Read more: Touch forms the foundation of the powerful human-horse relationship

This project builds on a similar project for dogs , which has collected information on over 85,000 dogs and been used in more than 70 research studies that have revealed behavioural differences that relate to head and body shape and the astonishing effect of desexing on behaviour.

Now it is the horses’ turn

We have created an online behavioural assessment package for horses and ponies, called the Equine Behaviour Assessment and Research Questionnaire (E-BARQ) that collects anonymous data for horse behaviour researchers, veterinarians and coaches. It’s a not-for-profit project that allows the global horse-folk community to donate their observational data to the University of Sydney and gain useful benefits in return.

Horse owners can upload photographs and videos to a custom-built app, recording their horse’s progress in training and competition over time. For the first time, they’ll also be able to compare their horse’s behaviour with that of other horses. The “share-&-compare” graphs will reveal attributes such as trainability, rideability, handling, compliance, boldness, and human social confidence.

There are two benefits. Firstly, owners can compare their horses’ behaviour to others around the world, giving them a useful benchmark.

Secondly, it will reveal the true impact of ancient traditions and modern trends. This can use used by everyone from the general riding public to veterinarians.

As E-BARQ can monitor the longitudinal consequences of different training methods, it can be a powerful tool for advancing horse welfare. It will also inform evidence-based judgements on the ethics and sustainability of horse sports.

Human safely, horse welfare

Horse vets know the importance of horse behaviour, as it often affects their safety. Indeed, a recent UK study has shown equine vet practice to be the civilian occupation with the highest risk of injury, surpassing firefighters. But vets also rely on owners to observe horse behaviour because it indicates health and recovery from surgery or disease. With the permission of owners, vets and riding coaches can monitor their clients’ horses over time in the app.

The questionnaire and app will expose how training and management influences horse behaviour, and vice versa. They will reveal how breeds differ in responses and illuminate breed-typical personality types, how male and female horses differ, how horses used in different disciplines (such as showjumping versus dressage) differ in their behaviour and how horse behaviour changes with maturation and training.

A horse’s behaviour has a direct impact on its usefulness and that, in turn, affects its value and – sadly – the care it receives. There is evidence from Europe that over 65% of horses outside the racing industry are slaughtered before the age of seven, very often for behavioural reasons.

Read more: Getting the facts about work in horse stables

Understandably, given riding is the most dangerous sport for children, parents crave authentic assessment of ponies’ behaviour. Information in E-BARQ could potentially help buyers identify warning signs of dangerous behaviours and make more informed choices.

By providing researchers with an unprecedented wealth of information, E-BARQ has the potential to revolutionise the way we train and manage our horses and, as a result, make real and lasting positive changes in horse welfare and the sustainability of horse sports.

– ref. Is your horse normal? Now there’s an app for that – http://theconversation.com/is-your-horse-normal-now-theres-an-app-for-that-107000

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Wallis, Lecturer and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Southern Queensland

A move to the country is often presented in popular culture as an idyllic life, a place where you can escape the pressures of the city.

It’s in television shows such as Escape from the City, River Cottage Australia and Gourmet Farmer, in books such as A Story of Seven Summers, Whole Larder Love and A Table in the Orchard, and in magazines such as Country Style and Australian Country.

But what’s the reality for those who’ve made the move?

Read more: Imagining your own SeaChange – how media inspire our great escapes

Welcome to Stanthorpe

As part of my research into how people experience this change I spoke in-depth with 12 people who moved to the small rural town of Stanthorpe in Queensland, population 5,406 at the last count.

They came from international places as far away as Dublin and London, from Australian cities including Brisbane and Adelaide, as well as the Sunshine Coast.

While the majority moved because they wanted to be in the country, some arrived because visa requirements meant they had to work in a rural place. Others came for their partner, to be nearer family or, in one case, for a career opportunity for themselves.

These circumstances weren’t always entirely within their personal control.

Once they settled in, the majority found they were glad to be there. They enjoyed the level of trust people showed them, or the lack of traffic lights in town.

Others found the idyllic rural life wasn’t all it’s made out to be in media. For them, moving to the country meant limited leisure choices and life opportunities.

Here’s some of what they told me (not their real names).

City girls

Natalie moved because she’d been offered her dream job in Stanthorpe, but said she was “a city girl at heart”.

Being in a small country town was challenging for her. She found it really hard to meet people her age. She also mentioned how:

[…] when you’re in a small town, there’s no getting away from each other […] everybody knows what’s going on in your life.

She loved her new job and appreciated the way people helped each other out, but she was always seen as an outsider. This was partly due to her accent and the type of clothes she wore, which others commented on.

After several years in her job, she was offered an opportunity in Brisbane and took it, keen to get back to the city.

Read more: New home, new clothes: the old ones no longer fit once you move to the country

Christine, a middle-aged woman who moved for her husband, said she was “not a country girl”. While her home was “a very pretty spot”, she often journeyed back to Brisbane and Sydney for things she couldn’t access locally.

You can’t just make an appointment with a gynaecologist or an ophthalmologist, there are none. The major services aren’t here […]

But she said she had a better social life now than she had previously because country people “make time […] it’s a lovely community”.

Country girls

Rae had mostly grown up in cities but enjoyed the outdoors as a child and had “always been a country girl at heart”.

We love it (Stanthorpe). It ticks all the boxes, big enough that you don’t know everyone, but small enough that you know most people.

Asked if the media show country life as it really is, she said:

Those magazines seem far too glitzy for what I know as truth […] it’s more muddy gumboots and bikes out the front of houses.

Lucy said of the magazines “they’re selling the dream”. Even though she tried, she couldn’t quite replicate that dream in her own life.

The participants who accepted the disparity between media idyll and country reality seemed most content.

Kate said her country life was nothing like she envisaged it would be.

But that’s good, because I can still enjoy reading books and watch McLeod’s Daughters and keep them there as that fantasy of what I’d like it to be in the country.

A place to call home, or not

Even though these were all grown women, they used the word “girl” when they described themselves.

This city girl or country girl moniker was used to show how they viewed themselves. It became a shorthand descriptor they and others could use to let people know if they were living in the “wrong” place, without upsetting the rural people around them with criticisms of the rural space.

Read more: How moving house changes you

While some remained in the country even though they weren’t thrilled about it, those who saw themselves as city girls either left or they maintained strong ties to the city in their everyday life, effectively straddling both worlds.

These conversations showed that if a person identified as “not from here”, that became an indicator they would remain feeling like an outsider and not adapt as easily as those who considered themselves as belonging.

Tania suggested the key to enjoying small town life was to get involved.

[…] the more involved you can get in things in the community, the quicker you’re going to settle into a country town.

She suggested local sports and bushwalking groups, classes, churches and other organisations such as the Country Women’s Association, Lions, Zonta and Rotary. Others suggested volunteering with groups such as Landcare or other groups as a way to create belonging.

While this might not work for everyone who makes the move from city to country, it’s a good place to start.

– ref. Should I stay or should I go: how ‘city girls’ can learn to feel at home in the country – http://theconversation.com/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-how-city-girls-can-learn-to-feel-at-home-in-the-country-124579

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

The just-announced inquiry into Australia’s retirement income system ought to be anything but run-of-the-mill.

Taking place 25 years after the introduction of compulsory superannuation, it provides an opportunity to either fix a broken system, or discard it as failed experiment.

Incremental reform won’t work.

There’s a budget problem

The first and most fundamental problem with compulsory super lies in fiscal arithmetic.

After a quarter of a century of compulsory super, some 70% of the aged population still rely on either a full or part age pension, which is an awful lot for a system whose stated aim is to substitute or supplement the age pension.

Modelling by actuarial firm Rice Warner predicts that it will still be 57% by 2038.

That’s right. After almost half a century of compulsory super – an entire working life – more than half the aged population will still be collecting the age pension.

It’s progress, of a sort.

By then then age pension will take up 2.5% of Australia’s economic output, down from the present 2.7%.

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

It will still account for one in every ten dollars spent by the government. That’s more than defence, twice as much as Medicare, and twice as much as the Commonwealth spends on schools.

In return, the government forgoes an enormous amount of revenue on superannuation tax concessions.

Its practice of taxing income paid as super contributions at 15% rather than the taxpayer’s marginal rate will cost the budget A$19 billion this financial year according to the Treasury, climbing to $23.3 billion in 2022-23.

Its practice of taxing super fund earnings at 15% (or less) rather than the marginal tax rate will cost the budget $20 billion this financial year, $23.6 billion in 2022-23.

We are forcing workers to divert up to 9.5% of their salary into super (soon to be 12% unless that legislation is withdrawn) and losing enough tax revenue to fund scores of government programs or to cut general tax rates, in return for little change in what we spend on the pension.

There’s a returns problem

The second problem is what happens to the money. Not only are there quite a lot of poorly performing funds – something that has been widely discussed in the leadup to the inquiry – but fees charged are incredibly high.

The Productivity Commission finds that average fees are 1.1% of annual balances. More than 4 million of us pay more than 1.5%.

It mightn’t sound like much, but it’s a fair proportion of the average annual return of 3.5 percentage points above inflation.

In New Zealand, where the government selects the default schemes on criteria that include price, the average annual fee is 0.55%. In Chile, which tenders exclusively on the basis of price, the average fee is 0.47%.

Many of the funds justify their fees on the basis of their superior skill at picking stocks, which, as Nobel Prize winners Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler have discovered, is almost always a bad idea.

Read more: Super fees vary wildly, and it will hurt your retirement income

Even when they do less stock picking over time, upping the proportion of safer assets such as cash and bonds as their clients age, they continue to charge the fees they justify on the basis of the work they do picking stocks.

Equally bad is the lack of transparency about what they charge. Those of us who able to switch (and here are still some who can’t) find it hard to find out what we are paying.

Try it for yourself. I am, by many measures, a pretty sophisticated consumer of financial products, but it took me a ludicrous amount of time to find out what was being taken out of my account.

And there are ways out

Here’s what I’d use as two guiding principles.

• The aged pension ought to provide a baseline dignified minimum for those who haven’t been able to provide for their retirement

• Saving through the super ought to be tax-free on the way in, tax-free on fund earnings, and taxed at the marginal rate (including the 50% capital gains tax discount) on the way out

In order to cut fees and lift returns there ought to be a default offering that invests in a broad range of Australian equities indexes and costs no more than 0.15% to 0.20% per year – maximum.

It would be natural to have a sliding scale of allocation from 100% equities at (say) age 25 to 0% equities (and all cash plus bonds) at age 65. Again, these would be defaults that people could opt out of.

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

The tax advantage given to super would be the timing: at retirement versus as money goes in and it earns income. It would need to be justified by the savings that would accrue to the budget from getting these people off the aged pension.

Whether these numbers would stack up is an empirical question that would require careful analysis.

But it is important to remember that the rate of the pension, the retirement age, and the various tax rates and contribution caps are all within the government’s control.

It would have a lot of wriggle room to make the arithmetic work.

We should fix it, or axe it

If we are going to keep sequestering between 9.5% and 12% of people’s pay, we need a good reason.

It could be to provide them with a decent deal in retirement, or it could be to provide a good deal for the taxpayer.

The current system is questionable on both counts.

It would be vastly preferable to get to a system where only a relatively small number of people retired on to the government pension, and the rest saved enough for their retirement not to need to, through a series of incentives and nudges along with some compulsion.

It could be world-class. The system we have isn’t. And tinkering with it won’t help. We need a retirement income revolution.

– ref. Vital signs. Our compulsory super system is broken. We ought to axe it, or completely reform it – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-our-compulsory-super-system-is-broken-we-ought-to-axe-it-or-completely-reform-it-124974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allan McCay, Law Lecturer, University of Sydney

The rise of artificial intelligence has led to widespread concern about the role of humans in the workplaces of the future.

Indeed, Israeli historian, futurist and publishing sensation Yuval Noah Harari warns in his most recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century that there might one day be little need for human labour.

Harari fears the day will come when artificially intelligent algorithms outperform us in all respects that are useful to employers, consigning many or most of us to long-term unemployment.

Unlike humans, these algorithms won’t be conscious – they won’t feel in the way that we do as they perform their tasks – but they will be clever enough to outdo us in the job market, perhaps easily so. If we keep our jobs, we might work for them.

Harari’s arguments are based on the plausible assumption that living (and working) is about making choices.

More controversially he suggests that the processes that underpin our choices are algorithmic in nature and thus crank out our decisions about what to do, and how to do it, in way that is disconcertingly similar to the way a coffee vending machine goes through a series of steps to make a coffee.

In Homos Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, he writes:

algorithms controlling vending machines work through mechanical gears and electric circuits; the algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts

So everything we do is ultimately algorithmic. And worryingly the algorithms implemented by computers (our workplace rivals) are getting better and better.

But will artificially intelligent algorithms really have an edge over us in all respects? Perhaps not, if David Hodgson is right.

‘Incommensurables’ could be our edge

David Hodgson had the unusual distinction of being both a senior Australian judge and a philosopher of some note. After completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and doctoral studies at Oxford University under the supervision of perhaps the most influential legal philosopher of the 20th century, H.L.A Hart (who reportedly described Hodgson as the ablest student he had ever supervised), Hodgson went on to a career as a barrister.

He ultimately became a Judge of Appeal in the New South Wales Supreme Court before passing away in 2012.

Whilst on the bench, he published research papers and books about consciousness and free will, and his final book has recently been the focus for an international group of philosophers.

If Hodgson is right we seem to have an advantage over machines when it comes to making decisions about “incommensurables”.

What’s an incommensurable?

Consider this question:

how do you decide what to do if you have to choose between helping a friend, and going on a date with a person you find attractive?

It’s difficult, because the there is no common metric to use in comparing the options.
Even more so than the virtues of “apples” and “oranges”, the considerations of duty and desire are incommensurable – different in kind.

Read more: Curious Kids: are robots smarter than humans?

Returning to the workplace, there would seem to be a whole range of jobs that require reasoned judgements in the face of incommensurability.

For example, if an architect tries to balance considerations about the aesthetics of a building’s design against issues relating to the bearing of load, there is incommensurability, because the considerations are of a different kind.

Evolution might have given us that edge

How could an artificially intelligent robot reconcile issues of beauty against concerns about how long a building would remain standing? What metric would it use if the two values are indeed incommensurable? This might be tricky.

Hodgson speculated that evolution might have led to the emergence of consciousness and a form of free will in order to enable our ancestors to make good decisions in response to the forms of incommensurability they encountered.

This capacity might have given us an evolutionary edge and in my view might have bequeathed us an edge over machines. It may help architects and other workers address the decisions they must make.

Harari is surely right to warn about the avalanche of job disruption that appears to be coming, but if Hodgson and I are right, humans will remain more valuable in the labour market than Harari imagines. We will remain able to do things robots aren’t bred for.

– ref. Might consciousness and free will be the aces up our sleeves when it comes to competing with robots? – http://theconversation.com/might-consciousness-and-free-will-be-the-aces-up-our-sleeves-when-it-comes-to-competing-with-robots-106703

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Saunders, Phd candidate, University of Wollongong

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

You leave Sydney and head for holidays on the South Coast. You plan to catch a quick surf, check out the boutiques and cafes, stroll around a local museum.

If you’re stopping in Berry you’ll notice a large steel sculpture in honour of two brothers, Alexander and David Berry. And in the main street you will encounter a bronze bust of Alexander, celebrating his determination to “replace bush and swamp”. The local hospital and a monument near the railway station recognise David. Old two-storey buildings along the main street, big trees and established gardens all add up to a picture of genteel pastoral history.

This polite scene ruptures if we know that Alexander Berry collected and traded in the bones of Aboriginal people, including those he had exhumed from their graves on his vast estate, Coolangatta.

Cultural institutions in our capital cities have begun to pay greater respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The Australian Museum in Sydney states “The First Nations collections belong to ancestors, to First Nations people of the present and to the young people of the future”. Melbourne Museum is “working to place First Peoples living cultures and histories at the core of our practice”.

Read more: How living museums are ‘waking up’ sleeping artefacts

But away from the cities and – despite the good intentions of many staff members – small museums lag behind, presenting tourists with stories that give a narrowed view of local histories.

Three towns, the same story

In a regional town museum you will probably encounter some version of the pioneer or settler story. This narrative is illustrated with the many farm tools, pieces of mining equipment, clothes, books, furniture and other domestic and civic artefacts donated by locals over the years.

In this version of history, pioneers move across the land, unencumbered by prior Aboriginal occupants, making it productive as they go. Small museums seem to get stuck in this white pioneer groove.

Historian Amanda Nettelbeck observes that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories are often presented as two separate sides of colonial history, rather than as an obviously connected relationship between British settlement and Aboriginal dispossession.

In the museums of Berry, Kangaroo Valley and Nowra, three towns central to the NSW South Coast tourism economy, the idea of a frontier (that space of conflict over land, resources, rights and sovereignty) is avoided. But how is this achieved, when the pioneer story depends on the frontier for its existence?

Looking at these three museums reveals artefacts of Aboriginal provenance are presented in ways that cast them as either relics of a distant past, symbols of a generic Aboriginality or curiosities with no political context. They celebrate the pioneer without acknowledging the founding dispossession of local Yuin people. Frontiers are messy; pioneers clean things up. And museums keep the story simple, neat and tidy.

Too hot to handle

This is not to say the dedicated volunteers who run these museums come down on one side of the “History Wars”. The staff who care for their collections are often keen to address their lack of information on specific Yuin histories.

In 2017, Nowra Museum hosted the travelling exhibition This is where they travelled, which accompanied Paul Irish’s book Hidden in Plain View: the Aboriginal people of coastal Sydney. In the same year, the Berry Museum hosted the Yuin anthropologist, the late Les Bursill, who delivered a lecture on Yuin history of the South Coast. Kangaroo Valley Pioneer Village committee members responded to a draft of this essay, saying they would renew signage in the museum and were keen to pursue new research on local Aboriginal histories.

Despite this, the overwhelming story remains that of white settlers’ hard work and perseverance. And although part of the reason for the static nature of museum stories is lack of funds and a reliance on the time and energy of volunteers, the narrative’s repetitive nature – and its general wear and tear – may also be due to its omissions. Bruce Pascoe reframes the perception of Australian history as boring, by drawing our attention to what’s left out: “Australian history isn’t boring, it’s just too hot to handle.”

The blinkered storyline of small museums is a symptom of what US scholar Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense”. Settler common sense describes the feeling of “taken-for-granted” possession of, and belonging to, a place which has been taken from someone else.

Settler common sense exists as “a given”: we (as a white person, I include myself) have the unquestionable right to possess that which doesn’t belong to us. It normalises settler possession of, and control over, land and the stories about that land. The pioneer or settler narrative relies on that assumption: white rights to non-white land, and white rights to the telling of history.

A place somewhere else

Pioneer Village Museum in Kangaroo Valley, NSW, presents Aboriginal history as far removed from its own backyard.

In one of the cottages in the recreated village hang two bark paintings, donated in the 1970s by a local who acquired them in Arnhem Land. In another cottage is a display case containing miniature souvenir versions of clubs, boomerangs and animal figurines.

Below these are a group of unlabelled grinding stones, which may or may not be from the local region. Labels for other objects in this display read “boomerang made from mulga wood” and “more mulga wood boomerangs” (mulga is a small tough acacia which grows in arid inland regions, not Kangaroo Valley). Other labels read: “replica of an emu egg”; and “fighting weapon could be used to split the enemy’s head open”.

These items are presented without context and without any relationship to Kangaroo Valley. They are accompanied by an illustrated word list entitled “Interpreting Aboriginal Symbols” and although the words are indeed Aboriginal, the language is Warrgamay, spoken by people of the Herbert River region of North Queensland.

By presenting objects that are replicas, miniatures, unlabelled or misleadingly labelled, the museum allows a generic “Aboriginality” to be visible while keeping it unrelated to Kangaroo Valley and local people. The presentation does not disrupt the Kangaroo Valley settler narrative because Aboriginal existence is presented as inauthentic and elsewhere.

Other histories about Kangaroo Valley tell a different story. The museum’s own archival sources document the many meetings in the region (albeit from colonial viewpoints) between local Aboriginal people and colonisers during the 1800s and 1900s, the large gatherings at Kangaroo Valley for ceremony and song-learning “for which they sometimes travel far” and the Aboriginal families who relied on work at the four timber mills in the town in the 1940s.

More than portraits

Drive south over the scenic mountain range from Kangaroo Valley and you will cross the Shoalhaven River to Nowra.

As a regional centre, Nowra has several museums to choose from: the Fleet Air Arm Museum for aircraft enthusiasts, Meroogal House Museum for lovers of old houses and domestic interiors, and the town museum run by the Shoalhaven Historical Society.

Nowra Museum’s exhibition of local Aboriginal presence is built around a collection of timber and stone artefacts and an impressive black and white photograph of an elderly couple, James Goulding and Mary Carpenter. They are seated on chairs in a garden, and wear European clothing typical of the early 1900s. Goulding, who also wears a top hat, has a ‘breastplate’ suspended from a chain, around his neck.

In a display case near the photograph, is a brass breastplate engraved with the name “Neddy Noora” and “Shoal Haven 1834”. Alongside this is a reproduction of a drawing that was part of a series of portraits of Aboriginal ‘kings’ and their wives done in Sydney by German-born Charles Rodius, in the early 1830s. The portrait shows the young Neddy Noora, wearing the breastplate over his European clothing.

The granting of breastplates to Aboriginal people signified a reward given for assistance or rescue and they were an attempt at gaining influence over individuals thought to be leaders.

Read more: A breastplate reveals the story of an Australian frontier massacre

Aboriginal recipients also had a stake in these tactics, no doubt being well aware of the hierarchies so blatant in colonial society. Offered as a status symbol, acceptance was the “gracious and prudent thing to do”. However, by the end of the 1800s, breastplates lacked political currency and became prized by white collectors.

Entangled

Engraved on the breastplate James Goulding wears are the words “Budd Billy King of Jarvis Bay” (sic). Budd Billy is an Anglicisation of Goulding’s Aboriginal name Budbili. Ngarigu linguist Jakelin Troy gives the meaning of budbili as “possum-skin rug”.

This single word from the Dharawal language of the Yuin nation, links a person and a place with important historical and cultural objects – a pre-colonial possum-skin rug and a colonial metal breastplate – both of which existed within the tangled cultures of the pre and early post-Federation era.

The breastplate given to Neddy Noora was found in Broughton Creek (near the town of Berry) in 1925. Neddy and another Aboriginal man, Toodwit (also known as Broughton), guided John Oxley’s expedition to mark an overland route between Sydney and Jervis Bay in 1819. Toodwit was central to Alexander Berry’s 1822 reconnoitre of the region.

Nowra Museum’s display has been updated recently to include a brief explanation of the political aspect of giving and receiving breastplates and when I contacted Lynne Allen, president of the Shoalhaven Historical Society, she explained that museum volunteers can provide visitors with an explanation of breastplates as a European construct.

She said that the large portrait of Mary Carpenter and James Goulding was “consistently amongst our visitors, Aboriginal or otherwise, the most popular of all our items”.

Does this popularity translate into greater awareness of our complex local histories? The people in these portraits are not just entangled with the white cultures that entered their lands but are linked to Yuin descendants today.

Quaint and charming

Heading north, back to the city, you will again pass through Berry, advertised to tourists as an historic village with “the perfect blend of village charm and city style” that is “full of interesting history”.

Berry Museum plays its part, presenting Alexander Berry as a soft-hearted adventurer yet hard-headed businessman, who was distressed by any form of human suffering. His interest in phrenology and trade in the skulls of Aboriginal people is not mentioned in Berry Museum.

In 1822, Berry and his business partner Edward Wollstonecraft were granted 10,000 acres on the Shoalhaven River by Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane. This possession of a vast section of Yuin land, renamed Coolangatta, gave Berry access to Aboriginal graves.

Collection of human skeletal remains, particularly skulls, was not uncommon in colonial societies. Berry and Governor Brisbane shared an interest in phrenology (the study of skull shape), and Brisbane donated a “skull of a native female of New South Wales” to the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh.

During the 1820s Berry also actively sought out skulls from associates in Tasmania. In 1827, in a letter accompanying a “craniological specimen”, Berry describes Arawarra, “the owner of the present specimen”, as a “once formidable warrior”, being carried by his son to “take a last look of Cooloomgatta (sic) now occupied by strangers”.

Berry describes how the “venerable old gentleman” died two days after this meeting and was buried on the Coolangatta estate. He goes on to describe the manner of Arawarra’s burial, stating that he “lived to an extreme old age and died in peace”.

The tourist space

Historian and cultural studies scholar, Katrina Schlunke, asks “what can and can’t be said in ‘tourist space’?”. Vandalisation of burial sites and collection of skulls does not fit with the image of Berry as a relaxing country getaway. And including the story of Arawarra carelessly may risk further desecration of Yuin protocols if not undertaken with extensive consultation with Elders and community members.

Museums have never been neutral in the choices they make about what to display and how, but avoiding traumatic or difficult histories is not neutral either.

Wiradjuri curator at the Australian Museum, Nathan Sentance, states that museums and archives “should not just work to document bad history, but work to prevent bad history from happening”. Including the “bad” history of the town of Berry may work towards a better understanding of how replacing the bush and swamps greatly benefited some people at the ongoing expense of others.

Reinterpreting local histories is not for the fainthearted and the more the “top” layer of the pioneer story is disrupted, the more the “too hot to handle” stories emerge.

The Berry District Historical Society’s website claims, “the complete story of Alexander Berry is full of adventure and courage”. This pitch tells us there is some serious reconsideration needed regarding what constitutes a “complete” story.

History is messy

In 2018, the 10-Year Indigenous Roadmap, commissioned by peak body Australian Museums and Galleries Association, was finalised. The aim of the roadmap is to change “interactions, communication, understandings and ultimately, the Australian view of First Peoples”.

Small museums, with their wealth of material, stories, experience and passionate volunteer staff, could play an important part in achieving that aim.

Megan Davis, Cobble Cobble woman, Pro Vice Chancellor and Professor of Law at UNSW, reported that in the dialogues conducted in preparation for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the overwhelming view was that “a nation cannot recognise people they do not know or understand”.

The truth-telling the Uluru Statement calls for, could be work that local museums, in partnership with Aboriginal communities, could contribute to in ways that profoundly reinvigorate how local histories get told.

– ref. Small histories: a road trip reveals local museums stuck in a rut – http://theconversation.com/small-histories-a-road-trip-reveals-local-museums-stuck-in-a-rut-113104

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

Government sources insist shock jock Alan Jones didn’t drive Thursday’s announcement of a cash payment to drought-striken farmers about to be turfed off their household support because they’d reached the four year time limit.

They say the measure – giving up to $13,000 to a couple and $7500 to individuals at a cost of $12.8 million this financial year – had been in cabinet’s expenditure review committee process for some time.

But the National Farmers Federation says it wasn’t given any notice, which seems odd since drought minister David Littleproud is constantly referencing the NFF.

Regardless of the sequencing, Jones’ extraordinarily angry and emotional performance on Tuesday, haranguing Morrison on radio, breaking down on TV, and warning of dire political consequences if the government didn’t do something, certainly concentrated the prime minister’s mind.

As one official puts it, Morrison is “attuned to the zeitgeist”. Described more prosaically, the PM is highly sensitive to public opinion, and he judges that in metropolitan areas as well as the regions, people want more action – and then more still – to help those brought to their knees.

As for Jones, whatever impact his outbursts had on the government, the fact the announcement followed so soon will be used to burnish his much honed image of having political influence.

Read more: View from The Hill: Alan Jones v Scott Morrison on the question of how you feed a cow

When he became PM, Morrison was immediately anxious to own the issue of the drought. He referred to it in his news conference the day he was elected leader, saying it was “the first thing I need to turn attention to”, and was quickly off to a drought-affected area.

Now he is feeling the full cost – political as well as financial – of that ownership, as he’s confronted with pressure on all sides.

NFF president Fiona Simson continues to say she doesn’t think the government has a drought policy.

The Coalition’s handling looks ad hoc and reactive. The responses of federal and state governments need to be better linked. For example, is there a case for federal help for moving breeding stock to agistment? Oh, the feds say, that’s in the state arena (rather than looking at augmenting state assistance). Drought policy is bedevilled by the old federal-state blame game, as shown by the wrangling over dam building.

Also, the government has no credible reason for keeping under wraps the report it commissioned from Stephen Day, who was its drought-coordinator, which would provide some useful overview.

Thursday’s announcement of the cash payment was messy: Morrison trumpeted it on radio at the same time as the Nationals unveiled it at a press conference.

(Morrison chose John Laws’ program, which he rarely goes on. Laws asked pointedly, “Why do you permit yourself to be harangued in the way that Alan Jones harangues you …[a lot of people] rather felt that it was a sign of weakness that you let Alan get away with what he got away with.”)

Read more: A national drought policy should be an easy, bipartisan fix. So why has it taken so long to enact a new one?

Some Nationals were unhappy at Morrison seemingly one-upping their leader Michael McCormack and his colleagues, especially as the PM went out of his way to tell listeners “that’s new news today on the John Laws programme”.

The problem is that disgruntled Nationals, under the pump in their seats, see it as symptomatic of a wider issue about Morrison’s approach. One senior National says: “Morrison is going to have to learn to build a deeper and more respectful relationship with the Nationals – find space for McCormack to be seen to be delivering for regional Australia.”

The Nationals’ problems go further. Outsiders observe the rivalry between the party’s deputy leader Bridget McKenzie and Littleproud, both of whom have stakes in drought policy. Littleproud was particularly upset at losing the agriculture portfolio to McKenzie after the election.

From the Coalition’s vantage point the drought debate – and the prime minister making himself so central in it – has raised unrealistic expectations of what government can do.

In prolonged drought, the harsh reality is some farmers will go under, just as in a recession, some city businesses will fail. There is only so much protection a government can or should provide. The difficulty for many farmers is deciding whether hanging on is worth the gamble, because there is no knowing how long it will be before the rains come.

On two fronts now Morrison, who likes to be in control, is at the mercy of events he can’t control. Apart from the drought, the International Monetary Fund’s downgrading this week of the growth outlook for the world and for Australia has reinforced the message that the government’s economic policy is on a knife edge.

The IMF downgrade takes the projection for Australia’s growth in 2019 to 1.7% – a year ago the IMF set it at 2.8%.

Read more: The dirty secret at the heart of the projected budget surplus: much higher tax bills

The situation poses a judgement call for the government – inject some stimulus quickly or hope that it can get through on its present fiscal setting, keeping its projected surplus (its top priority) intact.

Three reductions in interest rates in quick time haven’t had much effect in boosting the economy (and there is speculation about another). On the evidence to date, neither have the income tax cuts achieved what was hoped. People are not spending enough; many businesses are uncertain.

So far, the government has held out in face of exhortations from Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe to help on the fiscal side. (Lowe’s style might be at the opposite end of the advocacy spectrum to that of Jones, but he can pack a punch.)

Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (who is in the US for the IMF and other meetings) this week defended their position on the surplus as a giving a buttress against bad times.

“A surplus is not an end in itself”, Morrison told parliament – “a surplus … is a means to an end,” the end being that “Australians can have confidence that we can meet the uncertainties that are ahead.”

He describes Labor’s calls for government action as reflecting its “penchant … for panic and crisis.”

As it stands by its unwillingness to inject immediate stimulus, the government is harking back to the Labor’s action in the global financial crisis and what it condemns as overreach. Probably it was, but going hard and going early was a cautionary policy that took out a hefty insurance premium against recession.

The period ahead will tell whether the government’s refusal to stimulate the economy does indeed show the “cool and clear heads” that Morrison boasts. Or whether it will turn out to be an unfortunate manifestation of pig headedness, with policy having to be modified subsequently. If the latter, let’s hope it won’t be a case of too little too late.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Storm clouds avoid the bush, darken over the economy – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-storm-clouds-avoid-the-bush-darken-over-the-economy-125433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Fancourt, Adjunct Research Fellow, University of New England

Feral cats are wreaking havoc on our native wildlife, eating more than a billion animals across Australia every year. But managing feral cats and reducing their impacts on our threatened species is challenging, to say the least.

Aside from killing native animals, feral cats spread parasites and diseases such as toxoplasmosis which can kill native wildlife or make them more susceptible to predators.

To reduce these impacts, we must reduce feral cat populations. The difficulty is finding the right approach.

There have been suggestions that dingoes could help conserve biodiversity by controlling feral cats. But the evidence does not support this approach.

We investigated the relationship between dingoes and feral cats in central Queensland. Contrary to previous suggestions, we found that cats remained abundant, active and widespread, regardless of whether dingoes were present or absent, and regardless of where or when dingoes were active.

Our findings suggest that proposals to restore or reintroduce dingoes to protect threatened species may do more harm than good.

Do dingoes create a ‘landscape of fear’?

Some studies have reported fewer cats in areas with dingoes, concluding that dingoes must be suppressing cat numbers. However, these studies typically estimate the number of dingoes and cats using the number of footprints on a sand plot, counts from spotlight searches, or even the raw number of images captured on camera traps.

Unfortunately, all of these methods are known to be poor measures of abundance. Accordingly, whether or not dingoes suppress the abundance of cats remains hotly debated.

Read more: A hidden toll: Australia’s cats kill almost 650 million reptiles a year

It has also been suggested that dingoes create a ‘landscape of fear’, scaring cats and forcing them to change their behaviour to avoid dingoes. According to this hypothesis, dingoes might create cat-free periods or areas in the landscape, where threatened species could live without being harassed by cats.

By scaring cats away, some argue that dingoes might also prevent cats from hunting in the best areas, or hunting at the best times. Over time, this might even reduce cat populations by reducing their hunting success, body condition and breeding success.

Cats don’t give two hoots about dingoes

These suggestions might sound promising for conservation. But in reality, we found that dingoes do not impact cat activity.

Dingoes did not exclude cats from any patches, and cats were widespread across our study sites. Not only were cats and dingoes active in the same areas, cat activity was actually higher in patches where dingoes roamed than in areas where dingoes were absent. This suggests that dingoes do not create cat-free refuges in the landscape to protect threatened species.

Cats and dingoes were also active at the same times. While activity times for dingoes and cats overlapped at both sites, there was slightly less overlap at one site. But interestingly, this was because dingoes, not cats, had shifted their activity.

Read more: For whom the bell tolls: cats kill more than a million Australian birds every day

Cat densities at our sites were around 50% higher than the national average. This means that dingoes are not controlling cat numbers, either by killing or scaring cats, changing cat behaviour, or reducing their hunting or breeding success. Cats remained active, abundant and widespread across our sites, and our evidence suggests they also hunt and breed successfully in areas with dingoes.

A group of world-leading taxonomists recently determined that dingoes are not a distinct species, but actually a type of dog. Cats have lived around dogs for tens of thousands of years, and have clearly learned how to outsmart them in order to coexist. Our findings suggest that feral cats are no different to their domestic cousins in their ability to outsmart and coexist with dingoes.

Lessons from history

History is littered with examples of dingoes failing to protect threatened species from feral cats. Soon after European settlement, feral cats established and spread across Australia, causing the extinction of dozens of Australian native mammal species. This mass destruction occurred in the presence of dingoes, which had been introduced to Australia up to 5000 years earlier.

If the dingo couldn’t stop the spread of feral cats and protect threatened species from extinction while cats numbers were still low, it seems extremely unlikely that they could effectively suppress the two to six million feral cats that occupy 99.8% of Australia today.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States is often touted as an example of how dingoes could restructure Australian ecosystems and protect our biodiversity. But Australia isn’t Yellowstone, and dingoes aren’t wolves. Wolves are a native top-order predator in Yellowstone, while the dingo is merely an introduced middle-sized predator in Australia.

Dingoes eat threatened species too

Even if dingoes could suppress cats, dingoes are still predators that hunt and kill to survive. It is often claimed that dingoes are beneficial because they kill invasive pests and overabundant native animals. But they also kill the threatened species that they are supposed to protect.

For example, dingoes are the major predator of endangered adult bridled nailtail wallabies, and have contributed to the failure of reintroduction programs for other threatened species, including northern quolls and burrowing bettongs.

Read more: The dingo is a true-blue, native Australian species

Australia is rapidly losing the fight to save our threatened species. Trapping, shooting and exclusion fencing can all help control cats in small areas, but these approaches are not feasible, sustainable or effective over large areas.

Better approaches are needed to control invasive predators such as feral cats and protect our threatened species. But using one introduced predator to control another introduced predator is clearly not the solution.

This article was co-written by Dr Matt Gentle, a co-author of the research. Matt is a principal scientist with the Pest Animal Research Centre within Biosecurity Queensland.

– ref. Cats are not scared off by dingoes. We must find another way to protect native animals – http://theconversation.com/cats-are-not-scared-off-by-dingoes-we-must-find-another-way-to-protect-native-animals-123039

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jerry Zhou, Lecturer, School of Medicine, Western Sydney University

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

Does chewing gum stay inside you for years? – Olivia, aged 12, Australia.

Great question, Olivia! The short answer is that most gum you swallow ends up in your poo. But if you swallow a lot of chewing gum, it can get stuck and cause problems.

Chewing gum existed 6,000 years ago. Our ancestors chewed gum made from black tar and tree sap. Just like today, people chewed gum to keep their mouth clean and stay alert.

Almost every civilisation chewed gum. The imperial Chinese chewed ginseng root to pass the time, while ancient Greek soldiers chewed tree bark on their march to battle.

Our modern gum is made from a flavoured synthetic rubber-like material, a softer and tastier version of the same stuff we use to make pencil erasers or bicycle tyres.

Read more: Curious Kids: How did people clean their teeth in the olden days?

A gum’s journey through our digestive system

Your gut is 10 metres of bendy tubes that turns food into energy for your body. This process starts in your mouth, where the teeth chew and grind up food into smaller pieces. The food then drops into the stomach, where acids and chemicals break it down into even smaller pieces. Now it’s ready for your body to absorb and turn into energy.

Anything not used is pushed through your gut (also known as the intestines). Gum cannot be broken into small pieces by chewing or by the chemicals in your stomach.

So the gut pushes and squeezes the chewing gum out as poo a few days after you swallow it. That is where most swallowed gum ends up.

What if you swallow a lot of gum?

Swallowing a lot of gum can cause it to stick together or stick to food in your gut. If you have ever stepped on a piece of gum before, you know how sticky it is.

In rare cases, this can form a blockage doctors call a “bezoar”. A young Israeli girl had to have a large bezoar surgically removed from her stomach after developing a habit of chewing and swallowing at least five wafers of chewing gum per day.

As long as you mostly spit your chewing gum out and put it in the bin, you will be okay.

Read more: Curious Kids: how does my tummy turn food into poo?

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: does chewing gum stay inside you for years? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-does-chewing-gum-stay-inside-you-for-years-121432

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

In March last year, Frances McDormand won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In her acceptance speech, she drew attention to the female nominees in the room and left them with two final words: “inclusion rider”.

Inclusion riders are contractual clauses that can be used by prominent stars like McDormand to demand quotas for greater employment of minority groups on- and off-screen.

Within weeks, a long list of actors including Brie Larson, Matt Damon and Michael B. Jordan had pledged to adopt an inclusion rider in future contracts. Last September, Warner Bros became the first major Hollywood studio to adopt a company-wide policy to implement an inclusion rider practice.

But what do Australian discrimination laws say about hiring practices based on attributes such as gender, race or disability?

Pressure to diversify

Developed in the US by Dr Stacy Smith, inclusion riders are designed to put pressure on film companies to diversify their hiring practices. They are particularly targeted at increasing diversity through supporting acting roles and positions among the crew.

An actor in a leading role could request a clause in their contract stipulating that Indigenous Australians must comprise at least 10% of the supporting cast in an Australian film, or 50% of the film crew must be women.

Through this, power imbalances in creative industries can begin to be rectified.

Read more: The Oscars: inclusivity riders are a start but change needs to come from the ground up

Women have the majority of dialogue in just 22% of films. Just 4% of major film directors are female. While 17% of the Australian population are of non-European background, only 7% of characters in Australian television are of non-European descent. Further, 91% of Australian TV characters with a disability are cast with non-disabled actors.

Unclear legal implications

Discrimination laws in Australia protect most attributes symmetrically. For instance, this means men and women are both protected from sex discrimination.

Consider a male actor not selected for a supporting role where the lead actor’s contract required 50% of the supporting cast be female. If the male actor would have been selected but for the inclusion rider, he could mount a discrimination case.

However, all four of the current federal discrimination law statutes (race, sex, disability and age) – and indeed the new draft religious discrimination bill – contain a “special measures” provision.

These provisions permit otherwise unlawful discriminatory acts where they seek to further the opportunities of historically disadvantaged groups.

These laws also permit casting practices for particular roles on the basis of authenticity, through “genuine occupational requirement” provisions: a role can be written for a woman, or someone of Asian descent, and cast appropriately. The “genuine occupational requirement” provisions would not usually apply to inclusion riders, as riders target roles where these attributes are not “required” – such as supporting roles or off-screen roles.

Would inclusion riders be lawful?

We recently published a paper in the Media and Arts Law Review which examined the lawfulness of inclusion riders as “special measures”.

This is an especially difficult question because of the way these discrimination laws are drafted. Different policy reasons underpin each of the special measure provisions, such as “achieving substantive equality” (sex), “reducing a disadvantage” (age), and securing “adequate advancement” (race).

Inclusion riders that target groups across all four laws would therefore have to meet four different sets of requirements.

But the question essentially boils down to this: is the measure targeted at increasing opportunities for a disadvantaged group, and is it a reasonable and/or appropriate way of achieving this?

If a quota or measure is stricter, its rationale must be stronger. And the less represented a group is, the easier it is to make this rationale.

Our paper suggests inclusion riders are likely to meet this test and qualify as a special measure under all four laws. The groups targeted by inclusion riders are undoubtedly disadvantaged in the film industry.

When particular groups do achieve fair representation in creative industries, inclusion riders may then become unlawful. But this seems a long way off.

The rest of the ride

Despite inclusion riders likely being lawful under Australian discrimination laws, barriers to their implementation remain.

Producers may be concerned at the potential for discrimination claims and the consequential attention this could draw – even more so when measures must comply with four different federal laws and eight state and territory laws, which each provide different complex tests.

As such, we propose two reforms to encourage and empower actors and film companies to take up inclusion riders in Australia.

First, a new harmonised provision on special measures should be drafted. If each federal law contained the same special measures test this would provide certainty to producers seeking to implement inclusion riders. Though the harmonisation of all federal discrimination laws failed back in 2012, the harmonisation of a single provision should be more achievable.

Second, companies should be able to certify inclusion riders as lawful special measures.

The Australian Human Rights Commission currently has no power to approve particular special measures.

Allowing the Commission to certify such measures would provide producers with the preemptive authority and confidence to implement special measures. It could create greater certainty on the lawfulness of quotas in other sectors, too.

Inclusion riders aren’t the only answer

While inclusion riders provide an important and effective step towards the goal of achieving greater diversity in creative industries, it is not the only step to be taken.

Producers must consider how diverse groups are represented so as to avoid reinforcing stereotypes.

Pay parity also requires significant work: an inclusion rider cannot achieve its aims if more women are employed but they are paid vastly less than male counterparts.

Stakeholders could also build on Screen Australia’s Gender Matters program, which is already reaping benefits.

As then-Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick noted in a speech ten years ago on gender equality and quotas: “without a significant change in approaches the only thing we can expect is more of the same.”

If the response to McDormand’s speech is anything to go by, creative industries have the platform and opportunity to be leaders in this change.

Inclusion riders are a start: but more needs to be done to ensure we aren’t sitting here in another decade saying the same thing.

This article was co-authored with Monica Brierley-Hay (Associate, Federal Court of Australia)

– ref. The case for ‘inclusion riders’ in creative industries: what Australian discrimination law says about quotas – http://theconversation.com/the-case-for-inclusion-riders-in-creative-industries-what-australian-discrimination-law-says-about-quotas-122264

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peggy Kern, Associate professor, University of Melbourne

The Portal follows six individuals who undergo a personal transformation from trauma and struggle to calmness, self-acceptance, and compassion towards others. These personal changes are intertwined with contemplations about the broader struggles facing humanity and the role of technology.

The underlying claim is that stillness is not only a portal for personal transformation, but also a portal that ignites human potential for global transformation. The filmmakers contend that meditative practice has the power to move humankind from being on the verge of disconnection, chaos, and crisis to connection, calmness, and enlightenment.

While this might seem far-fetched, the film – slickly produced with stunning imagery – effectively captures our individual and collective challenges, highlighting the benefits people have experienced through various contemplative practices, and offering a hopeful vision of human potential.

Noise and haste

The movie begins with a powerful cacophony of noise, voices, and images – building up to a feeling of distress and a call to action that “something’s got to change”.

This sense of disruption, disconnection, and chaos then unfolds through the lives of six people from a range of backgrounds.

The experiences of the individuals are developed through the course of the film, skipping between their stories, supported by recurrent images and music. Their issues – abuse, violence, career-ending injury, stroke, suicide, loneliness, depression, stress, intrusive thoughts, debt, emptiness – will be familiar to many adults, young and old.

Extending beyond the individual narratives, futurists and philosophers explore the state of the world and the role of technology. Some viewers will likely agree with the causes attributed to these problems, others will not.

One commentator observes that almost every problem that we are facing is human-generated. We are living in a time when many of our social systems are unstable, with technology accelerating life faster than we can adapt to it.

Even as we become more interconnected than ever before, many young people struggle with loneliness and a lack of belonging. And concerns over the climate are negatively impacting upon physical and mental health.

We are divided from ourselves, others, and nature, which results in a range of problems ranging from mental illness to destruction of the natural environment.

Contemplative practices

The film proposes meditation is the solution to these problems, providing a way to realise our human potential.

Each of the featured individuals finds resolution through stillness, achieved through forms of contemplative practice: guided meditation, yoga, prayer, or quiet reflection. A growing number of studies, reviews, and meta analyses suggest contemplative practices correlate with beneficial outcomes, but also point to how little is known about these techniques].

Read more: What is mindfulness? Nobody really knows, and that’s a problem

The film makes meditation accessible, supported by the personal experiences of everyday people – including a university student impacted by a traumatic childhood, a soldier suffering from PTSD, a Rabbi recovering from a stroke, and an athlete trying to rebuild her life. Each individual finds ways that work for them to create stillness, calming the chaos experienced within.

The viewer is subtlety invited to join in. Near the end of the film, the cacophony of images returns, this time with the chaos transforming into calmness and offering a few meditative moments of stillness.

No quick fix

Importantly, those featured in the film demonstrate that meditation is not a panacea, and also not an escape. It’s a practice they develop and consistently prioritise.

Each person, struggling with various traumas, learns to not ignore their past, but rather to accept and sit quietly with it. Meditation becomes an approach for the characters to face and accept their challenging histories, rather than avoid or be destroyed by them.

The film also points to the potential for contemplative practices to develop collective well-being. Through meditation and stillness, the individuals develop compassion for others, opening up the possibility for connection.

The film ends with a hopeful vision, suggesting the beautiful transformation that could emerge if each of us were to embrace our individual potential and contribute our part to the world.

Hopeful but sceptical

The stories in this film are compelling, though at times hard to follow. The images and music are engaging, but the driving story and key messages are at times unclear. The statements and claims by the futurists and researchers featured deserve continued debate and study by the scientific community.

Is meditation the answer to changing the world? The personal transformation of six individuals is a far cry from global transformation. Then again, change occurs one person at a time, and perhaps in stillness, creative solutions to the problems facing our society can indeed emerge.

The Portal opens in cinemas today

– ref. The Portal review: can meditation change the world? – http://theconversation.com/the-portal-review-can-meditation-change-the-world-123513

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Ruppanner, Associate Professor in Sociology and Co-Director of The Policy Lab, University of Melbourne

The polls were wrong in the last US and Australian federal elections. Hillary Clinton was favoured to win at a margin of 85% to Donald Trump’s 15%. And Bill Shorten was expected to defeat Scott Morrison.

But what the polls perhaps didn’t reveal was that conservative candidates in both countries had captured an unexpected electorate: women.

Hillary Clinton performed poorly among white women because, as some argued, she couldn’t emotionally connect to voters.

Bill Shorten also lost women’s votes, pushing them towards the Coalition.

Read more: She’ll be right: why conservative voters fail to see gender as an obstacle to political success

Women are swinging elections in the US and Australia in ways analysts have struggled to predict. So, what is going on with female voters? Our two recent studies can help explain.

Gender linked fate

Our earlier study suggests a key to understanding women’s political attitudes is their perception their futures are connected to what happens to other women, or their “gender linked fate”.

The idea of a linked fate has long been used to explain voting patterns of racial minority groups. Individual African-Americans, for example, have generally understood their futures to be closely tied to the well-being of the whole group.

This sense of linked fate helps explain why African-Americans vote as a block for more liberal candidates. Supporting the group is more important than individual preferences.

In this study, we assessed whether women experience a sense of linked fate to other women. And we found something striking in our US sample. Women’s perceptions of gender linked fate were contingent on two dimensions: their race and their marital status.

African-American women reported higher levels of gender-linked fate than whites, regardless of whether they were married, single or divorced. But for white and Latina women, gender-linked fate was tied to their marital status.

Only 18% of married white women reported their futures were strongly connected to other women compared to 38% of single and 30% of divorced white women. The patterns are similar for Latina women. This means for these two racial groups, heterosexual marriage leads them to feel less connected to other women.

Read more: NZ was first to grant women the vote in 1893, but then took 26 years to let them stand for parliament

Marriage is shown to shift couples’ attitudes, making them more similar to each other over the course of marriage. But, the shift is not even.

Rather, women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage.

Single women, on the other hand, are more supportive of feminist issues than married women, with feminist attitudes intensifying for women who rely more heavily on their own earnings.

Essentially, the institution of marriage traditionalises women’s attitudes and, as our study shows, this is pronounced for white women.

Weak gender linked fate

In the US, we found white married women’s lower levels of gender-linked fate helps explain their tendency to identify as a conservative and vote for the Republican party, and their weaker support for abortion.

These findings are important in the context of American politics. The election of Donald Trump and the passage of heartbeat bills (a ban of any abortion once a heartbeat of a fetus can be detected, six to eight weeks after conception) across six US states are major swings to the right.

The assumption that women would vote for Clinton or that women would support abortion because they are women are not shown in the data.

Our research helps explain one piece of this puzzle – married white and Latina women don’t necessarily see their futures as tied to other women.

So, who are they tied to? Our research suggests men.

Women’s connection to men

We have since collected new data on 317 American white women and asked them about their connection to women and men.

From our interviews, we found conservative women were more likely to report that as things get better for men, they believed their own life also improved. Women who are more liberal were less likely to agree with this statement.

In contrast, liberal married women were more likely to say they would give up some of their resources (such as economic resources or class privilege) to benefit other women – a claim conservative women by and large did not make.

And, more politically liberal women reported their connection to other women has strengthened by 25% in the current political climate, over the past two years, compared to 8% among conservative women.

Simply, conservative white women are less connected to other women and more connected to men.

Read more: A ‘woman problem’? No, the Liberals have a ‘man problem’, and they need to fix it

The US is distinct in its racial, political and marital composition, but there are some lessons to be learned for the current Australian political climate.

The 2019 federal election showed women weren’t aligned with Labor in the way the polls predicted.

Something in Coalition’s message resonates with Australian women. Our research suggests these messages may be particularly powerful to certain groups of women – married, white and conservative – who are watching their family’s futures change.

– ref. Why white married women are more likely to vote for conservative parties – http://theconversation.com/why-white-married-women-are-more-likely-to-vote-for-conservative-parties-124783

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Hielscher, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

People living with mental illness often require support from carers, such as family and friends, on a long-term and somewhat unpredictable basis.

But these support networks are not always in place. Geographical or emotional distance from family members, conflict with friends, and the tendency for people with mental illness to withdraw from others means these individuals are often isolated.

In two Australian surveys – a national snapshot survey of Australian adults with psychosis and another looking at adults with long-term mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and psychosis – only one-quarter reported receiving regular assistance from family or friends. About three out of every four people living with mental illness reported the absence of a carer or other informal support.

Read more: From hospital to homeless: Victoria’s mental health system fails the most vulnerable

For someone living with mental illness, having a carer or support person facilitates continuity of care and provides advocacy and support, particularly during and after episodes of acute illness.

People with mental illness are at their most vulnerable following discharge from hospital or other inpatient facilities. Reintegrating back into society can be challenging. And during this time, the risk of suicide is high.

It’s somewhat unsurprising, then, that people without a carer or support network face poorer outcomes in terms of recovery.

How does having a carer help?

Following hospitalisation for an acute episode of mental illness, people typically require assistance with a myriad of tasks.

They may need help with day-to-day activities like grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning. People in recovery may also need support to re-engage with the community, including returning to work or study.

They will likely benefit from assistance in adhering to care plans, including managing medications and attending follow-up appointments. A person recovering from hospitalisation for an eating disorder may need support from family members to ensure they are eating as much as they need to at mealtimes.

As well as these practical supports, someone recovering from an acute episode of mental illness requires ongoing emotional support which reaffirms their sense of self and capacity to recover.

Read more: Depression: it’s a word we use a lot, but what exactly is it?

We surveyed 105 Australian mental health carers and found the most commonly reported care tasks were “providing encouragement and motivation”, “prompting their loved ones to do things”, and “liaising with health professionals”.

Carers spent the majority of their caring time providing emotional support, and the least of their care time assisting with activities of daily living, such as feeding and dressing.

Research has shown having a carer increases the likelihood of follow-up care and better health outcomes in the short and long term. Following hospitalisation, carers can recognise and respond to early warning signs of relapse and encourage better engagement in prescribed care plans.

And although it’s rarely considered part of the caring role, safe and stable housing is crucial for recovery. Most mental health carers also live with the person they are caring for.

Read more: Looking after loved ones with mental illness puts carers at risk themselves. They need more support

What about discharged patients who don’t have informal supports?

The transition from hospital to home can be frightening and difficult. Patients tend to become accustomed to the day-to-day hospital routine and in turn can feel increasingly disconnected from the outside world. These challenges are exacerbated in the absence of support from health professionals, family or friends.

Without family or carer involvement at discharge, a person with mental illness may be more likely to relapse and be readmitted, falling into a “revolving door” pattern of multiple hospitalisations.

One study of older psychiatric patients found absent or dysfunctional family support was one of the strongest predictors of hospital readmission in the 18 months after discharge. Patients without reliable family support were nearly twice as likely to be readmitted to hospital than those who had dedicated family carers.

Similar results have been found in broader and larger samples. Among 1,384 adult patients admitted to a psychiatric hospital, unreliable social support at discharge was associated with an increased risk of being readmitted to hospital within one year.

Further, reduced social support and lack of continuity of care has been shown to be an important predictor of suicide following hospital discharge. For self-harm and suicide, the risk is most pronounced in the three months following discharge from hospital.

What needs to improve?

Alongside the absence of family support, lack of connection with community-based services and supports is similarly associated with poor post-discharge outcomes.

Discharge planning and transitional programs have been established to provide additional practical and emotional support to people with mental illness after they leave hospital. These have reported promising results in terms of preventing hospital readmission and promoting engagement with community treatment (such as psychological support services, medication monitoring, and alcohol and drug recovery services). Further research which identifies the key benefits of such programs is needed, using larger controlled studies.

Another solution is improving housing support for mental health patients after discharge. Programs such as Housing Mental Health Pathways in Victoria assist people with mental illness and a history of homelessness who have no suitable accommodation at the time of hospital discharge. More programs like this are needed.

Read more: Mental health care spending saves money, and that’s worth investing in

The time following hospitalisation is one of the most vulnerable for people with mental illness. More needs to be done at both a community and policy level to better support people during this period – particularly those without a carer or informal support network.

If this article has raised issues for you or you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. For people with a mental illness, loved ones who care are as important as formal supports – http://theconversation.com/for-people-with-a-mental-illness-loved-ones-who-care-are-as-important-as-formal-supports-120344

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Byron, Lecturer in Psychology, University of Wollongong

I am in year 11 and I like to listen to music when I am studying, but my dad says that my brain is spending only half of its time studying and the other half is distracted by listening. He says it is better to leave my phone out of my room and concentrate on studying rather than listening to music. Is it OK to listen to songs when I am studying? – Robert, Year 11 student.

It’s a good question! In a nutshell, music puts us in a better mood, which makes us better at studying – but it also distracts us, which makes us worse at studying.

So if you want to study effectively with music, you want to reduce how distracting music can be, and increase the level to which the music keeps you in a good mood.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do adults think video games are bad?

Music can put us in a better mood

You may have heard of the Mozart effect – the idea that listening to Mozart makes you “smarter”. This is based on research that found listening to complex classical music like Mozart improved test scores, which the researcher argued was based on the music’s ability to stimulate parts of our minds that play a role in mathematical ability.

However, further research conclusively debunked the Mozart effect theory: it wasn’t really anything to do with maths, it was really just that music puts us in a better mood.

Research conducted in the 1990s found a “Blur Effect” – where kids who listened to the BritPop band Blur seemed to do better on tests. In fact, researchers found that the Blur effect was bigger than the Mozart effect, simply because kids enjoyed pop music like Blur more than classical music.

Being in a better mood likely means that we try that little bit harder and are willing to stick with challenging tasks.

Music can distract us

On the other hand, music can be a distraction – under certain circumstances.

When you study, you’re using your “working memory” – that means you are holding and manipulating several bits of information in your head at once.

The research is fairly clear that when there’s music in the background, and especially music with vocals, our working memory gets worse.

Likely as a result, reading comprehension decreases when people listen to music with lyrics. Music also appears to be more distracting for people who are introverts than for people who are extroverts, perhaps because introverts are more easily overstimulated.

Some clever work by an Australia-based researcher called Bill Thompson and his colleagues aimed to figure out the relative effect of these two competing factors – mood and distraction.

They had participants do a fairly demanding comprehension task, and listen to classical music that was either slow or fast, and which was either soft or loud.

They found the only time there was any real decrease in performance was when people were listening to music that was both fast and loud (that is, at about the speed of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, at about the volume of a vacuum cleaner).

But while that caused a decrease in performance, it wasn’t actually that big a decrease. And other similar research also failed to find large differences.

So… can I listen to music while studying or not?

To sum up: research suggest it’s probably fine to listen to music while you’re studying – with some caveats.

It’s better if:

• it puts you in a good mood
• it’s not too fast or too loud
• it’s less wordy (and hip-hop, where the words are rapped rather than sung, is likely to be even more distracting)
• you’re not too introverted.

Happy listening and good luck in your exams!

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do old people hate new music?

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: is it OK to listen to music while studying? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-is-it-ok-to-listen-to-music-while-studying-125222

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philippa England, Senior Lecturer, Griffith Law School, Griffith University

Good planning needs integrity, and public participation should play a role in that.

But a row over a high-rise development proposed for suburban Brisbane shows what happens when the public feels left out of the planning process.

This highlights the problem with what is termed performance-based planning, which allows some controversial applications to be approved with little or no input from the community.

A plan submitted

Aged-care provider TriCare first lodged its application to develop a new facility in June 2017.

Read more: It’s easy to get us walking more if we have somewhere to walk to near our home and work

The site it chose was zoned for community facilities and the application was treated under Brisbane City Council’s performance-based planning rules as “code assessable development”.

Even though the developer was not required to give notice of the proposal to the local community, people soon got wind of it. They mobilised strong opposition to the planned development.

The developer was proposing three buildings of eight, 12 and 16 storeys in a locality characterised by dwellings that are mostly one to three storeys high.

In November 2017, the council rejected the application. The developer appealed.

TriCare then modified the proposal to the council’s satisfaction and the Queensland Planning and Environment Court approved the negotiated deal last month.

The approved design is for three buildings ranging from seven to eight storeys, a very significant scaling down of the original proposal.

Still no public consultation

But once again the local community was not involved in any of the negotiations or the court proceedings. This is because no community appeals are allowed on code assessable development.

Would the developer have got what it originally wanted if the community had not shown its opposition? And why didn’t the court even consider the community’s point of view?

The answer to these questions lies partly in the legal framework for code assessable development.

In Queensland, code assessable development is considered a bounded form of assessment, which means it should be considered primarily against a planning scheme’s codes. The original aim was to speed up approvals for development applications broadly consistent with a council’s planning scheme.

These codes are written in a performance-based way. This means developers that only meet the overall outcomes of a code can still get their proposals across the line no matter what the code’s finer details state.

Overall outcomes are very often just that – broad statements of intent open to many different interpretations.

For example, in the TriCare case the applicable overall outcomes required development to be “generally consistent with the character of the area” and to “complement the prevailing, scale, height and bulk of expected development in the locality”.

The council – and the community – believed the initial application did not comply with these terms. The developer’s appeal argued its proposal was “generally consistent” with the character of the area as there were at least some medium-to-high-rise buildings in the area, including one nine-storey residential building on adjacent land.

Contrary to the council’s view, the developer argued:

The proposed development is of a scale, bulk and height that provides a high level of amenity and transitions sensitively to surrounding uses.

Evidently, code assessment is not quite the bounded and uncontroversial form of decision-making the legislators intended.

Planning with the community

In planning, good decision-making needs integrity. It needs to provide decisions the community knows to expect including, where appropriate, conditions that protect and respond to the needs of the community.

Read more: ’30-minute city’? Not in my backyard! Smart Cities Plan must let people have their say

In Queensland, the parameters of performance-based planning have swung too far in favour of flexibility. We need to improve the drafting of performance-based codes.

Requirements to be “generally consistent with the character of the area” serve no useful purpose if the character of an area is hybrid, or has different meanings for the short- and long-term residents of that area.

There is also a huge distinction between code assessable development – where community members have no right of appeal – and impact assessable development – where public notification and third party appeal rights apply.

Yet whether applications are classed as impact or code assessable is a matter left to the discretion of individual councils with very little input from the community.

Further guidance needs to be given to better match assessment categories with community concerns.

Flexibility and discretion have a role to play in good planning. But if integrity, honesty and public trust are also goals then transparency and public accountability should be increased.

The value of public participation – both in its contribution to better design and for keeping the system accountable and honest – needs to be genuinely recognised and valued.

Read more: New Queensland planning law puts transparency and accountability at risk

Not all development applications may warrant public appeal rights but a place at the table for the community somewhere along the line is surely warranted.

The Taringa development was initially assessed under legislation that has been superseded. But, as I warned last year, Queensland’s new Planning Act has done little to nothing to resolve the fundamental concerns this case raises.

The divisive story of the aged-care development in Taringa serves as a timely warning to other states looking to shift to a performance-based planning model.

– ref. In your backyard: why people need a say on planning that affects their local community – http://theconversation.com/in-your-backyard-why-people-need-a-say-on-planning-that-affects-their-local-community-124175