University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini and Michelle Grattan discuss the acts of civil disobedience by climate activist group Extinction Rebellion – including the harsh bail conditions faced by protesters, and whether the tactics they use will be helpful to their cause.
They also talk about America’s withdrawal from Syria and the ensuing Turkish military offensive, and consider what Australia’s responsibility is in the conflict.
Could this be the question we are all asking ourselves in 50 years’ time as we remember the moment a male runner finally broke the 2-hour marathon barrier — the “four-minute mile” of our time?
This isn’t an official marathon race – far from it. Kipchoge is running as part of the dedicated, privately funded 1:59 Challenge sponsored by UK chemicals firm Ineos.
But still, official or not, Kipchoge must put one foot in front of the other, at the frighteningly fast average pace of 2m 52s per km (or 4m 38s per mile), for 42.195km.
So will he do it?
Probably. But let me explain.
Earlier this year, I ran the ruler over more than 50 years of world record marathon times for men and women, applying statistical tools to answer this very question for official marathon attempts.
However, my analysis was confined to official International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) times. Here, runners must compete in a sanctioned IAAF competition in which the course, the competitors, the timing, and myriad other factors must all fall within strict rules.
Kipchoge’s attempt this weekend is thoroughly unofficial, and he knows it. Indeed, Kipchoge has form at this kind of singular attempt, having previously attempted breaking the sub-2 barrier with a different major sponsor back in May 2017 at the Monza Formula 1 circuit in Italy.
There, as in Vienna, he ran with dozens of dedicated pacers, whose deliberate efforts to shield Kipchoge from wind resistance rendered the attempt unofficial.
Neverthless, even the closed track, slick tarmac, high-tech shoes, and army of pacers couldn’t give Kipchoge the performance gain he needed. He fell agonisingly short, just 25 seconds outside the 2-hour mark.
The official story
Despite the unofficial nature of the attempt this weekend, the official analysis proves very helpful at answering our question.
The graph on the left below shows the progression of the official men’s marathon world record over more than 50 years.
The progression does not follow a straight line; rather, it is steep in the early years, and shallow towards the present. This means the faster elite marathoners get, the longer we have to wait for them to improve that little bit more.
The progression of the men’s marathon world record over 50 years, with a focus on the most recent four years and the key milestones in Kipchoge’s official and unofficial attempts.SD Angus/Monash University
Using statistical tools, I also fit prediction curves (in red) to the progression. These curves tell us the likelihood that a given time will be run, taking into account both the average performance improvement over time, and the inherent randomness of other factors.
Zooming in on recent years (the graph on the right), we can see that Kipchoge’s current official world record of 2h 1m 39s, set in Berlin on September 16, 2018, sits on the “1 in 4” line. This means we would have expected to see a time like this, on that day in history, with around a 1 in 4 chance.
In other words, without taking anything away from Kipchoge’s amazing effort, his Berlin world record was not a huge deviation from the expected historical progression.
His Monza run in May 2017, on the other hand, was entirely different.
If Kipchoge’s time of 2h 0m 25s had been run in an official event, it would have been expected with just a 1 in 23 chance, or around 4%. This gives a strong clue to the huge performance gains available in these privately sponsored “moonshot” attempts.
So, will he do it in Vienna?
With this analysis in hand, we can have a good go at working out the chances for this weekend’s Vienna moment.
Suppose Kipchoge and his team produce an equivalent performance to Monza in 2017. Given the official progression, we would expect a marginal improvement in the time.
As can be seen on the figure, if we step forward the “1 in 23” prediction curve from May 6, 2017, to October 12, 2019, we discover that Kipchoge would be expected to run 2h 0m 14s.
Simply by waiting around 2.5 years, Kipchoge effectively gains 11s “for free”. Of course, it’s not actually free – it comes at the usual cost of intensive research, hard-fought training adaptations, equipment upgrades, and so on. But theoretically, we naturally expect these improvements to happen in time as long as everyone involved in the sport is doing their job and pursuing their goals.
What’s left is 15 extraordinary seconds.
Chasing history
So where will the extraordinary come from?
First, the team of elite pacers seem to have significantly refined their approach. Video footage of a training session a month ago showed groups of pacers running in exact arrow-like positions, with precisely rehearsed transitions.
Second, all this exquisite coordination will only be possible on the day because of a custom-built electric pacing car driving ahead of the runners, beaming precision laser patterns onto the road to define the exact location of each pacer. The car apparently provides pacing accuracy to within 1 metre over the marathon distance.
Of course, this being an attempt funded by Britain’s wealthiest individual, an identical car will follow in the wings should anything happen to the first.
Eliud Kipchoge’s pacemaking team.
Third, and perhaps crucially, whereas Kipchoge ran his Monza attempt at a near-deserted motor racing circuit, the Vienna course will host a crowd hoping to witness history.
Kipchoge clearly thrives on crowd energy. He has invited the world to come to Vienna or watch online – in effect, to help shoulder the mental burden of expectation. This time he will not run alone.
Scores of arrests have been made across Australia as the Extinction Rebellion enters its fifth day of protests.
The activists are desperately trying to force the Australian government to take serious and effective action against climate change. And their brand of civil disobedience has caused major inconveniences, from hanging off bridges to locking themselves to gates, vehicles or cement blocks.
But while inconvenient, their protests are still non-violent. This is an important point to stress, as the members of state and federal government peddle the view that they are criminals and anarchists.
In fact, as the movement grows stronger, so do the governments’ attempt to stop it. It shows the Extinction Rebellion’s demands are actually being heard, but at the same time, the drastic responses make it clear policy-makers will still choose to ignore them.
Draconian responses to social protest
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk last month used social media to denounce the “sinister” tactics of “stupid” protesters. She claims the current XR protests are “absolutely ridiculous” and are endangering people’s lives.
Her government is now fast-tracking new legislation that would mean possessing a locking device could lead to a jail term of up to two years, or a fine of up to $6,000.
Peter Dutton and Michaelia Cash added fuel to the fire. The Home Affairs minister labelled the XR protesters “fringe-dwellers”, and claimed they should face mandatory jail sentences and welfare cuts.
Senator Cash added: “taxpayers should not be expected to subsidise the protests of others”, since protesting is not an exemption from a welfare recipient’s obligation to look for a job.
What’s more, NSW Police have imposed stringent bail conditions on protesters, traditionally used with members of bikie gangs. The bail conditions prevent them from “going near, or contacting or trying to go near or contact (except through a legal representative) any members of the group Extinction Rebellion”. They’re also not allowed to be within 2.5 kilometres of Sydney’s CBD.
These conditions had the curious result of also preventing defendants from attending court in the Sydney CBD.
Ad hoc laws
Yesterday, former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam had his bail conditions revoked by deputy chief magistrate Jane Mottley, who said they were not necessary given the low seriousness of the offences. It’s expected many more cases will be dismissed on the same ground.
Peter Dutton has urged Extinction Rebellion protesters should have their welfare cut.AAP/Mick Tsikas
Nevertheless, this use of bail conditions against XR activists raises serious concerns, as citizens are threatened with jail if they insist on partaking in political activism.
But it’s not the first time we see these kinds of ad hoc responses to social protest. Earlier this year, the federal government introduced The Criminal Code Amendment (Agricultural Protection) Bill 2019, specifically targeting the growing animal rights movement in Australia.
And some have expressed concerns that Palaszczuk’s efforts to crack down on civil disobedience are reminiscent of the authoritarian Bjelke-Petersen era, when the QLD government allowed extreme police violence against peaceful protesters.
But it’s worth remembering these XR protests have so far only caused traffic disruptions. While it constitutes a punishable offence, they are fine-only offences at most, as the judge noticed in Ludlam’s case.
Laws already exist to sanction those who breach traffic regulation. With reference to Queensland’s proposed anti-protest legislation, the Human Rights Law Centre noticed:
devices such as sleeping dragons, monopoles and tripods are commonly used in peaceful protest across Australia — our criminal laws already adequately cover their use when they cause major disruption.
The new laws may allow the police to search and arrest anyone who engages in a peaceful protest.
Communicative nature of protest
As I argue in my recent book on civil disobedience, this form of illegal protest has an inherent communicative nature. It seeks to elicit a reply from governments concerning the necessity of changing a law or policy.
The goverment’s responses show their unwillingness to entertain the activists demands.AAP/David Crosling
From this standpoint, the tough, and seemingly unnecessary, responses to the XR movement are, paradoxically, encouraging. They reveal governments cannot continue to ignore the voices of environmental activists.
On the other hand, the way state and federal governments have chosen to respond show their unwillingness to entertain the activists’ demands.
Besides the mere goal of deterring people from engaging in further protest, governments are also following a familiar strategy involving the use of patronising language, aiming to dismiss XR activists as not worthy of its attention. For instance, the millions of young people who took part in the School Strike for Climate were just “skipping school”.
These are all ways for governments to avoid having to answer for the legitimate questions about its controversial policies and careless attitude about scientists’ warning about rising global temperatures.
As they strives to come up with more demeaning labels for the XR movement, we are left to hope they may eventually apply their creative skills towards finding ways to finally cut Australia’s carbon emissions.
In several speeches of late, Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted with a straight face that Australia is doing its bit on climate change. The claim was swiftly and thoroughly debunked. The truth is that the Morrison government is piggybacking on the efforts of others, to varying degrees of success.
We saw it in electricity generation, where the federal government has rejected a string of schemes to reduce emissions. Nonetheless the electricity sector is getting cleaner as ageing coal-fired power stations are replaced by renewables. This outcome owes nothing to federal government action. It reflects state government policies and the residual effects of the previous Labor government’s Renewable Energy Target, and public pressure that forced banks and insurance companies to stop supporting fossil fuels.
Instead, the Coalition is relying on the hope that carbon dioxide emission rates of Australia’s new passenger vehicle fleet will reduce over time without any effort by governments, because vehicle emissions legislation overseas, where Australia’s cars are made, is delivering technological improvements. Official projections state that some, but not all, of this improvement will flow through to Australia.
Unfortunately, this assumption is not reliable. New research shows that for the first time, fuel efficiency in Australia is getting worse, not better. In the absence of positive action from governments, transport emissions will continue to grow, and even accelerate.
Total road travel in Australia rose from 181 billion km in 2000 to 255 billion km in 2018 – a 41% increase.
Total CO₂ emissions from road transport increased by 31% between 2000 and 2017, rising from 16% of total emissions in 2000 to 22% in 2017. With no action, transport emissions are projected to reach 111 million tonnes of CO₂ by 2030.
Emissions have grown more slowly than kilometres travelled, which suggests that improvements in fuel efficiency have partially mitigated the effect of increased travel. Reducing emissions from transport will require a stronger decline in emissions intensity (CO₂ emissions per kilometre travelled) from our vehicles. Under current policies, this will not happen.
This finding directly contradicts projections that emissions intensity will fall without government intervention.
The chart below shows the average fleet emission rates officially reported in Europe, the US and Japan, and based on laboratory tests. When compared to these jurisdictions, Australia’s new passenger vehicles have significantly higher average CO₂ emission rates, and thus fuel consumption, than other countries, but all show a decline.
Official new private vehicle fleet average CO₂ emission rates 2000-17
Unfortunately, real-world emissions and fuel consumption deviate substantially – and increasingly – from laboratory tests that are used to produce the officially reported CO₂ figures. This discrepancy is often referred to as “the gap”. So in reality, the reduction in CO₂ emission rates is not as large as official laboratory results suggest.
There are multiple reasons for this gap, such as the laboratory test protocol itself, and strategies used by car manufacturers -and allowed by the test – to achieve lower emissions in laboratory conditions.
TER corrected the official Australian figures to reflect real world emissions. It found that carbon emission intensity stopped declining around 2014 and is now increasing. This suggests that, for the first time, fuel efficiency is no longer improving and is actually getting worse.
Official vs real-world CO₂ emission rates for Australia’s new private vehicle fleet
The upshot is that total CO₂ emissions from road transport are increasing, and will accelerate in the future.
The TER study identified the likely reasons for this: increased sales of heavy vehicles, such as four-wheel drives, and diesel cars. The latter may have a reputation for fuel efficiency, but they still emit, on average, about 10% more CO₂ than petrol cars. Australian diesel cars are, on average, about 40% heavier than petrol cars, and have 15% higher engine capacity.
The road ahead
The worsening picture in road transport emissions will increasingly drag down Australia’s efforts to meet its modest climate goals set in Paris – even with the accounting tricks the government plans to deploy to reduce the task. Of course it also means Australia is far less likely to make the much sharper emissions reductions needed by all nations to stabilise the global climate.
What can be done about this? The most obvious first step is to implement mandatory fuel efficiency or vehicle emission standards. This policy, fundamental in other countries, would significantly lower weekly fuel costs for vehicle owners.
The federal government must adjust policy settings to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles.AAP
Second, a rapid shift to electric cars will help, and increasingly so as the electricity supply transitions to renewables. Deep emission cuts are then possible.
The third is to provide better information about actual emissions. This could be achieved by restoring the large testing programs conducted in Australia up to 2008, involving hundreds of Australian vehicles over different real-world Australian test cycles which generated large databases of raw measurements.
For the moment, Australia’s national greenhouse gas emissions strategy seems to be: do nothing, rely on the work of industry, state governments and other nations, and hope that nobody notices. But climate change is not going away. Dodging it now will only increase the costs we accumulate in the long run.
When you imagine the setting for Macbeth, misty heaths, battlefields, and the brooding highlands spring to mind. Teaching the play in the midst of a tropical summer in Townsville, far north Queensland, highlights disjunctions and surprising correlations between play and place.
In their 2011 book Ecocritical Shakespeare, Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton consider this relationship between our environment and our practices of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare:
What does the study of literature have to do with the environment? … What is the connection between the literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct, both in Shakespeare’s era and now?
One way of answering these questions is through the use of place-based education. Educational theorists Amanda Hagood and Carmel E. Price reason that “student learning is enhanced when course content is grounded in a particular place of meaning”.
This approach is neither new nor (on the surface) complex. Educational philosopher John Dewey prioritised experiential learning such as nature studies. More recently, Swansea University educators have published research on the benefits of curriculum-based outdoor learning for primary school students.
But preliminary research on outdoor Shakespeare education conducted with Townsville secondary school students shows contradictory responses: some students found the location “calming” and “less stressful” than classrooms. Others believed that learning did not “rely on location”.
Christopher Gaze founded Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festivalin 1990. Attendance at the beachside performances has since topped 91,000.
Students’ sense of place
In 2019, 60 first-year English students at James Cook University were asked to rate the importance of setting in Shakespeare plays, and the importance of their own place to the study of Shakespeare.
Of those surveyed, 85% felt that the setting was important to the play, while 96% believed that Shakespeare had little or no relevance to their local area. Few felt that their real life location was important in their study of the playwright’s work.
These results show a contrast between the perceived value of literary and of lived place. This is problematic: how do students engage with fictional, imagined literary places if their own lived experience of place is devalued?
When asked to explain their ratings, students said:
I believe the setting plays a big part in the play as it allows the audience to understand why the characters are doing what they are doing. Shakespeare isn’t important in Townsville.
I live in a rural area. There is not a lot of room for Shakespeare – though given small town conflicts you would see his plots acted out in real life.
There is slippage here between the student’s reference to physical place and their conceptual space, which does not have a lot of cultural room for Shakespeare.
A third student wrote:
My family doesn’t really care about Shakespeare, but I do enjoy some of his works personally.
Here, place was understood to refer to relationships, not environment – an understanding backed by British social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey’s theories.
The disparity between students’ conceptualisations of place and their devaluation of their own location as relevant to their studies may be symptomatic of what Alice Ball and Eric Lai identify as “an ethos of placelessness in education”. In Canada, David Gruenewald has argued that the curriculum is largely “placeless”, with educational reforms and high stakes testing increasingly disconnected from our places.
Shakespeare’s shipwrecks
One approach to teaching Shakespeare through place-based education could centre on shared spaces in lived place and text. As a Shakespeare scholar living near the Great Barrier Reef, I’m interested in what Steve Mentz identifies as the “blue ecology” of Macbeth; the play’s many references to the ocean, liquids, and bodily fluids.
One blue image common to both Shakespeare and Townsville is that of the shipwreck – a favourite trope of Shakespeare’s, essential to plays including The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles.
Macbeth invokes shipwreck imagery with a tale of changed fortune after Macbeth’s victory over the traitor Macdonald:
As whence the sun ‘gins his reflection,
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring, whence comfort seemed to come,
Discomfort swells.
The Witches offer a literal description of a ship or “bark”:
1 WITCH
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.
2 WITCH
Show me, show me.
1 WITCH
Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wrecked as homeward he did come.
Shipwreck is something that Shakespeare and Townsville have in common. Two of the most famous shipwrecks off Townsville’s coast are the SS Yongala (which sank in 1911 and is now a popular diving site) and the HMS Pandora (hulled on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791 after capturing some of the Bounty mutineers; remnants of the wreckage are on display at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville).
HMS Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef off north Queensland in 1791, while shipwrecks are a common Shakespearean trope.Museum of Tropical Queensland/AAP
Our students could both explore Shakespeare through the shipwreck and engage more with the history and culture of their own local places. This approach requires us to think about place as real and imagined; fitting for Macbeth, a play defined as a “tragedy of imagination”.
Bees are pretty good at maths – as far as insects go, at least. We already know, for example, that they can count up to four and even understand the concept of zero.
But in a new study, published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, we show honeybees can also understand numbers higher than four – as long as we provide feedback for both correct and incorrect responses as they learn.
Even our own brains are less adept at dealing with numbers greater than four. While we can effortlessly estimate up to four items, processing larger numbers requires more mental effort. Hence why when asked to count, a young child will sometimes answer with “1, 2, 3, 4, more”!
If you don’t believe me, try the test below. The various colour groupings representing 1-4 stars are easy to count quickly and accurately. However, if we try estimating the number of all stars at once by ignoring colours, it requires more concentration, and even then our accuracy tends to be poorer.
For numbers of elements ranging from 1-4, as represented here in different colours, we very efficiently process the exact number. However, if we try estimating the number of all stars at once by ignoring colour, it requires a lot more cognitive effort.
This effect isn’t unique to humans. Fish, for example, also show a threshold for accurate quantity discrimination at four.
One theory to explain this is that counting up to four isn’t really counting at all. It may be that many animals’ brains can innately recognise groups of up to four items, whereas proper counting (the process of sequentially counting the number of objects present) is needed for numbers beyond that.
By comparing the performance of different animal species in various number processing tasks we can better understand how differences in brain size and structure enable number processing. For example, honeybees have previously been shown to be able to count and discriminate numbers up to four, but not beyond. We wanted to know why there was a limit at four – and whether they can go further.
Bees learn to do this type of difficult task if given a sugary reward for choosing the correct association, and a bitter liquid for choosing incorrectly. So if we were to push bees beyond the four threshold, we knew success would depend on us asking the right question, in the right way, and providing useful feedback to the bees.
We trained two different groups of bees to perform a task in which they were presented with a choice of two different patterns, each containing a different number of shapes. They could earn a reward for choosing the group of four shapes, as opposed to other numbers up to ten.
We used two different training strategies. One group of ten bees received only a reward for a correct choice (choosing a quantity of four), and nothing for an incorrect choice. A second group of 12 bees received a sugary reward for picking four, or a bitter-tasting substance if they made a mistake.
In the test, bees flew into a Y-shaped maze to make a choice, before returning to their hive to share their collected sweet rewards.
Each experiment conducted with a single bee lasted about four hours, by which time each bee had made 50 choices.
Bees were individually trained and tested in a Y-shaped maze where a sugar reward was presented on the pole directly in front of the correct stimulus.Author provided
The group that only received sweet rewards could not successfully learn to discriminate between four and higher numbers. But the second group reliably discriminated the group of four items from other groups containing higher numbers.
Thus, bees’ ability to learn higher number discrimination depends not just on their innate abilities, but also on the risks and rewards on offer for doing so.
Bee’s-eye view of either four or five element displays that could be discriminated. Inserts show how we normally see these images.
Our results have important implications for understanding how animals’ brains may have evolved to process numbers. Despite being separated by 600 million years of evolution, invertebrates such as bees and vertebrates such as humans and fish all seem to share a common threshold for accurately and quickly processing small numbers. This suggests there may be common principles behind how our brains tackle the question of quantity.
The evidence from our new study shows bees can learn to process higher numbers if the question and training are presented in the right way. These results suggest an incredible flexibility in animal brains, of all sizes, for learning to become maths stars.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keith Chappell, Senior Research Fellow, School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland
A virus that infects koalas is steadily integrating itself into their DNA, ensuring that it is passed down from generation to generation. But the koala genome is defending itself, revealing that DNA has its own immune system to shut down invaders.
The virus, called koala retrovirus (KoRV), is linked to weakened immunity, cancer, and chlamydia infection in koalas. All retroviruses hijack the DNA in some cells of their host’s body, but not all of them manage to be transmitted to the host’s offspring.
Your DNA is 8% virus
Over the millions of years of evolutionary history, retroviruses have at one time or another made their way into the genomes of all species of vertebrates that we have studied.
We know about these ancient infections because retroviruses sometimes infect the animal’s sperm or egg cells, which means the virus incorporates its own DNA sequences into the genome that is passed from generation to generation.
These viral sequences can contribute to disease, but have also been “co-opted” by the host animals for processes that are essential to normal development. As much as 8% of the human genome is made up of the remnants of infectious viruses.
While we know that retroviruses have frequently appeared during evolutionary history, we don’t know much about how retroviral sequences infiltrate sperm and egg cells, or how these cells react.
Catching a retrovirus in the act
Almost all known retrovirus genome invasions happened millions of years ago. However, KoRV is a recently identified exception. The virus spreads between individuals, but is also infecting sperm and egg cells, so many koalas are born with this pathogen as part of their genome.
My colleagues and I at the University of Queensland are collaborating with scientists from the University of Massachusetts Medical School to analyse how koala sperm and egg cells respond to KoRV-A infection.
Our findings, published today in Cell, suggest these cells mount a novel “innate genome immune response” to viral infection, which may help control the spread of infectious KoRV.
Within this project, the team analysed DNA and RNA from different tissue samples from deceased wild koalas from South East Queensland. (Like DNA, RNA also contains genetic information about the koalas – but it is also what KoRV’s own genome is made of.)
The team specifically looked for short sequences of RNA, between 23 and 35 nucleotides long, known as PIWI Interacting RNAs (piRNAs). Clusters of piRNA sequences are retained within the genome and serve as a kind of memory bank of undesirable sequences – signatures of invading viruses – to be targeted.
An immune system for the genome
Based on our new findings, we suggest that there is a specialised immune system to defend against retroviral genome invasion. Like the ordinary immune system, this one includes an innate response – a sort of general-purpose defence against attackers – and an adaptive response, which learns to recognise specific pathogens and take them down.
At the early stages of egg or sperm infection, the altered DNA sequence results in a “molecular pattern” that is recognised by an innate genome immune system, which stops the activity of the virus and starts producing signature piRNA sequences to recognise the invader.
The innate immune response works until a memory of the genome invader is created and a sequence-specific adaptive response kicks in.
We propose a framework through which a sequence from an invading retrovirus can first have its genes “silenced”, and then through targeted processes it eventually becomes an integral part of the host genome.
This “genome immune system” changes our understanding of what shapes the genomes of all animals. No more can we view the genome as a defenceless entity governed purely by natural selection – it fights back.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University
Turkey did not waste much time in launching an attack on Syrian soil just days after US President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw US forces from northern Syria. As this development opens a new chapter in Syria, Turkey maybe unwittingly sinking deeper into that country’s civil war.
This is not the first time president Trump has mentioned withdrawal from Syria – he voiced it in April 2018.
The US government has always been tentative with its Syrian policy, which was openly exploited by Russia in its bid to support the Assad government’s grip on power in the embattled country.
It is also not the first time Turkey has talked about a military presence in Syria. In January 2018, it sent troops to north-western Syria, establishing its control over lands to the west of the Euphrates river. Turkey has increased its military build up on the Syrian border ever since.
The US contained any further Turkish advances by making it clear Turkey was not welcome to the east of the river, especially when the US needed the support of Kurdish forces in ending Islamic States’s presence in Syria.
Why does Turkey want to increase its military presence in Syria?
There are three main reasons Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is eager to send more troops in to northern Syria east of the Euphrates river.
The first is the prospect of free Kurdish states near its borders inspiring the sizeable Kurdish populations in the south east of Turkey to seek similar aspirations. Northern Iraq is slowly moving towards independence. If Kurds in northern Syria were to establish an autonomous region, it would only be a matter of time before the same demands were raised in Turkey.
Fearing this development, Erdogan has pursued an increasingly tough policy on Kurdish political activities in Turkey. The leader of pro-Kurdish party HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, has been in jail for almost three years.
Turkey’s second concern is the reported 3.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey since the conflict began in 2011. Although they were initially welcomed with open arms, there is growing discontent in the Turkish media and society, with many calling for their return.
Opposition parties have been critical of the Erdogan government’s inability to effectively manage the refugee crisis, which was one of the key issues that led to Erdogan’s loss in this year’s Istanbul elections.
Erdogan plans to create a safe zone in Northern Syria, establish new settlements within this region and slowly move Arab Syrian refugees back to Syria. This will change the demographics of the region and undermine Kurdish dominance.
Erdogan’s third aim is to make a political investment for future elections. This may be the most important reason, as Erdogan first mentioned a military offensive in Syria soon after his local government election loss in June 2019.
The Turkish leader needs the coalition with MHP, the nationalist party, to maintain his grip on power and enhance his chance of re-election. He needs a war to unify his electorate, please his coalition partner and silence the growing critical voices in the midst of a worsening Turkish economy.
Erdogan made strong hints in August he would send troops to northern Syria against the US-allied YPG, which Turkey considers to be a terrorist group. He was most likely testing international, especially US, reaction. The US responded by offering a joint operation in the region.
It appears Erdogan thought the US involvement was limiting his goals and wasting his time. Perhaps he reasoned the timing was right to make a bold move when Trump was politically weakened by an impeachment inquiry.
It seems Erdogan’s strategy worked. Trump agreed to withdraw from Syria on the condition Turkey took responsibility for handling thousands of IS prisoners and their families in camps.
Trump added a threat to “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey” if it was to do anything considered “off-limits”. But the move was still a green light for Turkey to send troops to Syria.
What is likely to happen now?
Trump’s announcement does not mean the US is pulling out of Syria completely. It’s likely the US will continue to have a presence in eastern Syria to watch developments closely and intervene if the situation deteriorates.
A total pull-out would further weaken Trump. He would not want to risk the already-waning Republican party’s support over concerns about a resurgence of IS in Syria.
Russia seems to be pleased with the developments. Putin knows the US withdrawal means greater Russian influence and shores up the Assad government. Since Erdogan does everything with full Russian endorsement, their close collaboration gives Russia leverage in its political and diplomatic struggle with the NATO.
One possibility is that Turkish forces do not face much resistance. They would then only advance to a limited region, with their stated aim of establishing a safe zone and returning Syrian refugees back to Syria. This may contain the situation without further escalation.
Another possibility is that the US abandoning its protection of the Kurdish YPG forces in northern Syria will have a cascading effects. A sizeable portion of Kurdish civilians may be displaced, and some may flee in advance, fearing the worst.
The Kurdish YPG forces may initially avoid open conflict with the advancing Turkish forces, and look for new alliances in Syria. The most likely candidate for this is Assad, who may see an opportunity to bring the Kurdish populations and regions under his control.
If an Assad-Kurdish partnership eventuates, Turkish forces may be drawn into the war within Syria.
Kurdish populations in Turkey may then become involved, threatening Turkey with what it fears the most – a Kurdish insurrection within its own borders.
The average cost for a woman with endometriosis both personally and for society is around A$30,000 a year, according to our research, published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Most of these costs are not from medication, or doctors’ visits, although these do play a part. Rather, they’re due to lost productivity, as women are unable to work – or work to their usual level of efficiency – while experiencing high levels of pain.
Remind me, what is endometriosis?
Chronic pelvic pain is pain below the belly button that occurs on most days for at least six months. The most common identifiable cause is endometriosis. Endometriosis is the presence and growth of tissue (called lesions) similar to the lining of the uterus that’s found outside the uterus.
Women with the condition have a variety of symptoms, including non-cyclical pelvic pain (which is like period pain but occurs regularly throughout the month), severe period pain, pain during or after sexual intercourse, and severe fatigue. Gastrointestinal problems, such as severe bloating (often called “endo belly” by those who suffer from it) and pain with bowel motions, are also common.
Currently, surgery (a laparoscopy) is the only way to make a formal diagnosis of endometriosis – this is where a small camera is inserted into the pelvic/abdominal cavity to investigate the presence of endometriosis lesions.
Both medical and surgical treatments are commonly used for women with endometriosis. Medical therapies include non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (such as ibuprofen and naproxen), oral contraceptive pills and other forms of hormonal treatments.
Surgery is the current “gold standard” of treatment, but despite successful surgery many women find their pain and symptoms can return within about five years after surgery.
Around 7% of Australian women aged 25–29 and 11% of women aged 40–44 are likely to have endometriosis, which is similar to the worldwide estimate of one in ten women.
Delays in diagnosis are extremely common, and combined with needing surgery for a diagnosis, means many women suffer for years with chronic pelvic pain before being diagnosed with endometriosis later in life. This contributes to the difficulty in getting exact figures for how many women in Australia have endometriosis.
Worldwide estimates of chronic pelvic pain range from 5% to 26% of women. In New Zealand, it’s around 25% and is likely to be similar in Australia but we are lacking any up-to-date and reliable statistics on this.
We surveyed more than 400 women aged 18 to 45 who were either diagnosed with endometriosis or experiencing chronic pelvic pain. We asked about health-care costs (both out of pocket and funded), employment-related costs, and other costs related to childcare and household maintenance. We also asked about their pain levels.
Women with endometriosis sometimes have to work when they’re in extreme pain, affecting their productivity.Flamingo Images/Shutterstock
We found the average cost for a woman with endometriosis was around A$30,000 per year.
Around one-fifth of this cost was in the health sector, for medications, doctors’ visits, hospital visits, assisted reproductive technology such as IVF, and any transport costs to get to these appointments. Of this, A$1,200 were out-of-pocket costs.
The bulk of the costs (over 80%) were due to lost productivity, either because of absenteeism (being off work) or presenteeism (not being as productive as usual because you’re sick). Women with endometriosis often use up all their sick leave and then often have to work when they are in severe pain.
Overall, if one in ten women aged 18 to 45 do have endometriosis, the total economic burden in Australia may be as high as A$9.7bn per year for endometriosis alone.
Pain scores had a very strong link with productivity costs. Women with the most severe pain had a 12-times greater loss of productivity, in terms of working hours lost, than those with minimal pain.
Overall, taking into account all costs (health sector, out-of-pocket, carers and productivity) women with severe pain have six-times greater costs (A$36,000) a year overall compared to those with minimal pain (A$5,700).
Finally, we also looked at the cost of illness not only of those women with a diagnosis of endometriosis, but also of those that had other causes of chronic pelvic pain, such as vulvodynia (pain, burning or discomfort in the vulva) and adenomyosis (growths in the muscular wall of the uterus).
We found the overall costs between the two groups – those with endometriosis and those with other types of pelvic pain – were very similar.
The more pain a woman has, the bigger the impact on her productivity and out-of-pocket costs.Iryna Inshyna/Shutterstock
So what should we be doing?
The economic burden of endometriosis is at least as high as other chronic disease burdens such as diabetes. However, many women are not receiving the support they need.
We also need to prioritise funding for endometriosis research, which until recentlyhas attracted comparatively little research funding.
Plans are underway to increase awareness and education, and improve diagnosis and pain management. Unfortunately, there is no such plan for women with other forms of chronic pelvic pain.
Reducing pain, by even a modest 10-20%, could improve women’s quality of life and potentially save billions of dollars each year.
Months after Labor’s shock election loss, it is still pondering how the Liberals metamorphosed from party of the bosses to party of the workers – one that stole an election win from under them.
At the May 18 federal election, several working class seats in Queensland did not fall into Labor’s hands as expected, and the party narrowly retained others in New South Wales with large negative swings.
They include the coal seat of Hunter, north of Sydney, where Labor’s resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon suffered a 10% swing against him. He this week claimed constituents were scared off by Labor’s ambitious emissions reduction goal – which necessarily entails curbing the burning of fossil fuels such as coal.
But cosying up to coal is not the way forward for Labor. Instead, it must find the common ground that unites workers in the cities and the regions – job insecurity – and build a consensus for climate action on that basis.
Now-Labor leader Anthony Albanese in Brisbane in 2017, followed by anti-Adani protesters.Darren England/AAP
Neo-liberalism has gutted coal communities
The rise in populist votes in Australia is to an extent part of a larger global movement spanning the UK’s Brexit vote, the election of US President Donald Trump, and the rise of far-right agitators across Europe. In Australia, as abroad, this process is the outcome of almost 50 years of neo-liberalism.
Large companies have departed from industrial heartlands, relocating abroad without implementing the same level of social protection and welfare. Blue-collar jobs have been supplanted by white- or pink-collar positions, offering careers in the immaterial world of finance and the service economy.
For some, this shift is not a bad thing, as it opens opportunities in less gruelling urban service jobs. But for working-class and coal communities, it means a loss of their way of life.
In their heyday, industrial factories were holistic experiences that synchronised workers’ lives to the rhythms of production. In coal communities, intergenerational attachments grew to the towns that were constructed to house mining workforces. So pervasive are the emotional attachments to mining that the prospect of moving into a different industry is not appealing to most. Not everyone wants to be a consultant, a service worker or a financial trader.
Office workers are seen on a lunch break at Martin Place in Sydney. Casualisation of the workforce is not confined to the mining industry.AAP/Mich Tsikas
Labor is between a rock (of coal) and a hard place
This global trend pulls Labor in two directions. Urban workers in the services, finance or creative industries perceive climate change as the greatest threat to their futures and demand a transition from coal to renewables. Labor’s traditional base, however, is mining communities who feel threatened by the policies environmentalists are calling for.
Is there a way to navigate these apparently conflicting voter needs? Yes. But not by embracing coal and hoping city voters won’t notice. Instead, Labor must build a coalition across both coal communities and its urban base, recognising that the political issues around coal in Australia are about more than climate change.
The biggest threat to existing coal jobs is not climate policy, but the increased casualisation of the mining workforce. Coal miners are significant victims of what unions such as the the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union has termed the “permanent-casual rort”.
Coal workers are increasingly employed on casual contracts through labour hire companies. They work the same shifts and do the same jobs for years, but are not entitled to paid holidays or sick leave and are liable to be sacked at any time.
This shift is not confined to mining and industrial manufacturing. Fewer than half of working Australians have full-time permanent jobs. Employers such as rideshare service Uber and others in the gig economy offer flexibility in exchange for exploitation, insecurity, and a lack of workplace protections.
Like coal miners, people working in the immaterial economy – many of whom are concerned about climate change – also face increasingly insecure workplaces. Yet few on the side of climate action see these commonalities, or think of coal communities as potential allies.
A CFMMEU video arguing against incensed workforce casualistaion.
Labor should broker a new kind of coalition
For Labor, a pro-coal message designed to win back coal miners will only alienate its urban base. Instead of flipping scripts between electorates, the party should build a broad coalition on the common job insecurity faced by both coal miners and urban, post-industrial workers.
This would create spaces of solidarity between environmentalists and miners. It would refocus the discussion from how environmental policy puts jobs at risk to how it can address workforce insecurity across industries.
Labor’s existing “Just Transition” policy goes part-way there. But it allocated just $15 million over four years to administer redundancies, and fund worker training and economic diversification. Judging by the election result, coal communities were not convinced by it.
Labor should look to the US, where the proposed Green New Deal promises to cut climate pollution while creating millions of safe, stable jobs, whether in weather-proofing homes, expanding railways or making wind turbines. It is underpinned by the notion that structural reform to address inequality is central to climate policy.
Coal miners are not ignorant of the changing economics of their industry. But Labor will gain ground only if it devises a climate policy that is environmentally sound and offers protection against precarious employment.
Last year, I received a phone call from a prospective student. She wanted to know if our university would accept her into a Master of Social Work program. Another local university had just knocked her back.
The caller had a drug-related criminal history and was ineligible for a working with children clearance (a blue card in Queensland).
She explained she had a previous conviction of drug importation – an offence she committed to help support her heroin addiction. Now, free of drugs, she wanted to do something positive using what she had learnt from this difficult period of her life.
Such stories are common – many social work students have traumatic histories that have led them to pursue that particular career choice.
But a working with children clearance is a precondition of enrolment in two-thirds of Australian universities (even if the student doesn’t intend to work in a child-related field). The remaining universities flag this as a likely requirement prior to undertaking placement – a practical placement is integral to a social work degree.
As serious drug-related offences generally prohibit people from getting a working with children clearance, the caller would be ineligible to study in most Australian universities. And yet lived experience can make for better social workers.
Working with children clearance is almost universal
To reduce the risk of harm to children, Australian states and territories now screen staff and volunteers before allowing them to work with children. Screening arrangements take varying forms, but all broadly adopt the same approach.
But risk has become a central consideration in the design and delivery of welfare services in Australia. It is now common for adult-specific welfare services to require all staff and volunteers, including social work students, to have a child-related suitability clearance.
To not use the most stringent risk-screening tools available, even if not needed by law, could be thought of as negligent. So working with children clearances have become an almost universal requirement in the human services sector. But this focus on mitigating risk has a significant impact on social work programs.
Social workers and trauma
Social work students have a much higher incidence of various forms of childhood trauma than students of other disciplines. A 1993 US study found 22% of social work students reported childhood sexual abuse compared to 2% of business students.
Many people who gain criminal convictions have also experienced childhood or adult trauma and associated self-medication using illicit drugs. One study of women in prison in New South Wales found 70% had been victims of childhood sexual abuse. Of these, 98% reported they were drug users (mostly heroin) and that their engagement with the criminal justice system was closely tied to drug use.
As this trend of excluding people with a range of criminal convictions from studying social work continues, Australia will inevitably have fewer social work graduates with lived experience of trauma and addiction.
This is a problem because studies have found lived experiences to be helpful in a range of social work fields. These include addiction-treatment programs, mental health, domestic and family violence, and working with sex workers.
And given the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the criminal justice system, Australia will have fewer First Nations People eligible to study social work.
The people disadvantaged by this emerging trend are not just prospective students. They are also future clients, who will have reduced access to practitioners who can draw on the lessons from their own journey of recovery from past trauma.
Legislative reform to prohibit organisations from requiring child-related criminal history clearances for roles that don’t provide services to children would be a helpful start to tackling this unintended adverse outcome.
Universities can also play a role by more actively valuing the lived experience of students with trauma histories. We can seek out creative solutions to the difficulties of finding placements for these students with criminal histories.
As for the student who called, she would be accepted into our social work program and her future clients would benefit.
If you want to know how bonus schemes can come unstuck, take a look at the Rugby World Cup
It’s inching its way towards the end of the group stage in Japan, where Australia takes on Georgia tonight. The bonus points on offer are of considerable interest to economists and may help determine who gets into the quarter-finals and who ultimately wins.
Unlike most sports tournaments, rugby tournaments have point systems that include “bonus” points for achievements within the game other than simply winning.
A narrow-loss bonus gives one point to the match loser if its margin of loss was seven points or fewer – the idea being that an extra converted try would have given the loser a different result.
It was carried over into Super Rugby when it began in 1996.
As well as narrow-loss bonuses, there are try bonuses, which have a similar history.
The standard try bonus – as used in this World Cup – is one extra point for scoring four or more tries, and can be earned by both teams (Super Rugby adopted a modified “net try” bonus in 2016).
The intention is to encourage more attacking rugby and higher scores, and also to explicitly reward tries rather than drop goals and penalty conversions.
Do bonuses work?
Together with Irish co-authors Robert Butler (University College Cork) and Patrick Massey, I set about putting these bonuses to the test.
We modelled data from the European Rugby Championship, Super Rugby’s northern hemisphere equivalent, which ran for several seasons without bonuses, before introducing them in 2003-04, allowing us to compare before and after games.
Our primary interest was the try bonus. Narrow-loss bonus effects are harder to isolate.
In research to be published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy, we report that the introduction of the try bonus was effective in increasing the likelihood that teams would score four tries in a match (which is an above-average number).
The effect was concentrated on home teams, which given the advantages they already enjoy are more often in a position to go for the bonus. It would appear to lend support for the view that the rule (or policy, in economist-speak) had achieved what it was meant to.
There’s a catch
But not so fast. We also found a significant reduction in teams scoring five or more tries.
That’s right, a reduction.
We believe it was driven by teams reducing their attacking effort once the bonus had been secured, as a large share of teams that score a fourth try already have a comfortable lead, and it is generally late in the game.
It means that, on balance, the evidence in favour of bonus points achieving their aims is mixed. At best they achieve something, at worst they are counterproductive.
This is especially so when it is considered that average scores actually fell by about 15% in the seasons where bonuses applied, although that might have happened for other reasons.
Think of the banking royal commission where it was revealed that bank employees opened children’s bank accounts without their consent in order to claim bonuses.
More egregiously, they signed up customers to insurance and financial products to which they were manifestly unsuited.
The point is not that the bonus schemes were ineffective. They were very effective, although often not in serving the needs of customers.
Incentives matter, and they matter so much that it is important to get them right. As good starting point is making clear the design of the incentive schemes, as happened in rugby but not in banking.
For better of worse the results will be on display tonight. Go Wallabies!
The Flinders Ranges covers a vast area spanning over 400 kilometres. The nearest capital city is Adelaide which, like all of Australia, exists on Aboriginal land. Adelaide is in Kaurna Country, about 200 kilometres from the southern end of the Flinders Ranges, one of the world’s most interesting and beautiful locations. This is a short drive, relative to most travel in Australia.
It is impossible to describe the Flinders Ranges as just one environment. The landscape changes as you travel from south to north and there is no way you could see its entirety in the span of a lifetime. But to give you an idea of how this land varies, lets start at its most southern end with its flowing green hills, near the small city of Port Pirie. This part of the Flinders Ranges is Nukunu Country. The land here is beautiful and your experience of it is very different, depending on whether you choose to drive on the eastern or the western side of the Ranges.
If you continue driving on the western side you will witness the place where the Ranges meet the ocean. You don’t need to pass through many towns, but you definitely should do so as they all sit on the beautiful coast of the Spencer Gulf. Port Germein, one of the stops, is a lovely seaside town and home to what was once the longest jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. One and a half kilometres long, it lets you experience what it would be like to stand in the middle of the sea looking across to the Ranges. An amazing view indeed.
From Port Germein, you can feel like you are standing in the middle of the sea.Shutterstock
The eastern side will take you through farmland and small towns. Gum trees, creeks, gorges and green grass surround you and it is one of the first times you will find yourself up close to the Flinders Ranges. Here, you will be travelling through Nukunu Country, or if you veer further east, possibly Ngadjuri or Adnyamathanha Country. There is a stronger colonial history in the towns here, which you can see in the monuments and buildings that now seem tattered and old. But before we get ahead of ourselves, there is one more stop I want to show you on the western side.
As you continue to travel you see the hills gradually turn into shades of dark green and brown. Their shape begins to change too, their soft edges turn to sharper points. The green grass transforms into red sand and you notice that the dark green and brown on the hills are the colours of the shrubs embedded into this sand. You eventually reach the small city of Port Augusta which sits at the top of the Spencer Gulf. This area is a meeting place for a number of Aboriginal groups that are separated on each side of the gulf, however, it is specifically connected to Barngarla and Nukunu. It is no surprise that this place is of great interest to so many Aboriginal Nations. It is the one place where the desert truly meets the sea. It is also the town where I grew up.
At Port Augusta, the dessert meets the sea.Shutterstock
The beauty of home
Growing up in Port Augusta, I never realised just how beautiful this place was or how fortunate I was to experience such stunning views. It is not until you have lived in a city and travelled the world that you start to see the beauty in the place you call home. I spent many days during summer down at the beach during high-tide. But I was more concerned with opening my eyes under water than opening my eyes to the beauty of the Ranges.
My house was not far from an amazing view. If I took a short stroll to the end of my street I could look over a large white salt-lake to the Flinders Ranges. In this area the Ranges become more textured, their edges rougher, the creases highlighted by the shadows cast during sunset. The vegetation here is overflowing.
But even this is not the best part of the Flinders Ranges. To reach the highlight, you must travel from Port Augusta along a small gorge until you reach the point of intersection with the eastern side of the Ranges at the tiny town of Quorn. Continue through this town and the land begins to flatten out. There are fewer hills and you see horizontal red ground for miles around. You are now in a much drier area of the country. Dust. Fewer trees. But shrubbery everywhere. In the distance small hills are rising. As you reach these hills you are exiting Nukunu country and merging into Barngarla and Adnyamathanha country.
When you arrive at the small town of Hawker, you are presented with the option of two roads, and two different adventures. You must ask yourself which side of Ikara (Wilpena Pound) you want to see – the east or the west? If you choose the eastern side, you get to travel at a higher elevation. This section of road brings stunning views that you cannot see anywhere else unless you climb a hill. You feel engulfed by the Ranges, seeing their true magnitude. As you travel north you begin to really enter Adnyamathanha Yarta (Country). You are fortunate to see open plains alongside the beautiful ridges of the Flinders Ranges. Despite the perception that this region is dry, there are flecks of green everywhere. The ground is not just red: it varies between orange, yellow, white and black. These are the same colours that are present in the malka, markings and rock art that exists throughout our Yarta.
On the edge of Ikara you see open plains alongside the ridges of the Ranges.Jacinta Koolmatrie, Author provided
If you travel further north-east you will continue to see small hills in the distance that transform into mountains. You might even be able to glimpse a line of white on the horizon – the salt lake, Lake Frome. The further north you drive, the closer you get to Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park. Here you can see creeks and high gorges and you begin to realise this area is not so dry.
Travel further west and you eventually arrive in Nepabunna, a central hub for Adnyamathanha people. During the 1930s, our people decided they needed assistance from missionaries because our land had essentially been destroyed by the influence of pastoralism. When farm animals were introduced to our country, the land began to change, our waters changed, and parts of our country were no longer open to us. It was decided that we needed to turn the place known as Nipapanha into a mission. Today, Nipapanha is known as Nepabunna and is home to a small number of Adnyamathanha people. Despite most of us living outside of this area, we still feel connected and call this area our home.
If you continue driving west, you will end up in the small mining town of Copley or Leigh Creek. This place is home to even more of us. The mine is located not too far outside of the town and operated for over 70 years. Coal was being mined here for use at the power stations in Port Augusta. When the power stations shut down, so too did the mine.
Travelling south out of Leigh Creek and Copley, you see even more amazing views. The hills around this area seem unreal. They create a strange illusion because they are close enough for you to see what is on them, but far enough away to look artificial. These hills are curvy and shapely; they look smooth. They look like what sand looks like when a snake slithers across it.
The Flinders Ranges look like what sand looks like when a snake slithers across it.Shutterstock
The views from this entire road are gorgeous. On one side you have a flat plain with no hills, because past this is the salt lake, Lake Torrens. On the other side the hills transform from smooth and curvy to the textured, ridged, multi-coloured ranges that circle Ikara. About half-way along this road, you will see the sign for Nilpena, the location of the Ediacaran fossils.
Measuring time
Ediacara is just one small location in the vast area known as the Flinders Ranges. Geologically, the fossils that are found here have transformed discussions about time periods and how the earth, and everything on it, came to be. Even the Ranges themselves are examples of this geological conundrum. They are not only scientifically amazing, they are incredibly breathtaking to witness. This region is truly an amazing place.
Despite the Flinders Ranges being so large, my ancestors and the ancestors of our neighbouring groups have explored it all. They mapped the entire country thousands of years before our colonisers had even thought of maps. Our people set borders between each other and formed customs that controlled how we entered each other’s country. They named every hill; every rock formation, big and small; every creek and every stream running off that creek. If you see something here, you can bet that we have given it a name.
The name of the Ediacaran fossils comes from their location in the Ediacara hills. But talking about the Aboriginal origins of this name is not as simple as you might think and it stems back to the colonial naming of all Australian places. Back in the time when the settlers were naming and claiming as many places as possible, some given names were original, some paid tribute to colonial figures and some were named after towns in other parts of the world. What is interesting is that many places were also named using Aboriginal words.
Some Aboriginal words that are used for places are not actually place names. In fact, there are many records of humorous words being given to settlers instead of the real name of a place. Due to the complexity of our naming, settlers often mistook words that referred to a specific spot rather than to the broader landscape that they were enquiring about. It was like using the name for a street as the name of a town. This adoption of names also led to the mispronunciation of words. Settlers were in no way linguists, and many Aboriginal words used as placenames have been altered and pronounced very differently to the way they were initially used.
Documentation of the word Ediacara does not clearly indicate which Aboriginal language it comes from, but there is some information about its meaning. One understanding is that this word is linked to a place where water is present. It is also believed that it could be a mispronunciation of the words “Yata Takarra” meaning hard or stony ground. Speaking to Adnyamathanha people about the meaning of the word Ediacara presents difficulties because of the linguistic history of Aboriginal place names. It is most likely that Ediacara was once pronounced very differently and it is possible that it may not be the name of the place where the Ediacaran fossils are located. Either way, the name that exists today in no way diminishes the Adnyamathanha history of the region.
Indigenous knowledge systems
From an archaeological perspective my ancestors have been in this area for over 45,000 years. Our histories are written in the land and passed down from generation to generation through talking and by marking rock walls. If you had traversed the land via the roads I took you on earlier, you would have passed many stories. But in order to tell you one of the main stories about the formation of our country today, I must return to the coalfields of Leigh Creek.
Although the closing of Leigh Creek mine caused distress amongst miners and power station workers, for me it felt like the land had finally won. It was no longer being attacked. Leigh Creek is not the only mine that exists on our country: we have had a long history of mining extending back to early colonisation. Up north uranium is extracted and down south, where the Ediacaran fossils are, copper and silver were once mined. I remember standing next to the Leigh Creek mine and looking inside the incredibly deep hole in the ground. You don’t feel well when you witness scenes like this because they are not pretty and you know that they are the direct result of human conflict. When I looked into that hole I saw a battle lost by my ancestors against developers. I saw my people’s fight and I saw their hurt. Mining coal may have been used to power parts of the state, but in terms of my Adnyamathanha community, it was a form of disempowerment.
The coal in Leigh Creek mine is connected to the story of Yurlu’s coal. Yurlu is a Kingfisher, but more importantly, he is the Master of Ceremonies. He came down from Kakarlpunha to Leigh Creek where he made a big fire out of mallee sticks. The fire was created to alert everyone to go south with him to Ikara where there would be a ceremony. Along the route of his travels he made several fires and these became the coal deposits you can find on the way down to Ikara. While doing this he was being followed by the two big snakes known as Akurras. These snakes pursued him all the way down to Ikara and you can see their travels represented in the shape of the hills and the ranges as they slithered south. They slid into the pound where they watched the ceremony, their bodies forming each side of the shape of the pound. There is more to this story, but this is enough to illustrate the breadth of our wisdom about our country. We never had any large animals to use as transport, we developed strong knowledge of place by traversing this land on foot.
Aboriginal stories are often viewed as mythology or folk tales, but they are much more than that. This is true of stories about Aboriginal places across the entire continent. Our stories come in many forms and provide various types of knowledge. In some instances they are used as maps. The places travelled to by the beings (they can be human, animal, plant or object) in these stories can be remembered over many generations. Even when these lands were no longer accessible during periods of environmental change, our people could recall them thousands of years later.
Our stories can be used as lessons, indicators of places or things that are dangerous. And I mean real danger, not “taboo”. Places where you can easily become disorientated and lost are in these stories as well as plants or other substances that are chemically dangerous to touch or consume. Our lesson stories can also lead us to places that can help us. They may describe natural springs in land where fresh water is uncommon, or they may map out the locations of rare food sources. They might relate to aspects of our culture such as the origin of certain ceremonies or the ways we identify ourselves in relation to each other.
Our stories are extensive and full of purpose, but because they are boxed into the category of mythology, the knowledge they contain is not seen as scientifically reliable. Western science has always prided itself on being objective and quantifiable and there is no doubt that it has presented some of the most important discoveries across the world. However, it has also been responsible for the oppression of my people. Western scientists developed ideas that enabled them to see Aboriginal people as lesser beings, that suggested “Western civilisation” was more intelligent than us. Western science is behind the forced removal of Aboriginal children, known more commonly in Australia as “The Stolen Generation”. Western science is the reason my people are seen as nomadic: it claimed we had no understanding of the land we existed on and that we were aimlessly wandering the country. Ultimately, Western science is the reason our land was originally taken away from us.
45,000 years of connecting to heritage
Western science and Indigenous knowledge clash because of their histories. In western society, science will always be placed on a higher pedestal, it will always be seen as more trustworthy. But Indigenous knowledge is the result of many thousands of years of observation. You cannot compare that to the past thousand or so years that western science has existed.
Scientific understanding of the Ediacaran period seems to be completely beyond the scope of Indigenous knowledge systems. It is unknown whether my ancestors had seen or even understood what the fossils were. However, the extent of our knowledge of the land and its creatures cannot be denied.
Adnyamathanha Country spans the plains and the ranges.Jacinta Koolmatrie, Author provided
A similarity can be found between these fossils and our cultural heritage. Both are significant and vulnerable, and both need to be protected. When geologists and paleontologists started going to Ediacara the station owner made an admirable decision to restrict the removal of fossils for research. Therefore, all documentation of the fossils is completed on site. Additionally, their location is kept private due to the fear of vandalism and looting.
Adnyamathanha people have similar fears about our heritage. Our rock art is routinely destroyed and artefacts are removed from their original place. They are taken as souvenirs or vandalised out of disrespect for our culture. Unfortunately, we do not have the comfort of owning private land. Our heritage is used for tourism and whilst it is great that this shines a light on our history and culture, you have to wonder whether it is all worth it when our cultural heritage is in danger of destruction. Adnyamathanha heritage deserves as much consideration as the Ediacaran fossils.
Prior to Reginald Sprigg announcing his discovery of the fossils in 1946 they were of no interest to anyone, but we have continually been connected to our heritage for 45,000 years.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bentley, Associate Professor, Centre for Health Equity, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne
We know walking more and increasing our levels of exercise are good for our health.
But how can we walk more in our busy lives?
Our research shows people walk more if the city’s design provides them with places to walk to near where they live, work or study.
The research also shows people walk even more if they live in a place that has good public transport and plenty of jobs or employment opportunities they can easily access.
We looked at what level of access they had for destinations to walk to, typically within about 800 metres, close to their home, work or study place. This could be local cafes, shops, supermarkets, libraries and other services, often referred to as local accessibility.
The amount walked on an average day by those with good local accessibility at home or near where they worked or studied was around 12 minutes. Those with limited access to local facilities walked only seven minutes.
People with good local accessibility near their homes walked five minutes more per day than those with poor local accessibility. People with good local accessibility near where they worked or studied walked nine minutes more.
But to get our activity to the next level we needed to look beyond what was locally accessible to people.
We looked at people’s relative travel commute time by public transport compared with driving, the level of public transport service accessible from where they lived, worked or studied, and the number of jobs within 30 minutes of people’s homes by public transport. These are sometimes referred to as measures of regional accessibility.
We found that the greater access people had to resources and public transport regionally, the more they walked.
For example, after accounting for local accessibility, people living in places with a higher number of jobs available within a 30-minute public transport journey walked just over four minutes more on average than people in areas with very low job availability.
People living in places where taking public transport was more efficient timewise than driving, walked more than seven minutes extra a day compared with people with low levels of public transport.
A little extra help
Our study also looked at the combination of local and regional accessibility to see if they encouraged people to walk even more.
We found that high exposure to both local accessibility and public transport accessible opportunities beyond the immediate neighbourhood was associated with greater walking benefits than exposure to just one or the other alone.
This combination of factors supported people to do around ten minutes more (give or take depending on the measures used) of walking on average per day.
Public transport effectively separates people from their own vehicle, be it at home or a park-and-ride stop. Public transport delivers them as pedestrians close to their destination, which in turn promotes walking throughout the day.
If people walk more in their residential environment (say to the shops, library, or post office), take public transport to their workplace or place of study and then walk more in this environment too (at lunchtime for example), they do ten more minutes of physical activity in a day than their counterparts who drive.
A message to planners
The message this new research tells us is simple.
City and urban design and transport planning have the potential to deliver a regular extra dose of what’s been described as the “miracle cure” of exercise by encouraging us to walk more.
A variety of walkable destinations that support people’s daily living needs to be designed into existing and, more importantly, new developments. That means at locations where we live, work, and study.
This can be done by locating shops, schools, post offices, GPs and public transport stops within good walking distance. Jobs need to be located close to where people live. This will encourage walking, cycling and public transport commuting. When this is not possible, employment opportunities should be embedded within well connected and efficient public transport networks.
Cities that support people to walk more will provide population health benefits through increased physical activity, helping them to become truly smart and healthy cities.
Joel Fitzgibbon was on his mobile at a cafe at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney on Thursday when he encountered Scott Morrison getting a mid-morning coffee.
“You’re making a lot of sense,” Morrison said to Labor’s resources spokesman, who’d set off a fire storm in his party by suggesting the ALP revise its climate policy to adopt the upper end of the government’s target of reducing emissions by 26-28% by 2030.
“Your love won’t help me, Prime Minister,” Fitzgibbon shot back.
He’s right there. Fitzgibbon’s radical proposal has burst open the conundrum the opposition has in reshaping one of the ALP’s centrepiece election pitches.
It’s a great deal more complicated than, for example, dealing with the franking credits plan, which Labor can’t afford to keep in its present form. That can be restructured, or dumped, without much political angst.
But the climate policy – for a 45% reduction in emissions by 2030 and a target of net zero by 2050 – has become an article of faith within Labor, and among many of its supporters. It’s also a policy that in the election split the voters Labor needed, attracting some but driving away others.
Weaken the policy and there will be a reaction from the ALP’s inner city constituents, who tend to look toward the Greens out of the corner of their eye. Keep a very high target and lose people once again – to the Coalition or minor parties on the right – from the traditional base, including in regional areas, especially in Queensland where coal mining is a thing.
Fitzgibbon maintains that by adopting the 28% target, Labor would not just be more acceptable to blue collar voters but would put more pressure on the government to act – although this latter point seems a stretch.
Getting to 28% without destroying blue collar jobs or harming the economy would also provide “a great foundation” for prosecuting the case for further action, he claims.
Among the multiple problems Labor has in reviewing its policy is that it will be considering a more pragmatic, less ambitious approach just when the climate debate is once again taking off in public consciousness.
It’s hard to assess precisely the extent to which the step up in activism represents the wider public view. Indeed the civil disobedience demonstrations are infuriating some people because of the disruption. Nevertheless, the period ahead could see the issue biting more, as the ALP is considering easing back.
Given how quickly things change and the relevance of what other countries do, in strict policy terms Labor arguably would be best not to settle a policy until, say, early 2021, for a 2022 election. But the government (and the media) will be able to exploit a Labor vacuum, so that holding out does carry political cost.
Fitzgibbon, who represents the NSW coal seat of Hunter and experienced voter wrath in May, won’t get the ambit claim he outlined this week. That would be going too far for the party, and for its climate spokesman Mark Butler who has a lot of reputation at stake. As soon as Fitzgibbon made public his proposal, Butler said it wouldn’t be embraced by Labor, declaring it was “fundamentally inconsistent with the Paris agreement and would lead to global warming of 3℃.”
Fortunately for the government, Fitzgibbon’s intervention reduced the attention on its energy policy, the inadequacy of which was again highlighted this week.
As the Coalition pushes ahead with seeking to get its “big stick” legislation to deal with recalcitrant power companies through parliament, criticisms of its policy came from, among others, the chair of the Energy Security Board Kerry Schott and the Grattan Institute.
Schott, whose board advises federal and state governments, wrote in the Australian Financial Review, ahead of the paper’s energy summit, that “government interventions to cap prices and to effectively subsidise certain generation projects will not encourage the considerable new investment and innovation that is needed”.
The Grattan Institute, which released a report on Australia’s electricity markets, said the government’s “fight to avoid the impending closure of the Liddell coal power station in NSW makes it harder for Australia to achieve its emissions reduction targets, and is likely to increase electricity prices and reduce the reliability of supplies”.
The AFR summit saw much finger pointing, with energy minister Angus Taylor blaming industry for the lack of investment, and industry blaming the government.
Taylor said dismissively: “Time and again we’ve seen industry participants and commentators swept up in the excitement of complex new programs represented by the latest fashionable acronym that everyone pretends to understand but few ever do.” Origin Energy’s CEO Frank Calabria said “the mere existence of the big stick is acting as a handbrake on investment, right when we need investment the most”.
In theory, Morrison could have tried to use the great authority his unexpected election win gave him to pursue more appropriate energy and emissions reduction policies. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult, as it would have contradicted much the government had been saying and doing.
But it was never an option. Morrison is either wilfully blind to what needs to be done (although when treasurer he supported the more rational policy of a National Energy Guarantee), or he is afraid to stir those powerful naysayers in his party.
So where are we left?
With a government stubbornly tied to a set of policies that experts insist won’t deliver effective results. And an opposition that’s in a funk about where it should position itself in the future.
Meanwhile Australia’s overall emissions rise (although electricity emissions are down, as some coal fired power goes out of the system); high electricity prices remain a burden on private and business consumers alike; and there is nervousness about the summer power supply.
Labor party president Wayne Swan has warned that the United States Democrats could be at risk of the overloaded agenda trap that helped defeat the ALP in May.
Writing in the American progressive journal Democracy Swan, a former treasurer, says that in Labor’s loss, the size of its agenda was more decisive than its shape.
“Labor had too many individual policies that, while fully funded, couldn’t be effectively communicated.” Thus opponents could characterise the ALP agenda as big spending and big taxing.
Swan says that given the Australian experience, he feels “some queasiness” at the array of policies being discussed in the emerging Democratic primaries.
“The policies are all urgent and correct, but they are too many, offering attack angles beyond a Republican strategist’s wildest dreams.
“The shape is right – but the sizing is wrong.
“I may be worried about nothing if the Democratic primary process does its job of whittling down the agenda to something more manageable, but I fear for the consequences if the Democratic primaries become a series of purity tests on policy that saddle an eventual nominee with too broad a policy terrain to be adequately defended from Trump and the Murdoch State Media.”
Swan writes that experience in Australia, the US and the recent Scandinavian elections showed the populist right’s rise was hollowing out the centre left’s support among working class and lower-income people.
This was happening “when the right’s solutions only exacerbate the root causes of people’s justified anger at the political system: austerity, the destruction of social welfare, and the turbocharging of inequality.
“Re-channelling this anger toward immigrants and the already disadvantaged is proving a more durable political tactic than anyone expected.”
Swan argues that progressive parties have the harder time of it when voters are distrustful.
“In an era of toxic distrust toward politicians and government itself, progressive parties suffer more because we promise more.
“Labor’s agenda was large; beyond a certain point, your ideas just end up jostling for limited political airspace and for a claim on the trust of voters.”
Faced with this “terrible conundrum” progressives can’t do less, according to Swan.
“We cannot retreat on either the shape or the content of our agenda. But size is another thing.
“Like it or not – and I don’t like it one bit – we are living in a world where the right’s success in demonising the whole political class depletes the reservoir of voter trust progressive parties rely on to shape and win a mandate for change.
“This means that we must find a way of communicating our vision through a shortlist of high-profile, easily campaignable policies.
“We must also acknowledge that the agenda can only be as large as the voters’ trust in the leader and the party to deliver it,” he writes.
“In a world of diminished voter trust, progressives must start with a core set of saleable, intelligent reforms that build political capital for the next tranche of reform, and the one after that.”
When you have a medicine dispensed at your local pharmacy under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), two things happen. The federal government determines how much the pharmacy receives for dispensing your medicine. It also decides what you need to pay.
This so-called fee-for-service funding means pharmacies maximise their revenue if they dispense many prescriptions quickly.
Rather than fast dispensing, it would be better for patients and the health-care system if the funding model paid pharmacists for improving the use of medicines, not just for supplying them.
This is possible, according to our research published recently in the Australian Health Review. And it should be considered as part of the next Community Pharmacy Agreement, which outlines how community pharmacy is delivered over the next five years.
Dispensing medications may seem simple but this can be misleading: it includes both commercial and professional functions.
Under the PBS, the pharmacy receives a handling fee and mark-up on the cost of the drug to cover the commercial cost of maintaining the pharmacy and stock.
It also receives a dispensing fee for the pharmacist’s professional activities. These include reviewing the prescription to ensure it is legal and appropriate, taking into account factors such as your age, whether you are pregnant and which medicines you’ve been prescribed before; creating a record of the dispensing; labelling the medicine; and counselling you, including providing a medicine information leaflet if needed.
Higher dispensing fees are paid for medicines needing greater levels of security (such as controlled drugs including opioids) and for medicines the pharmacist must make up (such as antibiotics in liquid form).
But for the vast majority of PBS prescriptions, a pharmacy receives the same basic dispensing fee, currently A$7.39.
If you have a medicine dispensed for the first time, if it has a complicated dose, or it carries particular risks such as side effects or interactions, a pharmacist is professionally obliged to provide counselling matched to the risk. The more detailed the counselling, the greater the time needed.
However, at present, the dispensing fee to the pharmacy does not change depending on the level of counselling you need. Indeed, the current funding model is a disincentive for the pharmacist to spend time with you explaining your medicine. That’s because the longer they spend counselling, the fewer prescriptions they can dispense, and the fewer dispensing fees they receive.
What could we do better?
Performance-based funding, in which payment is adjusted in recognition of the efforts of the service provider or the outcomes of the service delivered, is becoming more common in health care and can correct some of the volume-related issues mentioned above.
It’s already being used in Australia. For instance, GPs are paid a Practice Incentives Program (PIP) to encourage improvements in services in areas such as asthma and Indigenous health.
However, performance-based funding has yet to be used for pharmacists’ dispensing in Australia.
We propose dispensing fees should be linked to the effort pharmacists make to promote improved use of medicines. This is based on the principle that counselling means people are more likely to take their medications as prescribed, which improves their health.
In other words, pharmacists would receive higher dispensing fees when more counselling is required or if counselling leads to patients taking their medications as prescribed.
Pharmacists who spend longer counselling, for instance if someone’s health status has changed, should be rewarded for it.from www.shutterstock.com
Dispensing fees could be linked to the actual time taken to dispense a prescription: the longer the time, the higher the fee. The time taken would depend on the nature of the drug; the complexity of the patient’s treatment; recent changes in the patient’s health status or other medicines that need to be taken into account; consultation with the prescribing doctor; and the level of advice and education provided.
A blended payment model could include a fee-for-service payment for commercial processes and a performance-linked payment for professional functions.
The most experience with performance-based payments to pharmacy is in the United States, where evidence is developing of patients taking their medicine as prescribed and lower total health-care costs.
In England, the government’s Pharmacy Quality Scheme is similar to the Australian Practice Incentives Program for GPs. It funds improved performance in areas such as monitoring use of certain drugs and patient safety.
There is some concern about performance-linked payments. Performance targets need to be achievable without being onerous. And performance needs to be clearly linked to the payment being made, but not if other services suffer.
Incentives could apply to you too
Cost is a barrier to some people taking their medicines with over 7% of Australians delaying or not having prescriptions dispensed due to cost.
However, there is currently no financial incentive for you to have a generic (non-branded) medicine dispensed, which would save on PBS expenditure. So it makes sense for generic medicines to be a lower cost to you.
There is also currently no financial incentive for you to take your medicine as prescribed, which would likely improve your health and save the health budget in the long run. We are not aware of any country varying patient charges based upon this, although there are ways of monitoring if people take their medicines as directed.
However, countries such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom have lower or no patient prescription charges, minimising costs as a barrier to patients taking their medicine.
What would need to happen?
Dispensing a prescription should be an invitation for the pharmacist to interact with you and help you with advice on the effective and appropriate use of your medicine. At present, there is no incentive, other than professionalism, for pharmacists to add such value.
The proposed changes would require a major restructure to the funding of dispensing to provide incentives that are equitable and transparent and that did not adversely affect disadvantaged, rural and Indigenous people.
There would need to be agreement on reliable and valid performance measures and reliable information systems.
However, funding based on a professional service model rather than a dispensing volume model would support your pharmacist to provide greater benefit to you and the health-care system.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three chemists who collectively developed something that has become an absolute necessity in our daily lives – the lithium ion battery. From mobile phones to portable tools to electric cars, in less than four decades this invention has become a staple of modern society and could be instrumental in providing the energy storage needed to help power a renewable energy future.
The prize was shared equally by Stanley Whittingham, now at the State University of New York at Binghamton; John Goodenough, a former professor at Oxford University and now at the University of Texas at Austin; and Akira Yoshino, a researcher at Japanese chemicals company Asahi Kasei.
L-R: John Goodenough; Stanley Whittingham; Akira Yoshino.Niklas Elmehed/Royal Swedish Acad. Sci.
Lithium batteries have substantial advantages over previous types of batteries. They are vastly lighter and more compact than the antiquated lead batteries still found in most cars. They can be recharged, unlike the cheap “disposable” zinc or alkaline batteries still commonly used in toys and other portable devices.
What’s more, lithium batteries don’t contain a toxic metal, unlike nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries, and they also don’t suffer from the latter’s “memory effect” where after multiple partial discharges the battery only discharges to the level it had been repeatedly discharged to.
Lithium ion batteries’ closest competitors are nickel-metal hydride batteries, but these are heavier and don’t carry as much energy.
Whittingham developed the first functional lithium battery in the 1970s, after moving from Stanford University to the oil company Exxon. Exxon wanted to diversify amid fears of running out of oil in the early 1970s. Ironically, given that electric cars might eventually displace petrol vehicles, Exxon abandoned its promising battery research program when oil prices fell in the early 1980s.
Whittingham realised that lithium is a useful battery material because its atoms readily release their electrons, which can then provide a flow of charge.
The next advancement was made by Goodenough, who figured out that changing one of the components of Whittingham’s battery, from titanium disulfide to cobalt oxide, resulted in a much more powerful battery. He later found that iron phosphate was a less expensive and less toxic alternative that also worked well.
Goodenough’s battery.Johan Jarnestad/Royal Swedish Acad. Sci.
The final step that led to the modern commercial battery was taken by Yoshino, who replaced the solid lithium metal in previous batteries with lithium ions embedded in a form of carbon called petroleum coke. This removed the danger posed by highly flammable lithium metal, which burns when exposed to air.
Crucially, this also meant the battery’s electrodes were not degraded by chemical reactions. This is why lithium batteries can be recharged many times without losing power.
Akari Yoshino’s crucial innovation was to protect the lithium ions inside a matrix of carbon.Johan Jarnestad/Royal Swedish Acad. Sci.
That brings us pretty much up to date. Lithium-ion batteries are now so ubiquitous that you’re almost certainly reading this on a device that contains one.
But the story doesn’t quite end there. Goodenough, despite being 97 and the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize (they are not awarded posthumously) reportedly still goes to the lab every day.
This meeting will be discussing the Major Performing Arts (MPA) framework, and the open letter is an “urgent request [for ministers] to withhold [their] endorsement of the revised MPA Framework.” They write:
Across all measures, the independent and small-medium sector is the lifeblood of the national arts ecology. This sector, on which Australian culture depends for its productivity, efficiency and international reputation, is on the verge of collapse.
The letter captures the growing feelings of despair and disenfranchisement in the arts sector.
Protected funding for 29 companies
The MPA Framework, in existence under various titles since 1999, ensures the majority of available arts funding at the federal and state level is directed to 29 performing arts companies.
Of the A$177 million in arts funding the Australia Council had to distribute in 2016-17, $109 million went to MPA companies: the open letter says the current proportion of funding to the MPA companies is 59%. These companies aren’t subject to peer review, and are protected from cuts to arts funding.
The MPA organisations include ten orchestras, five opera companies, eight theatre companies, and three ballet companies. These companies are generally focused on the western canon and follow the European tradition in terms of their cultural priorities.
They tend to be white and male dominated in their leadership – Bangarra is the only First Nations company. The very nature of major performing companies excludes all other art forms, such as literature and the visual arts.
Primarily located in Sydney and Melbourne, MPA companies attract most of the arts sponsorship as well as the majority of the box office income: companies are theoretically only eligible to be a member of the MPA if they can demonstrate a non-grant income of more than $1.6 million.
The rich continue to get richer and the poor get poorer.
The open letter intends to draw urgent attention to the situation facing the broader community due to their funding inequity, the overall cuts in funding, and the lack of any real increase to arts funding over many years.
The public survey asked five questions, including what should be the MPA’s “guiding principles”, what the criteria for being an MPA company should be, and:
[…] MPA companies are not subject to a competitive process through peer review for their base funding […] Do you agree with this approach?
The open letter calls for the MPA framework to be abolished and for these companies to be subjected to peer review, like all other arts organisations and artists.
Many believe the two-tiered funding model is decimating the sector. Smaller players manage on very little and are seen as disposable, putting arts organisations that have been the backbone of the arts ecology at risk and causing many artists to struggle to survive, or leave the arts altogether.
Like the environment, the arts are an ecosystem. If a major part of it is damaged irreparably, the entire system could collapse.
Big companies rely on the output of small companies for development of new content, artistic styles, and emerging artists. Without the underlying structure of the independent and small-to-medium sector, the big companies can become moribund.
One argument is these large companies are labour intensive and require many more resources to stay afloat than a small gallery or a publishing company. It follows, then, it is necessary for governments to provide a large amount of funding to these companies.
Yet, as the open letter notes, big companies received a subsidy of $31.50 per audience member; the small-to-medium and independent sector receive a subsidy of $3.36 per audience member.
There are some hard questions here the letter writers want the culture ministers to address.
Do they want to support a healthy arts ecosystem? Do they want to lose extraordinary artists, arts activity and arts organisations year after year, because the government wants to protect the few who are big and powerful? Leaders talk about cultural diversity, but are they willing to shift funding priorities to ensure it occurs?
It’s critical the culture ministers address these fundamental questions without them being captured continually by political interests. The future of Australia’s arts ecology depends on it.
The unwillingness of the major (and other) banks to immediately cut their headline mortgage rates by as much as the Reserve Bank cuts its cash rate always attracts bad press, as well as condemnation from treasurers and prime ministers.
After the big four passed to variable rate owner-occupiers only 0.13-0.15 percentage points of this month’s 0.25-point cut in the Reserve Bank cash rate, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said they had decided to put profits “before their customers”, adding:
What we do expect the banks to do is to provide their customers with the best possible deal, and it’s very disappointing that they haven’t done that
How else do you describe it? I’ve never been one, whether as treasurer or prime minister, to give the banks a leave pass
Are the banks “profiteering”? Or are they right when they say their loan rates simply reflect their cost of funding?
‘Profiteering’ isn’t straightforward
My inquiries suggest that while there may indeed be some behaviour that could reasonably be described as profiteering, the banks’ complex funding arrangements explain much of their decisions not to pass on all of the past three interest rate cuts.
The cash rate is the rate for overnight lending between banks, and while it ultimately influences all interest rates, overnight lending and borrowing is a very small part of bank funding.
Most of the funds banks lend come from deposits and wholesale borrowings. They are typically provided for months or years rather than nights.
The rates banks pay for these funds don’t necessarily change immediately or by the same amount as the cash rate. But even when they do, the average cost of funding for bank loans changes much more slowly because it also includes the cost of funding taken out at earlier rates, until that funding is replaced by new funding taken out at new rates.
So the banks’ argument that their funding costs don’t move with the cash rate has theoretical merit.
But how can we assess whether it is valid in practice?
The figures cast doubt on the “profiteering” claim
One way is to look at the behaviour of the net interest margin (NIM) of the banks. This is the difference between the amount of interest they earn on loans and other investments over and above the interest they pay on their funding, expressed as a percentage of their interest-earning assets.
If they are “profiteering” by not reducing loan rates in line with funding costs, the NIM should increase. Has this happened?
The figures suggest not – although they are not published frequently enough to give a definitive figure for developments over the past few months. Note also that there are always other factors influencing the NIM. A shift into higher risk-lending, for example, could be expected to see an increase in the NIM to reflect higher loan rates charged for greater risk.
Net interest margins of the big four
100 basis points = 1 percentage point.KPMG analysis from ANZ, CBA, NAB and WBC half yearly reports
But the figures aren’t conclusive
The net interest margins of the big four have fallen markedly since 2010 and appear to have plateaued.
But that needn’t mean home borrowers are getting better deals.
The banks might be widening their margins on highly profitable home loans while narrowing them on others.
And even small changes in net interest margins (the kind not easily seen on graphs) can generate large dollar sums of the sort the banks need to offset the seemingly ever-mounting costs of compensation and fines resulting from the banking royal commission.
The difficulty of reaching a conclusion is compounded by the abundance of mortgage loan rates, such that it is the “headline” variable rate which attracts media and public attention, but which not all new borrowers pay.
Most banks offer significant discounts to new customers who are savvy enough to bargain and are good credit risks. There is not enough good contemporaneous information about what banks are charging these customers.
This isn’t to say that changes in the headline rate are unimportant. Headline rates are especially important because they apply to the mass of “back book” (existing) mortgage customers who are slow to rebargain or refinance.
Both headline and discounted rates matter
Changes in rates on the back book matter much more for bank profits than changes in rates on the front book (new borrowers). They adjust in line with the headline rate, the ones the politicians and bank critics notice.
Unfortunately for those existing borrowers, those rates move slowly because they depend on the banks’ past funding costs. They are funded from a mix of short term and other borrowings for terms of three months to several years.
Only as that existing funding matures and banks can refinance at lower rates can the average cost of their funds decline – and even then not generally by as much as the cash rate. Bank average funding costs are necessarily less variable than the cash rate, such that even over time after long lags we can’t necessarily expect their headline rates to track the cash rate.
Of course, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that the major banks, all wearing costs as a result of the royal commission, are attempting to recoup some of those costs by a less than complete pass-through of their average funding costs.
If they are, the offerings of alternative mortgage providers with different funding models will be become relatively more attractive and there will be more in it for customers who switch.
Ultimately, it’s customer awareness and action that will inhibit bank “profiteering”, far more than jawboning by politicians and the media.
Today, October 10, is World Homeless Day. Next week the Council to Homeless Persons will convene the Victorian Homelessness Conference to discuss options for ending homelessness. On the program are presentations and discussions about Aboriginal homelessness, youth homelessness, the links between mental health and homelessness, the NDIS, and a debate about tiny homes.
Nowhere is there any mention of, or provision for discussion about, public housing.
This is despite the fact that providing public and community housing (together, social housing) is the single most effective means to get people out of homelessness, and that nearly 43,000 households are on the state waiting list, and that Housing Minister Richard Wynne – who has primary responsibility for social housing – will be opening the conference.
The program does include a session on “How to win friends and influence homelessness policy”. The title may offer a clue to why housing advocacy groups no longer mention the actual housing solution – public housing. Interestingly, the keynote speaker, Dr Stephen Gaetz of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, will discuss among other things “underinvestment in social housing” in his own country.
The Canadians appear to be less anxious about upsetting their governments and the development industry. Earlier this year, British Columbia’s minister for housing, Selina Robinson, said of Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis that “this is not a supply problem: it is a right supply problem”.
Robinson was directly challenging the mantra that increasing housing supply is the solution to unaffordable housing. She was arguing for direct investment in housing specifically for low-income households.
Housing policy is the problem
Public housing supply has lagged behind housing need for decades in Australia. Australia needs to build 100 public housing dwellings a day for 20 years to provide for the people in the most urgent housing need – typically the bottom two-fifths of income groups – according to a recent study. This is achievable but would require a significant change in current policy.
Public housing policy in Victoria has become craven. Productivity Commission statistics for 2019 show every state in Australia except Victoria and South Australia has increased net spending on social housing since 2014-15. Since 2016 Victoria has transferred more public housing stock to the private sector than any other state. The state has fewer public housing dwellings today than ten years ago.
In a critique of the management of public housing, the Victorian auditor-general was scathing about a lack of long-term vision. The report described the current approach as “disjointed, poorly communicated and lacking in a comprehensive understanding of asset performance”.
The major policy response has been the Homes for Victorians initiative. Its centrepiece is the redevelopment of inner-city public housing estates in Melbourne. The objective is to shift public housing provision to the private sector under the cover of renewal. No effort has been made to meet the obvious demand on the public housing wait list.
A Victorian parliamentary inquiry in 2018 and research study in 2019 raised serious concerns about the renewal program, its ability to meet the needs of vulnerable people and its very objectives.
A number of public housing estates – Northcote, North Melbourne, Preston, Heidelberg and Ascot Vale – have already been partially or fully emptied of people. Demolition has begun at North Melbourne. Private developer MAB has been awarded the contract to develop these estates and sell the new dwellings to private owners.
Walker Street Estate in Northcote is scheduled for demolition in March 2020.Celeste de Clario, Author provided
The great majority of dwellings on these estates will be privately owned. The rest will be given to the community housing sector.
Community housing providers are required to take 75% of their clients from the Victorian Housing Register. However, rents can be higher and the increasing corporatisation of the sector pushes fundamental housing justice questions to the background.
After renewal, these estates will have less capacity to house people who are experiencing chronic homelessness and have other complex needs. Capacity to address chronic housing inequality across Victoria will be reduced.
How public housing policy must change
The logic that drives housing policy in Victoria and Australia is undermining the most important and effective tool we have for ending homelessness: public housing.
International evidence shows permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness is more cost-effective and does more to end homelessness. It also secures the housing system to work better for all.
The most effective and cost-efficient way of overcoming homelessness, housing insecurity and inequality is to provide and maintain public housing. This requires a shift in policy direction that values housing not as real estate but as a basic right to a safe, secure place to dwell. In Australia this also means linking housing justice to questions of Treaty and land justice for which Indigenous peoples have been calling for generations.
Victoria’s peak social justice and housing advocates have been aiming to win over state governments and influence homelessness policy for decades now. The crisis in affordable housing is just getting worse. Perhaps it’s time to consider an alternative strategy.
The New Zealand embassy has confirmed Indonesia has denied its diplomats’ requests to visit Papua and assess the conflict and human rights situation in the turbulent region.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, a spokesperson from the New Zealand embassy confirmed the travel ban, which has been extended to diplomats from the British and Canadian embassies as well.
The Indonesian Foreign Ministry, Kemlu, reportedly cited security concerns following weeks of violence and protest as the reason to deny entry.
“Security considerations were the main concern at the moment,” Kemlu spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said.
“We [Kemlu] follow the decision by the government to limit foreigners to visit Papua, including diplomats.”
– Partner –
Australian and United States diplomats had not requested permission to visit however as they feared such inquiries would cause a “diplomatic headache”.
The article said that the decision to block entry “underscored Indonesian sensitivities about the independence movement and recent violence in the provinces of Papua and West Papua”.
This follows reports that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Right has also been repetitively blocked from visiting Papua, despite being invited in 2018.
According to RNZ Pacific, UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet has said the talks with Jakarta to arrange a visit had stalled.
“We have been working with the authorities, but we haven’t been able to progress it. But we will continue to talk to them because they promised to my predecessor the visit to West Papua but afterward we try to make it work and it hasn’t worked yet but I hope it will work.”
The situation in Papua has reached a crescendo in the last two weeks with reports of over 30 people killed during protests and at least 11500 fleeing violence in the highland town of Wamena, reports Fiji Village.
Reports indicate that those killed were Papuans shot by military but also non-native residents burned to death when protestors torched buildings.
Despite calls from international groups to investigate the deaths on both sides of the conflict, the Indonesian government has been focusing its efforts on finding and apprehending those it deems responsible for inciting the protests.
According to The Jakarta Post, Papuan activists arrested for treason were surreptitiously moved from the Papuan city of Jayapura to East Kalimantan, prompting condemnation from their lawyers and rights groups.
Meanwhile, a build up of Indonesian troops and a nearby shootout has prompted the border between Papua New Guinea and Papua to be closed.
While ethnic violence and anger has characterised the conflict in recent weeks, there have been instances of stirring kindness and humanity with reports of security forces protecting Papuans from Indonesian militias and Papuans protecting Indonesians from the indigenous protestors.
The Jakarta Post reports that Papuans from Wamena personally escorted non-native residents into a safe zone during the worst of the demonstrations and helped them escape the town afterwards.
About two weeks since a transcript of Donald Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukrainian president was revealed, his approval with all polls in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is 41.6% and his disapproval is 54.0%. Trump’s net approval is -12.4%, down 2.5% since last fortnight’s article.
With polls of registered or likely voters, Trump’s approval is 42.2% and his disapproval is 53.9%, for a net approval of -11.7%, down 3.4% since last fortnight. The Ukraine scandal has had a small but discernible impact on Trump’s ratings.
As I wrote previously, I did not expect this scandal to have a serious or lasting impact, as better-educated voters already detest Trump, while lower-educated voters are far more focused on the economy. Indeed, after an initial drop, Trump’s ratings have stabilised recently.
While there has only been a modest drop in Trump’s ratings, support for impeachment has risen sharply. Before the Ukraine scandal, 51.0% opposed impeachment and 40.1% supported it, according to the FiveThirtyEight tracker. Currently, 49.2% support impeachment while 43.3% are opposed. Support has risen strongly among Democrats and non-aligned voters, but only modestly with Republicans.
The vast majority of Trump disapprovers now support impeachment, but the Ukraine scandal has not converted many Trump approvers into disapprovers.
Despite the increased public support for impeachment, there is very little chance that the Senate, which Republicans control 53-47, will reach the two-thirds majority required to remove Trump from office before the November 2020 election. In the RealClearPolitics average, Trump has well over 80% support for the Republican presidential nomination, with the other three candidates at about 2% each. Republican senators are very unlikely to go against their party’s base.
In head-to-head polling against the three leading Democrats in RealClearPolitics averages, Trump trails Joe Biden by 7.4 points (7.7 points last fortnight). He trails Elizabeth Warren by 4.5 points (4.0) and Bernie Sanders by 5.2 (4.8).
US jobs situation still good
Last week, there were worse than expected September industry surveys for the services sector in both the US and Europe. However, the US added 136,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.5% – the lowest since 1969. The one negative aspect of this jobs report was that hourly pay dropped 1c after increasing 11c in August.
The low US unemployment rate is not just because of low participation. The employment population ratio – the percentage of eligible Americans who are employed – increased 0.1% to 61.0% in September, its highest since December 2008, near the beginning of the global financial crisis.
My view is that, bad as Trump’s ratings are, they would be worse without the strong US economy; this explains why Trump’s ratings improved during September as the recession talk from August faded. If the US jobs reports continue to have good news until November 2020, Trump will have a reasonable chance of re-election.
There are two economic policies being pursued by the right that could undermine the global economy. One is the US/China trade war, where talks this week are unlikely to make progress. The other is Brexit, particularly a no-deal Brexit. A no-deal Brexit may occur on October 31, but is more likely after an election that current polling indicates the UK Conservatives would win.
Warren surges to tie with Biden in Democratic polls
In the RealClearPolitics average of Democratic national polls, Warren and Biden are virtually tied, with Warren at 26.6% and Biden 26.4%. It is the first lead for anyone other than Biden. Sanders is at 14.6%, Pete Buttigieg at 5.6%, Kamala Harris at 4.4% and nobody else has more than 3%.
Since the September 12 Democratic debate, Warren’s support has increased at the expense of Biden, Harris and Sanders. Some of Sanders’ recent drop is probably due to his October 1 heart attack.
In early state polls, there have been no new polls since last fortnight in Iowa, with Warren leading Biden by 23.0% to 20.3%. In New Hampshire, the two polls taken since the September 12 debate have Warren leading Biden by one to two points.
The big exception to Warren’s rise is South Carolina, which is the last of the four early states to vote on February 29. Owing to strong black support for Biden, he has a lead over Warren exceeding 20 points in three post-debate polls in that state.
The next Democratic debate will be held on October 15. Contrary to my previous expectations, the 12 qualifying candidates will not be split over two nights, but instead appear all on one night. The threshold has been increased for November and future debates, and so far eight candidates have qualified for the November 20 debate.
Brexit, Austrian, Portuguese and Canadian elections
I wrote for The Poll Bludger about Brexit and the September 29 Austrian election results, in which the conservatives won, but need an ally to reach a majority. My latest Poll Bludger article is about Brexit and the October 6 Portuguese election, a rare triumph for the left in a democratic world that is trending to the right.
The Canadian election will be held on October 21. The CBC Poll Tracker has the Conservatives and Liberals virtually tied in voting intentions, with the Liberals ahead on seats, but short of a majority.
Australian Newspoll: 51-49 to Coalition
The latest Australian Newspoll, conducted September 26-29 from a sample of 1,660, gave the Coalition a 51-49 lead, unchanged since early September. Primary votes were 42% Coalition (down one), 33% Labor (down two), 13% Greens (up one, and their best Newspoll since 2015) and 6% One Nation (up one).
Scott Morrison’s net approval was +4, down six points. Anthony Albanese’s net approval was -1, up four points. Morrison led Albanese as better PM by 50-31 (48-28 previously).
Voters favoured prioritising the US relationship over China by 56% to 25%. All figures from The Poll Bludger.
In a country as dry as Australia, surely it is a no-brainer that we have in place a coordinated, national drought response that can be rolled out the same way that the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements are triggered when the country experiences cyclones, floods or bushfires.
Drought used to be part of these arrangements but, for good policy reasons, was removed in 1989.
Our last attempt at national drought policy
Once upon a time, Australia had a national drought policy. It was enacted in 1992 following a comprehensive review and report by an independent panel, the National Drought Policy Review Task Force, and detailed negotiations between Commonwealth and state ministers and their officials.
The policy included commitments by both state and Commonwealth governments to implement a coordinated and comprehensive package of programs covering drought preparation and response.
At the Commonwealth level, these measures were centred around:
the controversial “exceptional circumstances” provisions of its revised Rural Adjustment Scheme, which were aimed at supporting farm businesses by subsidising up to 100% of the interest paid on commercial loans.
a farm household support scheme that provided short-term income support to farmers and also offered grants for those who decided to leave the land.
farm management bonds, later known as farm management deposits, that allowed farmers to set aside pre-tax income they could later draw on in times of need.
a drought relief payment (added to the policy in 1994) that provided income support for farmers in areas declared to be experiencing “exceptional circumstances” drought. By May 1995, over 10,000 families were accessing this payment every month.
Flaws in the policy
As anyone familiar with these programs will know, the exceptional circumstances program was plagued by problems.
The first was the lack of clarity around defining when a drought moved from a “normal” situation that was expected to be managed by farmers, to an “exceptional” situation with which even the best manager could not be expected to cope.
The definition of an “exceptional circumstances” drought became the subject of ongoing debate, along with concerns that drought assistance was based on administrative boundaries, leading to inequities that became known as the “lines on maps” problem.
The second issue was the amount of information farmers were required to provide in order to demonstrate eligibility for “exceptional circumstances” assistance. The process was considered onerous and time-consuming.
Amid these concerns, a comprehensive review of drought policy was conducted in 2008 by the Productivity Commission. This was accompanied by a report by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO on the likely impact of climate change on the frequency and severity of droughts in Australia, and an independent report on the social impact of drought.
Following the review, the government decided to end the “exceptional circumstances” program in 2009. This effectively gutted the national drought policy.
Since then, there has been no further attempt at developing a comprehensive, predictable drought policy response from the federal or state governments. There have been intergovernmental National Drought Agreements, but these have done little more than restate the principles underpinning the country’s drought policy since 1992.
In recent years, the Coalition government has appointed a drought envoy, Barnaby Joyce, and drought coordinator-general, Stephen Day, to study the impact of drought on farmers and recommend possible solutions, but we have yet to see what either has come up with.
Drought envoy Barnaby Joyce says he has sent drought reports directly to Scott Morrison, but these have not yet been made public.Lukas Coch/AAP
Providing meaningful, timely and predictable support
Much of the criticism levelled at the government’s response to the current drought relates to its ad hoc and knee-jerk nature. This reactive way of dealing with drought highlights the need to return to a more predictable approach. This would avoid perceptions of pork barrelling and provide certainty to farmers about what support is available and under what circumstances.
A new national drought policy needs to take several forms. First, it needs to support farmers to prepare for drought before it happens. This is one area where the current policy has been moderately successful.
As of August 2019, Australian farmers had set aside a total of $5.809 billion in farm management deposits. These deposits have encouraged farmers to manage financial risk by building up cash reserves in high-income years, which they could then use during times of drought.
Individual farmers can currently hold a total of $800,000 in deposits. One possible improvement is to raise the ceiling on annual deposits in the years following drought recovery to allow a rapid rebuilding of cash reserves.
Second, a strong drought policy needs to provide support to all farmers during drought, not just those who have accumulated sufficient deposits to help them ride out the lean years.
In recent years, many farmers have taken advantage of long-term, low-interest loans to help during drought, and some have called for zero-interest loans to be made available, as well. But loans are not an ideal solution, as repayments are generally required even when farm incomes remain low.
This would not only give farmers greater flexibility when it comes to repayment, it would also greatly reduce the extensive red tape that strangled the old “exceptional circumstances” scheme.
Third, we need a serious rethink of the way we provide income assistance to farmers in a broader sense. Providing income support to farmers who are asset-rich, for instance, raises questions about fairness when compared with poor people in cities who are struggling to get by on Newstart payments.
There has been no serious attempt in the past 45 years to measure the extent of poverty among farmers. We can develop more appropriate and equitable income-support policies if we can better understand the genuine nature of their need.
The elephant in the room
While the government has assiduously avoided making the link, an effective national drought policy also cannot be divorced from discussions about climate change.
The 2008 Productivity Commission report was pretty clear in its conclusions about the impact of climate change on drought in Australia. A growing number of farmers are now acknowledging this reality. Denying the need for serious consideration of climate change is not doing our agricultural producers any favours.
Developing an effective national drought policy is hard work. But in another sense, it should also be easy. This is because, unlike many other areas of government policy, it can be bipartisan.
Although the National Party has historically been aligned with rural voters, all parties are broadly sympathetic to farmers and value their contributions to the economy and, importantly, our national identity. The public also generally regards farmers positively and is responsive to their plight when they are faced with hardship.
As such, this should be one area where our politicians can come together to develop a coherent national response — one that is known in advance, forward-looking, equitable with other income-assistance programs in the community, and provides meaningful support before, during and after drought.
Who doesn’t want to know if drinking that second or third cup of coffee a day will improve your memory, or if sleeping too much increases your risk of a heart attack?
We’re invested in staying healthy and many of us are interested in reading about new research findings to help us make sense of our lifestyle choices.
But not all research is equal, and not every research finding should be interpreted in the same way. Nor do all media headlines reflect what was actually studied or found.
So how can you tell? Keep these five questions in mind when you’re reading media stories about new studies.
1. Has the research been peer reviewed?
Peer review is a process by which a study is checked by experts in the discipline to assess the study’s scientific validity.
This process involves the researcher writing up their study methods and results, and sending this to a journal. The manuscript is then usually sent to two to three experts for peer review.
If there are major flaws in a study, it’s either rejected for publication, or the researchers are made to address these flaws.
Although the peer-review process isn’t perfect, it shows a study has been subjected to scrutiny.
Any reported findings that haven’t been peer reviewed should be read with a degree of reservation.
2. Was the study conducted in humans?
Findings from studies conducted in animals such as mice or on cells in a lab (also called in vitro studies) represent the earliest stage of the scientific discovery process.
Regardless of how intriguing they may be, no confident claims about human health should ever be made based on these types of study alone. There is no guarantee that findings from animal or cell studies will ever be replicated in humans.
3. Are findings likely to represent a causal relationship?
For a study to have relevance to our day-to-day health, the findings need to reflect a causal relationship rather than just a correlation.
If a study showed that coffee drinking was associated with heart disease, for example, we want to know if this was because coffee actually caused heart disease or whether these to things happened to occur together.
In a number of studies that found this association, researchers subsequently found that coffee drinkers were more likely to be smokers and therefore, these results were more likely to reflect a true causal relationship between smoking and heart disease.
Just because something is common among coffee drinkers, doesn’t mean coffee caused it.Africa Studio/Shutterstock
In observational studies, where researchers observe differences in groups of people, it can sometimes be difficult to disentangle the relationship between variables.
The highest level of evidence regarding causality comes from double-blind placebo controlled randomised controlled trials (RCTs). This experimental type of study, where people are separated into groups to randomly receive either an intervention or placebo (sham treatment), is the best way we can determine if a something causes disease. However it, too, is not perfect.
Although other types of studies in humans play an important role in our understanding of health and disease, they may only highlight associations that are not indicative of causal relationships.
It’s not enough to know that an exposure (such a third cup of coffee or more than nine hours of sleep a night) causes an outcome, it’s also important to clearly understand the strength of this relationship. In other words, how much is your risk of disease going to increase if you are exposed?
If your risk of disease is reported to increase by 50% (which is a relative risk), this sounds quite frightening. However, if the original risk of disease is low, then a 50% increase in your risk may not represent a big actual increased risk of disease. A 50% increased risk of disease could mean going from a 0.1% risk of disease to your risk being 0.15%, which doesn’t sound quite so dramatic.
A single study on its own, even if it’s a well-conducted randomised controlled trial, can never be considered definitive proof of a causal relationship between an exposure and disease.
As humans are complex and there are so many variables in any study, we can’t be confident we understand what is actually going on until findings are replicated in many different groups of people, using many different approaches.
Until we have a significant body of evidence that is in agreement, we have to be very careful about our interpretation of the findings from any one study.
If the media report you’re reading doesn’t answer these questions, consider changing news sites or looking at the original paper. Ideally this would be linked in the news article you’re reading, or you can search PubMed for the article using a few keywords.
The journal article’s abstract should tell you the type of study, whether it was conducted on humans and the size of the effect. If you’re not blocked by a paywall, you may be able to view the full journal article which should answer all of the questions you have about the study.
Summer might be more than six weeks away, but out-of-control bushfires have already torn across parts of eastern Australia in recent days, destroying homes and threatening lives.
This did not come as a surprise to meteorologists and fire agencies. Record-breaking heat and windy conditions were forecast for parts of NSW and Queensland this week, prompting severe fire danger ratings.
We’re often told the Australian bushfire season is starting earlier. This year it began in September on the eastern seaboard. Last year and in 2013, significant spring fires hit NSW and in 2015 they affected much of the nation’s southeast.
This analysis is the most comprehensive ever conducted in Australia. It confirms the strength of the relationship between climate drivers such as El Niño, climate change, and the Australian bushfire season. It also demonstrates that a few milder bushfire seasons do not mean climate change isn’t happening.
A house burnt by bushfires in Laidley, southeast Queensland, photographed on October 9 2019.Scott Davis/AAP
Hot, dry, windy conditions spell fire trouble
The prerequisites for a severe bushfire season are high temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds that coincide with long periods of low rainfall.
These weather ingredients are used to calculate an area’s fire danger rating, using the Forest Fire Danger Index. The index produces a score reflecting the severity of fire weather on a given day, where zero represents minimal fire danger, 50 represents conditions where a fire ban may be issued, and 100 is considered potentially catastrophic.
Loss of human lives and property most often occurs on days when the index is high in a particular area. But strong seasonal fire weather doesn’t always translate to high-impact fires. Other factors in play include terrain, vegetation, ignition and the weather on the day.
In our research, we analysed the strength of the worst fire weather conditions to understand the relative severity of fire weather during different seasons and years, in relation to various climate drivers.
A Bureau of Meteorology video explaining bushfire weather.
Each of these climate drivers involves either changes to sea surface temperatures, wind movements, or both. They can all can affect temperature and rainfall patterns across the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia.
Our research confirmed that across the continent over more than four decades, climate drivers have affected the variability of Australia’s fire weather.
Of these drivers, the El Niño Southern Oscillation is the most influential. Weather during an El Niño phase is typically hot and dry, leading to worse seasonal bushfire conditions.
The positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole often coincides with El Niño and exacerbates its effects. This phase generally results in lower than average rainfall across southern Australia.
But when these two climate modes are in a negative phase, our research confirms that Australia often experiences more rain and milder bushfire conditions.
The modes evolve over many months and their effects on fire weather persist for several seasons. Their state during winter and spring is a strong indicator for the rest of the fire season for much of Australia.
The strength of the relationship between climate drivers and fire weather in spring. Purple squares show the strength of the relationship. Larger squares indicate a stronger relationship.User provided
The Southern Annular Mode refers to the north-south movement of strong westerly winds in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. When the mode is in a prolonged negative phase, fire weather conditions in Australia are worse – particularly in NSW. This effect is pronounced in winter and spring and means less rainfall and strong westerly winds.
The 2019 winter saw a persistent negative Southern Annular Mode, as did the 2013 and 2018 winter and spring seasons. There was a strong El Niño event and positive Indian Ocean Dipole in 2015. Australia’s bushfire season started earlier than usual in each of these years.
The converse is also true. In 2011 a strong La Niña (the opposite of an El Niño) resulted in milder bushfire seasons, as did the negative Indian Ocean Dipole of 2016.
Climate change is a culprit too
Long-term climate change in Australia is an undeniable reality. The State of the Climate 2018 report for Australia notes strong land surface temperature increases and a 10-20% decline in cool season rainfall across southern Australia since the 1970s. These changes are closely associated with increasing human greenhouse gas emissions, as well as natural variability.
The changed conditions has led to an average increase in the severity of seasonal bushfire weather across Australia – especially in southern parts of the continent. The increased severity affects all seasons but in particular spring, which means that, on average, the bushfire season is starting earlier.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian visits the control room at the NSW Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney on October 9, 2019.AAP/James Gourley
Pulling it all together
Our research has made clear that climate modes bring large and rapid swings to the fire weather, while human-induced climate change gradually increases background fire weather conditions. The trend generally means an earlier start to the bushfire seasons than in the past.
Climate change is definitely playing a role in producing the earlier start to bushfire seasons and overall more extreme seasons, particularly in southeastern Australia. However, the natural variations in climate modes continue to play a key role, meaning we should not expect every bushfire season to be worse than the last as a result of climate change.
Similarly, a few milder bushfire seasons among a string of record high seasons does not mean that climate change should be dismissed.
What have Scott Morrison and and Attorney General Christian Porter got in mind for unions?
The answer seems to be more of the same, more use of coercive power to make it harder for unions to fulfil their democratic functions of protecting workers and fighting inequality.
The newly-reintroduced Ensuring Integrity Bill was rejected in 2017, but the government thinks it’s got a better chance now, with the support of at least four of the six senate crossbenchers.
In part that’s because of the behaviour of John Setka, head of the Victorian branch of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining Energy Union who has been convicted of using a carriage service to harass a woman.
The Bill does not actually address Setka or his conduct, but the Government is using that negative impression to justify these new laws.
And it’s because of words like these, used by Justice Dyson Heydon, the royal commissioner tasked with examining trade union governance and corruption by the Abbott government:
it is clear that in many parts of the world constituted by Australian trade union officials, there is room for louts, thugs, bullies, thieves, perjurers, those who threaten violence, errant fiduciaries and organisers of boycotts
It’s also what the government wants people to believe about trade unions; that they are ugly, violent, law-breaking and self-interested.
In truth the most unionised occupation is teaching, the next most unionised is health care, and the third is protective services.
Why make it harder for teachers and nurses?
My research finds that there was a problem with union corruption the best part of a decade ago, most starkly apparent in the Health Services Union scandal, but for the most part unions have cleaned up their act.
I told the Senate inquiry into the Ensuring Integrity Bill that a proportionate response to the Royal Commission’s findings was warranted.
It included legislation imposing higher standards of financial management accountability on union officers, higher penalties for serious breaches of the Registered Organisations Act, criminal penalties for “corrupting benefits” and requirements for disclosure of benefits passing to a union under an enterprise agreement, clearer governance standards for separate entities and union funds such as election funds, and a specialist regulator for registered organisations.
Almost all of these measures have now been implemented. So what are we to make of the reheated Bill? It looks like an opportunistic attempt to take down unions.
Morrison needs an agenda
The government didn’t expect to be re-elected. Its business mates are demanding industrial relations reform. They want to shut down powerful unions like the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union. The government tried to stop it merging with the Maritime Union to become the CFMMEU rather than the CFMEU, but the Bill didn’t get through parliament in time.
With that objective frustrated, business wants new weapons to take on unions.
Hence the provisions in the Bill enabling employers, the minister and the Registered Organisations Commission to seek the disqualification of union officials and the deregistration of unions; provisions that could prove very handy in an industrial dispute, adding to the already extensive range of weapons employers already have access to.
The Bill massively over-reaches. The government claims it’s simply applying to unions the same regulatory standards that apply to corporations. But its application of the corporate model is highly selective.
So it’s one rule for unions
Schedule 1 would allow court-ordered disqualification to be sought against a union official on much wider grounds than those available for company directors.
An employer could seek to have an official removed because they have been involved in a technical breach of the protected industrial action rules under the Fair Work Act, but a union could not seek disqualification of a company director who had breached the same legislation by, for instance, presiding over the underpayment of workers.
Disqualification could also be sought because a union official had breached the proposed “fit and proper person” test.
The purpose of the latter test is to impose barriers to entry on dodgy and exploitative managers. There is no equivalent justification for prefventing someone becoming a union official.
Schedule 2 proposes new grounds for deregistering unions that partly mirror some of the grounds for court-ordered wind-ups of companyies under the Corporations Act.
Another rule for employers
But the addition of new grounds relating to a union’s (or members’) non-compliance with a wide range of laws has no equivalent in the Corporations Act.
Among the proposed grounds is “obstructive industrial action” – unprotected action that hinders of interferes with the activities of an employer or a public service, or that has a substantial adverse effect on community safety, health or welfare. Only a single instance would be needed.
The target of Schedule 2 seems to be the CFMMEU. But Commissioner Heydon neither recommended deregistration of the CFMEU nor proposed any change to the deregistration provisions.
The government already has the ability to seek deregistration of the CFMMEU under the Registered Organisations Act. Some of its grounds, including repeated breaches of court orders, would be sufficient in my view.
Instead of testing the existing law, the government has chosen to seek much wider grounds for deregistration and to give more parties, including employers, access to the mechanism, creating a threat to all unions, not just the CFMMEU.
And confusion about what unions do
The Coalition and employers can’t seem to make up their minds about unions.
a threat to the economy, with the merged CFMMEU threatening one part of the economy, and the proposed amalgamation of the National Union of Workers and United Voice threatening another.
The Ensuring Integrity Bill tells us it’s this second view that’s predominant, notwithstanding the reality that most unions play a valuable role in protecting vulnerable workers from exploitation, challenging managerial power in the workplace, and enhancing our democracy.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer, Program Manager / Adjunct Research Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
With the discovery of 20 more moons orbiting Saturn, the ringed planet has overtaken Jupiter as host to the most moons in the Solar system. Saturn now has 82 known moons, whereas Jupiter has a paltry 79.
Announced at the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre by a team of astronomers from the Carnegie Institute for Science led by Scott S. Sheppard, the discovery is the latest advance in the 400-year history of our understanding of the satellites of our neighbouring planets.
As technology has improved, we have observed more and more of these tiny, distant worlds – and we can be reasonably confident there are still plenty waiting to be discovered.
How do we even know Saturn has moons?
Although the planets of the Solar system are all visible to the naked eye and have been known to humans since antiquity, it wasn’t until Galileo Galilei turned a telescope on Jupiter in 1610 that we discovered Earth was not alone in having an orbiting companion.
Galileo saw Jupiter’s four largest moons and could make out what we now know are Saturn’s rings. Decades later, with better telescopes, Christian Huygens and Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed Saturn’s moons.
It became clear that the giant planets are surrounded by multitudes of satellites, resembling smaller versions of the Solar system. By the middle of the 19th century, telescopes had improved enough that the first eight moons of Saturn – including Titan, the largest – had been viewed directly.
The introduction of photographic plates, which enabled the detection of fainter objects with long-exposure observations, helped astronomers increase their count of Saturn’s moons to 14.
Closer inspections
It was a long journey (literally) to the next big improvement in our view of Saturn’s moons. Many of the smaller moons were not discovered until the Voyager fly-by missions in the 1980s and the more recent 13-year stopover of the Cassini spacecraft in Saturn’s orbit.
Until these closer visits, we knew little about the moons aside from the fact that they existed.
One of Cassini’s goals was to explore Titan, which is the only moon in the Solar system with a thick, smoggy atmosphere. Another was to take a look at Saturn’s other mid-sized moons, including frozen Enceladus, which may hold an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust.
Cassini also discovered much smaller moons, so-called “shepherd moons” that interact with Saturn’s rings by carving gaps and wavy patterns as they pass through a rubble of rocks and snowballs.
Bigger telescopes, more moons
These close-up observations from space advanced our understanding of individual moons that stay near to Saturn. Recently, many more moons have been found in orbits much further from the planet.
These more distant moons could only be detected with large optical telescopes such as the Subaru telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The telescope is equipped with sensitive cameras that can detect some of the faint objects separated by millions of kilometres from Saturn.
The new moons were discovered by comparing photos like this pair taken about an hour apart. While the background stars stay fixed, the moon – highlighted with orange bars – moves between frames.Scott Sheppard
To confirm that these objects are indeed associated with Saturn, astronomers have to observe them over days or even months to reconstruct the shape and size of the moon’s orbit.
Many small moons are fragments of shattered large moons
Such observations revealed a population of moons that are often described as “irregular” moons. They are split into three distinct groups: Inuit, Gallic, and Norse. They all have large, elliptical orbits at an angle to those of moons closer to the planet.
Each group is thought to have formed from a collision or fragmentation of a larger moon. The Norse group consists of some of the most distant moons of Saturn, which orbit in the opposite direction to the rotation of the planet. This suggests they could have formed elsewhere and were later captured by the gravitational force of Saturn.
Of the 20 new moons, 17 belong to the Norse group including the furthest known moon from the planet. Their estimated sizes are of the order of 5km in diameter.
Most of the newly discovered moons have retrograde orbits, going in the opposite direction to Saturn’s spin.Carnegie Institution for Science
Have we found all the moons now?
Are we likely to find even more moons around Saturn? Absolutely.
Some of the newly discovered moons are very faint and at the limit of detection with currently available instruments. New, bigger telescopes such as Giant Magellan Telescope will allow us to observe even fainter objects.
Two seemingly unrelated but important things happened in Melbourne last week. One was a memorial service for David Yencken AO; the other was the exhibition opening of the Future Park Design Ideas Competition. The connection between the two is that both gave us radical ideas for Melbourne’s open space.
David Yencken was a visionary man who had a profound impact on Victoria and Melbourne. He was responsible, among many things, for the transformation of Southbank and co-founding Merchant Builders. But one of his wildest ideas was the 1985 Greening of Swanston Street, when vehicle traffic was closed and a weekend street party was held right in the middle of Melbourne.
As the secretary (chief executive) of the Ministry for Planning and Environment, Yencken had been charged with changing perceptions of the city by rethinking its public spaces. At a time before pop-up parks and guerrilla gardening, his radical idea demonstrated what was possible for the inner city and sowed the seed of the idea of closing Swanston Street to traffic.
The project was not without controversy – it was costly and came in for political criticism as a stunt. But looking back to a time when inner Melbourne was underutilised and dominated by traffic, we can see how that radical idea sparked the imagination about what was possible for the city centre.
The Greening of Swanston Street in 1985.Victorian Ministry of Planning
This is just what the Future Park competition needs to achieve. The open competition held by the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects has attracted global interest, with 123 entries from 20 countries.
The brief was simple but provocative. Designers were to find space within 10 kilometres of the city centre and design a future park that responds to the challenges of Melbourne today. The design responses from the 31 shortlisted entries ranged from manufactured lagoons to urban wildlife corridors and street transformation parks that Yencken would be proud of.
Melbourne from Past to Last, a vision of a city street park.Future Park Design Ideas Competition, Author provided
The first wave of media coverage on the competition inspired a range of public comments about Melbourne’s open space. For example, from the online comments in The Age:
Royal Park is a massive area of underutilised space. Driving down Elliott Av it’s just an open wasteland. Grassland and scattered gum trees does not make a welcoming “park”.
How about bulldozing the eyesore known as Federation Square and putting a park in its place?
These designs forget to include the things that make it a Melbourne park, graffiti, vandalism, weeds and the homeless.
Architects and landscapers rarely, if ever, have a grasp on what will work for people … they are too busy trying to be creative, and not busy enough trying to make people happy.
What the public comments show us is that there is no single or obvious solution to our parks and public spaces. Some people like it busy, some people like the quiet. Some want European trees and others desire native plantings. It’s complicated, and each of these opinions make valid points.
Just like Yencken’s Greening of Swanston, there will always be debate about what makes good public space. And that is exactly why we need more radical ideas – some might call them “crazy” – for our cities.
We know the future of our cities will be complicated. Like it or not, there will be more people, a changing climate and increasing pressure on infrastructure and services.
These messy issues are often described as wicked problems. Popular in public policy and management, the term is used to explain problems with debatable cause and effect. Critically, the lack of agreement about wicked problems produces conflicting goals towards resolution.
Obviously, we need science, governance and planning, but finding solutions to wicked problems will also require creativity and collaboration. We need debate and we need ideas that can expand our imagination about what our cities can be. This is why it is so important that the competition entries for the Future Park explore new and outrageous possibilities.
Ideas throughout the shortlisted entries include plans for a new NBN: the National Biodiversity Network, which creates ecological corridors across the country. Others propose transforming schools into parkland; parks designed for bees; designs that return darkness to our urban landscapes; and sculpting new islands as rising sea levels engulf our coastline.
Multi-deck parks: as cities grow and space becomes ever more precious, urban parks replace car parks.Future Park Design Ideas Competition, Author provided
As design solutions, these ideas reflect the challenges of our world today. While many of these schemes are technically, socially or economically unfeasible, they remind us of the power of thinking outside of the box. Importantly, the competition format puts all of these ideas together in one place for us to think about and discuss.
In Australia, we have a limited culture of “open design competitions” for either built projects or speculative solutions. But design competitions provide opportunities for new voices and discovering unexpected solutions within these wild ideas.
Radical ideas are important and so is having the freedom to voice them. Especially as a way of expanding the discussions we need to have about the challenging future.
Opposition resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon has had his proposal to bring Labor’s climate change target into line with the government’s immediately torpedoed by the party’s climate spokesman Mark Butler.
In a speech to the Sydney Institute made public ahead of its Wednesday evening delivery Fitzgibbon suggested the ALP offer “a political and policy settlement” to match the higher end of the government’s 26-28% target for reducing emissions on 2005 levels by 2030.
Labor’s controversial election policy was for an ambitious 45% reduction.
Fitzgibbon said the change he advocated would mean “the focus would then be all about actual outcomes, and the government would finally be held to account and forced to act.
“A political settlement would also restore investment confidence and for the first time in six years, we could have some downward pressure on energy prices,” Fitzgibbon said.
But Butler rejected the proposal saying the government’s target “is fundamentally inconsistent with the Paris agreement and would lead to global warming of 3℃.
“Labor remains committed to implementing the principles of the Paris Agreement, which are to keep global warming well below 2℃ and pursue efforts around 1.5℃,” he said.
“Labor’s commitment to action on climate change is unshakeable. We will have a 2050 target of net zero emissions and medium-term targets which are consistent with the agreement,” Butler said.
Despite dismissing Fitzgibbon’s idea, Butler has acknowledged that Labor’s climate change policy must be up for grabs in the party’s review of all its policies between now and the 2022 election.
But revising the climate policy will be one of its major challenges, because the party is caught between its inner city progressive constituency and its traditional blue collar voters. Its ambivalent position on the planned Adani coal mine cost it votes in Queensland at the election.
Apart from the politics, the 45% target for 2030 would be more unrealistic at the next election because emissions at the moment are increasing, meaning ground is being lost.
Fitzgibbon, who takes a more pro-coal attitude than many of his colleagues, had a big swing against him in his NSW coal seat of Hunter.
He said in his speech that a 28% reduction would be a “meaningful achievement” and could be built on later. He also pointed out bluntly that Labor couldn’t achieve anything if perpetually in opposition.
“If we could get to 28% by 2030, and also demonstrate that we could do so without destroying blue collar jobs or damaging the economy, then we would have a great foundation from which to argue the case for being more ambitious on the road to 2050,” he said.
Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is from Queensland, refused to be pinned down when pressed on Fitzgibbon’s proposal.
“My view is we can take real action on climate change without abandoning our traditional strengths, including in regional Queensland,” he said.
The Victorian minister for energy, environment and climate change, Lily D’Ambrosio, asked at the Australian Financial Review’s national energy summit about Fitzgibbon’s comments, said she wasn’t much interested in what a federal opposition did.
“We have a very strong and ambitious policy and we took that to the last state election, and we all know the result of that election, so we will continue to implement our policies and get them done,” she said.
Federal energy minister Angus Taylor pointed to the divisions in the opposition but welcomed that there were “people in Labor who are making sensible suggestions about dropping their policies from the last election.
“What we saw happen there was Labor went to the election with policies – 45% emissions reduction target, 50% renewable energy target – where they weren’t able to or willing to detail the costs and impacts of those policies,” he said.
Last week, amid the cacophony of reactions to Greta Thunberg’s appearance before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, a group of self-proclaimed “prominent scientists” sent a registered letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The letter, headed “There is no climate emergency”, urged Guterres to follow:
…a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation.
The group, supported by 75 Australian business and industry figures, along with others around the world, obviously rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. But this missive displays remarkably different tactics to those previously used to stymie climate action.
The language of climate change denial and inaction has transformed. Outright science denial has been replaced by efforts to reframe climate change as natural, and climate action as unwarranted.
However, this is just another way of rejecting the facts, and their implications for us. Denial can take many forms.
Shades of denial
The twin phenomena of denial and inaction are related to one another, at least in the context of climate change. They are also complex, both in the general sense of “complicated and intricate”, and in the technical psychological sense of “a group of repressed feelings and anxieties which together result in abnormal behaviour”.
In his book States of Denial, the late psychoanalytic sociologist Stanley Cohen described three forms of denial. Although his framework was developed from analysing genocide and other atrocities, it applies just as well to our individual and collective inaction in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence of human-induced climate change.
The first form of denial is literal denial. It is the simple, conscious, outright rejection that something happened or is happening – that is, lying. One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, among others, have at one time or another maintained this position – outright denial that climate change is happening (though Senator Hanson now might accept climate change but denies any human contribution to it).
Interestingly, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday blamed “climate change deniers” in his own government for blocking any attempt to deal with climate change, resulting paradoxically in higher energy prices today.
It is tempting to attribute outright denial to individual malice or stupidity, and that may occasionally be the case. More worrying and more insidious, though, is the social organisation of literal denial of climate change. There is plenty of evidence of clandestine, orchestrated lying by vested interests in industry. If anyone is looking for a conspiracy in climate change, this is it – not a collusion of thousands of scientists and major science organisations.
The second form of denial is interpretive denial. Here, people do not contest the facts, but interpret them in ways that distort their meaning or importance. For example, one might say climate change is just a natural fluctuation or greenhouse gas accumulation is a consequence, not a cause, of rising temperatures. This is what we saw in last week’s letter to the UN.
The most insidious form of denial
The third and most insidious form is implicatory denial. The facts of climate change are not denied, nor are they interpreted to be something else. What is denied or minimised are the psychological, political, and moral implications of the facts for us. We fail to accept responsibility for responding; we fail to act when the information says we should.
Of course, some are unable to respond, financially or otherwise, but for many, implicatory denial is a kind of dissociation. Ignoring the moral imperative to act is as damning a form of denial as any other, and arguably is much worse.
The treatment of Thunberg, and the vigour with which people push away reminders of that which they would rather not deal with, illustrate implicatory denial. We are almost all guilty, to some extent, of engaging in implicatory denial. In the case of climate change, implicatory denial allows us to use a reusable coffee cup, recycle our plastic or sometimes catch a bus, and thus to pretend to ourselves that we are doing our bit.
Almost none of us individually, or we as a nation, has acted as we ought on the science of climate change. But that does not mean we can’t change how we act in the future. Indeed, there are some recent indications that, as with literal denial, implicatory denial is becoming an increasingly untenable psychological position.
While it is tempting, and even cathartic, to mock the shrill responses to Thunberg from literal and interpretive deniers, we would do well to ponder our own inherent biases and irrational responses to climate change.
These are just two examples of common strategies we use to deny our own responsibility and culpability. They make us feel better about what little we actually do, or congratulate us for accepting the science. But they are ultimately self-defeating delusions. Instead of congratulating ourselves on agreeing with the basic scientific facts of climate change, we need to push ourselves to action.
Australia should help Manus Island develop industries like tourism, a journalist who covers refugee detention in Papua New Guinea has said.
Melbourne’s Michael Green has visited Manus Island twice, and from his research has produced an award winning podcast, The Messenger, a book, They Cannot Take the Sky, and an artwork, How Are You Today, which is currently on display in New Zealand.
Green said formal employment increased by 70 percent on Manus Island through Australia’s detention regime.
But, with the refugees now transferred to Port Moresby, Green said employment opportunities were needed on Manus.
– Partner –
“I’ve spoken to people there who think that there’ll be an opportunity for a big tourism industry on Manus. It’s a beautiful place,” he said.
“There are now a lot of hotels which weren’t there before. Perhaps that might be possible. It will require a big shift.”
The people of Manus should decide what industries they wanted to develop and ask Australia for help, Green said.
“People will adapt. They’ve been adapting to colonial influence on that island for a long time. But I do think the Australian government has a responsibility to not just walk away,” he said.
“It would be good for the people on Manus to work out what they want and then demand it of the Australian government.”
About 1500 refugees have been detained on Manus by Australia since 2013 and Green said media coverage during that time had damaged the island’s reputation.
“There’s been some really bad coverage. And lots of the guys [refugees] will slip into saying things like, ‘Manus is a hellhole’. There’s some really terrible language that’s used,” he said.
“Actually Manus Island is a stunningly beautiful place and when I’ve visited there the people have been incredibly kind and generous.”
About 300 refugees remain in Papua New Guinea. Now in Port Moresby, some are in hotels awaiting resettlement in the United States, others are being forced into residential accommodation and about 50 men not given refugee status are locked up in a new immigration detention facility at Bomana.
Green said those not accepted by the US were unlikely to be able to settle in PNG.
“People who have tried to stay haven’t been able to access permanent residency,” he said.
“I know that some of those people… would like to go New Zealand. I hope that there would be a change in the Australian government’s attitude to the prospect of New Zealand resettlement.”
He was particularly concerned for the Bomana men.
“Lots of those people can’t be deported. It baffles me. I can’t understand what the Australian government thinks is going to happen to people who’ve been held indefinitely, without charge for this period of time. You can’t pretend the problem is going to solve itself.”
This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
Have you ever wondered who buys those huge boxes of antihistamines prominently displayed all year round in your local pharmacy? If antihistamines were just used for hay fever, you’d think sales would be good in spring, but pretty mediocre for the rest of the year.
Many of the antihistamines sold in Australia are actually for hives, or what doctors call urticaria. Hives produces multiple red, raised bumps (or wheals) that are incredibly itchy. Hives occurs all year round.
The condition is really common, with a Korean study showing around 22% of people can expect to have it at some time in their life.
Some people also get angioedema, where small blood vessels leak fluid into the tissues, causing spectacular swelling. If the swelling affects your throat and airways you can suffocate.
Fortunately, for the vast majority of people, hives comes and goes in a couple of weeks. While you can feel pretty miserable when you have it, antihistamines work well to control the rash and itch. Suffocation is exceptionally rare.
When hives won’t go away
If you are unlucky enough to still have hives after six weeks, it’s likely to persist six months, six years or even 26 years later.
This is what dermatologists call chronic urticaria, which affects about 1% of the population (around 250,000 Australians). The itch, sleep disturbance, swelling and rash associated with it severely impair people’s quality of life. Of all skin diseases, chronic urticaria seems to worsen your mood and disrupt day-to-day living the most.
One antihistamine tablet is usually enough to control hay fever. But people with chronic urticaria may need two, three or sometimes four tablets a day to control their itch. Even that may not be enough to stop the wheals.
What causes hives?
So what causes hives? If your hives go away within six weeks, you probably had them because of a delayed reaction to a viral infection. Sometimes this acute condition is caused by an allergic reaction to a medication; an antibiotic allergy is a common cause. Occasionally a food allergy causes hives.
What about chronic urticaria, when hives last more than six weeks? Doctors don’t know the exact cause. While patients often suspect a food allergy, doctors rarely find a food trigger.
We don’t know exactly what causes hives, seen here as raised, red bumps or wheals.from www.shutterstock.com
But we know autoimmunity is involved, when the body’s immune system targets itself.
Most patients with chronic urticaria have antibodies against their own immune system. In particular, these antibodies target molecules critical to a normal allergic response (immunoglobulin E, or IgE, and its receptor).
If antihistamines don’t help, there are other options.
Medications that specifically target IgE and get to the root cause of urticaria autoimmunity are now available, provided you meet all the special criteria. Only dermatologists are allowed to prescribe this medicine on the PBS.
To date, omalizumab has been the most effective treatment for chronic urticaria patients who don’t respond to antihistamines. It’s given as an injection under the skin every four weeks. Unfortunately symptoms in fewer than 50% of patients are completely controlled.
A new drug ligelizumab, which is still in clinical trials, is showing promise, according to international research we were involved with published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. However, this experimental drug, which also targets IgE autoimmunity, is only available in Australia as part of a clinical trial.
Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen.
Affirm Press
We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.
Enter the short story cycle — a hybrid of a novel and a short story collection. In her collection, Barking Dogs, Rebekah Clarkson offers a superbly constructed creative feat into the form, giving us a strong insight into how short story cycles operate and what they can offer to readers and writers.
However, until recently, short story cycles have received less attention and have been harder to get published than novels. This appears to be changing. Twenty-first century American authors Elizabeth Strout and Jennifer Eagan have had significant success with the form.
Barking Dogs was penned by Clarkson as part of her PhD in creative writing through the University of Adelaide. It represents the product of her extensive research into short story cycles and related literary practices.
Clarkson describes the short story cycle as a form in which each individual story can stand alone as an independent work of art, but when arranged with other stories, generates interconnection and perhaps interdependence. The 13 stories in her Barking Dogs can all be read and enjoyed in themselves, but are enhanced when read and appreciated in context. The book as a whole offers something else yet again — a greater tapestry, to which each story adds different threads.
Connections, recurring roles
Of the many links between separate yet connecting episodes in Barking Dogs, the most obvious is place. The book’s setting is Mount Barker, an Adelaide Hills town, portrayed at a moment of major change as housing developers carve the formerly idyllic, quiet community into a bustling outpost of aspirational suburbia.
Issues of this transformation — social, environmental, and economic — are considered from multiple points of view, through the voices of characters whose attitudes differ. This reflects Clarkson’s desire (expressed via email) to “represent a real place through fiction without privileging any particular perspective”.
Character provides another crucial set of interconnections in Barking Dogs. In several cases, major characters from particular stories reappear as minor characters or visitors in others. Elsewhere, this means revisiting the same main character at a different time and in a different situation. In the story Raising Boys, for example, Malcolm Wheeler is a suburban father dealing with relatively mundane albeit relatable everyday issues including marriage tensions, a child struggling at school, and complaints from neighbours about his son’s dog, which barks noisily.
Stories in the cycle make reference to popular parenting guides on raising boys.Annie Spratt/Unsplash, CC BY
A later story, The Five Truths of Manhood, reintroduces Malcolm as he learns that he has cancer. The diagnosis pushes Malcolm’s underlying frailties and reveals different aspects to the characters of his wife and son. This casts new light on how all three characters behave in the story. The references both stories’ titles make to Steve Biddulph’s books on manhood guide the reader to reflect on how social constructions of masculinity matter for families and individuals.
Another recurring character is Sophie Barlow, a missing schoolgirl who, though not directly present in any story, figures in the memories, thoughts and dreams of other characters.
We first encounter Sophie in Something Special, Something Rare, in which she has left her family home early in the morning but has not yet officially disappeared. Sophie’s father, Graham, reflects on how Sophie didn’t want to go bird watching with the family, and thus slowly recognises his own emotional disconnection from his daughter. Her tragic disappearance is foreshadowed towards the end of the story, when Graham realises:
He missed her. He really missed her. He’d been missing her for a couple years.
In contrast to this deeply personal view of Sophie, the story World Peace concerns Janice, a 12-year-old schoolgirl who cannot remember Sophie’s surname but remembers liking the sound of it:
Sophie Someone. It was the name of a girl you’d want to be friends with. It had a feel to it […] like a good song.
Sophie is remembered differently yet again in two other stories, and thereby hovers, ghost-like, throughout the collection. Her tragic demise falls between the cracks of the community, which is mirrored by how she falls between the cracks of stories.
The hidden tale of Sophie, among other recurrent themes and motifs of Barking Dogs, means each story in the book can be read again and again, with new levels of meaning gained each time. The book therefore meets Clarkson’s own key criterion for a successful short story cycle.
In email interview, Clarkson declares “the best response a reader can have is the desire to flip back to the beginning and read again”. Barking Dogs certainly provokes this desire, demonstrating the multifarious potentials of the short story cycle as a form that readers, writers and publishers will continue to develop and embrace in the coming years.
How could one of the best pianists Australia has ever produced die lonely, neglected and impoverished in a dilapidated house in suburban Melbourne?
The Eulogy, a documentary written and directed by Janine Hosking examines the life, career and tragic death of Australian concert pianist Geoffrey Tozer, who passed away aged 54 from liver disease.
The film begins with Paul Keating reading the now-infamous eulogy he delivered at Tozer’s memorial almost exactly a decade ago. The speech, which starts out as a celebration of the pianist’s life and achievements, culminates in an attack on Australia’s cultural establishment.
Keating speaks of the arts in Australia as riven with “bitchiness and preference” and “inverted snobbery”. He accuses the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras of treating Tozer with “indifference and contempt” and suggests the people “who had charge in the selection of artists during this period should hang their heads in shame”.
Tozer has been called one of Australia’s greatest pianists.Madman
The late conductor and music educator Richard Gill (who never saw Tozer perform) acts as a first-person narrator for the film as he tries to make sense of Tozer’s legacy and evaluate Keating’s claims.
Gill’s discovery of Tozer is intercut with archival footage of performances and the film’s soundtrack makes extensive use of Tozer’s many recordings. Discussions with friends, family and colleagues together with readings of Tozer’s diary and correspondence draw a sympathetic portrait of the virtuoso musician.
Charming animations guide the film’s audience around the diverse locales of Tozer’s life story. These places range from pre-partition India, Tasmania, Melbourne, London, Canberra (where he first met Paul Keating) to a disastrous misadventure in Queanbeyan in NSW where Tozer tried unsuccessfully to convert a convent building into a music conservatory.
Animated graphics punctuate the film.
Suburban Melbourne becomes a visual metaphor for Tozer’s ignominy, with images and descriptions of his final dilapidated house intercut with explorations of the Tozer archive – a repository lovingly curated, but nevertheless located in little more than a converted shed.
Video footage of Tozer being interviewed reveals a softly spoken and clearly insular man who struggled with the burden of expectation placed on child prodigies. The film offsets a sense of indignation at the purported neglect Tozer suffered with a compassionate account of his personal struggles and alcoholism. Keating’s claims are not allowed to stand untested and a picture emerges of a talented musical genius with limited life skills.
The film raises important questions about the significance of Tozer in our cultural canon, the duty of care held by Australia’s cultural institutions, and the precarious and vexing nature of talent.
Conductor Richard Gill narrates the film and his own discovery of Tozer’s legacy.Madman
The audience is left in no doubt Tozer was indeed a world-class musician. Gill’s journey comes to a climax when – by candlelight in that Queanbeyan convent building – he listens for the first time to Tozer’s performance of a concerto by the Russian composer Nikolai Medtner.
Tozer’s advocacy for and recordings of this previously almost unknown Russian master are widely praised and stand as one of his greatest achievements. The film’s presentation of this recording highlights Tozer’s extraordinary artistry. By staging the scene at the convent, the filmmakers juxtapose a musical triumph with his personal failure.
In its interrogation of Keating’s accusations against the Australian arts establishment, the film delves into the tragedy of Tozer’s personal life. It argues Tozer’s mother – with a combination of hot-housing, impossible expectations and lifelong codependency – denied him a normal childhood. This meant the pianist, following his mother’s death, could not deal with the adult world and used alcohol to cope.
A compassionate examination of what appears to be Tozer’s only romantic relationship – albeit a short one – gives the audience insight into the extent of his personal dysfunction.
Tozer at the piano a few years before his death.
The neglect Tozer suffered from Australia’s leading orchestras in the last 15 years of his life comes across less as “inverted snobbery” or the Tall Poppy Syndrome, but the stark reality of the requirements of working in any creative profession.
Orchestras schedule concerts two years in advance and must necessarily work with musicians they can rely on. Though clearly a genius, Tozer ultimately lacked the personal stability essential to success in the arts.
In searching for an antagonist and settling on Tozer’s mother, the film misses an opportunity to interrogate Western culture’s awkward relationship with notions of talent.
Although educationalists tout ideas of a growth mindset and the notion talent is not fixed, research into musical prodigies affirms genetics, a singular focus and a specialised educational environment are often a prerequisite to a talent like Tozer’s.
We can’t reasonably laud Tozer as a prodigy and musical genius while also casting his mother (who was also his first piano teacher) as a villain.
The Eulogy is an engaging and ultimately evenhanded evaluation of the life of a great Australian musician and a complex personality. As one of Richard Gill’s many former students myself, the death of the film’s narrator in October last year made the film still more poignant.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three researchers for their contributions to two unique fields.
Half of the 9 million Swedish krona (A$1.34 million) award goes to James Peebles, a Canadian cosmologist at Princeton University, “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”.
The other half is split between two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz from the University of Geneva and University of Cambridge, “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”.
Göran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said that together, these contributions provide us with an “understanding of the evolution of the Universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”.
L-R: James Peebles, Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz.Niklas Elmedhed/Nobel Media.
Cosmology
Peebles’ theoretical calculations have allowed cosmologists to interpret the cosmic microwave background (CMB), leftover radiation from the aftermath of the Universe’s birth 13.8 billion years ago. Discovered by accident more than 50 years ago, the CMB represents a goldmine for cosmologists, containing secrets to the Universe’s origins, age, and composition.
The cosmic microwave background, based on Planck data.ESA and the Planck Collaboration
While Peebles’ theoretical framework has provided the key to unlocking the secrets of the CMB, it has also left cosmologists with an even bigger question – one that revolves around the composition of the Universe.
Currently, regular matter – the stuff that makes up the stars, the planets, and everything on Earth – is believed to comprise only 5% of the total mass and energy in the Universe. The remainder includes a mixture of dark matter (25%), a mysterious form of matter that is invisible to traditional observational techniques, and dark energy (70%), which is thought to be the reason for the Universe’s expansion.
While these “dark” components remain mostly elusive, the pioneering work of US astronomer Vera Rubin proved almost beyond doubt that dark matter exists. Rubin’s ideas revolutionised cosmology, but sadly she never won a Nobel Prize and passed away in 2016.
Exoplanets
Mayor and Queloz were honoured for their 1995 discovery of an exoplanet – a planet outside our Solar system – orbiting a Sun-like star.
Using custom-made instruments on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence telescope in France, Mayor and Queloz observed a distant star in the constellation Pegasus, called 51 Pegasi, and found it to be wobbling.
This wobble is caused by the gravitational effects of a planet tugging on its host star and is observable via the changing nature of the star’s light. When viewed by a distant observer, the wobble affects the star’s light spectrum. If the star is moving towards an observer, its spectrum appears slightly shifted towards the blue end, but if it is moving away, it is shifted towards the red end.
By looking at these “Doppler shifts” using an observational method known as radial velocity, astronomers can not only detect the presence of a planet, but also estimate its mass and orbital period (the length of the planet’s “year”).
Radial velocity method of detection.Johan Jarnestad/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Mayor and Queloz discovered a Jupiter-mass planet, dubbed 51 Pegasi b. Its orbital period was just 4.2 days, compared with Earth’s 365-day journey around the Sun. This itself was a surprise, as astronomers didn’t expect such a massive planet to orbit so quickly and closely around its host star. The discovery gave rise to the nickname “hot Jupiter” for these types of planets, and heralded a new era of exoplanet research.
Today, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy, with many more expected in the years to come. Besides giving astronomers new insights into how our Solar system and its planets formed and evolved, exoplanet research may also answer the ultimate question of whether we are alone in the Universe.
Young Pasifika performers and artists came together last week for Moana Loloto, a night of indigenous storytelling to explore four pressing issues the Pacific and its people are facing.
Held at the Mangere Arts Centre in South Auckland, young people of Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa used dance, art and stories to discuss West Papua, the land occupations at Ihumātao and Mauna Kea and climate change, with a specific focus on Kiribati.
Tagata Pasifka spoke to some of the young “Pacific influencers” who were helping to bring these issues into the spotlight.
Mission 2 Zero’s Emily Muli said that it was a space to nurture stories and told the Pacific way.
“We just wanted to give space to people to talk about that in our ways so that’s through talanoa and creative arts.”
– Partner –
She said there has been a lot more engagement with issues like climate change over the past two years and this could be seen in the number of events that are being held.
Also speaking was Pelenise Alofa of the Kiribati Climate Action Network who told Tagata Pasifika that her work to help build resilience on Kiribati was made harder by a lack of political will in developed countries.
“My government and my people are trying their best, we try to adapt but we need more support from the developed countries to help us.”
This video was republished through Pacific Media Centre’s partnership with Tagata Pasifika
Married couples make a number of important decisions together, such as where to live, what type of house to buy, how many children to have and how to educate them. And the extent to which a person believes in powerful forces – like fate, luck or destiny – is among the personality characteristics that influence the way these decisions are made.
This is known as “locus of control”, a psychological term referring to how much a person thinks they have control over the outcomes of their lives, rather than feeling like their lives are influenced by external forces.
For example, having an “internal orientation” means you’d expect you could solve problems on your own. On the other hand, an external orientation means you think luck, fate, destiny, a higher power, or other outside influences will be more important to help resolve issues.
Our new published research, which crunched survey data from thousands of Australian heterosexual couples, showed those who felt a strong sense of control over their lives (internal locus of control) were far more satisfied in their marriage than those who put a greater emphasis on outside forces (external locus of control).
Are you my density? I mean, destiny?
Marriage satisfaction
We tested the impact of “locus of control” on marriage satisfaction with a nationally representative group of married couples. Data was taken from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) project, collected from more than 7600 households between 2001 and 2017.
And we analysed questions such as whether your own locus of control, or that of your spouse, has a greater impact on how happy you are in your marriage.
First, we found having an internal locus of control and a partner who is also internally oriented is associated with higher marriage satisfaction. In other words, if neither you nor your partner believe in powerful external forces like fate, you’re more likely to be in a happy marriage.
You had me at ‘internally oriented locus of control’.IMDb
We also found that for both men and women, your own locus of control is more important for how happy you are in a marriage, rather than your partner’s locus of control.
And spouses sharing a similar level of locus of control is beneficial to a marriage because they’d typically have similar views about how problems can be solved. But having a similar locus of control is still less important for your own marriage satisfaction than you having an internal locus of control.
Finally, we found heterosexual couples with a more externally oriented husband experience a greater decline in marriage satisfaction over time, compared with couples where the husband is more internally oriented. We did not find a corresponding effect for wives.
Locus of control is important because it affects couple interactions. It could lead to disagreements and misaligned perceptions regarding how household decisions are made.
For example, one variable we looked at was financial decisions. And we found externally oriented husbands married to more internal wives were more likely to report financial decisions were usually made by the wife, and less likely to report financial decisions were shared equally. However, internal wives perceive matters differently and view they aren’t solely making these decisions.
Our findings are particularly pertinent for couples considering marriage, because locus of control doesn’t generally change much over time, unless you make an active effort to do so – for example, through couples therapy.
Quiz: what’s your locus of control?
So before deciding to get married, couples could take this test determining your individual locus of control. This will offer a better idea of what to expect, based on the orientation of their partner and their own locus of control.
You can answer a few questions to determine your own locus of control. How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?
It is important to note locus of control is a continuum. Most people lie somewhere between the two extremes.
Broadly speaking, a score of 13 or lower implies you have an internal orientation, while a score of 21 or higher implies you have an external orientation. A score in-between 14 to 20 implies you have a midlevel orientation.
Now get your partner to do the test and have a chat!
New Zealand First leader and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters with Governor General Dame Patsy Reddy and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
When New Zealand First holds its annual party conference next week, the issue underpinning all the discussion and debate will be its survival. It’s a perennial problem, but one that is now particularly pronounced. With polling putting the party below the crucial five per cent MMP threshold for most of their time as part of the current government, party activists and MPs will debate the way forward for NZ First climbing back up. It’s got the potential to be a very fraught conference.
Tensions in the party appear to be running high, with a number of internal disputes and differences currently spilling out into the open. This isn’t the usual way for the NZ First party – an organisation that leader Winston Peters has always insisted should operate with extreme discipline and forced unity.
Cohesion is easier to achieve when a party is doing well, but when the chips are down, factions and personalities turn on each other. The stress of losing always pushes problems to the surface of a political party. That’s what appears to be occurring at the moment in NZ First, with a series of recent unforced errors.
President’s resignation from the party
Last week saw the resignation of the President of NZ First, Lester Gray, in highly unusual circumstances. Significantly, he resigned not just from the party’s highest office, but also from the party entirely.
This was first reported by veteran journalist Richard Harman, who quoted Gray’s Facebook page resignation, which stated: “I am no longer a member of the Party… Please direct all New Zealand First enquiries to another member or the Party website… I will always treasure the wonderful people I have met and the friendships we have started. Signing off, Lester” – see: Shock NZ First resignation.
According to Harman, the “resignation will be a blow for the party because Gray brought some new energy to what had previously been a low-key position playing second fiddle to Peters.” He had only just been elected a year ago, and is seen as being in the more socially conservative, or “populist right” wing of the party – coming from the traditional party stronghold of Tauranga, where Gray has also been the close friend and electorate chairman of MP Clayton Mitchell.
It’s clear that Gray was under great pressure within the party – later clarifying that “I want to get it out that I am fine and I just needed to get out [of the Party]”. This communication was part of resignation letter in which the departing president dropped a bombshell about his “moral” problems with the task of signing off the annual financial accounts of NZ First.
His resignation letter states: “I refuse to sign off the 2019 Financial Reports with the information I have been provided… As President, the limited exposure I have had to Party donations and expenditure leaves me in a vulnerable position… This type of operation does not align with my moral and business practice values, and I am therefore not able to support the Party any longer.”
The resignation letter also states that Gray felt there was “insufficient communication and support from senior members of the Party for me to effectively function as the President”.
It raises questions about the robustness of NZ First’s donation disclosures to the Electoral Commission, with National-aligned blogger David Farrar suggesting that the Commission should be asking Gray what his concerns were – see: Why did the NZF president quit the party?.
Here’s Farrar’s main point: “NZ First have (off memory) never ever disclosed a donation. Yet everyone knows they get significant corporate donations from the industries they represent in Parliament – forestry, fisheries and racing. The party office holders often get left in the dark, with Winston or his office or lawyers actually controlling the donations or money. A former party secretary filed numerous incorrect donation returns which she had to correct. The Electoral Commission is charged with ensuring party’s donation returns are accurate.”
Further internal discontent
A number of activists in NZ First appear to be discontented with the party at the moment. For example, in reaction to Gray’s Facebook announcement, another former election candidate, Helen Petersen, wrote: “Welcome to the population of people who have worked bloody hard for a party that treats its members like imbeciles and exploits the dedicated… So incredibly saddened by the fact that dedicated people with a genuine belief in a better NZ have been let down.”
Peterson, who has stood three times for the party and was placed at number 20 on the party list in 2017, has also authored a document listing her complaints about the party’s last election campaign, which describes NZ First as “disorganised, dishonest, and hypocritical”. Her report has been leaked to the media along with other internal emails, and you can see more in Jason Walls’ article,Leaked NZ First emails reveal party members deeply unhappy after 2017 election (paywalled).
Peterson’s document is titled “NZ First Concerns and issues regarding Election 2017”, and it reports that “A number of members nationwide have been extremely disappointed in the way in which the 2017 election campaign was handled”.
Some of the complaints are about money. Peterson says that party “members who paid huge amounts of money towards the campaign and promised repayment did not receive any reimbursement”. And: “Money allocated to support the campaign was not used for the purpose in which it was donated”.
The creation of the party’s list for the 2017 election is also strongly criticised. Summarising this, Walls’ says: “The documents reveal members felt the party’s list showed disrespect for hardworking, loyal, and long-serving members, and favoured candidates who had personal relationships with those who select the list placement. Members also complained the list process was sexist, as only three of the candidates in the top 18 were female.”
Furthermore, Auckland candidates weren’t given high list positions, resulting in no representation for that region amongst the current NZ First caucus. Peterson complains that this left “Auckland, who have the highest population, and where there are a third of the country’s total electorates without a New Zealand First Member of Parliament representing them” – see Boris Jancic’sNZ First leak: Members say they felt ‘exploited’ over donations (paywalled).
Coalition negotiations were also a point of contention for some members, according to the leaked emails and documents. Some complaints seemed to imply that Winston Peters had undertaken discussions on forming a government without proper consultation with the caucus.
Replying to such allegations, MP Tracey Martin stated that she was “deeply offended”. In terms of complaints from members that Peters shouldn’t have been taking legal action against National Party figures while involved in coalition negotiations, Martin replied: “None of us were aware of the papers filed by the Rt. Hon. Winston Peters because that was his private business and nothing to do with the formation of a government. None of us, particularly the Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, are that shallow”.
In addition, the leaks provide details of a 2017 election advertisement that was apparently vetoed due to concerns about racism. And the list of Auckland party membership was also leaked. This is detailed in Henry Cooke and Thomas Manch’s Major leak of NZ First membership database exposes personal details.
Apparently, the leaked membership database included “the names, occupation, phone numbers, addresses, and paid membership status of more than a thousand people affiliated with the political party – including Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and his partner Jan Trotman.” Cooke and Manch write that, “The leak is the latest in an ongoing saga challenging the unified appearance of a party known for strong leadership from Peters.”
The information contained in the leaked database is very detailed: “The 799 members listed in the undated Auckland membership database leak records details of paying members from as recent as 2016. Fewer than half, 351, were paying members as 448 were due to renew their membership. Another list of more than 80 Auckland central members, and a database of 225 volunteers from across the country were also included in the leak. The databases take the form of unencrypted excel spreadsheets with data on residential addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and when the member last paid party dues.”
Desperate ministerial electioneering
It’s not just party activists in NZ First who appear to be feeling pressed by things not going right for the party. Cabinet ministers, too, are showing the signs of discontent over their involvement in the coalition not paying off with higher public support.
Back in March, Defence and Veterans Affairs Minister Ron Mark was accused of using his Cabinet minister position to win party votes, when he told a veteran’s organisation that the $25,000 in Government funding they received was “courtesy of me” and “To be perfectly honest, when I look at the polling results of my political party New Zealand First, then the veterans, the Defence base, you guys haven’t supported us. At all” – see Derek Cheng’sRon Mark accused of threatening to cut Govt funding if veterans don’t vote NZ First.
According to Fisher, “One person present labelled Jones’ comments as an inducement to ‘bribery’ and another thought the minister – responsible for forestry and the $3 billion provincial growth fund – was ‘buying votes’.” And responding to such concerns, Jones said: “This is reciprocity. If you want it, back it. You can expect to hear me say that every week from now on. Does it violate constitutional principles? I don’t think so.”
But the fact is NZ First does desperately need more votes – which means they need to push the boundaries of electioneering. The last time Jones was in similar trouble for behaviour skirting close to rules – back in April – Heather du Plessis-Allan wrote that Jones (and his colleagues) is desperately seeking attention “in the same way that a junkie needs heroin, but also in order to keep his job” because they need to push their support levels back up to five per cent – see: NZ First feels very wrong in Govt after Christchurch attack.
Of course, NZ First will argue that they “always” bounce back in election year. Du Plessis-Allan isn’t so convinced: “The party he belongs to is currently polling below the 5 per cent threshold. As in, half of that. They should be doing better. Sure, New Zealand First always polls low mid-term, then bounces back during election campaigns. They often defy final-days predictions. Maybe they’ll do the same thing this time. Or maybe they won’t. This term, unlike others, they’ve had $3 billion to throw around and win over grateful regional voters, but it’s not working. The voters are taking the money, thanks very much, then telling polling companies they’ll vote for a much more sensible party.”
Finally, perhaps the party’s problem is that its traditional supporters just aren’t happy that NZ First are in coalition with Labour. Survey results came out this last week which suggest that NZ First voters were keener on a coalition with National – see Henry Cooke’sNZ First voters preferred National to Labour at 2017 election by wide margin.
