Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Senior Fellow, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

In the hit biopic Rocket Man, the ambitious young Reginald Dwight is counselled to hide his working-class roots if he wants to make it in “showbiz”:

You gotta kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be.

Arriving in Canberra in 2013, Jacqui Lambie carried just that kind of baggage – the burden of tough starts, frequent setbacks, of being a fish out of water. The former soldier is now back in the Senate for a second stint.

Her parliamentary reprise was not just something of a surprise, it lent the May 18 federal election a sense of restorative justice after her admittedly gaffe-prone first term was cut short in 2017 by a Section 44 citizenship hitch.

Read more: Lambie’s vote key if government wants to have medevac repealed

She’d arrived in 2013 as a total unknown under Clive Palmer’s eponymous PUP. Impulsive, frequently angry and clearly ill-prepared, Lambie soon cut ties with the irascible mining magnate, leaving him muttering about her ingratitude and a breach of promise.

Yet in 2019, when the eccentric millionaire ploughed upwards of A$60 million into a gaudy, winless nationwide campaign, Lambie triumphed on a shoestring, boosted by Tasmanians to fill the last available Senate spot.

But there was no Elton John-style artifice involved. Forming the Jacqui Lambie Network, she would defiantly trumpet her own name and working-class roots, parading herself as the real deal, pure battler, core-Apple Isle.

It was an exercise characterised by a brutal frankness about her past. Disarmingly so.

“I was a bloody wrecking ball,” she recently told Nine Newspapers, about why she was so controversial and had flamed out in her first period in Canberra.

I just had no idea what idea what I was doing. I’d come from ten years, basically between the bed, the couch and a couple of years in the psych ward.

Now she’s back. Better, stronger and wiser for the journey.

Already, the proudly rough-edged advocate for the battler state has had a significant impact while signalling to Prime Minister Scott Morrison that her vote for future government bills will carry a price.

How much? A fortnight ago, it was A$230 million to be forgiven for the state’s social housing debt.

The concession followed Lambie’s swift post-election support for the Morrison government’s signature A$158 billion election pledge of income tax cuts for low, middle and high-income earners.

The housing debt waiver was a solid victory for the frail Tasmanian economy. It was reminiscent of the fiercely parochial Brian Harradine – a conservative Catholic independent who used his pivotal vote through the Howard years to get special deals for the smallest state.

Read more: View from The Hill: Jacqui Lambie plays the Harradine game

But Lambie’s response in the moment of victory betrayed her continuing lack of political polish.

Rather than hammer home the full weight of her achievement, she remarked that she should have asked for more, driven a harder bargain. Is this a harbinger of her approach in future fights? Probably.

What is clear is that the government’s concession, and the intent in her response, together underscore the importance of Lambie’s so-called swing vote.

With 35 senators and Cory Bernardi more or less in the bag also, Team Morrison needs a further three to reach the required majority of 39 votes in the Senate – assuming Labor and the Greens are offside.

That is, three out of the five crossbench votes comprising either the two Pauline Hanson votes plus Lambie, or the two Centre Alliance votes plus Lambie. A number of crucial bills loom.

Eager to scrape together a third-term agenda from the parched policy landscape of its unexpected victory, the Coalition is reheating ideas proposed and defeated in previous terms.

Two of them are the Ensuring Integrity Bill, which seeks to impose harsh new restrictions on unions and give the government unprecedented executive power to deregister them, and the expansion of drug testing for welfare recipients.

Lambie’s support is likely to be pivotal – depending on what the other two micro-parties do.

Another issue is the proposal to expand the cashless welfare card to reduce the incidence of welfare being spent on non-necessities.

All are controversial.

On drug testing for Newstart and Youth Allowance recipients, Lambie is playing hardball.

After initially signalling some sympathy for the plan – having seen her own son descend into ice addiction – she has since made it clear she will not support the measure unless, first, politicians agree to random drug and alcohol testing, and second, there are adequate rehabilitation facilities on the ground.

Ministers have raised no objections to being drug-tested, but rolling out enough beds for an estimated half-a-million Australians with drug-dependency issues (many of whom would not be on welfare it must be noted) is no small thing, especially as Lambie has said she wants the beds in place before she supports the testing.

Lambie’s abrasive style is such that predicting her attitude to legislation is not straightforward. This is because it is a mixture of working-class battler politics (not unlike traditional Labor values), tinged with a resentful outsider populism that tends to be more right-leaning.

Overlaid on that is Lambie’s adoption of Harradine’s successful Tasmania-first model.

Her emergence as a swing vote in the Senate puts her in a direct contest with Pauline Hanson, who already owns the populist right.

Either woman can potentially hold the whip hand on government legislation depending on the issue, but Lambie has more room to move.

For the government, that means treading carefully, keeping the lines of communication open, copping the odd spray, and hoping for no dramatic changes of opinion. This is never easy with Hanson, and even less predictable with Lambie.

Politics is often derided as show business for ugly people. Lambie seems intent on making it real business for real people – but with a touch of show business for good measure.

– ref. Jacqui Lambie mixes battler politics with populism to make her swing vote count – http://theconversation.com/jacqui-lambie-mixes-battler-politics-with-populism-to-make-her-swing-vote-count-123175

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Attwell, Senior Lecturer, University of Western Australia

Countries around the world, including Australia, are using different ways to get parents to vaccinate their children.

Our new research, published this week in the journal Milbank Quarterly, looks at diverse mandatory vaccination policies across the world. We explore whether different countries mandate many vaccines, or just a few; if there are sanctions for not vaccinating, such as fines; and how easy it is for parents to get out of vaccinating.

This is part of ongoing research to see what Australia could learn from other countries’ attempts to increase childhood vaccination rates.

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

The shift from voluntary vaccination

Until recently, many governments preferred vaccination to be voluntary. They relied on persuasion and encouragement to try to overcome parents’ hesitancy or refusal to vaccinate their children.

However, recent measles outbreaks have made those methods less politically tenable. The rise of pro-vaccination activism and the polarisation of public debate about immunisation policy has motivated governments to take a more hard-line approach.

Read more: Measles outbreaks show legal challenges of balancing personal rights and public good

Early evidence from Italy, France, California and Australia indicates this has led to higher vaccination rates. But different countries have pursued very different policies.

Australia’s federal “No Jab, No Pay” policy removes entitlements and childcare subsidies from unvaccinated families. Four Australian states also have “No Jab, No Play” policies to limit vaccine refusers’ access to childcare.

Read more: Banning unvaccinated kids from child care may have unforeseen consequences

California bans unvaccinated children from school, and Italy fines their parents. France classifies vaccine refusal as “child endangerment” and can impose hefty fines.

Some governments can use more than one method at once, like Australia’s mix of state and federal policies. Italy’s new policy uses a combination of excluding unvaccinated children from daycare and fines for parents.

Making it hard to refuse

Australia, Italy, France and California make it difficult for parents to refuse vaccines by only permitting medical exemptions to their mandatory policies.

However, other jurisdictions ultimately allow parents to refuse vaccines, albeit using different methods. For example, Germany and the state of Washington require parents to be counselled by medical professionals before they obtain an exemption to vaccinating their child. In Michigan, public health staff provide a mandatory education course for parents seeking non-medical exemptions.

Which policy leads parents to vaccinate?

We can assess a policy to get parents to vaccinate using a notion called “salience”. Put simply, will a vaccination policy actually make parents vaccinate?

For example, Australia’s federal vaccine mandate has become more salient since parents can no longer obtain conscientious objections and risk losing benefits for not vaccinating.

But there are other factors to consider, such as whether a policy promotes timely vaccination.

Australia’s “No Jab, No Pay” policy applies to children from birth, so it motivates parents to vaccinate on time. But the United States has state-level policies that prompt parents to have their children up-to-date with their vaccinations when they start daycare or primary school.

Who doesn’t have to vaccinate?

Another important question is who gets to duck away from the hand of government. Australia’s “No Jab, No Pay” policy leaves wealthy vaccine refusers untouched as they are ineligible for the means-tested benefits docked from unvaccinated families.

And Australian states’ policies to exclude vaccine refusers’ children from daycare doesn’t affect families who don’t use daycare.

Since France and California exclude unvaccinated children from school, these countries have the capacity to reach parents more equitably (almost everyone wants to send their kids to school so more people are incentivised to vaccinate). In both places, you can homeschool if you really don’t want to vaccinate.

Addressing the many reasons for not vaccinating

Mandatory vaccination policies also need to recognise the two types of parent whose child might be unvaccinated. Much airtime focuses on vaccine refusers. However, at least half the children who are not up-to-date with their vaccines face barriers to accessing vaccination, such as social disadvantage or logistical problems getting to a clinic. They are the children of underprivileged parents, not vaccine refusers.

When it comes to the vaccination status of disadvantaged children entering daycare, Australian states have chosen a “light touch” as part of the “No Jab, No Play” policy. Existing state policies provide grace periods or exemptions for these families.

But the federal “No Jab, No Pay” hits all parents where it hurts, and offers no exemptions or grace periods to disadvantaged families. Likewise, California’s school entry mandate makes no such exceptions. Italy and France have daycare exclusions similar to “No Jab, No Play” in their policies, but we have not found any evidence they make exceptions for disadvantaged families.

Read more: Forget ‘no jab, no pay’ schemes, there are better ways to boost vaccination

Finally, mandatory vaccination policies vary on how much they cost for governments to deliver. Oversight of parents, such as inspections or implementing fines, can drain government resources. And educational programs for parents seeking exemptions are expensive to run.

Governments can outsource some of these costs to parents (for instance, parents may have to pay a fee to see a doctor for an exemption).

Governments can also hand over the tasks to medical professionals, but then they have less control over what these professionals do. For instance, California is now seeking tighter regulation of doctors who say children are eligible for medical exemptions. This monitoring will cost the state, but will allow greater oversight. Victoria also had problems with doctors who accommodated vaccine refusers.

So where does this leave us?

Our work investigating international strategies to get parents to vaccinate their children is ongoing. Australians seem strongly attached to our vaccine mandates. But both state and federal policies have undergone tweaks since their inception.

Any future adjustments should ensure all parents are targeted, that disadvantaged families are not further disadvantaged, and that we make it very easy for everybody to access vaccines in their communities and on time.

Globally, as more jurisdictions move away from voluntary child vaccination to mandatory policies, we need to get a clearer picture of how these policies work for families, government and the policy enforcers, including school staff and health professionals.

– ref. How other countries get parents to vaccinate their kids (and what Australia can learn) – http://theconversation.com/how-other-countries-get-parents-to-vaccinate-their-kids-and-what-australia-can-learn-122274

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Hare, Director, Climate Analytics, Adjunct Professor, Murdoch University (Perth), Visiting scientist, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

This piece is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

It is almost five years since the landmark Paris deal was struck. Nearly 200 countries agreed to work towards limiting global warming to 1.5℃, beyond which the planet is expected to slide irreversibly towards devastating climate change impacts.

But few nations are on track to reaching this goal. Right now, we’re heading to warming above 3℃ by 2100 – and this will have catastrophic consequences for the planet.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called a major climate summit in New York on September 23, where countries are expected to announce more ambitious climate targets than they set in Paris, and solid plans to achieve them.

Ahead of the summit, let’s take stock of the world’s best and worst performers when it comes to tackling the climate emergency.

Australia is keeping poor company

The Climate Action Tracker is an independent scientific analysis produced by two research organisations tracking climate action since 2009. It monitors 32 countries, accounting for more than 80% of global emissions.

We looked in detail at who has made the most progress since 2015, and who has done the least. Australia sits firmly in the group of governments we labelled as actually delaying global climate action, alongside the United States (which under President Donald Trump has walked away from the Paris agreement altogether).

Other countries delaying global climate action with highly insufficient targets and no progress since 2015 are the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia.

Today, Australia’s emissions are at a seven-year high, and continue to rise. The government’s commitment to fossil fuels remains unwavering – from coal projects such as Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine in Queensland to huge new gas projects.

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, providing 29% of coal’s global trade, and last year also became the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. Its exported fossil fuel emissions currently represent around 3.6% of global emissions.

The surprising success stories

Ethiopia, Morocco and India top the list of countries doing the most to tackle climate change. In total, eight international jurisdictions have made good progress since 2015, including the European Union, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, and Argentina (although they still have a lot of work ahead to meet the 1.5℃ goal).

While India still relies on coal, its renewables industry is making huge leaps forward, with investments in renewable energy topping fossil fuel investments. The country is expected to over-achieve its Paris Agreement target.

So what are they doing right? Costa Rica’s national decarbonisation plan covers the entire economy, including electrifying the public transport system, and huge energy efficiency measures in the industry, transport and buildings sectors. Costa Rica has also put a moratorium on new oil production.

The EU is set to overachieve its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and is in the process of considering an increase in this to at least 50%. It has recently increased its renewable energy and energy efficiency goals, and is sorting out its emissions trading scheme, with prices of emission units increasing.

Read more: Australia to attend climate summit empty-handed despite UN pleas to ‘come with a plan’

This, together with past investments in renewable energy, have helped to achieve a 15% reduction in German electricity sector emissions in the first half of 2019. Whilst Germany has missed its 2020 targets, it has begun a process to phase out coal no later than 2038 – still a number of years too late for a Paris-compatible pathway.

Quitting coal is key

An increasing number of countries are adopting net zero emissions targets, many of them in the European Union, and some outside. Some, like the UK, have dumped coal, and are well on the way to achieving those targets.

A global phase-out of coal for electricity is the single most important step toward achieving the 1.5℃ warming limit. At the latest, this should be achieved by 2050 globally, by 2030 in the OECD and 2040 in China and other Asian countries.

There are some signs of optimism here. On one estimate, the number of coal projects in the pipeline shrunk by nearly 70% between 2015 and 2018, and investors are increasingly wary of the technology. Yet coal is still set to boom in Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Turkey.

Read more: The gloves are off: ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children

In 2018, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions reached a historic high. While coal reversed its recent decline, emissions from natural gas surged by 4.6%.

Renewable energy is the key to unlocking rapid decarbonisation. It already supplies more than 26% of global electricity generation and its costs are dropping rapidly. To accelerate this fundamental transition, more governments need to adopt and improve policies that enable renewable technologies to be rolled out faster. This would contribute to low-carbon economic development and job creation.

Don’t forget about trees

Nowhere is the alarming rate of global deforestation more obvious than in Brazil, now in the middle of a record fire season. It adds to damage wrought by President Jair Bolsonaro who has weakened his country’s institutional framework preventing forest loss.

In 2018, Brazil recorded the world’s highest loss of tropical primary rainforest of any country – 1.3 million hectares – largely in the Amazon. The deforestation reached 7,900 square km in 2018, a 72% increase from the historic low in 2012.

The past few weeks have shown us what 1℃ of global warming means. Hurricane Dorian, fuelled by high sea-surface temperatures, wiped out the northern Bahamas. Temperatures in the 40s set records across Europe. And in Queensland, the earliest fire season on record destroyed homes and razed rainforests.

The predicted 3℃ of warming by 2100 will bring a lot worse: widespread crop failures, dead coral reefs, more extreme heat waves and major threats to water supply and human health.

The world can avoid this, but time is running out.

– ref. The good, the bad and the ugly: the nations leading and failing on climate action – http://theconversation.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-the-nations-leading-and-failing-on-climate-action-123581

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Hodgson, Professor, Curtin Law School and Curtin Business School, Curtin University

The robo-debt recovery programme has been criticised as badly designed and unfair ever since it began in mid 2016.

A year later the Senate Committee on Community Affairs recommended it be put on hold until its design flaws could be addressed, yet there has been a procession of stories since of people who have had their payments cut off or money demanded because of the application of bad data matching.

The minister for government services has confirmed in parliament that as many as one in five of the debt recovery notices issued might be incorrect, and apologised to a woman who received a debt notice on behalf of her dead son.

How it worked

Robo-debt’s modus opeandi was to estimate income that might disqualify someone from receiving benefits using an inaccurate formula, and then to require that person to prove the estimate was wrong.

The class action announced by Labor government services spokesman Bill Shorten and lawyer Peter Gordon on Tuesday, seeks to answer, once and for all, whether those foundations are legally sound.

It will be based on the legal concept of “unjust enrichment”. Unjust enrichment is a common law term that arises when a person has retained something of value to which they are not legally entitled.

Was it “unjust enrichment”?

Access to social security is governed by specific legislation, so an important part of the case will be whether the common law principle of unjust enrichment can be applied to actions that have been taken under that legislation.

In legal terms, if the government passes legislation that allows it to act in a specific way, then that leglislation will generally prevail over common law as long as it is not ultra vires (beyond the government’s powers to make) and the people making the relevant decisions have complied with it.

The class action will need to take into account existing appeal mechanisms under the Social Security Act. But those existing mechanisms are often limited to whether the person making the decision has acted in accordance with procedural requirements.

Administrative law is usually limited to procedural fairness rather than fairness of outcomes. For example, when deciding to send a matter to a debt collection service, the question will be whether the criteria were applied and whether they were applied correctly.

It would be an interesting question to apply to an algorithm.

It’s getting more sophisticated…

Despite, or perhaps because of, the problems that emerged with the first iteration of robo-debt, the government has stepped up its reliance on data matching.

Employees may have noticed that their payroll data is now sent to the Australian Taxation Office at the time they are paid rather than quarterly or annually as had been the case. There are benefits to this, particularly when you are tracking your superannuation contributions.

Read more: Robo-debt class action could deliver justice for tens of thousands of Australians instead of mere hundreds

And it means the Tax Office data can be matched to Centrelink data in real time rather than estimated later, overcoming one of the major shortcomings of the system, in line with the recommendations of the Senate Committee.

…and augmented, with drug tests and welfare cards

Data matching is getting more sophisticated in other ways. Centrelink data is being matched with Medicare data in order to identify “persons of interest who have a high likelihood of fraudulent behaviour”.

While all Australians want to be sure that Centrelink benefits are paid properly, the expansion of data matching has the potential to further victimise social security recipients.

In tandem with proposed drug testing programs and the proposed expansion of the cashless welfare card, there is a creeping stigmatisation of social security recipients.

Read more: Why Centrelink should adopt a light touch when data matching

The safety net that ought to be there to support us when we need it is being unravelled.

– ref. Robo-debt is only one way government stigmatises claimants. There’s only so much a class action can do – http://theconversation.com/robo-debt-is-only-one-way-government-stigmatises-claimants-theres-only-so-much-a-class-action-can-do-123686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathalie Collins, Academic Director (National Programs), Edith Cowan University

The hit sitcom Friends aired for the first time 25 years ago this week. Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey have not aged on our small screen – and neither has their charm. Make no mistake: these characters were crafted to resonate emotionally and to live on in syndication.

The characters on Friends display a particular sensibility which makes them so appealing: their authenticity, as seen through the prism of their self-awareness. It is through this we are drawn in.

Authenticity is often seen as being something people naturally exude – and yet if this is true, how can characters we know are fictional do such an excellent job of it?

And what can real people, especially in management and leadership roles, learn from fictional characters about crafting an authentic persona?

Here are three very important lessons we can learn about management from Friends.

1. Know your type

Friends showed us instantly accessible characters: the boy-child casanova, the rich girl on hard times, the hippie blonde. From the pilot episode, they align to instantly recognisable clichés. Over time (and subsequent viewings) we get to know their full selves.

In the workplace, we are also a type. Professional encounters are often predicated on thin slice judgements that stick. Are you “the pleaser”? Or perhaps “gotta have the last word guy”? We are the architects of our own professional type: in direct encounters, on LinkedIn, and even in how we walk.

Knowing your type can lead to benefits in figuring out how to develop yourself in your industry, and choosing a work environment that’s right for you. It also gives others an accessible way to interact with you until they get to know your full personality.

Instant accessibility is the front door to deeper emotional engagement.

2. Be consistent – but don’t be afraid to grow

Friends characters are consistent enough so we know what to expect from them, but they change over time. Change too much and you are too risky an emotional investment; never change and you are boring and closed minded.

The series charts Rachel’s and Joey’s journeys from bit players on the edges of their dream jobs to career success through a combination of persistence and better choices. Ross and Chandler become less emotionally anxious. Phoebe and Monica move away from the pain of their past into more secure relationships.

Only Gunther remains at the cafe, forlorn and still mooning over Rachel.

Change is natural, yet managers struggle to admit they can learn. The worst example of this can be seen in politicians: blame-shifting, maintaining one’s position when evidence is to the contrary, denying errors made, and always claiming the high ground.

An organisation stuck in stasis through close minded management will rapidly fall behind. Managers who shirk their responsibilities as change agents will face extinction like Ross’s dinosaurs or worse: unemployment.

The natural instinct is to hide the uncertain and messy process of growth. Yet managers who can navigate the process transparently will enjoy the loyalty of a well informed staff. Someone who believes they cannot learn or change lacks the ability to have relationships that matter – in the workplace or elsewhere.

3. Accept your flaws

The Friends characters are flawed. But they are not just flawed: they know and accept their flaws.

Chandler is aware of his emotional cowardice as he boards a flight to Yemen to avoid a break up. Ross recognises that he was wrong to think he and Rachel were on a break. Monica embraces her competitiveness playing a “to-the-death” ping pong match for hours during what can only be described as a hair-accaine in the tropics. Rachel knows it is wrong to fantasise about her personal assistant.

Striving to be a better person has appeal; perfection does not. As managers our instinct is to be all things to all people – while also being right. This is especially true when confronted with our mistakes.

The rise of “corporate psychopaths” means the human approach stands out in stark relief. Having flaws is human; recognising those flaws and giving yourself room to change and grow openly makes you an accessible and welcoming manager.

Above all: be true

Authenticity takes work. Our friends on Friends make it look easy, funny and natural. In the real workday grind there are pressures of home and life. There is no audience, no laugh track, no quick resolutions. There is no editing in post-production.

But authenticity in the workplace has been found to lead to greater employee engagement, more ethical workplaces, increased productivity and better outcomes on almost every measure.

The postmodern father of authenticity, Lionel Trilling, describes it as being “true to oneself”. If you aren’t sure what that means sit back, relax, and check out Friends again. Enjoy the laughs.

And improve your management skills while you’re at it.

– ref. Could managers BE any more authentic? 3 ways you can improve your leadership skills by watching Friends – http://theconversation.com/could-managers-be-any-more-authentic-3-ways-you-can-improve-your-leadership-skills-by-watching-friends-123600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hall, Senior Researcher in Politics, Auckland University of Technology

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

As a new sense of urgency to act on climate change rises – through calls for climate emergencies and green new deals – it is vital that we limit pushback while encouraging action.

Worst of all, we could do nothing about our rising global emissions. But the next worst thing is to provoke popular resistance to climate action. If large swathes of people revolt against efforts to mitigate emissions, we’re hardly any better off than having not acted at all. Advances must outpace setbacks.

The question of whether to face up to climate change is, thankfully, largely won. The technical question of how to mitigate emissions is flourishing. But we must also address the political question of how to bring people along with the low-emissions transition.

Read more: A climate change curriculum to empower the climate strike generation

A careful revolution

To sustain public support over years and decades, care is essential. Of course, the climate crisis is itself an appalling lapse in duty of care by decision-makers, and we all increasingly face the risks of this.

Still, we shouldn’t overlook this duty in our response. Decision-makers can’t afford to be careless about the consequences of climate action, nor uncaring towards people it affects. This should be a careful revolution, which is urgent without being reckless, bold without being cruel.

American political scientist Joan Tronto and civil rights activist Berenice Fisher once defined care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible”. They propose several steps.

The first is caring about a problem. Second is taking care by assuming responsibility to act. Third is care giving where intention becomes action. And fourth is care receiving where the carer ensures that the other’s needs are actually met. If not, then the cycle of care begins again, by acknowledging that the original problem is not adequately solved, or that new problems have sprung up.

This last step is especially critical for the legitimacy and longevity of low-emission transitions. As a public issue, climate change is famously complicated – a super-wicked problem – that cuts across multiple systems and timescales. Careful policy-making is needed because unintended consequences are inevitable.

Read more: Will politicians take action and try to save the planet from climate change?

But intended consequences also produce pushbacks. The gilets jaunes protests in France are a spectacular example, where a rising carbon tax was the catalyst for a serious political crisis.

This wasn’t a matter of negligence. On the contrary, the carbon tax worked precisely as it was supposed to, making fuel more onerous to pay for. The real misjudgement was the French government’s carelessness about how the price hike would be received, especially alongside wealth tax reforms that reinforced economic inequality.

In short, it isn’t enough to care about climate change. Caring too much for the ends of policy – which is what urgency tends to encourage – can lead to carelessness for the means.

Rather, care must be well balanced. It must place responsibility upon the right actors for the right reasons and with the right expectations. It must act competently to deliver the outcomes it promises. And it must be responsive to human needs, not only in the future, but those of people living today.

A more careful way

Just transitions are the best known example of careful climate policy-making.

This approach recognises that major disruptions are sometimes required, particularly in high-carbon sectors like the fossil fuel industry. Long-standing jobs will be lost, or radically transformed. Long-term investments will be forfeited and infrastructure decommissioned. Where scientific reality cannot budge, human plans must give way instead.

Yet as inevitable as this disruption is, the manner in which it is rolled out is not. A transition can be done callously, with only a concern for emissions reductions. Or it can put justice, equity and inclusivity at its heart, for both the ends and means.

Just transitions involve industrial strategies such as retraining, pension bridging, relocation assistance and other forms of social support, as well as investment strategies that create viable pathways to the low-emissions economy.

But this isn’t only needed for industrial workers. It is for urban dwellers who must live through the restructuring of transport and energy systems, and renewal of built environments. It is for people in rural landscapes who must adapt to changing food systems and growing expectations for ecosystem restoration. It is for everyone who depends on the high-emissions status quo yet who lack the means for transitioning from this economy to the next, who risks being stung without being moved by carbon taxes and regulations.

A matter of judgement

Care isn’t all we need. It can tip into timidity, preaching caution and delay when actually haste is required. After all, if protecting people from disruption becomes the prerequisite for change, then change may not happen at all. Care is one facet of good political judgement, but not the only one.

Still, if the transition is rushed or negligent, if it favours ambition over solidarity, if it treats relationship building as an impediment to progress, if it cares too much for the ends of policy and not enough for the means, then it will create unnecessary resistance.

From the perspective of the climate system, this too is a failure. It is emissions reductions, not merely good intentions, that matter.

– ref. Why our response to climate change needs to be a just and careful revolution that limits pushback – http://theconversation.com/why-our-response-to-climate-change-needs-to-be-a-just-and-careful-revolution-that-limits-pushback-123588

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Arnold Lohmeyer, Adjunct Researcher, Flinders University

A new strategy to tackle bullying of children both inside and outside the school gates was recently released by the South Australian Department of Education.

It has adopted the national definition of bullying that directly links it to a misuse of power. The strategy also questions the role “movies, television, newspapers and the internet” could play in promoting violence.

But bullying is just one way people misuse power to harm others, and violent media as the cause of violent behaviour in young people is an old idea.

Read more: Not every school’s anti-bullying program works – some may actually make bullying worse

My research challenges simplistic answers about what causes young people to be violent.

To reduce school bullying we need to look at what is known as the invisible violence that young people are typically exposed to in their everyday lives.

Invisible violence isn’t direct action, such as bullying between people. It’s a feeling of violation experienced through culturally accepted behaviours and power imbalances.

Physical violence can then be thought of as the visible eruption or outpouring of the pressure built up through invisible violating social and power inequalities.

Violent media is not the (only) problem

The new Bullying Prevention Strategy aims to reduce the likelihood of bullying by addressing individual factors, social dynamics and social and cultural factors.

On this last point, the strategy says:

While research in this area is still emerging, there is evidence that social and cultural factors can influence children’s experiences of bullying.

The strategy suggests there is a need to better understand the influence of media on behaviour.

But the idea that violence in movies, games and other media is corrupting young people has been extensively researched and is regularly a source of unwelcome moral panic.

Political leaders are often quick to point the finger of blame at violent video games as the cause of youth violence. In contrast, the results of significant research into a straightforward link between violent media and violent behaviour suggest this idea is inappropriately simplistic.

Sure, plenty of movies and video games glorify violence, and this is clearly visible to young people. But there are other less visible ways that young people are exposed to power inequalities and violence.

Exposure to ‘invisible violence’

My research gathers marginalised young people’s experiences of violence. These are young people who have often been victims or perpetrators of school bullying and violence.

When asked about what violence means to them, they would begin by talking about physical fighting, verbal abuse and sometimes more complex experiences such as self-harm or neglect.

When I asked more, they started describing other power inequalities and abuses that are not typically thought of as violence. They talked about “rolling people for their money” because crime is “what happens with the loop of poverty”.

They saw a system that “rewards you for being upper middle class and white and educated”, and which considered people “not really that violent” if they are nice and polite.

These ideas are not usually thought about as violence. Violence is usually associated with physical force. But these young people saw violence all around them. As one young person described to me:

[…] the violence of our systems and structures of our society that we participate in […] even in just existing, it’s like a violent existence.

This violence is hidden because we don’t think about violence in this way. But this invisible violence tells a story about how young people see who has power and how they use it.

There isn’t a simple correlation between young people seeing or experiencing this kind of violation and then acting out bullying behaviour. Social systems and human behaviour are more complex than that.

But research so far in this space suggests this kind of invisible violence legitimises and justifies interpersonal violence.

This is a new area of research and there are unlikely to be simple answers. But blaming youth violence and bullying on violent media hasn’t produced meaningful ways forward. This issue needs new and creative ways of rethinking the problem and causes of violence among young people.

A big issue in need of answers

An alarming number of Australians experience bullying and violence in schools and workplaces. More than a quarter of students in years 4 to year 9 in South Australian schools and more than a third of all employees in Australia have been bullied at some time.

My research suggests violence isn’t simply something that is inherent to youth or that we grow out of as an adult.

Instead, visible violence and bullying can be thought of as a symptom of invisible violating social inequalities. Young people don’t grow out of violence; they just learn to accept it and hide it in socially acceptable places.

That’s why changing violent behaviours such as bullying in schools requires us to challenge our assumptions about violence. Rather than disparate incidents of bullying between individuals, violence needs to be examined as a pattern of abuses of power and a social narrative that underpins our society and cultural identities.

– ref. If you want to cut bullying in schools, look at the ‘invisible violence’ in our society – http://theconversation.com/if-you-want-to-cut-bullying-in-schools-look-at-the-invisible-violence-in-our-society-123093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Love, Hon Senior Fellow, Transport Health and Urban Design (THUD) Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne

The Spanish city of Barcelona has pioneered an innovative approach to managing traffic, freeing up public space and promoting walking and cycling. The “superblocks” model produces considerable health and economic benefits, according to newly published research, and could be applied in Australian cities too.

So how does this model work? Large “superblocks” covering an area of around 400m by 400m are created from residential blocks of 150m by 150m. These residential blocks are currently surrounded by normal busy streets.

Outside the superblocks, the city’s normal through traffic is accommodated on streets with a maximum speed of 50km/h. Within the superblocks, cars are banned or restricted to 20km/h, priority is given to walking and cycling, and open space is reclaimed or created from parking.

Read more: How traffic signals favour cars and discourage walking

These priorities accord closely with the goals of growing Australian cities that are struggling to preserve liveability in the face of increasing congestion and density. While current urban designs for new suburbs across Australia are an improvement on post-war suburban residential developments, the results are still unsatisfactory.

Residents of these new outer suburbs typically depend heavily on cars. They have limited (if any) public transport access and scant opportunity to walk or cycle to local amenities. Urban sprawl means commuting times and distances continue to increase, traffic congestion worsens and transport emissions rise.

Residents of these suburbs have poorer economic and health outcomes relative to the whole population.

Read more: City-by-city analysis shows our capitals aren’t liveable for many residents

What are the benefits of superblocks?

In light of these issues, Mark Stevenson collaborated with researchers from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health to explore the superblocks model and its potential benefits for Australian cities. Their research, published in Environment International, found the associated benefits in Barcelona are considerable.

Premature mortality rates were reduced by about 700 fewer deaths a year and life expectancy increased. This was due to reductions in air pollution, noise and heat, greater access to green space and increased transport-related physical activity.

The economic effects of transforming the existing urban blocks are also impressive, estimated at €1.7 billion (A$2.7 billion) a year. This benefit mainly comes from increased life expectancy, a 20% reduction in premature mortality and a 13% reduction in overall burden of disease.

Read more: Superblocks: Barcelona’s car-free zones could extend lives and boost mental health

Could this model work for Australian cities?

The superblock concept is reminiscent of Griffin’s early Canberra model of self-contained residential development. Traffic was to be routed around neighbourhoods and suburbs rather than through them.

From the perspective of transport sustainability, that model failed, as the city was designed around the car. As the residential neighbourhoods were also low density, schools and neighbourhood retail hubs felt the effect of ageing families and declining populations.

However, a superblock approach might work with two critical differences.

First, if densities were tripled, this would allow for more population within each neighbourhood. Higher density would support more social and retail infrastructure on a smaller footprint.

Second, if cars were restricted within each superblock and more frequent public transport routed around the outskirts of each, then people could get to services and recreational spaces on foot. The result would be a new, healthier urban dynamic.

Read more: New creatives are remaking Canberra’s city centre, but at a social cost

Our cities are already ‘retrofitting’

In a case study of Docklands in Melbourne, urban planner Kate Matthews argues along similar lines, but in an inner-urban landscape. She makes the point that the City of Melbourne has retrofitted social infrastructure and open space. An area that was sterile, wind-swept and cut-off has now become a family-friendly neighbourhood.

The elements for success were that it was walkable, green, safe and had everything you need. Matthews argues that the Docklands experience could be transferred to other centres by applying the following principles:

• if you build it, they will come
• prioritise infrastructure
• actively manage traffic
• invest in the public realm – streets, squares, parks, green spaces and other outdoor places that everyone can freely access and use.

Read more: Seven steps Melbourne can take to regain its ‘liveable city’ crown

Some cities and towns – such as the Tonsley redevelopment in Adelaide, Claisebrook Village in East Perth, and the Barangaroo and Green Square renewal projects in Sydney – are already well down this path. We need more examples to draw on and learn from. All levels of government should encourage this approach, as the evidence is now there to show that significant health and ultimately financial benefits accrue to the communities that live within them.

Could we also apply these principles to developments in outer growth suburbs? How might this process be managed? And who pays for the up-front investment in the public realm, more frequent public transport and social infrastructure, whether in existing urban areas or new growth suburbs?

These are real questions, but surely none are greater than those we face now. If we commit ourselves to resolving the challenges of designing high-quality, affordable, higher-density urban environments in Australia, the research shows the beneficiaries will not just be ourselves but our children and their children’s health in, importantly, a sustainable future.

– ref. Superblocks are transforming Barcelona. They might work in Australian cities too – http://theconversation.com/superblocks-are-transforming-barcelona-they-might-work-in-australian-cities-too-123354

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terry Carney, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Sydney

The announcement by Gordon Legal of a class action to compensate victims of the government’s so-called robo-debt scheme is welcome, perhaps even groundbreaking.

Standing alongside class action litigator Peter Gordon at a press conference in parliament house on Tuesday, former opposition leader and shadow government services minister Bill Shorten said the legal veteran was the man who “took on big tobacco in America, took on asbestos cases, took on thalidomide compensation”.

Gordon said he only began looking at robo-debt when Shorten took over the portfolio in May and invited him to examine the government’s curious behaviour of wiping the debts at the centre of legal challenges rather than pursuing them and establishing its right to the money in court.

What is robo-debt?

Robo-debt is a part-automated process in which recipients of government benefits are sent letters asserting that they owe the government money because they have been overpaid. Many of the debts are false or highly inflated because they are calculated using an inaccurate formula that averages employment earnings over a series of fortnights rather than identifying what actually earned in the relevant fortnight.

Robo-debts have been routinely overturned as lacking a legal foundation when appealed to the first level of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Although the rulings have always been accepted by Centrelink in the individual cases taken before the Tribunal, Centrelink has not applied them to cases not taken to the tribunal.

Nor has Centrelink ever challenged those individual rulings at the second level of the tribunal, where the hearing and the reasons for decision are made public.

A Federal Court challenge by two Australians who are arguing the illegality of robo-debts remains underway, but Centrelink wiped both debts after the case was launched. Argument remains about whether this means there is still a live legal issue to be heard. The case is not expected to return to court until December.

What is “unjust enrichment”?

What is incontrovertible is that very large sums of money are being raised by a scheme that verges on extortion. “Unjust enrichment” is the term Gordon Legal plans to use in the action, a term that applies when one entity is enriched at the expense of another in circumstances the law sees as unjust.

It is also investigating whether the so-called collection fees levied by Centrelink should be refunded and whether those who have wrongly paid all or part of the amounts claimed should be paid interest on the amounts collected and whether they are entitled to compensation.

Between July 2016 and March 2019 the government issued 500,281 robo-debt notices, asserting debts of A$1.25 billion, with the average being $2,184, but not uncommonly as much as $10,000.

Much less has as yet been collected, but tax return garnishees, debt collection agencies and staff “quotas” are driving it up.

What’s different about the class action?

The class action differs from Administrative Appeals Tribunal reviews or Federal court actions by seeking remedies for a whole class of people, not only those with the knowledge or personal stamina to lodge an appeal.

It is form of legal process that cannot be stopped or slowed by wiping the debts of a few individuals. Being a judicial process, it is aired in public (first-tier tribunal decisions remain private).

What’s being claimed?

The simple argument that will be put is that the government has obtained monies to which it was not lawfully entitled. Not having a lawful basis for the collections (their being, in a sense, an unwarranted “tax” on the supposed debtors), it will be argued that it should return (“restitute”) the monies and pay damages as compensation for unjust enrichment.

There are a number of special features and technical requirements to be satisfied before a class action can successfully be lodged for consideration, including obtaining a sufficient number of plaintiffs.

Where to now?

It is still very early days. There are many procedural and legal hurdles yet to be crossed.

However, unlike the paths trodden to date, the class action holds the potential of being able to deliver justice to the many rather than to the few who win private victories without ever testing the government’s powers in open court.

Read more: Danger! Election 2016 delivered us Robodebt. Promises can have consequences

– ref. Robo-debt class action could deliver justice for tens of thousands of Australians instead of mere hundreds – http://theconversation.com/robo-debt-class-action-could-deliver-justice-for-tens-of-thousands-of-australians-instead-of-mere-hundreds-123691

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

Arthur Sinodinos will soon leave the Senate, and early next year take up the position of Australian ambassador in Washington. A former staffer and one-time public servant as well as a former minister, in this podcast Sinodinos reflects on the challenges of pursuing reform, has some advice for ministerial staff in dealing with the public service, and warns about dangers for democracy and science posed by a polarised media.

A strong ally of Malcolm Turnbull, Sinodinos tells Michelle Grattan that the former prime minister was “prepared to make a stand for what he believed was right – and unfortunately there were others who didn’t seem to be too comfortable with that”.

On the current controversy about Liberal MP Gladys Liu and her past ties to groups with links to the Chinese regime, he says: “I think she’s trying to … make sure that she’s got her memory intact, as it were. And then I’m sure she will as necessary provide further information”.

On the contrast between the roles of staffer and politician: “One of the biggest differences is that when you’re the politician and the front person, the minute you say something … you own it, Whereas when you’re the adviser you give all the advice in the world but there’s not quite the same level of responsibility”.

Transcript (edited for clarity)

Michelle Grattan: Senator Arthur Sinodinos will leave parliament in a couple of months for a new career. He will succeed Joe Hockey in Washington as Australia’s ambassador to the United States. It’s one political figure following another in a post that’s both highly important for Australia, but also in the Trump era, very difficult. Arthur Sinodinos has seen politics not just as a parliamentarian and a senior frontbencher but also as a top level staffer when he was right-hand man to then prime minister, John Howard. In earlier years, he worked in the Treasury. He joins us today to look back and to look forward.

Arthur Sinodinos, can we start with your transition from being a senior staffer to a politician, albeit via a time in the business sector. What are the big differences between those two roles?

Arthur Sinodinos: Well I think one of the biggest differences is that when you’re the politician and the front person, the minute you say something, it’s out of your mouth … you own it. Whereas when you’re the adviser, you give all the advice in the world but there’s not quite the same level of responsibility [as] when you actually have to go out there and say things and take the rap for them. And that is one of the big differences. And that does influence the way people approach the job. For example let me give you a story about the American ambassador. He was one of a number of people in the Reagan administration who allegedly told Reagan around 1987/88, don’t use that phrase “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”. But it was Reagan’s instinct to use that phrase. Now they were being risk averse, or minimising risk for him, but he had the instinct, and this is what it takes at the end of the day. You have to also go on your own instinct as the front person when something needs to be said or when you need to push the button and change tack on something.

MG: You’re also a one time public servant. The bureaucrats these days often feel pushed around by ministerial staff. Do you think these staff too often become arrogant and feel everything is political, so therefore good policy is compromised?

AS: I mean the practice we had in the Howard Government – after some early hiccups when a number of secretaries were fired – was to recognise that staffers and public servants have complementary roles and that the place operates best when there’s a bit of a team in place and each understands and respects the role of the other. And I think that’s always important. And my advice to young staffers or people starting out in staffing who maybe haven’t worked in the public service is get to understand the public service. They’re also your stakeholders and it’s important for people to work together. The public service is a great resource and it’s like any workforce, you’ve got to motivate them. And that’s important to get the best out of them.

MG: You were one of Malcolm Turnbull’s closest supporters. Indeed you came back, I think, when you were on sick leave to support him in that last week. Looking back on the Turnbull government, do you think that there was any advice you could have given to help avoid the collapse of his prime ministership?

AS: Unfortunately, I don’t think any advice would have saved Malcolm’s prime ministership in the end. There were just forces at work who I think were just determined to blast him out and unfortunately a series of events came together which brought that to a head. What I do admire about Malcolm is that the irony is in a sense he was blasted out over climate change twice. The first time in 2009 and the second time over the National Energy Guarantee and in a sense it’s admirable that he was prepared – even though at the end he was prepared to defer the National Energy Guarantee for a while – he was still prepared to make a stand for what he believed was right. And unfortunately there were others who didn’t seem to be too comfortable with that. There’ll be debates going on for years about whether Malcolm had the right political instincts. Well my view is these days what you need is authenticity and he was authentic in his own way, but unfortunately he wasn’t allowed I think to do the job that he could have done.

MG: You’ve been at the political coalface now in one role or another over some four decades. How do you think politics has changed in that time and has it changed for better or for worse?

AS: I think politics in many ways is much faster now. The media cycle is certainly faster – the 24/7 cycle. I think it’s also much easier for parties to be fragmented because it’s much easier for individuals to get a platform, partly through the way the media itself is fragmented. One of the dangerous trends has been that the media itself has become a battleground. We used to look to the media to be the the journals of record and today much of the media gets dragged into the actual fight and this is a danger for democracy in my view. It’s a danger for science which is increasingly being trampled in the public arena, and I think it’s a danger when we have a situation where people can essentially choose their own facts. And choose media outlets which feed their own version of reality and feed their confirmation bias. I think that’s dangerous for democracy going forward.

MG: Well the media gets dragged in, or does it opt in? Has it decided to get involved more as participants. Obviously always media were participants, but there’s an increasing trend now.

AS: Yes there is an element of that. And what that does is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So if some start to go more one way others start to go the other way as if to try and bring back some balance. But the result of that is that overall it tends to create a greater feeling of partisanship.

MG: Well let’s cut to the chase here. Do you think News Corp has become particularly partisan?

AS: I think they have a particular business model, particularly Sky, and that’s attracted a particular viewership. But that that also has meant that other outlets, I’ve noticed with the ABC and others, have tended to therefore have to take stronger stands on certain things because they feel they’re pulling against a shift in the other direction. And so that’s the point – that these forces tend to sort of create this more partisan field out there.

MG: What is that business model?

AS: I think the business model is to try and corner a particular part of the market and become the champions of that part of the market.

MG: The conservative right-wing part?

AS: Yes. As opposed to just trying to cover the field as a whole.

MG: Do you think it’s harder to get reform these days? As part of the Howard advisory team you were at the centre of the tax debate. Are things more difficult now?

AS: Often we seem to act as if things are more difficult now and yet I just think if people are prepared to stand up on something and explain it and indicate clearly why people will benefit from something I still think it’s possible to get things through. But we seem to have somehow spooked ourselves overall that somehow the more difficult reforms are not possible these days. I think reform is still possible but it requires a lot of work and because there are many more outlets and many more bases to cover and more stakeholders to consider – and stakeholders who have their own capacity to do research and whatever – that does require a lot of groundwork to be done. Part of the reason the tax reform got through in 1998 was that there had been a whole year of actually putting the thing together and then a commitment at the political level to not only work out the technical arguments, but to try and anticipate the political arguments and have responses to them so that when we were ready to go on that GST reform we thought we had, in terms of the arguments, every base covered.

MG: The Coalition’s obviously riding high at the moment, but do you think it needs to do more to build resilience for the long term? That is, for the next election, and what should it be doing?

AS: The impression I get from what the Prime Minister has said particularly in the party room is that he knows that while we’re doing well at the moment relative to Labor, that Labor are not going to lie on the mat forever. There’s just this dynamic in politics that the pendulum swings one way and then it swings back. And so I think he’s very conscious of building resilience, and I think the way he’s doing that first of all is by trying to be stable and certain when it comes to policy. I think he’s sending out very clear signals as to what his priorities are, particularly in terms of who he’s working for. And also I think in terms of the economy he’s indicating that while we’ve put certain measures in place to help get the economy through the current softness that we’re experiencing, they’re prepared to contemplate further measures. For example, in the budget next year an investment allowance has been raised.

MG: The government’s been surprisingly aggressive I think towards big business at the moment – criticising it for social activism and for not being supportive enough of government policies. Do you think this is a sound strategy or will it just alienate the business sector, and what’s driving it?

AS: I think what needs to happen is business needs to sit down with the government and work out in terms of where the government is going, the government’s reform priorities, the sort of areas that need to be addressed. In terms of how to explain things to people, how it’s best to do that. I think what Ben Morton and others were saying is that every day as politicians we’re out there trying to persuade the “quiet Australians” to do things they might not necessarily immediately see in their interest. We want business and others to understand the challenge of that and not leave that just for us but to work as partners in that process. And business is vital to the Australian economy. Big business, small business. No one denies that. The question is how we work together to get the sort of outcomes that everybody wants.

MG: You speak of Ben Morton’s speech and he’s assistant minister to the prime minister and he’s part of Scott Morrison’s inner circle. So this has the Prime Minister’s imprimatur, but it’s almost as though he was thinking that big business should be an extension of the government. That’s not how things work these days.

AS: Now I think what he was saying is that, look we have certain objectives as a government. When you are dealing with government, please address those objectives when you’re asking for things from government. And I’ve often said this to people who are asking things and come to Canberra looking for things. Always understand who you’re dealing with, always adopt the language of the government of the day, understand where they’re coming from, and pitch yourself accordingly. And I think Ben is essentially saying that, and by putting it out in those stark terms, I think what he’s doing is saying look there’s a bit of a line in the sand here we’ve all got to get on with this now, and please come to the table and contemplate what we’re saying and why we’re saying it. Please listen.

MG: The government’s bringing in its so-called “big stick” legislation this week which would allow at the extreme for the divestment of parts of companies in the case of energy companies that weren’t playing ball. What happened to dry economics in the Liberal Party?

AS: Well I’ve never had the same reaction as some people to say divestment is not something that should ever be considered by the Coalition. It was a feature or has been a feature of the US anti-trust regime for decades and decades. So in the land of the free and the home of the brave, it’s been a feature of the landscape for a long time. So it’s not inconsistent with free market economics. It’s something that deals with areas where there’s excessive concentration and where firms are therefore able to exert market power and do things which frustrate, if you like, the more competitive operation of markets. So I think it has to be seen in that context. The other thing is, to some extent we’ve been driven to take those, what are perceived as extreme measures because there is such a mess in the energy sector and we need to find a way through in terms of making sure that when we take measures to reduce the cost of electricity those measures flow through to consumers and that companies with market power do not take some of those savings for themselves.

MG: But of course you could have got out to this mess by endorsing the NEG.

AS: Well look this is like the Irish question. You wouldn’t start from here but here is where we are, and we’ve ended up in a particular situation and we’re trying to work our way through. And what I think Angus Taylor’s tried to do since the election is essentially find ways. And now he’s doing, as I understand it, more talks with the states around how do we facilitate the transition in the energy sector and how do we create a bit more certainty around power supplies and all the rest of it. And I think that’s going to be important to providing a bit of investment certainty and help underpin lower prices.

MG: Don’t you think that if Bob Hawke [had] brought in the big stick legislation, John Howard would have cried “the socialists are here”?

AS: Well it depends on the context that the time and I think the context we’re in now has led as I say to these sorts of measures being undertaken.

MG: On another issue of the day, Gladys Liu has obviously still a lot of questions to answer. Shouldn’t she just call a press conference and answer them?

AS: As I understand, what’s happening is she is going through her history of donations and getting her information in order. I think she’s trying to sort of make sure that she’s got her memory intact, as it were. And then I’m sure she will as necessary provide further information. She has come under a lot of pressure very early on in her career and even seasoned politicians under the microscope of someone like an Andrew Bolt probably would have had problems. But I think she’ll be able to explain all of this. And certainly I think the treasurer, the prime minister, the minister for home affairs, standing by her is a clear indication that they are confident that there is nothing there that would suggest that she’s somehow been compromised.

MG: How serious do you think this issue of Chinese interference in Australian politics is? We’ve heard for example from Andrew Hastie saying people often underestimate the broad threat of China. We heard from Duncan Lewis, the outgoing head of ASIO, when he said this is a real problem. He didn’t mention the Chinese of course, diplomatically, but we all know what he was talking about.

AS: There’s no doubt that there is foreign interference going on and there’s no doubt that the security agencies are reporting to government about the extent of that interference. Certainly in the cyber space, there’s a lot of activity going on and it’s not just from one country. It’s from a number of countries and non-state actors as well. So that is the fact. The challenge for us as a country is, how do we accommodate the rise of China within our region while maintaining some sort of global rules based order? And that requires us to work with the Americans in terms of our traditional alliance relationship to ensure they have a presence in the area. It means encouraging all sides of the debate to come back to the table to global rules based order is a way of resolving disputes. We don’t want China to fail – a failing China or a stumbling China is a bigger problem than a prosperous and successful China that is taking its place rightfully within the Asia Pacific. But we have these teething problems because they’re the rising power. The Americans, particularly since the 1990s have been seen as the worst as the hyper power and they’re having to accommodate the rise of China. And we just have to stand up in the areas where we feel there is overreach, whether they are strategic areas or technological areas. But what we’ve got to do is not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’ve got a strong relationship with the Chinese. We have a big Chinese community in Australia. We mustn’t make them feel at any stage that they are somehow viewed as a fifth column or whatever. It’s important for us to maintain the relationship and develop it while also at the same time seeking to do what we can to diversify our trading opportunities in the region and our strategic options.

MG: There are a lot of problems though at the micro level if you like to put it like that. For example are our universities becoming too dependent on Chinese students?

AS: Well I think that the universities do have to look at how dependent they are on international education, and certainly the incentives provided by governments over a long period in the way we’ve operated have certainly encouraged that dependence as well. But I think the universities understand that they can’t be too dependent on just one source of international students and I think they’re taking action to diversify. And certainly that should be encouraged.

MG: Now I want to turn to the United States, to your future.

AS: Yes.

MG: Scott Morrison will be in Washington at the end of this week. He gets on very well with the president. But are there any risks for Australia in this closeness?

AS: Well I think there are no risks as long as we are always very clear about the fact that while our interests are very close they’re not completely identical, given where we are in the Asia Pacific. And we have to keep explaining to our friends and allies what our national interest is. And our interest is, as I said before, in how we accommodate the rise of China in a way which maintains or seeks to restore as far as possible a global rules-based order.

MG: We’ve signed up to the Middle East operation to protect sea lanes. Are there dangers here though? Firstly we see the situation in the Middle East turning even nastier than previously. And secondly does our involvement compromise the Australian government’s efforts on behalf of Australian citizens who are held in Iran?

AS: Well it may be a hard thing to say but foreign policy can never be hostage just to the fear that your people may be taken hostage or there will be attacks on your soil. As we saw with 9/11. Your foreign policy can’t be hostage to those considerations. It has to be a foreign policy in your interest and certainly in our national interest for these seaways and laneways to be as open as possible and that’s a principle we’re prepared to stand up for and that’s what we’ve done with the Straits of Hormuz. And it’s true, the Middle East situation is always fragile and as we can see from recent events with the drone attack on the Saudi oilfields, it’s always subject to potential escalation. But precisely because it’s such a strategic part of the world and there’s such strategic significance, us doing things and standing up for principles like freedom of navigation is very important.

MG: Can I ask you finally about how you’ll approach the job of ambassador, which is a hard one in a place like Washington where you have to be across a whole lot of stakeholders and power is more diffused and so on. Joe Hockey engaged in golf diplomacy, including with the president. I don’t think you play golf?

AS: I’m not much of a golfer but I used to play. I’m a bad golfer and maybe that’s a good thing.

MG: Are you taking any lessons?

AS: No.

MG: But if golf’s not your go, what will be your way of operating?

AS: I think the most important thing is to establish personal relationships, whether it’s with the relevant people in the administration or in the congress. Understanding what our national interest is and what we’re actually seeking to pursue there. Identifying some priority areas to pursue. Some of those will come out of the state visit to the US that the Prime Minister’s undertaking now. There’s talk about rare earth minerals, for example, they’re critical minerals. There’s talk around what we do further in space. I’m interested in the whole science and innovation space and what we can do more there. I think the infrastructure space, there’s a lot we can help each other with. So I’m happy to identify those priorities as well as the more broader issue which is the traditional diplomatic function of representing our interests in the US. And so I’ll go wherever is required, do whatever is required to do that. But everyone does this in their own way. So I think Joe’s done a great job and I have to sort of work out my modus operandi essentially when I get there I think.

MG: Well you’ll be going into an election year so that’s quite difficult. How do you balance your contacts with the incumbent team and the challenging team?

AS: Look I think people in the administration would understand that being an election year you do want to have contact with the other side. I mean one of the things that Joe has done is maintain fruitful contacts with both sides of politics because apart from anything else they’re both represented in congress.

MG: And he said that one of the ways he got in early with the Trump administration was that he reached out to that team during the campaign.

AS: Yes that’s correct.

MG: Is that a proper way of operating?

AS: Well during election years often ambassadors will be observers at the conventions and they’ll get to meet people from both sides, and I think that’s important because as I say ultimately both sides are also in the congress and that’s where a lot of legislation affecting Australia gets done.

MG: And you’ll be doing it too?

AS: Yes.

MG: And do you go to America with some network already in place of contacts from from your previous lives?

AS: Well I’ve been there through the Clinton era and through the George W. Bush era. There’ll be some contacts still there but there’s probably quite a few that I’ll have to now sort of restart or start anew.

MG: Well as Malcolm Turnbull might have said, it’s a most exciting time to be there.

MG: Thank you very much Arthur Sinodinos. All the best for your new life and your new career.

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A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

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– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Arthur Sinodinos with some reflections and advice – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-arthur-sinodinos-with-some-reflections-and-advice-123596

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Walters, PhD candidate in music, University of Adelaide

Review: XXX Neon Sign, composed by Dan Thorpe, Rumpus Theatre

More than perhaps any other instrument, the grand piano symbolises the classical music canon and its rigid traditions. Placing such an instrument centre-stage conjures particular expectations for audiences: expectations Dan Thorpe thoroughly demolishes in XXX Neon Sign.

XXX Neon Sign is based on an epic poem by James Andre about working in a Brisbane porno shop. A work of “composed theatre”, XXX Neon Sign uses musical strategies to organise all aspects of the performance: the performer and the work itself are inextricably linked. Coined by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, Roesner describes composed theatre as where “the performance often is the work […] its authorship often more complex, collaborative and emergent.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Thorpe performing XXX Neon Sign. It relies on his idiosyncratic style of piano-playing and the way he embodies the protagonist in Andre’s poem.

This concept of embodiment permeates Thorpe’s music. His use of scrolling graphic scores in earlier works such as false cognate and Pressure and Light place the emphasis on physical gestures and the way performers use their body to create sound.

In these compositions written for other musicians, Thorpe allows his musicians bodily autonomy and a greater degree of freedom. While avant-garde art music composers have sought more and more control over the bodies of performers throughout the 20th century and beyond, those working in experimental paradigms like Thorpe cede such control.

A physical performance

Thorpe’s own physicality is explored in various ways in XXX Neon Sign. Thorpe intimately reaches into the body of the instrument, preparing the strings with a set of household keys; using an electromagnetic device, an “e-bow”, to warp the strings and create muted drones.

Angular, disjointed chordal figures, interspersed with the odd forearm cluster chord are prominent, with rhythmic complexity in both the spoken word and the piano lines.

Unlike the type of music one might associate with the products in the porno shop, there are many moments in XXX Neon Sign where the timbre becomes fragile and delicate – the e-bow’s drones create moments of profound stillness, while the use of keys on the piano strings creates some gorgeous microtonal harmonies.

Thorpe’s training as a classical pianist is most evident in his appropriation of waltz figures from the classical piano repertoire, played with a deliberate clumsiness, to accompany an anecdote about a “swaggering bogan”.

XXX Neon Sign explores ideas around Australian masculinity, heterosexuality, and class. A rather drab shop assistant’s uniform (design by Olivia Zanchetta) and Thorpe’s well-cultivated mullet effectively signifies the working-class aspect. We listen as Andre, a queer man, interacts with the porno shop’s customers, and we get an insight into the things men say when they believe they have a supportive audience.

While Andre’s descriptions of his interactions with customers contain plenty of dark humour, there is also poignancy and empathy woven throughout the text and in the nuances of Thorpe’s delivery.

Nudity – both live and in projection – might seem like an obvious artistic choice in the context of poetry about a porno shop, but here it is less about sex than about vulnerability. Videography of Thorpe’s body by Gilbert Kemp-Attrill is projected on the wall behind the piano. Thorpe’s movements range from sweeping balletic gestures to a subtle tensing of the jaw.

XXX Neon Sign is the first production for Rumpus Theatre – a new, independent theatre collective based in Bowden, just outside Adelaide’s city centre. This work is an excellent fit with the ethos of the collective: bold and innovative, while portraying aspects of society rarely seen in mainstream artistic projects.

XXX Neon Sign is at Rumpus Theatre until September 21

– ref. XXX Neon Sign review: embodied performance about working in a Brisbane porno shop – http://theconversation.com/xxx-neon-sign-review-embodied-performance-about-working-in-a-brisbane-porno-shop-123444

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastian Leuzinger, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

Would it be helpful to undertake a nationwide and coordinated mass planting of trees and plants that are known to have a high uptake of carbon dioxide such as paulownia and hemp alongside the attempts to plant natives?

Exotic (but non-invasive) trees have their place in our efforts to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. We could increase plantings of fruit trees and timber that we use to construct our homes. But this question refers to the potentially faster growth of some non-native species, and the associated faster removal of CO₂.

Importantly, fast growth (and therefore CO₂ uptake) is only one side of the story. The two other points to consider are how big a tree will grow (how much carbon it will ultimately store) and how long it will live. For example, a slower growing tree may end up storing more carbon in the long run.

China and India are leading the world in regreening the landscape. Many other countries have tree-planting programmes, including New Zealand’s project to plant a billion trees, which argues that the “right tree should be planted at the right time in the right place”.

Read more: Keeping the city cool isn’t just about tree cover – it calls for a commons-based climate response

Which tree to plant where

It is pointless to select tree species only for their carbon storage ability, particularly in built-up areas. Here, other selection criteria are much more important: a fast growing tree may need to be cut down after 20 years because it is unsafe, for example. Safety, resilience to environmental pressures in our cities, and aesthetics will come first. A tree that meets these criteria will ultimately be appreciated more, live longer, and store more carbon, regardless of its initial growth rate.

For rural plantations and afforestation, the rate of growth may well be a consideration. In New Zealand, exotic mono cultures will absorb atmospheric carbon a lot more quickly once planted, and it may be argued that carbon sequestration goals have to be put before biodiversity considerations. Moreover, in the New Zealand context, native trees often take over in exotic (pine) plantations that are left untouched.

As for the two mentioned plant species: hemp is a herb and thus not competitive with the carbon sequestration ability of trees. But it may be used as an efficient energy crop or in concrete, both with a potentially positive carbon sequestration effect.

Paulownia, while fast growing, has a very low wood density (about half of other trees). Again, it has it’s place as a valuable construction wood, but there is no reason to give preference to this species over native trees in the New Zealand context, at least not from a carbon sequestration perspective.

Read more: Five climate change science misconceptions – debunked

In summary, planting a tree is much more important than planting a particular tree. The best solution for selecting a species for a given site will be achieved when we listen to local foresters, the local community, and the latest scientific findings.

While planting trees should be promoted in all cases, it must also be understood that this will not save us from cutting carbon emissions if we want to achieve a sustainable future.

This article is part of The Covering Climate Now series
This is a concerted effort among news organisations to put the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage. This article is published under a Creative Commons license and can be reproduced for free – just hit the “Republish this article” button on the page to copy the full HTML coding. The Conversation also runs Imagine, a newsletter in which academics explore how the world can rise to the challenge of climate change. Sign up here.

– ref. Climate explained: how different crops or trees help strip carbon dioxide from the air – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-different-crops-or-trees-help-strip-carbon-dioxide-from-the-air-123590

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Conway, Senior Lecturer – Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University of Technology

Two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Apple and Google, are launching cloud-based gaming services this year.

Apple Arcade, due for release in two days, will ultimately go head-to-head with Google’s Stadia when the latter launches in November. And both will also be battling a surprising foe: friction.

In this context, “friction” means anything that increases inconvenience for the user. Friction makes you take extra steps, think more than necessary, or work harder to get the service you want. In designing a gaming platform, friction is bad.

Read more: Gaming through the ages: older Australians are embracing video games

Both companies will attempt to reduce friction by using cloud technology to store digital resources and services on their own servers, and deliver them to clients through the internet.

The game files will thus be stored and shared in much the same way that documents or photos are currently handled via DropBox, Google Drive, and Apple’s iCloud.

Specifically, Apple Arcade will use a model called “infrastructure as a service”. As long as you have an Apple device, you can play hundreds of games at any time, from any location, including offline (once you’ve downloaded the game).

This model outsources the problem of data storage to remote data centres around the world. The user’s device remains responsible for the operating system, maintenance of the software (such as patches and graphics drivers) and real-time processing of data.

Google Stadia is planning to use a slightly different model, called “platform as a service”. This means Google will take care of all the maintenance and processing requirements too, so the user’s device acts only as a receptacle for hosting the application and user data.

Budget-friendly gaming?

Both services will use a flat rate, monthly subscription model to let users play a multitude of games that would otherwise cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

For Apple Arcade all games are included in this fee, but you need suitable Apple hardware.

Ambitiously, Google’s Stadia promises to eradicate the limitation of hardware cost. Google will handle the hardware requirements, software processing and maintenance.

Instead of needing an expensive PC with the latest hardware and software, or dedicated gaming console, Stadia users simply need an inexpensive computing device such as a phone, Chromecast, or smart TV. All of the heavier processing requirements will be handled by Google, and the games simply beamed to your device.

However, unlike Apple Arcade, Stadia requires payment for individual games (neither of the services will have in-app purchases requiring additional payment).

When it comes to mobility, both Stadia and Apple Arcade will offer gameplay across multiple devices, from any location with all progress saved.

Sounds great right? What could possibly be the downside of these services?

We should heed culture critic Neil Postman’s warning regarding technology:

New technology is a kind of Faustian bargain. It always gives us something, but it always takes away something important. That’s true of the alphabet, and the printing press, and telegraph, right up through the computer.

The Faustian bargain in this context involves privacy and data, connectivity, and user control.

Privacy and data

As with any network technology, as soon as you opt into Apple Arcade or Google Stadia, your data becomes part of their system.

In digital games, it’s possible to track all kinds of user behaviour as you play.

While this might not lead to the building of psychological profiles and user manipulation on the scale of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, Google and other Silicon Valley giants have an awful record of respecting user privacy.

Network connectivity

Bad internet connection? Sorry, you’re out.

If you opt for Apple Arcade, this is less of a problem as you can download the game and play offline, but depending on your connection it can take minutes or hours before you can start playing – and let’s hope you don’t have a monthly data limit.

Meanwhile, to achieve 4K resolution streaming using Stadia, you require a steady flow of 20 megabits per second (Mbps). This will require a National Broadband Network (NBN) connection, but the entry-level NBN plan achieves a meagre 7Mpbs average.

Even for 720p resolution, which barely qualifies as high-definition, you need 10Mbps. Simply put, you’re going to need to pay for an upper-tier NBN plan, assuming that’s even possible in your area.

Mods and extras

Apple Arcade and Google Stadia also remove the potential for mods in gaming.

Mods (an abbreviation of “user modification”) are extensions that offer new levels, items, quests, or characters. These are made by amateur game developers and made available, generally for free, across the internet on various platforms such as Valve’s Steam.

The mod scene has had an enormous influence on gaming culture. The World of Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), popularised the now enormously successful Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre. Counter-Strike began as a mod for Half-Life.

Read more: Gamers use machine learning to navigate complex video games – but it’s not free

Both Apple Arcade and Google’s Stadia operate as closed systems, not allowing user modification in any substantial way. Any mod scene for these services is, at the moment, impossible by design.

And although Google is an enormous company, if the Stadia service is cancelled, all of its users will lose their individual game purchases.

A frictionless bargain?

We all want less friction in our lives.

We want things to be easy and accessible. In this sense, cloud technology offers a seductive bargain, encapsulated in one of Apple’s slogans: “it just works”.

Yet, in pursuit of things “just working”, we make sacrifices. We offer up our privacy, data and control.

The question becomes, what are we willing to lose in striking this bargain? Because, as Neil Postman reminds us, we will always lose something.

– ref. Apple Arcade and Google Stadia aim to offer frictionless game streaming, if your NBN plan can handle it – http://theconversation.com/apple-arcade-and-google-stadia-aim-to-offer-frictionless-game-streaming-if-your-nbn-plan-can-handle-it-123359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andy Marks, Assistant Vice-Chancellor, Strategy and Policy, Western Sydney University

“How good is Gladys Berejiklian?” Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked a jubilant crowd of Liberal supporters on the evening of her March 23 2019 state election win. Only as good as her most recent legislative adventure, it would seem.

When, barely six months ago, the NSW Liberal premier returned the state’s Liberal-National coalition for a third term, a leadership spill was the furthest thing from the minds of her supporters and detractors. She had defied a strong challenge from Labor and federal political distractions to secure a narrow win and contain the carnage for her Nationals partners to a handful of seats.

Read more: NSW Coalition scrapes back in as minor parties surge – but delivering on promises will not be easy

But a leadership spill is precisely the scenario three of her party-room colleagues — Lou Amato, Tanya Davies and Matthew Mason-Cox — attempted to force upon her late in the evening of September 16. Their chief rationale? The premier’s failure to act on their concerns

by stopping the fast-tracking of [an] abortion bill and immediately establishing a joint select committee into abortion law reform in NSW.

The rebels withdrew the spill threat ahead of a September 17 party-room meeting, claiming they’d been promised

further concessions will be forthcoming in relation to amendments to the abortion bill.

Moderate Liberals have reportedly responded:

Any chance of concessions to the bill went out the window last night when they started this. We don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Clearly the matter is anything but resolved.

How is it a political leader with freshly consolidated electoral support, a budget in surplus, low trending unemployment and record infrastructure investment found herself so publicly undermined by backbench colleagues in such an 11th-hour stunt? The reasons are diametrically simple and complex.

At a basic level, the events are an airing of protracted and unresolved factional tensions within the National and NSW structures of the Liberal Party. Moderates and conservatives are in a battle for the soul of the party. This thwarted spill proves that even electoral success has not resolved that destructive impulse.

At last year’s Liberal federal council, the party’s conservatives put forward motions to, for example, sell off the ABC and move Australia’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. At the NSW branch level, preselections are no longer simply fraught, they verge on out-and-out warfare, resulting in allegations of bullying and intimidation.

From a less partisan and broader ideological standpoint, single-issue or emblematic politics — a lens through which many view the abortion bill — is rearing its head to an unprecedented extent globally. It is apparent in Brexit, where crashing out of an economic union is proxy for the perceived failure of trickle-down economics.

Street-by-street regionalism is also infusing the decision-making of parliamentarians, eclipsing state-based or party positions.

Take Tanya Davies’ scenario where she contends with an electorate of pronounced social conservatism. Rates of Catholicism are nearly twice the national average in Davies’ outer western Sydney electorate of Mulgoa. The rate of Mulgoa residents identifying as being of “no religion” is almost half the national average. It is this electoral picture that may be emboldening Davies to take a strong stance on certain issues, even if it means not toeing the party line.

Parliamentarians appear to feel increasingly compelled for electoral or personal imperatives to take a stand on conscience issues that ordinarily they’d rationalise on the basis of consolidated party positions. That impulse won’t end with an abandoned spill.

Read more: After 119 years, NSW is set to decriminalise abortion. Why has reform taken so long?

As if these unresolved fissures weren’t troubling enough for Berejiklian, she also faces a near stalemate in the upper house. Her chief Legislative Council negotiator, moderate Don Harwin, has proven abysmal at delivering legislation through an increasingly fraught chamber that features an emboldened Mark Latham, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and assorted crossbenchers, all intent on clipping their respective tickets to the premier’s legislative agenda.

One of the state’s most effective premiers in terms of economic fundamentals finds herself in an unusually perilous position. The spill may be off, but her leadership is anything but certain.

Gambling on low-profile support, instead of high-profile stewardship, of the abortion bill looks to have been a miscalculation.

But it is hard to see how any position on this issue would consolidate her leadership at this time and in this emerging political climate.

– ref. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian avoids a spill but remains in troubled waters – http://theconversation.com/nsw-premier-gladys-berejiklian-avoids-a-spill-but-remains-in-troubled-waters-123676

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Charlson, Conjoint NHMRC Early Career Fellow, The University of Queensland

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) recently declared climate change a health emergency, reflecting similar positions taken by a growing list of peak medical bodies around the world.

The AMA’s statement highlights the significant impacts climate change is having on physical health, including an increase in climate-related deaths. The World Health Organisation regards climate change as “the greatest threat to global health in the 21st Century”.

But the statement also draws the very important issue of mental health out of the shadows.

Read more: Act now on climate change to protect Australians’ mental health

Climate change can affect people’s mental health in a number of ways, both directly and indirectly.

We know experiencing extreme weather events is a risk factor for mental illness. And many thousands of people around the world are displaced from their homes as a result of climate events, putting them at perhaps even higher risk of mental illness.

More generally, people feeling distressed about the state of the planet may find themselves in a spiral of what’s been termed “eco-anxiety”.

Extreme weather events and psychological distress

Unprecedented weather events across Australia are already demonstrating clear and devastating impacts on the mental health of Australians, particularly in rural areas which are being hit the hardest by unseasonal drought, fires and floods.

These extreme weather events have resulted in the loss of homes, land and livelihoods. Research has found these experiences are taking a significant psychological toll on Australian farmers, who feel their sense of place and identities are under threat. Meanwhile, we’ve seen increasing rates of suicide among rural communities.

Elsewhere in the world, research similarly shows being affected by extreme weather events is a major risk factor for mental illness. This was evident, for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

Read more: How climate change affects the building blocks for health

Climate-related displacement

Long-term environmental changes, including once fertile land turning to desert, erosion of soil and coastlines, and sea level rise, are predicted to result in large-scale displacement, a major risk factor for mental illness.

Global statistics already estimate that in 2017 the majority of people forced from their homes around the world were displaced as a result of climate-related disasters.

In Australia, low-lying islands such as those in the Torres Strait are at the forefront of this reality, with relocation plans already under consideration.

At the extremes, the reality of climate-induced social instability is already tangible across numerous countries, and the Asia-Pacific region is considered as high risk.

The existential dread of climate change

For many Australians, the existential dread of what the future holds in the face of unmitigated climate change is having documented impacts on their mental health. Australia’s youth have been exemplary at voicing their despair and “eco-anxiety” around the foreseeable deterioration of our planet.

For those too young to have a voice, parents are feeling anxiety and distress on their behalf. Mums and dads are under pressure to instil values such as caring for the environment, while worrying about the future of the planet they are leaving their children.

Read more: Heatwaves linked to an increase in Australian suicide rates

And this emerging narrative of how climate change is impacting people’s mental health is not complete. The relationships between climate events and mental health are complex and not always apparent.

Extreme heat has been observed to be harmful to multiple aspects of mental health and well-being. Data from South Australia demonstrates hot days are associated with increased hospital admissions for mental and behavioural disorders.

Other research has found spikes in temperature were associated with increased suicide rates in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart.

A less obvious impact arises from the strong connection between nutritional status and mental health. Climate-related impacts on agriculture lead to reduced availability of nutritious foods, and poor nutritional intake can affect mental health.

Read more: Health Check: seven nutrients important for mental health – and where to find them

So, what can be done?

The AMA’s recent statement has echoed calls from other medical associations for leadership on a national strategy for health and climate change. But what is it we can be doing to protect people from climate change-related mental health challenges?

Doing everything we can to reduce the progression of climate change is one clear way to address this issue.

But with the knowledge the climate crisis is only escalating, some practical responses will focus on preparing the health system for climate change. This should include increasing awareness of the mental health effects of climate change across the community, private, and government sectors.

It will also be important to invest in areas where mental health services are under-resourced, which are often the rural areas where the mental health effects of climate change are likely be most severe.

Read more: Climate change is the defining issue of our time – we’re giving it the attention it deserves

A small but significant consolation is the public awareness being generated through the tireless work of advocacy groups and purposeful media reporting of farmers’ personal stories of distress.

Climate change adaptation strategies are in their infancy, but already we’re seeing some programs aimed at strengthening communities, particularly rural communities most severely affected by drought.

There will be no single solution to address the mental health impacts of climate change; a broad perspective and a range of actions will be necessary. As the climate crisis continues to unravel in Australia and globally, this will require strong leadership and some innovative thinking.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Fiona Charlson, the author of this piece, is available for a Q+A on Wednesday the 18th of September from 2pm-3pm AEST to take questions on this topic. Please post your questions in the comments below.

– ref. The rise of ‘eco-anxiety’: climate change affects our mental health, too – http://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-eco-anxiety-climate-change-affects-our-mental-health-too-123002

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Wilkes, Senior Research Geophysicist, CSIRO

At some point in recent weeks, a once-in-a-lifetime event happened for people at Greenwich in the United Kingdom.

Magnetic compasses at the historic London area, known as the home of the Prime Meridian, were said to have pointed directly at the north geographic pole for the first time in 360 years.

This means that, for someone at Greenwich, magnetic north (the direction in which a compass needle points) would have been in exact alignment with geographic north.

Geographic north (also called “true north”) is the direction towards the fixed point we call the North Pole.

Magnetic north is the direction towards the north magnetic pole, which is a wandering point where the Earth’s magnetic field goes vertically down into the planet.

The north magnetic pole is currently about 400km south of the north geographic pole, but can move to about 1,000km away.

How do the norths align?

Magnetic north and geographic north align when the so-called “angle of declination”, the difference between the two norths at a particular location, is 0°.

Declination is the angle in the horizontal plane between magnetic north and geographic north. It changes with time and geographic location.

On a map of the Earth, lines along which there is zero declination are called agonic lines. Agonic lines follow variable paths depending on time variation in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Currently, zero declination is occurring in some parts of Western Australia, and will likely move westward in coming years.

That said, it’s hard to predict exactly when an area will have zero declination. This is because the rate of change is slow and current models of the Earth’s magnetic field only cover a few years, and are updated at roughly five-year intervals.

At some locations, alignment between magnetic north and geographic north is very unlikely at any time, based on predictions.

The ever-changing magnetic poles

Most compasses point towards Earth’s north magnetic pole, which is usually in a different place to the north geographic pole. The location of the magnetic poles is constantly changing.

Earth’s magnetic poles exist because of its magnetic field, which is produced by electric currents in the liquid part of its core. This magnetic field is defined by intensity and two angles, inclination and declination.

The relationship between geographic location and declination is something people using magnetic compasses have to consider. Declination is the reason a compass reading for north in one location is different to a reading for north in another, especially if there is considerable distance between both locations.

Read more: New evidence for a human magnetic sense that lets your brain detect the Earth’s magnetic field

Bush walkers have to be mindful of declination. In Perth, declination is currently close to 0° but in eastern Australia it can be up to 12°. This difference can be significant. If a bush walker following a magnetic compass disregards the local value of declination, they may walk in the wrong direction.

The polarity of Earth’s magnetic poles has also changed over time and has undergone pole reversals. This was significant as we learnt more about plate tectonics in the 1960s, because it linked the idea of seafloor spreading from mid-ocean ridges to magnetic pole reversals.

Geographic north

Geographic north, perhaps the more straightforward of the two, is the direction that points straight at the North Pole from any location on Earth.

When flying an aircraft from A to B, we use directions based on geographic north. This is because we have accurate geographic locations for places and need to follow precise routes between them, usually trying to minimise fuel use by taking the shortest route. All GPS navigation uses geographic location.

Read more: Five maps that will change how you see the world

Geographic coordinates, latitude and longitude, are defined relative to Earth’s spheroidal shape. The geographic poles are at latitudes of 90°N (North Pole) and 90°S (South Pole), whereas the Equator is at 0°.

An alignment at Greenwich

For hundreds of years, declination at Greenwich was negative, meaning compass needles were pointing west of true north.

At the time of writing this article I used an online calculator to discover that, at the Greenwich Observatory, the Earth’s magnetic field currently has a declination just above zero, about +0.011°.

The average rate of change in the area is about 0.19° per year, which at Greenwich’s latitude represents about 20km per year. This means next year, locations about 20km west of Greenwich will have zero declination.

It’s impossible to say how long compasses at Greenwich will now point east of true north.

Regardless, an alignment after 360 years at the home of the Prime Meridian is undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

– ref. Explainer: what happens when magnetic north and true north align? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-happens-when-magnetic-north-and-true-north-align-123265

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

Australia’s attempts to secure the release of an Australian national and two with joint UK-Australian citizenship from an Iranian prison have become vastly more complicated following the brazen attacks on Saudi oil facilities over the weekend.

Room for quiet diplomacy has been narrowed while the world comes to terms with a strike at the very heart of global energy security.

At this stage, it is not clear to what extent facilities at Saudi Arabia’s main refinery have been crippled, but initial reports indicate it could be weeks and possibly months before it is brought back into full production.

Read more: As Australia looks to join a coalition in Iran, the risks are many

Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery processes about half the kingdom’s oil production. According to initial reports, the attack reduced throughput by 5 million barrels a day, or nearly 5% of global production.

‘Hostage diplomacy’

Australia’s former foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has offered to intervene with the Iranian authorities in an attempt to secure the release of the Australian nationals being held in Tehran.

These include Mark Firkin and his UK-Australian girlfriend, Jolie King. The two were arrested earlier this year for the unauthorised flying of a drone near a military facility on the outskirts of Tehran. They have not been charged.

More serious at this stage, however, is the case of Melbourne University Middle East specialist and joint UK-Australia citizen Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was detained in October 2018. She has been sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Iran has not publicly announced details of charges against her.

The cases of Moore-Gilbert, Firkin and King have, inevitably and unhelpfully, become enmeshed in wider geopolitical tensions in which Iran is fighting back against a US sanctions regime that seeks to cripple its economy.

Iran is being accused of “hostage diplomacy” by resorting to the incarceration of foreign nationals at a time when sanctions are rendering enormous damage to its oil-exporting economy.

This is the background to the diplomatic challenges facing the Australian government in its efforts to free its citizens. These are, by any standards, unpromising circumstances.

While Australian officials insist Canberra’s decision to commit to a US-led mission to protect ships travelling through the Strait of Hormuz is unconnected to the detention of its citizens, Tehran has a history of using individuals ruthlessly as bargaining chips in a wider geopolitical game.

Read more: Infographic: what is the conflict between the US and Iran about and how is Australia now involved?

Hostage taking, or “hostage diplomacy”, has a lengthy tail in the history of the Islamic Republic going back to the November 4, 1979, seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and a siege that ensued for 444 days. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for more than a year.

More recently, Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian was held in Iran for 544 days before being released with three other Iranian-Americans as part of a prisoner swap in 2016, just before economic sanctions on Iran were lifted under the terms of the nuclear deal.

In recent weeks, Iran has also detained a UK-flagged oil carrier in the Persian Gulf. The Stena Impero remains in Iranian custody, but members of its crew have been let go.

US blaming Iran for Saudi attack

All this was contributing to heightened tensions in the gulf before this weekend’s attacks at the very heart of Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wasted little time in blaming Iran for the attacks. Although Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for the strikes using drones, Washington is investigating whether cruise missiles were the weapon of choice, fired from either Iraq or Iran itself. A Trump administration official told Reuters,

There’s no doubt that Iran is responsible for this. No matter how you slice it, there’s no escaping it. There’s no other candidate.

Tehran has denied Washington’s accusations.

Saudi Arabia and its Yemeni government allies have been engaged in a vicious conflict with Houthi rebels since 2015. Thousands have been killed, and many more displaced, in what is regarded as the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today.

Read more: Yemen: a calamity at the end of the Arabian peninsula

Iran is supporting the Houthis and is widely accused of fuelling the Yemen conflict to weaken Saudi Arabia.

In other words, the gulf and its environs are primed for worsening conflict unless the US and Iran can reach an accommodation that would enable an easing of sanctions.

President Donald Trump has been angling for a face-to-face meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly to address ways in which tensions could be eased.

Attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities – and, thus, the global economy – hardly provides a favourable environment for discussions that might, or might not, take place.

Iran has set as a precondition for talks a relaxation of sanctions.

Australia’s limited leverage

Meanwhile, the Australian government finds itself in a situation where it has limited leverage. Trade between Australia and Iran is negligible and holds little promise as long as sanctions remain in place. Canberra’s decision to join a US-led mission in the Middle East means that it is now identified with Washington’s “maximum pressure” approach.

Australia is one of three countries to have signed up to the US initiative. The others are Britain and Bahrain.

In all of this there is another complicating factor, and one that has been little-reported. Tehran was displeased when Australia arrested an Iranian citizen at the request of the US for breaching sanctions.

Iran made repeated representations to secure the release of Negar Ghodskani after her arrest in 2017. She has pleaded guilty to conspiring to facilitate the illegal export of technology from the US and faces a hefty fine and jail time.

This is a tangled web, and hardly likely to become less so.

– ref. As pressure on Iran mounts, there is little room for quiet diplomacy to free detained Australians – http://theconversation.com/as-pressure-on-iran-mounts-there-is-little-room-for-quiet-diplomacy-to-free-detained-australians-123599

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison McEwen, Head of Discipline of Genetic Counselling, Graduate School of Health, University of Technology Sydney

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

Why are some twins identical and some not? – Chloe, age 12, Australia

We have spent many years explaining how genes work to people who would like to have children, so we’re happy to answer this excellent question.

There are two types of twins: fraternal and identical.

Fraternal twins may be born on the same day but are not genetically the same. They look different, have different genes and may be of the same sex or the opposite sex.

Identical twins, on the other hand, look the same, share the same birthday and share the same genes. They are the same sex, meaning they will both be girls or they will both be boys.

To understand why, we need to look at what happens at the time a pregnancy starts. We call the start of a pregnancy the time of conception.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do people grow to certain sizes?

What happens when a woman becomes pregnant?

Most women produce one egg each month. Each time a man and woman have sex, the man produces thousands of sperm. If the man and woman have sex and do not use contraception (for example a condom, IUD or the Pill), there is a chance that a sperm will fertilise the egg and the woman will become pregnant.

Most of the time, a single egg is fertilised, and goes on to develop into a single baby. If the egg is not fertilised, the woman will soon have her period, which is the way a woman’s body prepares itself for a new egg to be fertilised the next month.

We call a fertilised egg a “zygote”. This is a good word to remember, as we use it to help us understand the different ways identical twins develop during pregnancy (and knowing a word like zygote might impress your science teacher one day).

How do identical twins happen?

As you may know, genes are the instructions that tell our bodies how to develop and grow. They are like a recipe for creating each of us as unique individuals.

We have two copies of each of our genes: one from our biological mother and one from our biological father. That’s why we look like both our mother and our father.

Identical twins happen when a zygote splits into two in the first few days after conception. They have come from a single egg and a single sperm, so they share the same genes as each other. The reason the zygote splits is thought to be inherited, which may be why some families have a few sets of identical twins.

Because identical twins come from a single zygote that splits in two, they have exactly the same genes – exactly the same recipe. They will both have the same coloured eyes and hair, and will look the same. Identical twins are always the same sex too – they will both be girls or they will both be boys.

How do non-identical twins happen?

Identical twins are also called monozygous twins. This just means that they have come from the same, single zygote (mono means “one”). Non-identical twins are sometimes called dizygous twins (di means “two”, so dizygous means two zygotes).

Earlier on, we said that most women produce one egg each month. Occasionally, a women will produce more than one egg in a month. Non-identical twins happen when a woman produces two eggs (in the same month) and both eggs are fertilised by two different sperm.

Unlike identical twins, non-identical twins do not share the same genes as each other. They grow together and share the same birthday, but they are only as related as any other brothers and sisters. Non-identical twins could both be girls, or both be boys, or could be one girl and one boy twin.

Interestingly, there are more non-identical twins in Australia now than there have been before. The number of twin pregnancies has grown over the past 30 years. This might be partly because women in countries like Australia are having children when they are older and the chance of a twin pregnancy increases as women get older (as they are more likely to produce more than one egg in the same month).

The chance of a twin pregnancy is also higher if a couple uses assisted reproductive technology to help them to become pregnant.

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

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

– ref. Curious Kids: why are some twins identical and some not? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-are-some-twins-identical-and-some-not-121435

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marc Hudson, Researcher, University of Manchester

Paddy Manning’s excellent account of the Australian Greens will not be the last word on Australia’s most successful third party, but will doubtless remain important and influential for many years to come.

Manning’s exhaustive (but never exhausting) Inside the Greens pulls the reader through almost half a century of battles over development that threatened the natural world. It spans Tasmania’s Lake Pedder battle in the 1970s to this year’s Galilee blockade over future coal extraction, including the proposed Adani mine – all while explaining the tensions between pragmatists and idealists.

Read more: Greens on track for stability, rather than growth, this election

Inside the Greens should be read not just by those particularly interested in the issues, and the political tragics who buy all these sorts of books, but by anyone who feels the need to combat what veteran political journalist Laura Tingle calls “political amnesia”.

A well-informed perspective

Manning has been working on this book for several years and some portions of the work have appeared in The Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has excellent access to archives and activists, and has interviewed extensively – including Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Richard Di Natale – and referenced sources such as writer Amanda Lohrey’s Quarterly Essay Groundswell and journalist Paul Kelly’s book Triumph and Demise.

Manning refers less to the broader academic literature, such as Tim Doyle’s Green Power and Hutton and Connors’ History of the Australian Environment Movement.

Manning is not the only writer to tackle the Greens of late. In the same way Shaun Crowe, author of Whitlam’s Children (astutely reviewed in Overland) was clear where his sympathies lay, so is Manning.

However Manning has not traded his critical faculties for access. While his sympathies are clear, both about the Greens party itself and within its ranks, you trust him not to soft-pedal. For example, he is perfectly happy to call out bad behaviour. Discussing the furore around Alex Bhathal, a perennial Greens candidate in Victoria, Manning says:

On a blunt assessment, Bhathal was a high-profile victim of a long-running feud between two Melbourne branches, the Darebin and Moreland Greens. Hardly anyone knows whence it started, or what it’s about.

The main strengths of the book are that Manning resists the temptation to merely handwave at the 1970s and ‘80s before diving into the gory (and much told) dilemmas of the Rudd-Gillard years (anyone looking for new juicy gossip about that period will be disappointed). Nor does he descend into blow-by-blow accounts of the tensions within the New South Wales Greens, and between the NSW and federal parties.

Inevitably in a book of this length and detail (and given that it was only completed after the recent federal election), some ambiguities and errors have slipped through. Among the more obvious, the 20% greenhouse emissions reduction target was propounded by Bob Hawke’s government, not John Howard’s, and Australia did in fact sign the Kyoto Protocol (in April 1998), but only ratified it in November 2007 under Kevin Rudd. Far less importantly, Ben Oquist was not executive director of The Australia Institute in 2014 when the bizarre Palmer-Gore deal saved the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA – Richard Denniss was (I know, I know, I should get out more).

The first 11 chapters give a chronological account of the political pushes for sustainability in the 1960s and ’70s (without perhaps giving enough attention to pro-conservation Liberals and Labour at the time, or the tensions within the Australian Conservation Foundation) all the way through to the recent wars within the NSW Greens and the 2019 election.

The second, shorter half of the book is perhaps not quite as strong. Manning gives a serviceable account of the climate emergency, before an examination of tackling inequality in the “aspirational era”. A better chapter takes on the Greens’ defence and military policies – he approvingly quotes, but doesn’t cite, the defence expert Alan Carris.

Manning finally talks about the challenges ahead for the Greens. Herein lies the book’s greatest shortcoming. On page 398 Manning had already quoted Jonathan Moylan (he of a fake press release that temporarily wiped A$314 million from a coal company’s market value) saying “what we need is a movement powerful enough that it can’t be ignored by any politician”.

Read more: The Australian Greens at 25: fighting the same battles but still no breakthrough

Indeed. And that is the great, largely unexamined, and seemingly unacknowledged failure of the green left, both inside and outside parliament. In the same way Denniss did a very good job of elucidating the problem with affluenza, Manning has diagnosed the problems for the capital G and lower-case greens without necessarily putting forward concrete or specific curatives. But nonetheless, this book deserves a very wide readership.

Inside the Greens is published by Black Inc.

– ref. Greens’ challenge aptly described by Paddy Manning, but with no solutions in sight – http://theconversation.com/greens-challenge-aptly-described-by-paddy-manning-but-with-no-solutions-in-sight-122050

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Abby Mellick Lopes, Senior Lecturer in Design, Western Sydney University

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

A recent report by the Greater Sydney Commission singles out urban heat as one of four priority areas given our coming climate. It identifies tree canopy as the top response for reducing city temperatures and delivering amenity. However, the public conversation about urban heat often misses the complex relationship between trees, people and the built environment, which challenges this response.

In soon-to-be-published research supported by the Landcom University Roundtable we found that responding to a more extreme climate requires new social practices and new relationships with the commons. Commons are the spaces, resources and knowledge shared by a community, who are, ideally, involved in the regeneration and care of those commons. Trees are an important social commons, but they also present multiple challenges.

Read more: Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change

Closing our doors to the great outdoors

For one, trees are an outdoor amenity, but we are spending more and more time indoors. For those who can afford it, air conditioning delivers cooling in the privacy of your own home or car – no need for trees.

However, staying in cool bedrooms and car rides mean less time outdoors and with others, which isn’t ideal for human health and well-being.

Read more: Increasing tree cover may be like a ‘superfood’ for community mental health

Air conditioning also uses more fossil-fuel-based energy, which generates more greenhouse gas emissions. The result is more climate change.

Mixed feelings about trees

As the Greater Sydney Commission report makes clear, tree canopy in Greater Sydney is roughly proportional to household wealth. The “leafy suburbs” are the wealthier ones. This means tree planting is an important investment in less wealthy parts of the city, which experience more extreme heat days.

Read more: In a heatwave, the leafy suburbs are even more advantaged

However, research also shows people have mixed feelings about trees. In comparison to the neat shrubbery and easily maintained sunny plazas we’ve become used to in our cities, trees can be “messy” and “unpredictable”. Leaf litter can be slippery and natives like eucalypts, with their pendulous leaves, provide limited shade. People worry about large trees falling over or dropping branches.

Trees are often at the centre of disputes between neighbours. They can also be perceived as a security problem – if trees reduce visibility they might provide cover for wrongdoers.

In addition, insurance companies can charge a premium if a property is deemed at risk of damage by large trees. As we experience more extreme weather, laws on vegetation clearing are becoming more risk-averse.

Read more: If planners understand it’s cool to green cities, what’s stopping them?

What trees where and when?

Urban development tends to give priority to roads and delivering the maximum number of dwellings on sites. This leaves little space for trees, which need to fit into crowded footpaths with ever-changing infrastructures. For example, will larger trees interfere with 5G?

When juggling priorities in the streetscape, trees often lose out.

Read more: Trees versus light rail: we need to rethink skewed urban planning values

It’s an obvious point, but trees take time to grow. It can take many years for a planted sapling to become a shade tree. In that time there will be no shelter from the heat.

Also in that growing period, which can sometimes be unpredictable, trees need to be nurtured, especially in times of drought. And, once the tree is mature, fingers crossed that extreme weather events do not undo all those years of waiting.

So, while increasing tree canopy sounds like an obvious solution, trees are in fact a complex social challenge. In our research, we point to ways some of these tree-related tensions can be managed.

Shade in the meantime

Shade is an important civic resource. Large, mature trees with spreading canopy provide the best shade, so strategic construction bans and tree preservation orders are an obvious first step.

However, if shady canopy is decades off, we need to think about other, creative ways to provide shade in the meantime to ensure, for example, that people of diverse abilities can walk their city in reasonable comfort. This might include temporary shade structures such as awnings, bus shelters and fast-growing vine-trellised walkways (if there is space to create troughs for soil and the structure doesn’t cause access problems).

And, as the Cancer Council consistently reminds us, we all need to adopt more climate-defensive clothing.

Read more: Requiem or renewal? This is how a tropical city like Darwin can regain its cool

An important alternative is to follow our regional neighbours and start to populate parks and other public spaces at night. This suggests a need for removable shade, so we can take part in activities like stargazing.

Cultivating an intergenerational commons

Mature trees can die back or die altogether, so other trees should be maturing to take their place. Usually, experts design and maintain landscapes for others to enjoy.

However, users of the cooling services of parks could be invited into the process of planning and realising landscape designs. This would give them a say on the trees of which they have “shared custody”. Planting for succession can create an intergenerational sense of ownership over a shared place.

Current planning practices tend to ignore wind and solar patterns. The result is urban forms that make heat worse by prioritising comfortable private interior spaces over the commons of public space. Designing cool cities means using trees, water and buildings to create cool corridors that work with cooling breezes – or even summon these in still, heat-trapping basins like Western Sydney.

Read more: How people can best make the transition to cool future cities

These few examples point to new ways of living with trees as social commons, but they also point to new forms of commoning – collaborative forms of care and governance that invite people to adopt new social practices better suited to living well in the coming climate.

It is a positive step that state development agencies like Landcom aim to demonstrate global standards of liveability, resilience, inclusion, affordability and environmental quality. In so doing, they initiate transitions to these more commons-based ways of living.

In addition to the authors of this article, the Cooling the Commons research team includes: Professor Katherine Gibson, Dr Louise Crabtree, Dr Stephen Healy and Dr Emma Power from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at Western Sydney University (WSU), and Emeritus Professor Helen Armstrong from Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

– ref. Keeping the city cool isn’t just about tree cover – it calls for a commons-based climate response – http://theconversation.com/keeping-the-city-cool-isnt-just-about-tree-cover-it-calls-for-a-commons-based-climate-response-120491

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eve Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University

“This is a bit controversial, we know that,” deputy prime minister Michael McCormick told the National Party’s federal council, which on the weekend voted for a national roll-out of cashless debit cards for anyone younger than 35 on the dole or receiving parenting payments.

The Nationals have joined the chorus within the federal government proclaiming the cards a huge success.

The Minister for Families and Social Services, Anne Ruston, has even gone so far as to claim welfare recipients are “singing its praises”.

Really?

Both McCormick and Ruston have proclaimed success based on the most recent trial of cashless welfare in Queensland. This trial began barely six months ago, and the independent evaluation by the Future of Employment and Skills Research Centre at the University of Adelaide is ongoing.

A more complex story emerges out of my research into lived experiences of the first cashless debit card trial, which began in Ceduna, South Australia, in March 2016

I spent about three months in the town of Ceduna between mid 2017 and the end of 2018 talking to people about life on the card.

All communities are diverse and people’s experiences diverge. Some liked the card, or had come to accept it, others were caught up dealing with far more significant problems.

Read more: The Cashless Debit Card Trial is working and it is vital – here’s why

But I talked to people who found the card “an insult”. They told me it made them feel “targeted” and “punished”. They talked of degradation and defiance. They also told me the card didn’t work.

As for the the claim by both Ruston (and her ministerial predecessor Paul Fletcher) that the card empowers people to “demonstrate responsibility”, the opposite was true. In the words of June*, an Indigenous grandmother, foster carer and talented artist: “It has taken responsibility away from me. It’s treating me like a little kid again.”

Indigenous testing grounds

Ceduna, in the far west of South Australia, was the first of four sites chosen to trial cashless debit cards. The second was in the East Kimberley

The location of these two trial sites meant early trial participants have been predominately Indigenous. I am of the view that Indigenous communities are being used as testing grounds for new technologies and controversial measures.

Read more: Expansion of cashless welfare card shows shock tactics speak louder than evidence

In the first two trial sites, income support recipients younger than 65 have just 20% of their payment deposited into their bank account. The remaining 80% goes on to their debit card, which cannot be used at any alcohol or gambling outlet across the nation. Nor can they be used to withdraw cash.

The lead-grey cashless debit card is similar but different to the lime-green BasicsCard, introduced as part of the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (the “Intervention”). The use of the BasicsCard as an “income management” tool was extended to non-Indigenous people in the Northern Territory in 2010, and to other states in 2012.

The BasicsCard generally quarantines 50% of a social security recipient’s income so that it cannot be spent on alcohol, gambling, tobacco or pornography. BasicsCard holders need to shop at approved stores. In contrast, the cashless debit card, administered by financial services company Indue, can theoretically be used wherever there are Eftpos facilities.

Shame and humiliation

My research wasn’t based on collecting statistics but “hanging out” and getting to know people. I came to see the stigma associated with the “grey card” sometimes resonated with past experiences.

Robert*, for example, told me about growing up on a mission and then suddenly finding himself as “one little blackfella” in a large high school. He was acutely sensitive to the “smirks” and judgements of others whenever he used the grey card to pay for things.

Pete* left high school after a couple of weeks to join an itinerant rural workforce that has since vanished. After decades of manual work, finding himself unemployed due to ill health was devastating enough. Being issued the grey card compounded his humiliation.

Others voiced their belief the grey card was designed to induce shame. But they refused that shame, expressing instead a defiant belief in the legitimacy of their need for support.

The welfare system often defines people by the one thing they are not currently doing – waged employment. But many people I spent time with in fact laboured constantly: it just wasn’t recognised as work. People like June*, for example, looked after sick kin, the elderly and children. Yet the grey card treated them as dependents.

I heard about ways of getting around the card’s restrictions. As one acquaintance put it: “Drunks gonna drink!” One strategy involved exchanging temporary use of the card for cash. With terms that nearly always disadvantage the card holder, it has the potential to make life tougher for people living in hardship.

These observations concur with the sober assessments of experts such as the South Australian Aboriginal Drug and Alcohol Council.

The evaluation of the Ceduna trial for the Department of Social Services was more positive, noting that alcohol drinkers and gamblers reported doing so less frequently. But it also noted no reduction in crime statistics related to alcohol consumption, illegal drug use or gambling. And the Australian National Audit office was so critical of the government’s evaluation it concluded that it was difficult to ascertain “whether there had been a reduction in social harm” as a result of the card’s introduction.

Which makes simplistic claims about the card’s success look a bit rich.

*Pseudonyms are used throughout.

– ref. ‘An insult’ – politicians sing the praises of the cashless welfare card, but those forced to use it disagree – http://theconversation.com/an-insult-politicians-sing-the-praises-of-the-cashless-welfare-card-but-those-forced-to-use-it-disagree-123352

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pat Ranald, Research fellow, University of Sydney

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership has been touted as the best hope for keeping world trade flowing after the attacks on the World Trade Organisation.

The WTO isn’t dead yet, but in a two-pronged attack, US President Donald Trump has been flouting the spirit if not the letter of its rules by on one hand imposing tariffs on China and other countries, and on the other blocking appointments to its appellate body. The latter means that after December the appellate body will no longer have enough members to hear new cases.

Although nothing like a proper replacement for the WTO (it would have 16 member nations instead of the WTO’s 164) the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is being talked about as a backstop. The 16 RCEP members account for almost half the world’s population; among them China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand.

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

The RCEP negotiations have dragged on since 2012, in part because of what had been seen as a near intractable sticking point: so-called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) procedures.

ISDS was one of worst parts of the RCEP

The World Trade Organisation doesn’t have ISDS. In the WTO, governments can take action against governments under WTO rules but corporations can’t sue governments.

ISDS provisions, present in many one-on-one or regional trade deals, allow foreign corporations (but not local corporations) to take on governments.

When the Philip Morris tobacco company lost its case against the Australian government over plain packaging laws in Australia’s High Court, it was able to have a second go in an international tribunal using the ISDS provisions of an Australia-Hong Kong investment treaty. This right would not have been available to an Australian company.

Although Australia successfully had the case thrown out, it took it seven years and cost A$24 million. Australia recovered only A$12 million from Philip Morris.

Read more: When even winning is losing. The surprising cost of defeating Philip Morris over plain packaging

ISDS provisions were developed in the post-colonial period after World War II to compensate international investors for the direct expropriation or taking of property by governments. But over the past 20 years they expanded to include “indirect” expropriation, “minimum standard of treatment” and “legitimate expectations”, which do not involve taking of physical property and do not exist in many national legal systems.

Because the cases are very costly, they are mostly used by large global companies that already have enormous market power, including tobacco, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, mining and energy companies.

There are now 942 known ISDS cases, with increasing numbers against health and environment laws, including laws to address climate change.

The tide is turning against it

Legal experts like former High Court Chief Justice Robert French have noted they are conducted by temporary tribunals often presided over by practising advocates who can represent a corporation or government in one case and then sit on a tribunal the next, calling into question their independence. The decisions need not make use of precedents and have no appeals, meaning they need not be consistent.

Both the United States and European Union are moving against ISDS provisions. In January the 28 EU member states decided to terminate ISDS arrangements between themselves.

The EU is not including ISDS in any of its current negotiations, including those for a EU-Australia free trade agreement.

In the longer term, Europe is pursuing a controversial proposal for a permanent Multilateral Investment Court, which would once again allow foreign investors to sue sovereign governments but would address procedural concerns about temporary tribunals. It hasn’t yet gained support from the US, Japan, Australia or other key players, so is not likely to be implemented soon.

The US and Canada have excluded ISDS from their part of the new North America Free Trade Agreement, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Read more: How is new NAFTA different? A trade expert explains

Two institutions that oversee ISDS cases, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law and the World Bank International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, are conducting reviews of the system.

It looks as if the RCEP will be free of it

Australia is notoriously tight-lipped about international trade negotiations. But late last week Malaysia’s trade minister Datuk Darell Leiking revealed that Malaysia and each of the other 15 parties to the RCEP negotiations had agreed to exclude ISDS provisions from the deal.

Malaysia, India, Indonesia and New Zealand are all officially opposed to ISDS provisions, but this is the first public sign that all the RCEP countries have agreed to exclude it.

“Once the agreement is in force, which is within two years, the member states will re-look into it and see whether or not we are going to have the ISDS. But it must be an agreement made by all countries,” he is quoted as saying. “For now, there is no ISDS.”

Read more: The fossil fuel era is coming to an end, but the lawsuits are just beginning

Opposition to ISDS is growing. The Australian government’s apparent agreement to remove ISDS provisions from the RCEP raises questions about why it is continuing to pursue such provisions in the Indonesian and Hong Kong trade deals currently being reviewed by the parliament’s joint standing committee on treaties.

It also raises the question of whether Labor, the Greens and the Centre Alliance, each of which has has policies opposing ISDS, will support the agreements when committee reports on them in mid-October.

But problems remain

Defeating ISDS in the RCEP will be a victory for social movements and governments concerned to retain public interest regulation.

But other problematic proposals remain on the RCEP agenda.

These include longer monopolies for medicines that would delay the the availability of cheaper medicines and would have the worst impacts in developing countries.

It remains to be seen whether this and other sticking points can be resolved and the negotiations completed by their current target date of the end of 2019.

– ref. Suddenly, the world’s biggest trade agreement won’t allow corporations to sue governments – http://theconversation.com/suddenly-the-worlds-biggest-trade-agreement-wont-allow-corporations-to-sue-governments-123582

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

In 1955, an enormous photographic exhibition, The Family of Man, challenged the world as to what it meant to be human. The curator, Edward Steichen, assembled 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries, while his brother-in-law, the poet Carl Sandburg, provided the lyrical subtext to the show and its title.

In his poem, The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany (1944), Sandburg wrote, “There is dust alive/ With dreams of the Republic,/ With dreams of the family of man/ Flung wide on a shrinking globe”.

In some ways, this new vast exhibition, Civilization: The Way We Live Now, a version of which has just opened at the National Gallery of Victoria, catches the flame of the challenge of The Family of Man with its dreams of humankind living on a rapidly shrinking globe.

The show brings together over 100 contemporary photographers from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and Australia with over 200 photographs. Unlike its illustrious predecessor of more than 60 years earlier, many of the photographs in this exhibition are huge in dimensions and in a very wide range of mediums.

“Civilization”, the title of numerous exhibitions, conjures the image of civilisations of the past – Egypt, Rome, Byzantium – empires that rose and collapsed. This exhibition explores the concept of a “planetary civilisation” – one, where for the first time in human history, more people live in cities, than in rural settings.

Human mobility and interconnectivity have meant that more people, countries and economies are interdependent than ever before. For the first time, there is a real prospect that the human species stands to comprehensively annihilate itself, not through an act of war, but through man-made climate change and over consumption. It is also the first time that photographers are virtually everywhere and are photographing virtually everything.

The curators of this exhibition, William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell, have examined many thousands of contemporary photographs and have spoken to hundreds of photographers around the world.

Through this process of interrogation, the material has suggested eight fluid, porous sections around which the exhibition is arranged: Hive, Alone together, Flow, Persuasion, Control, Rapture, Escape and Next. These, as Ewing stresses, are some of the broad themes that are preoccupying many of the world’s finest photographers today.

Last year, the exhibition was shown in Seoul, earlier this year in Beijing and now it is in Melbourne, where it has been considerably trimmed of some of its international content and supplemented by a number of Australian photographers.

Next year, the exhibition will travel to Auckland, in 2021 to Marseilles and there is promise of future venues in the coming years. The Family of Man was to tour for eight years and attracted over nine million visitors and there is every possibility that this exhibition will match or exceed this number.

‘Homogenising humanity’

If The Family of Man posed the question what do humans have in common to make them human, photographs in Civilization focus on what the curators term the “shared human experience”. The historian Niall Ferguson noted in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011): “It is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history that a system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenising humanity.”

This homogenised humanity prevails in many of the photographs, whether it be in the claustrophobic clutter of the great metropolises of the “Hive” or the truly unsettling images of the “Next” section. This is a future where a perfect race appears in Valérie Belin’s models, robots replace humans in Reiner Riedler’s photographs and we leave this crowded planet in the images of Michael Najjar.

In navigating this extensive exhibition, you experience mixed emotions – on one hand these photographers are holding up a mirror to this concentrated global urban environment that we recognise as real and a shared experience, but on the other hand this is an exhibition of very significant art.

Many of the names of these photographers read like a roll call of some of the leading documentary and art photographers in the world.

In one of the iconic images of this exhibition, Thomas Struth’s “Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin” (2001), a huge type C photograph, our civilisation has recreated a past civilisation so that we can stand in triumph over past achievements.

The great veteran photographer, Lee Friedlander, records America through the prism of the car window, while the Canadian Edward Burtynsky presents a huge panoramic view of mass food production in his “Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China” (2005).

The young Russian photographer, Sergey Ponomarev, in one of the most moving photographs in the exhibition, “Migrants walk past the temple as they are escorted by Slovenian riot police to the registration camp outside Dobova, Slovenia, Thursday October 22, 2015” comments on the theme of mass migration in the era of the new world order.

There is also a powerful section on images of escape – an escape from a created reality that now imprisons us – the fake wilderness in American amusement parks recorded by the Austrian Reiner Riedler or the American Jeffrey Milstein’s “Caribbean Princess” (2014) an inkjet print from the Cruise Ships series.

A hallmark of a memorable exhibition is that it seduces the viewer through its sheer beauty, while at the same time making us question the reality that we inhabit.

Civilization: The way we live now is an important milestone exhibition that raises questions of the single planetary civilisation that is now evolving, where a stranger on social media may appear more real than our neighbour, and where our very future appears increasingly problematic.

Civilization: The Way We Live Now is at NGV Australia, Federation Square until 2 Feb 2020.

– ref. Civilization: The Way We Live Now – powerful, troubling photographs of a crowded planet and uncertain future – http://theconversation.com/civilization-the-way-we-live-now-powerful-troubling-photographs-of-a-crowded-planet-and-uncertain-future-123593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Belgrave, Professor History, Massey University

From 2022, New Zealand history will be taught at all schools as part of the compulsory national curriculum. The announcement is an astonishing turnaround, given that the ministry of education and parliament’s education and workforce select committee were opposed to any degree of compulsion just a few weeks ago.

New Zealand has been one of few countries in the world not to ensure that its citizens have some experience of their own past at school. As a history professor, I give frequent visiting lectures and in one of these, last week, only two students could clearly identify 1840 as the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, despite two thirds of the class being New Zealand born. None of them knew much about the treaty itself or about New Zealand’s colonial history, or about the Waitangi Tribunal, which has been dealing with treaty settlements for the last 30 years.

It would be hard to imagine that students in the United States did not know the importance of 1776, the year that sparked the American Revolution. Or for those in India and Pakistan to be ignorant of 1947, the date of partition, and the struggle that preceded it. Or for Australian university students not to be aware of the date of federation in 1901.

Read more: The kīngitanga movement: 160 years of Māori monarchy

History is more than dates and events

The campaign to have history taught in New Zealand schools has been long and sustained, led notably by a group of Ōtorohanga secondary students, who were surprised to find that they lived close to several key events of the New Zealand wars, including the battle of Ōrākau and the sacking of Rangiawhia in the 1860s. The New Zealand History Teachers Association presented an impassioned submission to a parliamentary select committee this year, but none of this was enough at the time to convince the ministry.

As Graham Ball, the association’s president commented, and as all historians know, history is as much about debate, contested narratives and disputed interpretations, as it is about facts.

Understanding why things happened, and their consequences, requires a significant grounding in historical knowledge, including dates, people, events and the context in which everything takes place. But how we explore these facts, how we interpret them, and the lessons we learn for the present, are all dramatically influenced by politics, cultures and the expectations of today’s society.

Each generation reinterprets the same facts, remembers new ones and forgets others. Teaching history at school, even to primary school students, will be far from simply providing a list of what they need to know.

Deciding what we must teach our children and our grandchildren about our past is a question we have avoided for decades, going back to a time when history was almost always someone else’s: largely the tales of British kings and queens and the wars which marked their reigns.

Read more: Why children need to be taught to think critically about Remembrance Day

New Zealand’s diverse history

Much of the impetus for having New Zealand history taught in schools has been around understanding colonisation and its impact on Māori. Some of the calls were for the compulsory teaching of colonial history, Māori history, or even just the New Zealand wars. The current decision has a much broader brief, as it must. Today’s schoolchildren have to see in their history the experience of their own communities, as much telling the story of recent migrant communities and their place in New Zealand as the story of 19th-century colonialism.

This is a debate that cannot be left to historians and history teachers, and government will find it needs to be well resourced. We need both a national debate and one in local communities.

Our stories have a lot of pasts to include: the histories of hapū and iwi, as well as Māori as a whole, the Irish, the English and Scots and other Europeans, as well as Samoan and other Pacific communities. They need to have places for early Chinese and Indian migration, as well as for the large number of diverse communities that have arrived here in the last half century.

These histories need to be alive to other forms of difference, to gender, to poverty and to divides between rural and urban communities. But they should not just be divided histories. They should also explore the society these communities created here, examining what they had in common, as well as what has separated them.

Read more: Want a safer world for your children? Teach them about diverse religions and worldviews

Defining a history curriculum

At my own university, interest in medieval studies has risen substantially, reflecting the Game of Thrones and Vikings effect. Fantasy and history that replicate a medieval world appear a safe place to understand the past, where a distance of centuries allows an understanding of history that rarely has political impact in the present.

In making New Zealand history compulsory, we are forcing our young people to confront the challenging questions of inequality, racism and legacies of the Empire.

This will only be a success if it avoids easy stereotypes, and simple narratives that divide the world into heroes and villains. At the end of their compulsory schooling, New Zealanders should know more of the detail of their past, but they should also have the skills to handle its complexity and its contradictions.

They need histories that are not too earnest, that cover not just the good, the bad and the ugly, but the funny, the ludicrous and the entertaining.

– ref. Why it’s time for New Zealanders to learn more about their own country’s history – http://theconversation.com/why-its-time-for-new-zealanders-to-learn-more-about-their-own-countrys-history-123527

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

Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers says it’s time to change Australia’s economic course “in a responsible and affordable way which doesn’t jeopardise the surplus”.

Chalmers predicts the budget outcome for last financial year, forecast to be a deficit at budget time, could possibly show a surplus, because of high iron ore prices and other factors including an underspend on the NDIS.

He argues the government can have both a more stimulatory policy and a surplus going forward, given the various boosts to the budget’s bottom line. “I don’t think the government has come to a fork in the road where it’s a choice between a surplus or doing something responsible to stimulate the economy.

“As it stands right now it’s possible to do both and we think the government should do both”.

The government should boost Newstart, Chalmers tells Michelle Grattan, although he wouldn’t oppose it first holding “a short sharp review” to examine interactions with other payments.

On Labor’s way ahead, now being debated within the party, Chalmers says “we’d be mad not to learn the lessons” of the election result.

With some of the opposition’s most controversial election policies in his portfolio, notably on franking credits and negative gearing, Chalmers is already consulting widely.

There’s agreement on two things, he says. “Nobody expects us to finalise our policies three years before the next election […] and nobody expects us to take an absolutely identical set of policies to the 2022 election”.

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A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

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AAP/ Joel Carrett

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Jim Chalmers on the need to change economic course – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-jim-chalmers-on-the-need-to-change-economic-course-123597

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, James Cook University

Lucy (Charlotte Nicado) is a pink-haired millennial having a quarter-life crisis. Her school friends have drifted away, she has a useless law degree, and a depressing rotation of casual jobs has left her broke.

To top it off, her ex-boyfriend just Facebook-announced his engagement.

Lucy sets her sights on internet stardom to give her life some direction. When Lucy flips her car while she’s livestreaming she becomes a viral meme as #flipgirl, and so begins her addiction to the most controversial currency of our age: attention from strangers on the Internet.

Content, the new series from ABC, derives humour from the intersections and misalignments of online life and reality, but it goes one step further: it’s the first show set entirely on an iPhone screen.

Filmed vertically, Content is built to watch on your phone, and the narrative unfolds through messages, FaceTime calls, and whatever Lucy’s phone sees when she opens her camera (including the selfies she’ll delete later).

We get to see the things Lucy makes public, but also her search history, the people she stalks, and the messages she never sends. This provides a unique view of Lucy, exploring both her private and public personas.

While her real life spirals into a comedy of errors, she’s compelled by the digital world’s norm of mandatory positivity to show only a happy, upbeat attitude that people will want to “follow” and “like.”

Read more: The ruthless pursuit of online ‘likes’ gives you nothing

Smartphone as an entertainment medium

Watching a show set on a phone on your phone has some uncanny effects. Sometimes on reflex I tried to pause or scroll on Lucy’s screen, which was my screen, but not really my screen, creating an enjoyable slippage between reality and the show.

Using the currency of popular nonfiction forms to give an appealing twist to a fictional story isn’t new. Novels did it with fictional autobiographies, movies did it with mockumentary, and digital producers have been treading this territory for years (see lonelygirl15 hoax-turned-web-series and the performance art of Amalia Ulman).

Content reformulates a little bit of each of these strategies, creating a self-reflexive version of streaming media that reaches towards a metafictional viewing experience.

Mobile technology is an increasingly dominant mode of media consumption – and production. There’s no doubt that phones are changing the way we make TV and movies. Festivals like the Cinephone International Smartphone Short Film Festival and the SmartFone Flick Fest have been developed to celebrate and foster the art of phone-shot media.

But Content isn’t trying to use the smart phone to create the appearance of a more legitimate production. Instead, it deliberately creates an amateur aesthetic that resembles your own smartphone usage. Filmed with an iPhone, often held by the actors, Content uses the selfie as a camera technique rather than for self-portraiture.

This creates an authentic world for millennials Lucy and Daisy: a generation living much of our lives through phone screens.

The traps of the attention economy

Content emphasises the trap of internet fame, particularly for young women.

Girls are socialised to be experts in impression management, and the currency of internet attention monetises this complex social skill. The source of Content’s comedy is that Lucy isn’t very good at the negotiations required in this setting – busting the myth that millennials are “born digital” and therefore inherently understand digital worlds.

As Lucy breaks into the attention economy, she perceives the quantitative data of likes and comments as positive. Bemoaning the lack of support from her friends and parents, Lucy sees her newly gained online following as a support network, telling best friend Daisy “hundreds of thousands of people are here for me.”

But the viewer is able to see beyond the numbers to the qualitative evidence: most of the comments Lucy receives are negative. She is openly mocked by her followers who laugh at her and call her names.

Online success for young women often attracts as many haters as fans. And in a metafictional twist, this principle has been illustrated by vitriol directed at Lucy from Twitter users who mistook the show for reality.

We’re compelled to consume

It’s a shame that Content encourages us to laugh at Lucy more than with her as we follow her journey. Girls who derive a sense of confidence and self-worth from digital forms of sociality are an easy target, and I wanted more moments where Lucy is more than a narcissistic stereotype.

The show misses opportunities to flesh out the figure of the wannabe influencer even as it explores the funny and terrible ways that the attention market shapes young people’s lives.

But its forays into female friendship prove more fruitful. Lucy’s lifeline is her long-time bestie, the sensible and camera shy Daisy (Gemma Bird Matheson). They’re the perfect odd couple for a female-centred buddy picture, and their dynamics drive the show’s best moments.

Ultimately, even if we already know Content’s take-home message – that the “real” people we watch online are faking it most of the time – we are still compelled to consume the lives of others for entertainment.

Commentary on the social media market that focuses on how it is turning us into narcissists overlooks a crucial aspect: the continued demand for such media indicates we’re just as interested in the lives of others as we are in our own.

New episodes of Content are released Wednesday and Friday through @ABCTV social accounts

– ref. Reality slippages and narcissistic stereotyping – watching Content, a TV show made for smart phones – http://theconversation.com/reality-slippages-and-narcissistic-stereotyping-watching-content-a-tv-show-made-for-smart-phones-123595

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Sherwen, Director Wildlife Conservation and Science, Zoos Victoria, University of Melbourne

Each year, from September to mid-October, the tiny and very precious mountain pygmy-possums arise from their months of hibernation under the snow and begin feasting on billions of bogong moths that migrate from Queensland to Victoria’s alpine region.

But for the past two springs, moth numbers have collapsed from around 4.4 billion in alpine areas to an almost undetectable number of individuals. And the mountain pygmy-possums went hungry, dramatically affecting breeding success among the last remaining 2,000 that live in the wild.

Read more: Meet the Australian wildlife most threatened by climate change

This year’s migration of bogong moths to the possums’ alpine home is crucial for the critically endangered mountain pygmy-possums. That’s why we’re asking you to do two simple things: turn off your lights at night, and if you see a bogong moth, take a picture.

What’s happened to the moths?

We don’t know exactly why the moths are not making it to their summer alpine destination. It’s likely extreme drought, pesticides and changes in agricultural practices are all major factors. However, scientists believe that because moths use both the Earth’s magnetic field and visual cues on the horizon to navigate, light pollution from urban centres can confuse the moths and stall their journey.

Some of the greatest beacons on their path are Parliament House and Canberra’s bright surrounds. Both parliamentarians and the general public are being asked to turn unnecessary outdoor lights off from September 1 to October 31, as part of the Lights Off for Moths campaign.

Artificial night lighting has dramatically changed the nocturnal environment. In urban environments, the soft glow of moonlight is overpowered by bright streetlights, security lights and car headlamps. These light sources can be more than 1,000 times as bright as moonlight, and their biological impact is increasingly visible and widespread.

One of the most obvious impacts of artificial light at night is that it can attract animals (sometimes fatally). While a “moth to a flame” may be somewhat poetic, when one moth becomes hundreds, or potentially thousands, the ecological impact may be catastrophic. Current global lighting practices may be creating this very scenario.

Recent evidence links the presence of artificial light at night with large-scale deaths and shifts in nocturnal migration patterns in birds. In insects, artificial night lighting disrupts nocturnal pollination networks and is strongly linked with observed mass declines in insect (and particularly moth) populations.

No moths means hungry possums

When a species like bogong moths decline, it has huge ramifications. Insects in particular are vital pillars supporting whole ecosystems – without bees and other insect pollinators, for example, we risk the extinction of our flowering plants. Many birds, reptiles and mammals depend on insects as part of their diet.

For mountain pygmy possums, the fatty, nutrient-rich bounty of bogong moths arrives right as they are waking up in the spring. They are one of the only Australian mammals that hibernate, and can spend up to seven months sleeping under the alpine snow.

The possums awake ravenously hungry, and devour the bogong moths to regain crucial fat stores. Without the moths there at the right time, the possums struggle to secure enough energy to breed successfully.

Snap that moth

Alongside the Lights Off for Moths campaign, Zoos Victoria has launched Moth Tracker, an app that allows Australians to photograph and log any potential sightings of migrating bogong moths.

Moth Tracker, which can be accessed through any laptop or smartphone, is adapted from the popular Southern Right Whale watching app in collaboration with Federation University and Victorian conversation network SWIFFT.

Bogong moths migrate from their winter breeding grounds throughout Queensland, New South Wales and western Victoria in search of cooler climates for the Spring and Summer in the Victorian and NSW Alpine regiiit fro on wmhere the mountain pygmy-possums live.

Before they become moths, the larvae look like tiny, shiny brown capsules and are commonly referred to as cutworm. Migratory bogong moths are dark brown, with two lighter spots on each wing. They are small, only about the length of a paper clip. During the day they’re often seen grouped together like roof tiles. At night, they are more active and flying around.

If you see a bogong moth (or something you think might be a bogong month), we need you to take a photograph and log the location, day and time with Moth Tracker. Scientists will use the data to determine whether any moths are making their way to the precious, and very hungry, possums that are just starting to wake from their winter hibernation.

Read more: Lights out! Clownfish can only hatch in the dark – which light pollution is taking away

The Victorian Mountain Pygmy-possum Recovery Team, together with partner organisations, is also investigating options for interventions in the wild if needed. These may include a world-first airdropping of “bogong balls” to feed the hungry possums, as well as improving habitat connectivity and captive measures to support populations through the breeding season.

But with unnecessary outdoor lights switched off and citizen scientists looking out for bogong moths, there is still hope for the mountain pygmy-possums.

– ref. You can help track 4 billion bogong moths with your smartphone – and save pygmy possums from extinction – http://theconversation.com/you-can-help-track-4-billion-bogong-moths-with-your-smartphone-and-save-pygmy-possums-from-extinction-123512

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kassia Beetham, Exercise Physiology Lecturer, Australian Catholic University

Expectant mothers receive an avalanche of information about potential risks to their baby. There’s a growing list of foods, toxins and environmental threats to avoid. It’s normal for this to lead to an increased level of anxiety.

As a result, some women believe it’s safer to avoid any risks in pregnancy, no matter how small. Vigorous exercise may be considered one of these risks.

But we’ve recently reviewed the research and found vigorous exercise is safe during pregnancy, including in the third trimester. And not only is it safe; it’s healthy, too.

Read more: Is it safe to run while pregnant? We asked five experts

Moderate exercise vs vigorous exercise

The safety of moderate intensity exercise during pregnancy has been well established. Walking, swimming and using an exercise bike are all activities that could be considered moderate intensity.

Expectant mothers who do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week, as recommended by the Australian Physical Activity Guidelines, are healthier, happier, stronger, and develop fewer complications like gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia.

Read more: Health Check: what should our maximum heart rate be during exercise?

When we’re talking about vigorous exercise, this means exercising to an intensity where you struggle to maintain a conversation, but can still manage a sentence. This could include activities such as jogging, circuit-based resistance training, or interval training on a stationary bike.

In the broader population, it’s exercise at 70-90% of your maximum heart rate (where maximum heart rate is about 220 beats per minute minus your age).

For pregnant women, it may feel a little harder to achieve vigorous intensity exercise because of some normal changes to the heart and blood that occur during pregnancy.

And the safety of doing vigorous exercise during pregnancy has been more controversial. For example, past research has suggested that during vigorous exercise, blood flow is re-directed to the muscles and could take away oxygen and nutrients from the growing baby.

Our research

We collated all studies looking at mothers exercising at a vigorous intensity during the third trimester, to understand how safe this was for mothers and babies. Our review included 15 studies totalling 32,703 pregnant women.

What we found should be reassuring for active women with healthy pregnancies: vigorous exercise appears to be safe for both mum and baby, even when continued into the third trimester.

The studies looked at a range of outcomes for both mum and baby, and none showed any meaningful increase in risk. There was no difference in birth weight of babies when their mums did vigorous exercise; and in particular no difference in the number of babies born small for gestational age.

For women in the healthy weight range, vigorous exercise didn’t affect the amount of weight they gained during pregnancy. That is, they followed the expected trajectory of weight gain as their pregnancy progressed.

But, in overweight and obese women, for whom it can be more difficult to adhere to the recommended weight gain during pregnancy, vigorous exercise did appear to reduce maternal weight gain.

It was also associated with a slightly lower chance of a baby being born premature, and a few extra days of gestation.

High-intensity and high-impact exercise

Exercise at greater than 90% of maximum heart rate is considered “high-intensity exercise”. This is where you can’t even string a sentence together.

We don’t yet know if high-intensity training carries any risks, so there’s still a limit to what mums might want to do later in a pregnancy. We’d recommended mums do the “talk test” to make sure they can still speak while exercising.

Expectant mothers should also be cautious about doing high-impact exercise in the third trimester, like running, jumping or lifting heavy weights. The findings from our review suggest these types of high-impact activities are not likely to affect the baby, but it’s still not known whether they may weaken the mother’s pelvic floor muscles, which may contribute to incontinence.

If expectant mothers want to keep these activities up, we’d recommend they consult an exercise professional and their doctor.

Read more: Should women exercise during and after pregnancy?

Exercise during pregnancy is important – but it doesn’t have to be vigorous

Vigorous exercise is an efficient strategy for improving a mother’s physical and mental health. The benefits to her heart, lungs, muscles and mood are likely to be the same, if not greater, than for moderate exercise.

The main aim of physical activity in pregnancy is to achieve health-enhancing benefits in a way that is safe, enjoyable, and sustainable.

Some women may find it difficult to be mobile in the third trimester, let alone exercise vigorously. So, if you’re happily doing lighter exercise, like regular walks, you can feel confident in the benefits you’re providing both you and your baby.

Pregnancy specific yoga or pilates may also be a gentler way to improve muscular strength, heart health and mental health. These activities might help you prepare your body for the upcoming challenge of childbirth, and subsequent recovery.

Read more: Weight gain during pregnancy: how much is too much?

If you’re struggling to achieve the recommended 150 minutes per week, particularly in the third trimester, then find ways to increase your breathing rate in shorter bouts. For example, by taking the stairs, parking the car a little further away, or going for brisk walk in your lunch break.

Mothers will usually get the most benefit with some extra support, whether from an exercise professional (like an accredited exercise physiologist), a medical practitioner, or both. Programs can be tailored to the most suitable exercise intensity for you.

– ref. Is vigorous exercise safe during the third trimester of pregnancy? – http://theconversation.com/is-vigorous-exercise-safe-during-the-third-trimester-of-pregnancy-121762

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

What a week it has been in the Apple core. In recent days the tech giant has released a litany of products, including new phones, watches, tablets, and more.

The big-ticket items are clearly the new iPhone 11 range. These hint at some interesting technology directions, which will most likely spread across the mobile sector.

Of course, it’s hardly radical to create a phone that is also a camera, web browser, computer, and gaming device. That idea is as old as smart phones themselves.

But Apple’s continued progression down this road raises the question of whether this trend can be sustained indefinitely, or whether there is in fact a limit to what the market will bear in terms of functionality, aesthetics, and cost. The new iPhones are priced from A$1,199 for the basic model up to A$2,499 for a top-spec iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Cameras, computing and competition

In keeping with its rivals, Apple has clearly made the camera system the focus (pardon the pun) of its new iPhones. Aesthetically minded users might find the cluster of camera lenses jarring – more function than form – and doubly distressing if you’re unlucky enough to suffer trypophobia, the fear of irregularly clustered bumps or holes.

The back of the 11 Pro sports three cameras with different focal lengths. Despite still being only 12 megapixels each, in this era of filters and digital enhancements, pixel-count is no longer the crucial metric.

Each camera, including the front-facing one, can be used simultaneously. It’s now conceivable to film an entire feature-length movie on a phone (should you ever actually want to). This requires a significant amount of internal coordination to ensure that colour grading and exposure blend seamlessly between these cameras, which in turn brings us to the question of computing power.

The new iPhones are equipped to handle not just complex computational photography but also advanced augmented reality and fast-learning artificial intelligence.

This level of highly integrated computing is one of the clearest direction changes in the iPhone lineup. It makes perfect sense from Apple’s point of view, not just because it helps to enhance performance, but because Apple controls its entire research, development and production line anyway.

But all of this integration comes with a couple of obvious downsides for the user. One is that it’s increasingly difficult to service your own phone. The other is that for all their “multitasking” claims, it’s still only possible to do one thing at a time. One of the reasons I sound sceptical about filming feature-length movies on an iPhone is the question of what happens if you receive a phone call halfway through shooting a big scene.

What are ‘pro’ phones really for?

Despite the “Pro” moniker, and the suggestion that they can be used to produce commercial-standard creative work, even top-end iPhones are still inherently personal devices. Of course, Apple isn’t really pitching its phones as essential kit for film directors. The actual use case is somewhat more prosaic.

The top-end price tag of A$2,499 looks remarkably like laptop pricing. For professionals who do most of their work on their phone, Apple clearly thinks even this hefty price tag will represent a sensible investment for a versatile piece of kit.

Remember that mobile phones in the early 1990s were comparatively just as astounding in price, yet they sold to professionals who were busy and affluent enough to require one (or at least wanted to look as if they were).

That said, flagship phone pricing is creating a digital divide between those who insist on the latest phone and those happy to make do with an older model. As a result, the budget and mid-range phone market has become as competitive as it is varied, with fantastic handsets available for less than A$400 outright, as well as a booming secondhand market.

Read more: 3 reasons why we are addicted to smartphones

I always consider repairability when buying technology. I maintain my phone by replacing screens and batteries, which anyone can do with the right guidance. But many manufacturers work hard to thwart these home repair efforts.

Many phone components, including batteries, are now often “authenticated” with the phone’s central processing unit, so that should an unofficial repair occur the device may refuse to work as intended. Sadly, users have little control over this.

If you buy a device, you should have the right to repair it. When buying a flagship phone, remember you will almost undoubtedly one day drop it on the floor, so it pays to think about how you’ll get it fixed, and whether you’re happy to play by the manufacturer’s rules.

Read more: Sustainable shopping: if you really, truly need a new phone, buy one with replaceable parts

It is clear that modern mobile devices are trying to be the “everything” device, balancing functionality with aesthetics, and even trying to take a bite out the laptop market (with a price tag to match). Premium pricing structures have been tested and appear set to say. It seems that expensive phones bristling with high-performance cameras have become the new norm.

– ref. Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro wants to take your laptop’s job (and price tag) – http://theconversation.com/apples-iphone-11-pro-wants-to-take-your-laptops-job-and-price-tag-123372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology

On the way home, you wander into the supermarket for a loaf of bread. But before you reach the bread aisle, you drop in your prescription at the supermarket pharmacy. Shopping done, you pick up your pills on the way out.

Across the US, UK and mainland Europe, supermarket pharmacies are becoming the norm. But in Australia, they’re banned.

The Commonwealth government is negotiating the seventh Community Pharmacy Agreement with pharmacists, which outlines how community pharmacy is delivered over the next five years, who delivers it and where.

So could pharmacies in supermarkets be an option for Australia?

Read more: Explainer: what is the Community Pharmacy Agreement?

How common are they?

Overseas, pharmacies have been in supermarkets for decades. In the UK, supermarkets like ASDA, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s have them. And so do Walmart, Kroger and Publix in the US.

Canada’s largest supermarket Loblaw announced plans in 2010 to expand more aggressively into the pharmacy business. It later bought pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart.

Arguments against

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia argues pharmacies in supermarkets means community pharmacies would be unable to compete, supermarkets would put shareholders’ interests ahead of patients, and consumer protection would be lost. Such critics argue supermarkets would push smaller players out of the market, limiting consumer choice and access.

The Guild also suggests it would be hypocritical for supermarkets to run pharmacies when they rely on cigarette and alcohol sales.

Read more: Relaxing pharmacy ownership rules could result in more chemist chains and poorer care

Overseas, there is public support for small, independently run community pharmacies over supermarket-owned ones.

For instance, in 2013 almost 2,000 people petitioned against supermarket giant Tesco, fearing an existing pharmacy across the road would be “bulldozed” out of business.

Arguments for

The main arguments for pharmacies in supermarkets seem to be they would offer the public a cheaper and more convenient service.

For instance, Walmart employs more than 10,000 pharmacists across 3,000 retail pharmacies throughout the US and launched a 24 hour pharmacy service over a decade ago. Then it began dispensing generic medications for as little as US$4.

Read more: Is pharmacy the final frontier for supermarkets?

Supermarkets also seem committed to supporting pharmacies in store, despite tough times. In 2019, Tesco, which runs 300 in-store pharmacies, reported no pharmacy staff positions would be lost when 9,000 store positions became redundant.

There are also claims of hypocrisy. Why does existing Australian legislation prevent a supermarket from owning a pharmacy, but not a pharmacy from owning a supermarket?

What might work in Australia?

If Australia follows international trends, we might consider two models:

• straight-out ownership, where a supermarket owns a chain of pharmacies and employs pharmacists to run them, or
• a strategic alliance, where a pharmacy chain, like Chemist Warehouse, has smaller versions of its stores inside a supermarket.

Examples of straight-out ownership include Sainsbury’s in the UK and Walmart in the US. This arrangement allows them to sell these assets at a later stage.

This is what happened with Sainsbury’s, which sold its 281-store pharmacy business to Celesio, the owner of the Lloyds Pharmacy chain, for £125m in 2015. Sainsbury’s indicated the move would enable further growth, while extending their pharmacy services to customers.

In an example of a strategic alliance, UK pharmacy chain Boots and supermarket Waitrose agreed in 2009 to stock each other’s products.

Boots supplied health care, pharmaceutical products and services, like flu jabs and medical check-ups to Waitrose, and Waitrose supplied food to Boots. Pharmacies in 13 Waitrose stores were also re-branded “Boots Pharmacy”.

Read more: Why Australian supermarkets continue to look to the UK for leadership

However, existing legislation prevents either option in Australia unless changes are made in the new Community Pharmacy Agreement. This is because current pharmacy ownership rules prevent supermarkets or anyone (other than a pharmacist) from owning a pharmacy.

If ownership rules were lifted, but location rules remained, supermarkets would be prevented from operating pharmacies opening within 1.5km of one another.

This means if Coles had an in-store pharmacy, then Woolworths across the road, could not operate one, and vice versa. And if there was already a pharmacy in the neighbourhood, neither could open one, even if ownership rules were relaxed.

Are we set for regulation or liberalisation?

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, which represents owners of community pharmacies, and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, which represents individual pharmacists, both support current ownership rules — strong regulation over ownership and location.

However, pharmacy giant Chemist Warehouse and Ramsay Health Care (which owns pharmacies as well as private hospitals), say ownership rules are redundant and ineffective. And they’re not alone.

Critics of the current Community Pharmacy Agreement argue over-regulation of pharmacies, particularly surrounding ownership and location, limits competition and growth.

Read more: The right prescription: pharmacy sector in dire need of reform

And in 2015 the Harper Report into competition policy recommended:

[…] pharmacy ownership and location rules should be removed in the long-term interests of consumers. They should be replaced with regulations to ensure access to medicines and quality of advice regarding their use that do not unduly restrict competition.

European countries seem to be moving towards deregulation. In 2017 Italy passed legislation to allow corporate entities to own a pharmacy business, and also increased the number of pharmacies a proprietor may own.

So what are the impacts of deregulation? If we look at evidence from Europe, when the UK relaxed ownership and location rules, pharmacies operated more efficiently. Pharmacies also had more freedom to set prices for over-the-counter products and offered a wider range of services.

Yet, the same research also found where there was stronger regulation, such as in Spain, consumer access to pharmacy improved, as new pharmacies were opened based on geographic, demographic or needs-based criteria. Simply, if there was already one pharmacy servicing a neighbourhood, they didn’t need another.

Is Australia likely to see supermarket pharmacies?

Whether Australia is likely to see supermarket pharmacies any time soon is open to debate.

In a speech to the Pharmacy Guild’s national conference in 2019, federal health minister Greg Hunt said there would be no change to the ban on locating pharmacies within supermarkets.

However, other powerful groups are calling for change. These include the Australian Medical Association, which wants the regulations changed to allow broader ownership of pharmacy businesses.

If supermarkets were to guarantee sufficient controls — such as to ensure the safe use of medicines, staff were properly trained and there were safeguards to ensure equitable access for elderly patients, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly people living in rural and remote areas — it would be hard to argue for existing rules about pharmacy ownership and location.

– ref. A loaf of bread and a packet of pills: how supermarket pharmacies could change the way we shop – http://theconversation.com/a-loaf-of-bread-and-a-packet-of-pills-how-supermarket-pharmacies-could-change-the-way-we-shop-122640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Jotzo, Director, Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Climate action will be on the world stage again at a meeting of world leaders in New York on September 23. The United Nations has convened the event and urged countries to “come with a plan” for ambitious emissions reduction.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the meeting because he says global efforts to tackle climate change are running off-track. He wants leaders to present concrete, realistic pathways to strengthen their existing national emissions pledges and move towards net zero emissions by 2050.

Australia is not expected to propose any significant new actions or goals. Prime Minister Scott Morrison – in the US at the time to visit President Donald Trump – will not attend the summit. Foreign Minister Marise Payne will attend, and is likely to have to fend off heavy criticism over Australia’s slow progress on climate action.

Australia: procrastinator or paragon?

Australia has gained an international reputation as a climate action laggard – plagued by political acrimony over climate change, offering few policies to reduce emissions and embroiled in diplomatic rifts with our Pacific neighbours over, among other things, support for coal.

For many afar, it is difficult to understand the policy vacuum in a country so vulnerable to climate change.

In turn, the federal government points out that Australia is one of the few countries that has fully met its emissions reductions targets under the Kyoto protocol period to 2020, and says that it expects to meet the 2030 Paris emissions targets.

Come with a plan, and make it good

The landmark Paris agreement includes a global goal to hold average temperature increase to well below 2°C and pursue efforts to keep warming below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Countries set so-called “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) outlining an emissions reduction target and how they will get there.

Read more: Why declaring a national climate emergency would neither be realistic or effective

Australia set a target to reduce emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. Under the Paris treaty, the national pledges should be reviewed and strengthened every five years.

The UN convened the summit to ensure countries are developing concrete, realistic pathways to enhance their NDCs. The new pledges should be in line with a 45% cut to global greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade, and net-zero emissions by 2050.

Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions are about 12% lower than in 2005, the base year for the Paris target. But since 2013 they have steadily risen, and are continuing to rise.

In the electricity sector, recent declines in coal-fired power and increases in renewables are reducing carbon output. But those savings are being negated by rises in the gas industry and from transport.

Nevertheless, the Australian government is loudly confident of reaching the Paris target – including by using a large amount of accumulated credits from the Kyoto Protocol period. On average, Australia stayed below the Kyoto emissions budgets from 2008 to 2020, and the plan is to count this “carry-over” against an expected overshoot in the period to 2030.

This may be compatible with the Paris Agreement rule book. But it would receive scorn from countries that care about climate commitments. The Kyoto targets were not in line with the ambition now spelled out in the Paris agreement, and Australia’s Kyoto targets are seen by many countries as lax.

With meaningful policy effort, Australia could meet the Paris target without resorting to Kyoto credits, and possibly meet a much more ambitious target. This would set us up better for deeper cuts down the road.

Rapid and large emissions reductions could be made in the electricity sector – especially if the investment boom in renewables of the last two years were to continue. However the latest indications are that renewables investment is tailing off.

Large improvements can readily be made in transport by shifting to electric vehicles and improving the rather dismal fuel efficiency of conventional cars still sold in Australia. Gas and coal use in industry can be cut by improving efficiency and shifting to electricity, and by phasing out some old energy-hungry and often uneconomic plants like aluminium smelters.

The gas industry can do better through improved management of leaks and reduced venting of methane; we can also improve agricultural practices and land management.

Read more: Why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth’s climate

The transition in the energy sector will definitely happen, based on the cost advantage of renewables, unless governments actively stand in the way. The question is how quickly and smoothly it will happen.

The advantages of the renewables transition extend beyond our shores. Solar and wind energy could be converted to carbon-free hydrogen and other zero-emissions fuels at massive scale and then exported. Electricity could also be sent through undersea cables to Asia.

This is shaping up as a real possibility, depending on technology costs and whether the world kicks the fossil fuel habit.

Outside electricity generation, policy measures are needed to achieve, or at least encourage, these changes. A price on carbon like many countries now have, would do a very good job, combined with the right regulation and public investment.

Limiting the risk of catastrophic climate change demands that global emissions fall rapidly in coming decades. Keeping temperature rise to 2°C or less means reducing emissions to net-zero.

Australia will be expected to table strategies to get to net-zero by 2050 next year, at the UN’s climate COP, or “conference of the parties”.. That process should be a chance for Australian governments, industry and civil society to put heads together about how this could work.

Read more: Nuclear power should be allowed in Australia – but only with a carbon price

The year 2050 is beyond the horizon of most corporate interests vested in existing assets, and it allows greater emphasis on long term opportunities than on short term adjustments. This should encourage a more open discussion than the often acrimonious debates about 2030 emissions targets and short-term policies.

Australia should show the world it can imagine a zero-emissions future, and hatch the beginnings of a plan for it. It would help position the nation’s resources industries for the future and help with our international reputation.

– ref. Australia to attend climate summit empty-handed despite UN pleas to ‘come with a plan’ – http://theconversation.com/australia-to-attend-climate-summit-empty-handed-despite-un-pleas-to-come-with-a-plan-123187

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vaughan Cruickshank, Program Director – Health and Physical Education, Maths/Science, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania

Physical education is one of the most popular subjects for children in their early school years. Yet by secondary school less favourable attitudes towards what’s known in the Australian school curriculum as Health and Physical Education (HPE) can start to creep in.

By adulthood, the mention of HPE brings on both pleasant (for those who enjoyed HPE at school or completed HPE activities well) and unpleasant memories (those who suffered embarrassment, bullying or injuries).

Read more: Teenagers who play sport after school are only 7 minutes more active per day than those who don’t

These attitudes towards HPE are important as early life experiences can be linked to our health later on. Adults with positive memories of HPE are more likely to be physically active throughout their lives.

That’s why we need to get students hooked on a range of activities they don’t give up on and can enjoy doing for many years after they leave school.

Exercise for our health

One of the major focuses of any HPE program in schools is to develop movement skills and physical activity in young people. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says physical activity is vital to improve mental, social and physical health, as well as preventing diseases such as obesity, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

Lifestyle diseases are likely to be an increasing problem in Australia due to the projected increase in the percentage of the population aged 65 years and over.

For this reason, a high-quality HPE program early on at school that provides opportunities for students to experience a range of activities they can engage in later in life is important.

This can prepare students for the skills needed for lifelong engagement in physical activity and to lead active and healthy lives.

Our activities change as we age

The activities with the highest participation by Australians of different age groups are shown in the table below. These findings show some obvious differences between age groups.

School-aged students participate in more team-based activities. Often these involve physical contact and/or require speed and agility. Participation rates in these activities decrease substantially after the age of 35.

Australians aged 65 and over mainly participate in less intense aerobic activities. Seven of the top 10 (walking, golf, cycling, bowls, yoga, bush walking and pilates) activities for the 65-plus age group do not even make the top 10 for school-aged Australians.

Giving students increased access to these activities might assist schools in meeting UNESCO’s challenge to help young people develop lifelong participation in physical activity.

Teach them healthy habits when they’re young

Some school HPE and outdoor education programs are likely to include a few of these activities listed for the adult age groups.

But the crowded curriculum and specific HPE time allocations can be a problem. Teachers often don’t have time to cover these activities in enough detail to really hook students in. That means students don’t get to the point where they want to make these activities a permanent part of their movement tool kit.

Busy schools should consider integrating aerobic activities into other subject areas. For example, an excursion to a local park or reserve for bushwalking or orienteering could be linked with geography and science. It could also help inspire writing tasks in English or measurement tasks in maths.

Teachers could be encouraged to use class breaks for short yoga sessions. Yoga and pilates could be offered at lunchtime, either with a teacher, posters and signs, or via an app projected on a screen.

Doing a web search for your location and activities (for example, “golf/bowls/bushwalking clubs near me”) will help schools find nearby clubs to connect students with. Schools could invite club staff or volunteers to come to talk to the students and run practical sessions.

Being aware of local recreational clubs and organisations and the opportunities they provide (such as barefoot bowls nights), as well as websites where they can get more information (bushwalking trails), will make it easier for students to engage with these activities.

Engaged students are active and healthy for life

So we need to make sure students are provided with enough choice in activities.

Read more: Our ‘sporting nation’ is a myth, so how do we get youngsters back on the field?

Improved choice for students within HPE programs allows them to discover activities that provide appropriate levels of challenge for them to be able to overcome and achieve for overall enjoyment.

Evidence suggests that providing such a mastery climate in school HPE and junior sport can help students feel high levels of competence in their physical abilities. This then assists with students’ individual motivations to be physically active.

– ref. Bushwalking and bowls in schools: we need to teach kids activities they’ll go on to enjoy – http://theconversation.com/bushwalking-and-bowls-in-schools-we-need-to-teach-kids-activities-theyll-go-on-to-enjoy-123004

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Matthews, Senior Lecturer in Urban and Environmental Planning, Griffith University

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Climate change increasingly threatens communities all over the world. News of fires, floods and coastal erosion devastating lives and livelihoods seems almost constant. The latest fires in Queensland and New South Wales mark the start of the earliest bushfire season the states have ever seen.

What happens when climate change causes extreme events to become chronic, potentially rendering some communities unviable? This question is fuelling a new strand of global research focused on “climigration”. Climigration is the planned relocation of entire communities to new locations further from harm. And it has already begun.

Read more: Climate change forced these Fijian communities to move – and with 80 more at risk, here’s what they learned

It takes a lot to convince a community to move. But extreme events disrupt communities socially, economically and physically. Buildings and infrastructure are damaged, as are community cohesion and morale. Lives may be lost; many others are changed forever.

When extreme events disrupt communities, responses usually occur in one of two ways. We can try to repair damage and continue as before, which is known as resilience. Or we try to repair and fortify against future damage in a process of adaptation. Climigration is an extreme form of climate change adaptation,

This article draws on our recently published research, which investigated how land-use and strategic planning frameworks can prepare for climigration.

From imagination to reality

Climigration is no longer a concern for the future; it is a challenge today. The notion of strategically relocating entire communities has quickly moved from imagination to reality.

For instance, in 2016 the US Department of Housing and Urban Development provided US$1 billion to help communities adapt to climate change in 13 states. The grants included the first direct allocation of federal funding to move an entire community.

Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana is the first US community to undergo federally sanctioned climigration. The move has been forced by the loss of coastal land to rising seas and storm surges. Last December, the state bought land at residents’ preferred site to develop their new community.

Climigration options were previously considered in Alaska. Climate-induced coastal erosion has threatened the viability of the village of Newtok for many years. Its residents voted in 2003 to relocate to higher ground but the relocation looks unlikely to be completed before 2023.

In Australia, more than 100 households in Grantham, Queensland, were relocated to higher ground with government assistance after devastating floods caused by an exceptionally strong La Niña in 2011.

Read more: Moving Grantham? Relocating flood-prone towns is nothing new

Critical factors in climigration

Climigration is, of course, not a phenomenon restricted to the US and Australia. It is a growing concern for many countries.

Our research sought to establish a framework for effective climigration planning. We systematically reviewed international case studies of community relocations undertaken because of environmental hazards. As part of this we developed a hierarchy of influencing factors in planning for climigration.

We found that the degree to which a community agrees on the need to relocate is a crucial influence. Consensus generates social capital, which supports action and improves the prospects of successful outcomes.

Perception of the timing and severity of risks is another critical factor. Immediate, obvious risks are more likely to motivate action. Motivation can be low if risks are seen as a problem for the distant future, even if impacts may eventually be devastating.

Read more: Why move back? Floods and the difficulty of relocation

Political, economic and logistical support from government moderately influences the success of community relocation. Relocation may still occur without government support, but this is not preferable and the chances of success are lower.

Strong local leadership can improve the capacity of communities to face the reality of relocation and then to resettle. Strategic leadership from outside agencies is a complement to local leadership, not a substitute.

How to plan successfully for climigration

Strategic and land-use planning systems will be central public agencies in many climigration cases.

Planners already have relevant skills and training. These include community consultation, mediation and stakeholder engagement. Planners can coordinate land acquisition and development applications. They can provide temporary housing, infrastructure and transportation.

Planning for climigration also requires other professional input, including disaster management, social psychology and engineering.

Strategic planning for climigration should begin as early as possible. Vulnerable communities can be identified using risk mapping.

Read more: Our deadly bushfire gamble: risk your life or bet your house

Alternative sites can then be shortlisted and potential logistical demands identified.

Securing land for relocation may place planners in the middle of competing forces. They need to be careful and deliberative to balance the expectations of residents, government, and the market.

Consultation is vital to secure community consensus in the event of climigration. It is a key tool for planners to explain risks and engage residents in crucial decisions.

Specific policy frameworks for climigration are preferable but not essential. When used, they can improve coordination and reduce the risk of negative outcomes.

A confronting concept

While climigration is not yet a common planning issue, it is likely to become an increasingly urgent agenda. Climigration events like those in Louisiana, Alaska and Queensland are just the first wave.

There are limits to the feasibility of climigration. It might only be viable for small towns and villages. Undoubtedly there will be cases where climigration is rejected as too much of challenge.

Triage-based planning could be helpful in deciding which communities to relocate.

Read more: We can’t save everything from climate change – here’s how to make choices

Accepting the notion of climigration may be the biggest challenge for planners. The idea that the only viable future for a community is to be relocated elsewhere is unusual and confronting. Managing climigration through planning practice may prove more straightforward than adjusting to the idea in the first place.

– ref. ‘Climigration’: when communities must move because of climate change – http://theconversation.com/climigration-when-communities-must-move-because-of-climate-change-122529