Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Carah, Senior Lecturer in Communication, The University of Queensland

This is the fourth in a series of articles discussing a recently released comprehensive evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 policy reforms to tackle alcohol-fuelled violence and the implications for liquor regulation and the night-time economy in Queensland and Australia. A summary report is also available.

The effect on live music of changes to trading conditions in nightlife precincts generates heated debate. That’s because live music matters. It is a unique and important part of the late-night rhythm and culture of the city.

In both Melbourne and Sydney, we’ve seen sustained debate about how urban development and regulation of licensed venues affect opportunities for live performance.

Contrary to some of the claims made in these debates, our evaluation of the Queensland government’s tightening of liquor licensing restrictions in 2016 suggests no change to the number of venues or impact on the overall trend of an increase in live music performances.

Read more: Lessons from Queensland on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy

But staging smaller shows by emerging artists has become more difficult because of the costs of new security requirements. The viability of the venues depends on selling alcohol. As a result, many venues depend on alcohol sales in late-night trade when they convert to being a bar or club with DJs.

What happened in Fortitude Valley?

In July 2016, the Queensland government changed laws affecting designated safe night precincts like Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. This included serving last drinks at 3am and mandatory ID scanning in venues trading after midnight.

We monitored what impact these changes to trading conditions might have on live music in Fortitude Valley.

The Valley is unique in Australia for its concentration of live music venues in one small neighbourhood and the early development of policy to protect and foster live music in the area.

Read more: A live music scene needs a live music policy

The Valley has two overlapping precincts. The special entertainment precinct was created in 2006 to provide regulatory certainty for live music venues. The safe night precinct is the area subject to the 2016 Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence legislation.

Live music venues in the Valley compete with large clubs and pubs for space. They are subject to the regulatory and compliance frameworks introduced to contain harms in the precinct. As a result, they are having to rethink how they maintain their distinctive music scenes in rapidly changing neighbourhoods.

Have live music venue numbers changed?

Despite its cultural and economic importance of original live music venues, their numbers and performances are not systematically and independently monitored in Australia. Music industry bodies could work with performers and venues to publish independent and reliable information about the number and type of venues and gigs over time.

Music rights licensing organisation APRA/AMCOS asks live music performers to submit performance returns that document all their live performances. Our analysis of this data shows live music performances in The Valley have been trending upward since 2001. Our evaluation suggests the Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence policy measures had no impact on this trend.

This APRA/AMCOS performance data, however, cover everything from cover bands, DJs and ambient music in restaurants and bars to original live music performances in small venues through to stadium rock shows.

We also used a combination of precinct walk-throughs (where we observed original live music venues trading on Saturday nights), street press and social media. We found the number of original live music venues in the Valley has not changed since last drinks and ID scanner regulations were introduced in 2016. While original live music venues come and go, change owners and change names, the overall number in the area has been stable for much of the past 15 years.

Live music is dependent on late-night trade

While the trading pattern of venues on Saturday nights has not changed, in interviews we conducted venue owners and managers reported various ways they subsidised or supplemented the income from live music.

Nearly all original live music venues only generate income from bar sales. Proceeds from tickets and the door go to production costs and the musicians. The viability of the venues depends on selling alcohol before, during and after performances.

Read more: Queenslanders are among our heaviest drinkers on nights out, and changing that culture is a challenge

Some venues used profit generated on large weekend shows to subsidise smaller local weeknight shows. These shows matter because they provide opportunities for emerging artists to hone their craft and are part of the distinctive cultural fabric of the city.

However, venue owners indicated that staging these smaller shows has become more difficult because of the prohibitive cost of employing security to operate the mandatory ID scanners. This illustrates how, according to venue owners, efforts to contain harm in the nightlife economy can have unintended damaging effects on cultural scenes.

The majority of venues that support original live music in the precinct are less than ten years old. Many seem well adapted to the commercialised late-night precinct because they combine live music with late-night trade. They put on a show early in the evening and then by midnight convert to a late-night bar or club with DJs.

Some of these venues claimed they would not be commercially viable if they only put on original live music before midnight and then closed. Others indicated live music enabled them to generate revenue earlier in the evening – before a clubbing crowd comes in.

A policy dilemma

This kind of adaptation is what you’d expect to see in a market as it reacts to changes in both consumer culture and policy. But it raises thorny questions for cultural and public health policy.

From a public health perspective we might be concerned about original live music becoming dependent on late-night trade and mass alcohol consumption in nightlife precincts. From a cultural policy perspective the ingenuity of venues using the earlier hours of an evening to stage original live music is something to encourage.

The Valley has a unique concentration of live music venues, and cultural policy has played a role in fostering and sustaining this vibrant cultural scene. In one sense that’s a success story the city should celebrate and look to capitalise on alongside the effort to reduce harms in nightlife precincts. But, in another sense, a critical issue is that the effort to both maintain cultural vibrancy and reduce harms is potentially thwarted by venues shifting to a homogenous late-night clubbing model.

– ref. Tighter alcohol licensing hasn’t killed live music, but it’s harder for emerging artists – http://theconversation.com/tighter-alcohol-licensing-hasnt-killed-live-music-but-its-harder-for-emerging-artists-121117

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Sear, Industry Fellow, UNSW Canberra Cyber, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW

Danger Close is a new Australian film depicting one of the most significant battles of the Vietnam war: The Battle of Long Tan. “Danger Close” is a military phrase used in battle when forward and directing fire onto an enemy.

Danger Close might also be an apt way to describe what is one of the most controversial Australia military battles of the 20th century, but also the perils of producing films about events that are still in living memory.

On August 18, 1966, an isolated infantry group of 108 men from the D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment and three New Zealanders from an artillery forward observation party, plus RAAF helicopters and a relief force of armoured personnel carriers, fought a battle opposing a vastly superior force, in abysmal weather conditions, for an entire afternoon.

Seventeen Australians were killed in the battle in a rubber plantation at Long Tan, in southern Vietnam. A further 25 were wounded, one of whom later died.

Long Tan deservedly has a place in the pantheon of Anzac history. It is a tale of extraordinary bravery, fortitude and coolness under pressure and a phalanx of strong personalities. It also featured a live concert with performers such as Little Pattie and Col Joye, which happened at the First Australian Taskforce Base of Nui Dat and could heard in Long Tan before the battle began.

Vietnam veterans have long been caught in a struggle between a nation divided over an unpopular conflict, and the reluctance of our official culture to recognise their professionalism and bravery. Indeed the Commander of D Company, Major Harry Smith, and Platoon Sergeant Bob Buick have fought for 50 years to have the Australian government officially recognise the bravery of those in the battle.

Though Australian popular music has recognised the collective pain of Vietnam (think of Cold Chisel’s Khe Sanh), no major Australian film has tackled Vietnam since The Odd Angry Shot (1979).

In Danger Close, producer, and former reservist Martin Walsh, Hollywood blockbuster writer Stuart Beattie and auteur of precise and visceral emotion Kriv Stenders (Boxing Day, Red Dog) have created a film that combines attention to military detail and emotional intensity with a conventional cinematic narrative arc and characterisation.

Vietnam movies as a cinematic genre have evolved over decades in the United States. Danger Close is most closely associated with the memorialising genre of films like Platoon (1986). In such films, the battleground is imbued with religiosity – this helps reconcile the act of private remembering with more public notions of commemoration and sacrifice, in a healing way.

When I saw Danger Close in Canberra, the audience reaction reflected the kind of public ritualism most often seen on Anzac Day. There was a mood of profound, reverential, collective silence broken only by applause as the credits rolled.

The battle from both sides

No one doubts the bravery of the men who fought at Long Tan, and the respect they are due. But the film repeats some statistics that are the subject of considerable debate. The failure to acknowledge this debate obscures the complexity of the battle, and the military skill on both sides.

The official Australian War Memorial history To Long Tan estimates 2500 enemy troops were involved in the battle. Danger Close repeats this figure on screen. However To Long Tan states that only 1000 members of this Viet Cong force had direct contact with soldiers from D Company. It reports that “the confirmed result of the battle of Long Tan was 245 enemy left dead on the battlefield and three enemy captured”.

Ernie Chamberlain, a former intelligence officer and veteran of the Vietnam conflict, has produced a detailed monograph on Viet Cong D445 Battalion, the opposing force against Australians and at Long Tan.

Combining Australian research with multiple Vietnamese sources, Chamberlain has questioned the figures in the film Danger Close. He suggests the final figures are that 1,750 Viet Cong/NVA were in the region of the Battle, with 210 killed in action.

Indeed, in May a post appeared on the “General’s Page” of “Build the Nation – Maintain the Nation”, a website possibly connected to the People’s Army of Vietnam, foregrounding “another war film” about “American’s war of invasion in Vietnam”.

This post, possibly from a senior officer of the Vietnamese military who had seen only the trailer for Danger Close, pointed out that though “we beat them comprehensively” the film underplayed the technical skill of the Viet Cong Commanders – and inflated the figures of the Viet Cong casualties.

Tactical confrontations

There has also been a running debate in the veteran community about whether D Company wandered into an ambush. Chamberlain’s examinations of intelligence and a complex variety of Vietnamese sources suggest that the battle was a result of a Viet Cong (VC) tactic to “lure the tiger from the mountain” to fight the force of a new Australian base where it suited them.

The film depicts wave on wave of Viet Cong running at the Australians, seemingly with abandon. But closing on the enemy fast was a tactical technique used by the Viet Cong to get as close as they could to the Australian troops, to compromise artillery support – to literally bring the “danger close”. These kinds of depictions are in danger of depersonalising and othering the Vietnamese.

Expanding the myth

Commemorative storytelling in Australia tends to valorise tactical confrontations – individuals and small units engaging in direct hostilities to defeat enemies and hold terrain. Danger Close is emblematic of this type of narrative.

But this attachment to decontextualised small unit actions might not always be the best way forward for understanding conflict on a personal or political level.

Other veterans of Vietnam have teamed up with those from the Afghanistan conflict to use geospatial data visualisations of every “contact” to tell a different, non-narrative version of Australia’s Vietnam War. Such approaches have led to genuine collaborative efforts, sharing data and helping a contemporary Vietnam find its own “Wandering Souls” Missing In Action. This kind of work acknowledges a new sense of military common purpose in Asia, which will only grow in the future.

We are headed towards an era of Accelerated Warfare likely to occur in complex mega-cities and the cyber domain, and a new environment of political warfare. The Australians who participate in these new kinds of wars deserve to see the Anzac myth expand to meet their experiences and new kinds of service.

In this urgent context, arguably Danger Close has missed a great opportunity. The film repeats disputed facts and interpretations, while the emotional force of its compelling story risks cementing in Australian culture this version as the only view of Long Tan.

It’s easy to say it’s a fictionalised movie, not a documentary, and cut Danger Close some slack. But how do we want to frame the stories we tell ourselves as we face a complex, uncertain future in our region?

Putting Australia’s Vietnam War on screen is way overdue. Commemorative storytelling is essential to heal wounds of the past. But Australian culture must begin to frame war stories with an eye to the present and future too.

There are other versions of “Anzac courage” that might be set in Timor-Leste, Rwanda, Iraq or Afghanistan, and new narratives that might accurately reflect the complexities within every conflict.

– ref. Danger close? The battle over the meaning of Long Tan – http://theconversation.com/danger-close-the-battle-over-the-meaning-of-long-tan-121487

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ann Kayis-Kumar, Senior Lecturer, UNSW

Can something that has been seen be unseen?

It’s an axiom of the internet age that it can’t – and though the world’s biggest mining company, Glencore would like it to be otherwise, it’s one with which the High Court of Australia today agreed in a landmark case concerning tax havens and data leaks.

Last year Glencore went to the court to demand the Australian Taxation Office unsee what it might have seen about Glencore’s use of offshore legal lurks to minimise its Australian tax obligations.

What had the Anglo–Swiss multinational bothered was information from the single biggest data leak in history – called the Paradise Papers because the documents exposed the use of “tax paradises” by corporations and wealthy individuals.

Read more: Four things the Paradise Papers tell us about global business and political elites

Glencore’s lawyers argued anything about the company in the leaked documents was “privileged” and the tax office should be prevented from using that information to pursue the company for more money.

Today the High Court agreed the leaked documents were privileged. But it also ruled the tax office could use them. This gives the tax office a green light to use leaked documents to go after any multinational corporation or individual using tax havens to minimise their tax obligations.

The Paradise Papers

Glencore was among about 120,000 companies and people mentioned in the Paradise Papers. The papers entail more than 13 million documents handed over to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published its first stories in November 2017. Other companies named in the documents include Apple, Facebook, McDonald’s, Nike, Twitter and Uber. Individuals include Queen Elizabeth and pop singer Shakira.

The data leak, like the Panama Papers, Luxembourg Leaks and Football Leaks, illuminated the secretive tax-haven industry for tax agencies.

Prior to the Paradise Papers, the Panama Papers led about two-dozen national agencies to collect more than US$1.2 billion in fines and back taxes. The Australian Taxation Office was one of the biggest collectors, recovering more than US$92 million.

Read more: These five countries are conduits for the world’s biggest tax havens

Glencore was hoping to ensure the tax office couldn’t use the Paradise Papers to do the same. While in Canada it agreed to pay regulators US$22 million in fines for corporate wrongdoings exposed by the leaked documents, it decided to take a different tack in Australia – where its operations include 25 mines extracting coal, copper, zinc, nickel and bauxite.

Even if the documents exposed Glencore’s connection to secretive deals and hidden companies, Glencore’s lawyers argued they were between lawyer and client, and therefore confidential, covered by “legal professional privilege”.

Because of this privilege, Glencore’s lawyers said, the tax office should not be able use the information to demand more money.

When a cat is let out of a bag

Barristers on both sides discussed the case in terms of a cat being let out of a bag.

The tax office’s position was that “privilege” only meant someone could refuse to let a cat out of the bag. Once a cat was out of the bag, however, “privilege” couldn’t be used to put the cat back.

Glencore’s position was that it could, because the cat was still a cat.

The High Court’s justices did not agree with Glencore’s barristers. In their unanimous decision, they state:

“The Glencore documents are in the possession of the defendants and may be used in connection with the exercise of their statutory powers unless the plaintiffs are able to identify a juridical basis on which the Court can restrain that use.”

This means “privilege” only prevents the tax office from demanding Glencore let the cat out the bag. Now the cat is out of the bag, Glencore can’t ask the tax office to pretend it has not seen the cat.

Greater loopholes remain

While this means the tax office can now use leaked documents to pursue a company or individual for more tax, it doesn’t necessarily mean the federal government is about to reap a revenue windfall.

To begin with, tax officials will still need to trawl through millions of documents. To do so will take time and money.

Then, to have a strong case, the tax office will need to find that companies or individuals aren’t just deliberately structuring their tax affairs to minimise tax – because that’s allowed – but are going further, into the illegitimate area of “aggressive tax planning”.

This is the greater problem for Australia’s tax office – not the companies doing something clearly shady but those whose legal resources are so far ahead of the tax office that they can achieve all they want in minimising tax through completely legal loopholes.

It takes years for loopholes to be closed, and once they are, corporate tax advisers just find news ones.

It’s a game between a nimble, well-advised mouse and a slower-moving cat.

That’s a problem no High Court decision can solve. Only a federal government committed to genuine tax reform can do it.

– ref. Australia’s tax office can use global data leaks to pursue multinationals, High Court rules – http://theconversation.com/australias-tax-office-can-use-global-data-leaks-to-pursue-multinationals-high-court-rules-116972

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Lawrence, Professor, Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University

This is an edited extract from SLUDGE: disaster on Victoria’s goldmines.

Bento Rodrigues, Brazil, 6 November 2015

Wet, orange mud covers everything: streets, houses, cars, animals, trees, fields. The violent force of a torrent of mud has overturned cars and left them hovering on top of buildings. It has torn the roofs off houses and pushed over their walls.

The view of the town from helicopters flying above reveals a desolate landscape: sludge-caked animals struggle to free themselves, and rescue teams search desperately for survivors. Mud dyes the river orange for hundreds of kilometres downstream, and two weeks later it will flow out into the Atlantic in an expanding orange stain.

Read more: Dam collapse at Brazilian mine exposes grave safety problems

This devastation is the result of the catastrophic failure of a tailings dam: a vast settling pond built to store the muddy waste from Samarco’s Germano iron ore mine. Late one afternoon in November 2015 the dam wall gave way. The collapse released a flood of polluted, sediment-laden water that raced down the valley below, destroying and burying everything in its path and leaving 21 people dead. The valley will never be the same.

Just three years later another tailings dam failed in the same part of Brazil, with more tragic human consequences.

On January 29, 2019, as mine workers were sitting down to lunch in the company cafeteria, one of the dams gave way at the Córrego do Feijão iron mine near Brumadinho. Nearly 12 million cubic metres of polluted mud rushed down the Rio Paraopeba River, submerging the mine’s administration area and parts of nearby communities.

More than 300 people were killed, including the workers eating their lunch and two holidaymakers from Sydney. A third of the bodies still have not been recovered from the sludge.

Ironically, the owners of the mines – including Australia’s BHP – built these tailings dams to protect the environment. Without them, waste would have poured into the river every day the mines operated. The sludge would have flowed everywhere, oozing through streets and under doors, creeping up walls and between trees, covering gardens and crops.

Read more: How BHP and Vale react next to Brazilian dam failure will be critical

It would still have turned the ocean orange – it just would have taken longer and occurred more gradually, over years rather than hours, and no one would have drowned.

Victoria, Australia, 19th century

In the nineteenth century Victoria was the centre of a global resources boom, with the surging economy and environmental consequences to match. Gold from the mines built Marvellous Melbourne, while mud oozed from the goldfields to choke numerous rivers across Victoria. In those days tailings dams were unheard of.

Read more: How gold rushes helped make the modern world

When BHP was formed as Broken Hill Proprietary in 1885 it was common practice to just let the waste flow where it flowed, and no one thought differently. Tailings covered vast areas of land in mining regions all over the world, including Australia.

Today, environmental protection laws in developed countries require mines to store their waste water on site. Modern tailings dams like the one that failed in Brazil are intended to keep mining waste out of rivers. Mining companies build ponds next to their processing plants and fill them with all the water that has been used to process the ores.

These dams contain millions of cubic metres of highly toxic liquid and slurry. Controlling waste at the source is considered modern industrial and environmental best practice, and dams hold thousands of megalitres of polluted water, keeping them out of waterways.

Read more: Gold Rush Victoria was as wasteful as we are today

Dams can work well for years, but sometimes, as at the Germano iron ore mine, they give way and the accumulated toxic waste of many years is released in one catastrophic event.

Tailings dams and other environmental protection measures are a recent set of developments. In Australia they have their origins in the long history of the gold rush. Modern laws regulating the resources industry are the result of generations of struggle against the mining waste that once filled river valleys. People had a name for these waves of sand, clay and gravel that choked the rivers and blanketed the fields. They called it “sludge”, and they wanted to be rid of it.

Read more: Emancipated wenches in gaudy jewellery: the liberating bling of the goldfields

Victorian communities were some of the first in the world to successfully challenge industrial pollution.

Understanding how they succeeded and why it took so long provides us with vital insight into contemporary struggles to balance mining interests with environmental values.

SLUDGE: disaster on Victoria’s goldmines is published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. The book will launch in Melbourne on August 15 at Readings, Carlton. Details here.

– ref. Gold rush-era rules to stop mining pollution are still in use – but they’re failing – http://theconversation.com/gold-rush-era-rules-to-stop-mining-pollution-are-still-in-use-but-theyre-failing-120887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Eckstein, Senior Lecturer in Law and Medicine, University of Tasmania

Working your way around the health-care system can be overwhelming. This is especially hard when care takes place in health systems under stress.

However as a patient, you have rights about how you’re treated. This includes not just your actual therapy, but how you’re spoken to, how your records are handled and even whether you wish to be treated at all.

Now, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has updated its charter of patient rights.

The idea is to promote a more active role in health care for patients (and their carers) by reminding them of their seven rights: access to health care, safety, respect, partnership, information, privacy and giving feedback.

But what do these rights really mean when it comes to day-to-day issues you or your family might face with your GP, in hospital or in a nursing home?

Read more: Why an Australian charter of rights is a matter of national urgency

Example 1: leaving hospital early

Imagine an elderly patient who has been hospitalised with an infection. After a couple of days of treatment, she wants to go home to live alone. The patient’s doctors are worried she won’t be able to take care of herself and try to convince her to move into a rehabilitation facility. She refuses.

Respect means the patient has the right to make her own choices, even if they could result in harm. But this doesn’t mean just abandoning the patient to her rights. A first step is the right to information, to ensure she understands the risks of going home. Partnership requires communication with the patient herself as well as other people she chooses, like family members and friends. This helps support the patient.

Read more: Hospital discharges to ‘no fixed address’ – here’s a much better way

Example 2: dementia restraints

More than half of all people in permanent residential aged care have dementia.

Sometimes patients become physically aggressive, becoming a danger to themselves and others. Physical and chemical restraints for these people has been widespread, and is being considered by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

Restraints won’t be the right thing in all cases. Whether it’s right for a particular person requires balancing respect for the patient’s own views and dignity, with other people’s rights to safety. Respect can be facilitated by working in partnership with the patient and their family to identify safe options other than restraint.

Read more: Physical restraint doesn’t protect patients – there are better alternatives

Example 3: health information disclosure

Trips to the emergency department are often scary and sensitive. The visit can be even worse if you feel others can overhear your conversations with doctors or nurses.

More than one in ten people who went to the emergency department of a major Melbourne hospital reported this experience. These people felt the loss of their privacy. It also might fail to show respect, dignity and consideration, as required in the right to respect.

But not every unwanted disclosure of health information will be wrong. Some might even be necessary to meet other health-care rights.

For instance, an emergency department with curtains instead of walled rooms to help people or equipment move more freely might meet the safety right even though it risks a patient’s right to privacy. But the charter at least means hospitals and treating teams have to justify any unwanted disclosure of health information. It also means patients who feel uncomfortable can give feedback, another of their rights.

Read more: Paper tsunami: how the move to digital medical records is leaving us drowning in old paper files

How does Australia stack up?

Other countries have created similar lists of patients’ rights, including New Zealand and Scotland.

The most valuable part of the Australian charter is improving patient and carer understanding of existing health-care rights. This makes it easier to know when to complain to a state or territory complaints commission, or the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.

Although the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care is releasing more resources for patients, its charter may not go far enough in protecting groups who experience systemic bias in their health-care interactions. This includes many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Read more: Ms Dhu coronial findings show importance of teaching doctors and nurses about unconscious bias

Another pitfall of the charter is its non-binding nature. It describes the rights patients should expect but it does little to enforce them. This can leave the charter as something of a toothless tiger, an issue also discussed internationally.

The charter also doesn’t deal with potential patient responsibilities. These are the obligations consumers have for their own health, like treating staff considerately and keeping medical appointments.

It’s hard to see how one can exist without the other.

– ref. Patients have rights. Here’s how to use yours – http://theconversation.com/patients-have-rights-heres-how-to-use-yours-121637

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

After the first Democratic presidential debate on June 25-26, Joe Biden fell in Democratic national presidential polls, and Kamala Harris surged. In the lead-up to the July 30-31 debate, Biden recovered lost support while Harris lost some of her gains.

Read more: US Democratic presidential primaries: Biden leading, followed by Sanders, Warren, Harris; and will Trump be beaten?

Since the debate, the biggest movement is clear gains for Elizabeth Warren, while Harris has continued to fall. In the RealClearPolitics national Democratic poll average, Biden currently leads with 30.8%, followed by Warren at 18.0%, Bernie Sanders at 16.8%, Harris at 8.3% and Pete Buttigieg at 6.3%. All other candidates are at 2% or less.

As I wrote previously, four states – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina – hold their primaries or caucuses in February 2020, while all other states need to wait until at least March 2020. So early state polls are important.

In the only poll conducted since the second Democratic debate in Iowa, Biden led with 28%, followed by Warren at 19%, Harris at 11%, Sanders at 9% and Buttigieg at 8%. In New Hampshire, there have been two polls since the debate. One has Biden at 21%, Sanders 17%, Warren 14%, Harris 8% and Buttigieg 6%. The other gives Sanders a lead with 21%, followed by Biden at 15%, Warren 12%, Buttigieg 8% and Harris 7%.

In general election polling, Biden has a high single-digit lead over Donald Trump, Sanders a mid single-digit lead, and both Warren and Harris have low single-digit leads. Biden’s perceived electability is crucial in explaining his continued strong polling, as this tweet from analyst Nate Silver says.

For the next Democratic presidential debate, on September 12, the threshold for participation has been increased. As a result there are likely to be far fewer candidates than the 20 in each of the first two debates.

Trump’s ratings slightly down after gun massacres

On August 3-4, 31 people were murdered in two separate gun massacres in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.

In the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate, Trump’s ratings are slightly down since these massacres. With all polls, Trump’s ratings are 41.9% approve, 53.6% disapprove, for a net approval of -11.7%. With polls of registered or likely voters, his ratings are 42.6% approve, 53.3% disapprove, for a net approval of -10.7%.

Perhaps due to his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump’s net ratings have fallen about 1.5 points since my previous article a month ago, and this trend has continued after the massacres.

In the latest US jobs report, the unemployment rate remained at just 3.7% as 164,000 jobs were added in July. These jobs reports have been good news for Trump. I wrote an old but still relevant article on my personal website last year about how the low US participation rate holds down the unemployment rate compared to Australia.

The question that should be asked about Trump is why, given the strong US economic performance, his net approval is well below zero. FiveThirtyEight has historical data from 12 presidents going back to Harry Truman, and Trump’s net approval is only ahead of Jimmy Carter at this point in their presidencies. If there is an economic downturn before the November 2020 general election, Trump is likely to be far more vulnerable.

An economic downturn could occur due to Trump’s trade war with China, or due to a “no-deal” Brexit in the UK. I wrote for The Poll Bludger on August 2 that the UK parliament is running out of options to prevent no-deal, which PM Boris Johnson’s hard “Leave” cabinet suggests he will pursue. In my previous Poll Bludger article on July 23, I talked about Johnson’s crushing victory (66.4-33.6) in a Conservative members’ ballot.

Trump can still win the 2020 election, despite his low approval ratings, if he is able to either demonise his eventual Democratic opponent, or win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, as occurred in 2016. However, recent state by state polling has Trump’s net approval below zero in ten states he carried in 2016, and in some of those states his ratings are well below zero.

Read more: US 2016 election final results: how Trump won

If all the states where Trump’s net approval is currently negative were to go to the Democrat, the Democrat would win the presidency by an emphatic 419-119 votes in the Electoral College.

Australian election preference flows and the first Newspoll

On August 2, the Electoral Commission released data on how every minor party’s preferences flowed between the major parties at the May federal election. The Greens, who won 10.4% of the primary vote, flowed heavily to Labor (82.2%), but Clive Palmer’s UAP (3.4% of the vote) flowed at 65.1% to Coalition, and One Nation (3.1% of the vote) was almost identical in its flow (65.2%). Excluding the Greens, UAP and One Nation, Others preferences were 50.7% to Labor.

Analyst Kevin Bonham says there was barely any increase in the Greens preference flow to Labor since 2016. The Greens flow increased in four states, fell slightly in Queensland, and was weaker in SA as more moderate voters returned to the Greens after the collapse of Centre Alliance.

In 2016, One Nation preferences were just 50.4% to the Coalition, so the Coalition’s flow from One Nation increased almost 15%. In 2013, Palmer’s party preferences were 53.7% to the Coalition, so the UAP’s flow to the Coalition improved 11.4%.

Preference shifts advantaged the Coalition by 0.8% on the national two party vote compared to if no preference shifts had occurred. The Coalition’s overall share of minor party preferences (40.4%) was its best since 2001, when the Greens only had 5%.

Read more: Difficult for Labor to win in 2022 using new pendulum, plus Senate and House preference flows

In the first Newspoll since the election, the Coalition led by 53-47, from primary votes of 44% Coalition, 33% Labor, 11% Greens and 3% One Nation. Scott Morrison’s ratings were 51% satisfied, 36% dissatisfied, for a net approval of +15, a big improvement from +1 in the final pre-election Newspoll that was biased against the Coalition. Anthony Albanese’s initial ratings were 39% satisfied, 36% dissatisfied. Morrison led by 48-31 as better PM.

This poll was conducted July 25-28 from a sample of 1,600. Bonham says there is no indication in The Australian’s report that anything has changed at Newspoll since the election’s poll failure. As I wrote after the election, there was, and still is, a lack of adequate documentation of Newspoll’s methods.

Read more: Newspoll probably wrong since Morrison became PM; polling has been less accurate at recent elections

Spain’s Socialists fail to form government

The Spanish Socialists won the April 28 election, but as I wrote on my personal website on August 1, a lack of cooperation between the Socialists and far-left Podemos could mean another election. Also covered: a landslide for former comedian Zelensky’s party in the Ukraine, and the conservatives easily retain their hold over Japan’s upper house.

– ref. Biden still leads US Democratic primaries, Trump’s ratings fall slightly after gun massacres, plus Australian preference flows – http://theconversation.com/biden-still-leads-us-democratic-primaries-trumps-ratings-fall-slightly-after-gun-massacres-plus-australian-preference-flows-121439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gerry Groot, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Adelaide

As China grows more powerful and influential, our New Superpower series looks at what this means for the world – how China maintains its power, how it wields its power and how its power might be threatened. Read the rest of the series here.

The operations of the Chinese Communist Party are generally opaque, especially to outsiders. But in recent years, the party’s reach and influence with the Chinese diaspora has become much more obvious, particularly in Australia.

Most recently, Liberal MP Gladys Liu, the first Chinese-Australian woman to win a seat in the lower house, was revealed to have ties to the World Trade United Foundation, a body whose officeholders are closely tied to pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong.

This follows the resignation of former Senator Sam Dastyari over his contacts with Chinese political donor Huang Xiangmo in 2017, and last year’s passage of a new foreign interference law, which was sparked by concerns over Chinese influence.

What connects all these elements is the Communist Party’s little-known United Front Work Department. The successes of this department have been crucial to building the party’s legitimacy at home and, to a significant extent, abroad, especially with overseas Chinese communities.

Read more: Why do we keep turning a blind eye to Chinese political interference?

What is the United Front?

The United Front Work Department, or UFWD for short, is a special department of the Communist Party. It is responsible for organising outreach to key groups of Chinese citizens, including ethnic Chinese abroad, and representing and influencing them.

In its simplest terms, the UFWD is about uniting those who can help the party achieve its goals and neutralise its critics. Its work is often summed up as “making friends”, which sounds benign, and often is. But it can have other meanings, such as helping to stifle dissent at home and abroad.

Within China, the United Front system historically consisted of intellectuals, business people, religious believers, ethnic minorities, returned overseas Chinese and former members of the Nationalist Party (known as the KMT or GMD). More recently, this group has expanded to include social media personalities, independent professionals (notably lawyers), managers in foreign-funded businesses, overseas Chinese, and young Chinese studying abroad.

Overseas Chinese, including those in Australia, have a special place in this system and are actively courted by dedicated UFWD representatives.

How its mission is changing under Xi Jinping

The United Front has become much more prominent since Xi Jinping became Communist Party general secretary in 2012. Xi has been instrumental in raising its status in the Chinese political system and publicly supporting a dramatic expansion of its roles and target groups.

Under his watch, the UFWD’s work has become much more centred on promoting the party’s key ideals. These include the consolidation of Xi’s leadership and spread of his ideology (known as “Xi Jinping Thought”), and the broader goals of ensuring social stability and China’s national rejuvenation.

Importantly, the latter includes reinforcing China’s claims over the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Macau, and particularly Taiwan.

While China already has sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macau, the United Front has been crucial in helping the party exert influence over local politicians, trade unions, and business groups in both regions. However. the current unrest in Hong Kong shows this approach may have lost some of its effectiveness.

United Front is also one of the ways the party stakes its claim to popular legitimacy and to representing all Chinese people throughout the world.

One way the department does this is by carefully vetting members of key social and occupational groups, such as doctors and lawyers, who provide the government with expert opinion on proposed laws and other issues during “consultative conferences.”

Those selected to take part in these conferences are assumed to have considerable influence and prestige. And they include a number of overseas Chinese, including some Australian-Chinese.

All members of these conferences are carefully screened by the UFWD for their political reliability and willingness to accept party leadership and its positions.

Read more: Academic Chongyi Feng: profits, freedom and China’s ‘soft power’ in Australia

Many provocative ideas and issues that can’t be raised in the party itself or in the People’s Congresses are often floated in the consultative conferences.

This system of garnering expert advice and channelling it back to the party is central to its claims to be democratic. The party maintains that this system of consultation is superior to Western democracy because it is more representative and doesn’t suffer from the “chaotic” results of Western-style elections.

This system is even more important since the party has given up on its own longstanding experiments with village-level electoral democracy. These elections failed to deliver on the initial promise of bringing greater efficiency and legitimacy to the party, and instead often became dominated by local special interests pushed by powerful families, clans or even gangs.

How United Front is exerting its influence

Under Xi, there has also been a dramatic shift in what the UFWD is expected to achieve. Much of its work since the 1980s has focused on incorporating new interest groups into the political system (such as entrepreneurs and professionals) to prevent the emergence of any organisations outside the party’s control.

Now, it is much more about assimilation – all members are expected to believe the party’s central ideology and promote Xi as China’s “core leader”.

In a sense, we are seeing a process similar to that of the 1950s, when United Front was first used to organise groups like intellectuals, religious believers, and business people and provide them with nominal political representation in the consultative conferences – in some cases as government ministers.

The next step was forcing them to accept the Communist Party takeover of their businesses, churches, or associations. The United Front also demanded they fully accept socialist ideology through campaigns of intense, and sometimes violent, “thought reform,” which left many dead.

Today, it is minorities such as the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians who are again under intense pressure to allow the party to take full control of their organisations. This often includes the demolition of property and the severing any links with foreign religious groups and NGOs. The UFWD is the organiser in the background.

Read more: The Australia-China Relations Institute doesn’t belong at UTS

The flow-on effects of these changes in Australia is an intensification of the party’s efforts to unite with and influence the Chinese diaspora, and use them to promote the party’s causes and positions. Or at the very least, not to oppose them.

We have seen a dramatic proliferation of United Front-linked organisations in Australia, such as the Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China, as well as new religious bodies and industry and cultural associations.

The marginalisation of sensitive issues like Taiwan among Chinese-Australian communities, the lack of support for China’s Muslims and other persecuted religious minorities, and the very muted responses to the protests in Hong Kong, seems to indicate that these efforts are bearing fruit.

– ref. Explainer: what is China’s United Front, and how much influence does it have in Australia? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-chinas-united-front-and-how-much-influence-does-it-have-in-australia-119174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Seadon, Senior Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology

Recycling in Australia used to be fairly simple. Our older readers may remember bottle drives, paper and cardboard collections, and the trip to the scrap metal merchant to sell metals.

This is called, in recycling parlance, sorting the “streams”. It creates very clean recycling that requires little sorting at a plant.

But recycling got more complicated. As councils organised kerbside collection, it made less economic sense to sort at the kerb. Instead, trucks collected mixed recycling and took it to centralised sorting facilities.

The materials also changed, with glass often replaced by plastics. Plastics like the PET in drink bottles and HDPE in milk bottles were easy to separate and had a ready recycling market.

Then, when developing countries like China opened the floodgates to paper and plastics, there was no need to separate the seven categories of plastics. It was cheaper and easier for Australian companies to bundle it all up and send it to China for “recycling” – in 2017, some 600,000 tonnes.

Read more: Here’s what happens to our plastic recycling when it goes offshore

When China found they were the world’s dumping ground they shut the door and demanded only clean, separated plastics – and then only the ones that had a secondary market in China.

Suddenly Australia was expected to separate more carefully – and this cost money. Now the federal government has pledged A$20 million to boost Australia’s recycling industry.

But what is Australia’s recycling industry?

Right now, there are 193 material recovery facilities in Australia. Most are hand-sorted; nine are semi-automated, and nine are fully automated. These are nowhere near sufficient to sort Australia’s annual recycling.

There are two basic ways to sort recycling: mechanical-biological treatment plants, which sort mixed waste into low-grade recycling, and material recovery facilities, which have a stronger focus on extracting reusable stuff.

Here’s how they work.

Mechanical-biological treatment

MBT plants are in various stages of development in Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney. These plants take the rubbish we generate every day and inject it into a rotary drum (a bioreactor) that spins and is heated to 60–70℃.

The process shreds the waste and the organic wastes are stabilised and homogenised. Most of the water evaporates through a fermentation process in which microorganisms break down the organic material and release heat – much like a composting system.

Read more: Why can’t all plastic waste be recycled?

The material then leaves the reactor and passes over a screen that separates the organic waste. The organic waste then fermented and composted, then separated again using a smaller mesh screen. The smallest particles are sent back to the bioreactor drum to provide the microorganisms.

Meanwhile, the larger material from the first screening is sent to a wind separator where the lightweight material, like plastics, are blown the furthest, medium-weight materials, such as textiles, fall in the middle and the heaviest, like metal, glass and stone, fall immediately. The heaviest fraction is sent along a conveyor and metals are separated by a magnetic separator.

The remaining material is sent to another wind separator, along with any remaining material from the other fractions that cannot be separated, which separates combustibles and debris.

The debris (about 10% of the original waste) goes to landfill, and combustibles are sent to a facility that compresses the material into blocks for industrial fuel.

Read more: We can’t recycle our way to ‘zero waste’

Material recovery facilities

Material recovery facilities accept mixed recycling. The first step is putting recyclables on a conveyor belt where they are carried up to a sorting line.

In the more mechanical processes, people line up along the belt and rip open bags and remove contaminants such as non-recyclable plastic, used nappies and other rubbish, which then goes to landfill.

In the more automated systems, ripping open the bags can be done by machines and the sorting is done in the next stage.

The material then goes onto a scalping screen that sorts out the small foreign objects before passing over a screen in which flat materials such as cardboard pass over and the others drop down. The paper and cardboard go off to storage. Meanwhile, the material that has dropped through hits another screen that breaks any glass, which drops through the screen and is taken by conveyor belt to a recovery bin.

The leftover material goes to fibre quality-control stations where the fibre materials (such as paper) pass by operators who pick off any contaminants before the paper goes into another bin for baling and recycling.

This leaves the cans and plastic containers. Passing this stream over a magnet means any steel cans will be removed from the stream and collected.

Next, any fibre that has made it through the process is removed manually and the plastics are then sorted manually into individual types. The bottles are perforated mechanically so they do not explode when compressed.

With the plastic containers removed, the next step is to divert the aluminium. Powerful magnetic fields created by an eddy current separator throws non-iron metals, like aluminium, forward from the belt into a product bin and non-metals fall off the belt into a separate bin. Finally most of the materials are compressed and baled for efficient transport.

Automated sorting systems

The nine more modern facilities in Australia use optical sorting systems to take out the manual and mechanical sorting. The optical sorters detect anywhere between three and eight varieties of material.

A new facility in New South Wales can detect eight different types of material: aluminium, cardboard, glass, HDPE plastic, mixed paper, newspaper, PET plastic, and steel. The combined stream passes through a light beam which then instructs a set of high pressure air jets to direct the material to one of eight collection bins.

Read more: Australian recycling plants have no incentive to improve

As worldwide demand for high quality, clean recycling material increases, Australia must upgrade its technology. Incentives and financial help for recycling companies may be necessary to see Australia develop a viable domestic recycling industry.

– ref. How recycling is actually sorted, and why Australia is quite bad at it – http://theconversation.com/how-recycling-is-actually-sorted-and-why-australia-is-quite-bad-at-it-121120

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominique de Andrade, The University of Queensland

This is the third in a series of articles discussing a recently released comprehensive evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 policy reforms to tackle alcohol-fuelled violence and the implications for liquor regulation and the night-time economy in Queensland and Australia. A summary report is also available.

A disturbingly high proportion of young people, particularly women, experience unwanted sexual attention in entertainment districts across Queensland.

This is the bad news from a two-year, independent evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 “Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence” (TAFV) policy (the good news included a significant statewide reduction in serious assaults).

Read more: Lessons from Queensland on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy

One in three patrons reported unwanted sexual attention – including harassment, unwanted touching, or sexual gestures – in or around a licensed venue in the preceding three months. Among those who reported unwanted sexual attention, two in three women (68%) also reported physical and/or verbal aggression.

The rate of unwanted sexual attention was highest for young women (ages 18-24). More than 50% had experienced this harm in the previous three months, as the chart below shows.

In the Fortitude Valley entertainment district, a staggering one in four reported unwanted sexual attention on the night they were interviewed (26% of 262 female patrons interviewed and followed up the next day).

Over the two-year evaluation, 4,055 patrons (43% female) were interviewed on Saturday nights on the streets of three entertainment districts – Cairns, Fortitude Valley (Brisbane) and Surfers Paradise (Gold Coast).

While the rates fluctuated over time in these areas, the rate of unwanted sexual attention didn’t change when comparing the months before and after the TAFV policy took effect. The chart below shows the trend for Fortitude Valley.

Uncomfortable truths

These findings highlight some uncomfortable truths.

First, the unwanted sexual attention young women experience in the night-time economy is an intransigent public health and safety problem.

Second, the issue is considerably under-researched.

Third, overcoming the problem requires discussion beyond alcohol accessibility and drinking practices.

The findings of the evaluation sit against a backdrop of increasing global intolerance of the sexual abuse and harassment of women. For example, the number of women reporting sexual assault to Queensland Police has increased for the past six years. This increase might be attributable to the raising of public consciousness (e.g. the “Me Too” campaign).

Read more: #MeToo has changed the media landscape, but in Australia there is still much to be done

Such awareness-raising has had impacts on broader social norms around sexual aggression towards women. But the evaluation suggests this messaging has largely failed to permeate the social norms of the night-time economy.

Why haven’t nightlife norms changed?

Understanding and addressing the mechanisms behind unwanted social attention in this context is particularly challenging. In addition to the broader social norms, licensed venues have their own cultural norms – including sexualised environments and heavy drinking – that often contribute to unwanted sexual attention.

Read more: Queenslanders are among our heaviest drinkers on nights out, and changing that culture is a challenge

Recent experimental research suggests unwanted sexual attention in these settings may be related to males misperceiving the social environmental cues. They read alcohol presence, alcohol consumption and revealing dress by females as signs of sexual interest. They might have been influenced by decades of sexualised alcohol marketing.

Such research highlights the need to better understand the risk and protective factors affecting victims and perpetrators of sexual aggression, and how these factors interact with cues in the physical environment.

Responsibility is broadly shared

These findings have many implications for policy and practice.

For a start, many experiences of unwanted sexual attention sit beyond the boundaries of the law. This raises a number of questions. Who is responsible for acting on unwanted sexual attention in and around licensed venues? And is it time to reassess the individualisation of responsibility in entertainment districts?

One strategy that attributes some responsibility to venue staff has been trialled in cities such as London, Chicago, Vancouver and Melbourne. The Good Night Out initiative aims to train and empower licensed venue staff to act as capable guardians (instead of bystanders) who intervene in incidents of unwanted sexual attention. While theoretically such approaches are promising, the evidence for such targeted strategies remains limited.

The pervasive problem of unwanted sexual attention in night-time economies also requires attention from local and state governments. Strategies that specifically address this harm should be embedded in alcohol policy.

Without a more sophisticated approach that targets all types of aggression, young women will likely continue to experience high rates of unwanted sexual attention on their nights out.

Read more: No harm done? ‘Sexual entertainment districts’ make the city a more threatening place for women

– ref. Unwanted sexual attention plagues young women going out at night – http://theconversation.com/unwanted-sexual-attention-plagues-young-women-going-out-at-night-121116

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

The Morrison government is at risk of losing control of China policy. Push-back from within its own ranks is complicating its ability to manage relations with Beijing. China policy is being subjected to a buffeting from hawkish backbenchers who would like to see Canberra adopt a harder line.

Let’s dispose first of straw man arguments about whether Liberal backbencher Andrew Hastie was within his rights to warn of threats to national sovereignty by a rising China that is ruthlessly advancing its own interests.

Hastie has every right to raise alarms about China’s behaviour in his capacity as a member of parliament and chair of the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence and security. He was given opinion space in Nine newspapers to so.

Read more: View from The Hill: It’s not in the ‘national interest’ for the backbench to shut up about China

However, he was ill-advised to use a reference to Nazi Germany to advance his argument about a China threat. Hastie may not have likened China to the Third Reich explicitly, but by referencing France’s inability to withstand German aggression he was implicitly making the link.

This is what he said:

The West once believed that economic liberalisation would naturally lead to democratisation in China. This was our Maginot Line. It would keep us safe, just as the French believed their series of steel and concrete forts would guard them against the German advance in 1940. But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare. Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become.

Invoking Nazi Germany or the Holocaust to advance an argument is treacherous terrain at the best of times, unless the author is clamouring for attention.

One wonders how much notice Hastie’s commentary would have attracted if there had been no reference to the inadequacies of France’s Maginot Line.

It’s reasonable to speculate that his contribution would have gone the way of those written by other China hawks in the so-called national security establishment, many of whom have converted their hawkishness on China into a cottage industry.

One other point might be made about Hastie’s contribution. It is simply not correct to say, as he did, there was a general expectation China would continue to democratise and in time become more like us.

This is a flawed and naive point of view.

China’s ruthless suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989 was not an aberration. It was consistent with its behaviour since it began opening to the outside world in the late 1970s.

Read more: Thirty years on, China is still trying to whitewash the Tiananmen crackdown from its history

Its 1979 suppression of a Democracy Wall movement, and the arrest of prominent dissidents including human rights activist Wei Jingsheng, now in exile, attest to a regime’s ruthlessness in stifling dissent.

Beijing’s tolerance of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests will be viewed through a prism of what these might portend for the mainland. If there is any indication of contagion across borders, China will react forcefully, and may do so anyway if disturbances continue.

Before addressing what might be an appropriate response from the Australian government to an eruption of anti-China sentiment on its own backbench, perhaps it would be useful to define the challenges at play.

In its latest manifestation, China is no longer a status quo power. It is one that is seeking expand its power and influence in what it regards as its own sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific, broadly defined to include the southwest Pacific.

These attempts to assert itself are not simply restricted to the militarisation of geographical features in the South China Sea. They also involve pursuit of an economic, diplomatic and propaganda offensive that is designed to advance Chinese interests at home and abroad.

In seeking to promote these interests, Beijing is an indefatigable exploiter of opportunities and weaknesses. If there is a rule of thumb in dealing with China in this latest phase, it is that it will seek to get away with what it can on many different fronts.

In that sense, Hastie has a point: Australia cannot simply adopt a passive response to Chinese single-mindedness in pursuit of what it perceives to be its own interests.

The question, then, becomes what to do?

This is where it becomes crucial that the Morrison government settles on a clearly defined strategy to deal with a disruptive China. What this should involve is a combination of a hedging strategy in partnership with Australia’s allies to balance Beijing’s militarised ambitions, and a separate one in which Australia’s own economic and diplomatic interests are asserted.

The government’s task will be to tread a fine line between security arrangements with its allies, principally the United States, and a relationship with China that is defined by Australia’s own interests and not those of anyone else.

In a thoughtful speech to Asialink before the G20 Summit in Osaka in June, Morrison outlined what appeared to have the makings of a “Morrison doctrine” on how to steer a course in treacherous waters between Australia’s security and economic lifelines.

The prime minister argued for a more activist diplomatic role in the region, aimed at securing Australian national interests in what are choppy waters. He said:

We should not just sit back and await our fate in the wake of a major power contest.

Australia could do worse than pursue an Asian equivalent of the Helsinki Accords that helped keep the peace in Europe during the Cold War.

This is a time for creative Australian diplomacy, not running off to Washington to hide behind America’s petticoat.

This returns us to the Hastie intervention and the national interest question.

Just as Hastie is entitled to express a personal point of view, so does the government of the day have a responsibility to assert what is in the national interest.

Clearly it is not in the national interest for political leaders to disregard comments that might have a negative impact on relations with Australia’s pre-eminent trading partner. China absorbs one-third of Australia’s merchandise exports.

This is what the prime minister had to say:

… the government is fully aware of the complexity that is involved in our region and the challenges that we face in the future… And we are careful as a government to ensure that we don’t seek to make them any more complex than they need to be. And that is what Australians can count on. We will be measured. We will be careful and we will put Australia’s national interest first.

Morrison needs to assert this point of view more forcefully if he is to avoid losing control of China policy. These is nothing inherently inconsistent between a national interest argument and one that enables dissident voices to have their say.

After all, this is not China.

– ref. Morrison needs to take control of China policy – but leave room for dissent – http://theconversation.com/morrison-needs-to-take-control-of-china-policy-but-leave-room-for-dissent-121739

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

An analysis from The Australia Institute accuses Scott Morrison of planning to exploit a “pollution loophole” equivalent to about eight years of fossil-fuel emissions from the rest of the Pacific and New Zealand.

The “loophole” is using Kyoto credits to help the government meet its emissions reduction target.

The progressive think tank issued its salvo ahead of the Pacific Island Forum in Tuvalu, which Morrison is attending and starts today.

Anxious to sandbag the Australian government against criticism over its climate policy from island countries, for which the climate change issue is major, Morrison has announced Australia is redirecting $500 million of the aid budget over five years to go to “investing for the Pacific’s renewable energy and its climate change and disaster resilience”.

But Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga quickly said the money should not be a substitute for action.

“No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing,” he said on Tuesday.

“Cutting down your emissions, including not opening your coal mines, that is the thing we want to see,” he said.

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said this week: “I appeal to Australia to do everything possible to achieve a rapid transition from coal to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change”.

Morrison said on Tuesday: “Australia’s going to meet its 2030 Paris commitments. Australia’s going to smash its 2020 commitments when it comes to meeting our emissions reduction targets. So Australia meets its commitments, and we will always meet our commitments. And that is a point that I’ll be making again when I meet with Pacific leaders.”

Morrison confirmed before the election that Australia would use credits from overachieving on its Kyoto 2020 targets to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target.

The Australian Institute said: “If Australia uses this loophole, it would be the equivalent of about eight times larger than the annual fossil fuel emissions of its Pacific neighbours.”

Australia intends to use 367 Mt of carbon credits to avoid the majority of emission reductions pledged under its Paris Agreement target. Meanwhile the entire annual emissions from the Pacific Islands Forum members, excluding Australia, is only about 45 Mt.

The institute’s director for climate change and energy, Richie Merzian, said the government’s plan to use Kyoto credits was an insult to Pacific islanders.

“You can’t ‘step up’ in the Pacific while stepping back on climate action,” he said.

– ref. Australia Institute analysis adds to Pacific pile-on over Morrison’s climate policy – http://theconversation.com/australia-institute-analysis-adds-to-pacific-pile-on-over-morrisons-climate-policy-121817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate C. Prickett, Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, Victoria University of Wellington

The terrorist attacks on the Christchurch Muslim community on 15 March this year resulted in a political response that was decidedly different from what usually follows mass shootings in the United States.

The speed of legislative action, banning military-style semi-automatic weapons (MSSAs) within days of the attack, was remarked on both at home and around the world. Some gun owners began handing over their MSSAs to police voluntarily after the attacks, and hundreds of guns have been handed in during government buyback events throughout the country.

Read more: Why NZ needs to follow weapons ban with broad review of security laws

But there was another group who considered the government response an over-reaction and an infringement of gun owners’ rights.

Given these diverging views, which story truly reflects gun owners? Do gun owners trust the government to do what’s right? And do they trust other gun owners or the pro-gun lobby that purports to represent them?

These are questions we can now answer from our recent survey.

Gun owners are middle-class European Kiwis

Our team runs an annual survey asking a nationally representative sample of New Zealanders about their trust in people and institutions. The 2019 survey was carried out just prior to the attacks, but we decided to run it again in April, primarily to see whether this tragedy had an impact on trust. We also asked respondents whether they were a gun owner or living in a household with someone who owned a gun – and we asked about trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby.

Overall, 15% of respondents reported owning a gun (7.7%) or living in a household with someone who owned a gun (7.5%). Among those who said they owned a gun, 88% were men, but among those who said they didn’t personally own a gun but there was one in the home, 81% were women. In short, men own guns.

People in gun-owning households were somewhat more likely to be New Zealand European (84% vs 74% in the general population) and were more likely to be between 45 and 60 years old, compared to those who did not own guns (34% vs 25%).

Household gun owners reported moderately lower levels of education, with 32% having a university degree compared with 37% of non-gun owners. They were more likely to report middle-class household incomes between NZ$50,000 and NZ$150,000 (60% vs 52%) and less likely to live in big cities (21% vs 47%).

These statistics paint the profile of gun-owning households as fairly average, middle-class, New Zealand European Kiwis, with men primarily the owners.

Gun owners trust themselves

Perhaps surprisingly, gun owners are only a little different from others in thinking the government is generally doing the right thing. Controlling for the things that differentiate gun owners from those who don’t own guns, we found a statistically significant, but not very meaningful difference. Survey respondents were asked:

How much trust do you have in the government to do what is right for New Zealand?

On a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “very little/none” and 4 is “a great deal”, gun owners reported an average of 2.6 vs 2.7 among those who did not own guns.

If gun owners seem like the group who stood to lose through this legislation, why aren’t there bigger differences between those who do and do not own guns in their trust in government? One explanation could be that gun owners are actually more similar than different from the rest of New Zealand when it comes to their views on guns.

In addition to asking about trust in groups such as police, medical practitioners and corporations, we asked people how much trust they had in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby to do the right thing. This scale ranged from 1 (no trust at all) to 5 (complete trust). Unsurprisingly, gun owners reported a higher average trust level in other gun owners: 3.4 compared with 2.7 among those who did not guns – a moderate to large effect size.

When looking at trust in the pro-gun lobby, gun owners still reported higher levels of trust than non-gun owners – 2.7 vs 2.2. But the overall levels of trust were much lower than in gun owners generally. Gun owners tended to rate the gun lobby similar in trust as corporations and politicians. Those who don’t own guns rated the gun lobby as only more trustworthy than bloggers or online commentators.

Gun owners’ distrust in pro-gun lobby

It suggests that gun owners have trust in themselves to do the right thing, but far less trust in the pro-gun lobby to represent their best interests. But is it just that gun owners are apathetic to the gun lobby – they neither trust nor distrust it – or is it actual distrust in the lobbyists?

The data suggests it may be a bit of both. Over a third of gun owners distrust the gun lobby compared with only 9% of gun owners who don’t trust other gun owners. On the flipside, close to half of gun owners either have lots or complete trust in gun owners but only 23% can say the same about the gun lobby.

When this survey was conducted, the main legislative change announced was a ban and government buy-back of MSSAs. For the average gun owner, this might have been seen as sensible. But as more changes were announced and the gun lobby began to mobilise, it is important to understand whether their views are widely shared by gun owners.

Read more: New Zealand gun owners invoke NRA-style tropes in response to fast-tracked law change

Although gun owners report higher trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby, breaking this down by political ideology shows that most of the higher levels of lobbyist trust are concentrated among those gun owners to the political right. For example, among those on the political left, there is no statistical difference in trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby by whether you own a gun or not. The difference in gun trust among gun owners and those who don’t own guns is widest on the centre, centre right and right.

As New Zealand goes through the process of reforming gun laws to make our country safer and reinforce gun ownership as a privilege rather than a right, one thing is important: the views of the average gun owner are not co-opted by a fringe view of gun ownership.

– ref. Survey reveals a third of NZ gun owners distrust gun lobby – http://theconversation.com/survey-reveals-a-third-of-nz-gun-owners-distrust-gun-lobby-121736

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, La Trobe University

Parkinson’s disease, a debilitating neurodegenerative disease common in elderly people, is twice as prevalent in men than women.

A new study published this month suggests the sex gene (SRY on the male-specific Y chromosome) plays a role in the loss of dopamine-making neurons that underlies this disease.

As well as providing a spectacular example of how genes act differently in male and female brains, this discovery may lead to a new treatment option for men suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

Read more: Not just about sex: throughout our bodies, thousands of genes act differently in men and women

Sex and disease

Many diseases are more common in one sex than the other. For example, multiple sclerosis and other immune disorders are more common in women than men. Parkinson’s disease, and several mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, are more common in men than women.

Treatments, too, may be differently effective in men and women because of differences in expression of genes important for drug metabolism.

The bases of these sex differences are often unclear. Is it a hormonal difference that makes men and women differently susceptible to diseases, and differently amenable to treatment? For instance, the sex difference in Parkinson’s disease was previously attributed solely to the protective effect of the hormone oestrogen in female brains.

But as well as hormonal differences, we now have reason to believe genes on sex chromosomes may directly affect the brain.

Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease is a growing problem, particularly with an ageing population. Nearly one in 300 Australians live with Parkinson’s disease. It usually appears in later life as problems in starting and maintaining voluntary movements, and may be accompanied by severe tremor.

Read more: What causes Parkinson’s disease? What we know, don’t know and suspect

Parkinson’s disease is caused by a loss of neurons responsible for making dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that sends messages to other nerve cells. Symptoms appear when 70% of these dopamine-synthesising cells have been depleted. We don’t understand how these neurons are lost, but expect the effect of loss on motor function is due to the curtailed dopamine production.

Parkinson’s disease is progressive and incurable, but the symptoms may be ameliorated and delayed by medications that boost dopamine or substitute for it.

SRY and Parkinson’s disease

In humans and other mammals, females have two X chromosomes (XX), and males a single X and a male-specific Y chromosome (XY). SRY is the master gene on the Y chromosome that determines the male sex of a baby in the embryo.

But research has found SRY seems to be active in other parts of the body, too. In mice and rats, SRY is active in the brain, and in humans it’s expressed in several tissues and organs, including the brain.

Read more: What makes you a man or a woman? Geneticist Jenny Graves explains

SRY has been found to be expressed at abnormally high levels in the brains of mice and rats mutated to have symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and in animals where the disease was induced by chemical treatment.

Previous work showed overactivity of the SRY gene destroys neurons that synthesise dopamine. We’re not entirely sure how this happens, but given the link between dopamine production and Parkinson’s disease, it might partly explain why Parkinson’s disease affects males more commonly than females.

This new study now shows that interfering with SRY expression in the brains of rodents with Parkinson’s disease ameliorates the severity of symptoms. Vince Harley and Joohyung Lee from the Hudson Institute in Melbourne found that quashing SRY action prevented or mitigated the reduced mobility of male animals with Parkinson’s disease.

So, suppressing the activity of SRY in neurons of Parkinson’s disease patients could ameliorate their symptoms.

This sort of a cure may be many years away, but it would have a huge impact on the quality of life of thousands of men in Australia living with Parkinson’s disease.

Sex and the brain

Male and female brains really are different at every level; molecular, cellular, and behavioural. For 60 years this has been attributed to sex hormones. But we’re beginning to find that genes may also have direct effects.

A recent analysis of the activity of most of the 20,000-odd genes in the bodies of hundreds of men and women showed that more than one-third were expressed much more highly in one sex than the other. This sex bias was not limited to sex organs, but was obvious at many other sites, including the brain.

The effect of SRY in the brain is a strong demonstration that male and female brains are genetically different in health and disease, and a reminder we must take account of sex differences in diagnosing and treating disease in men and women.

Read more: Differences between men and women are more than the sum of their genes

– ref. The sex gene SRY and Parkinson’s disease: how genes act differently in male and female brains – http://theconversation.com/the-sex-gene-sry-and-parkinsons-disease-how-genes-act-differently-in-male-and-female-brains-121764

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

Carbon dioxide is a fertiliser for plants, so if its concentration increases in the atmosphere then plants will grow better. So what is the problem? – a question from Doug in Lower Hutt

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) is warming our climate, but it also affects plants directly.

A tree planted in the 1850s will have seen its diet (in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide) double from its early days to the middle of our century. More CO₂ generally leads to higher rates of photosynthesis and less water consumption in plants. So, at first sight, it seems that CO₂ can only be beneficial for our plants.

But things are a lot more complex than that. Higher levels of photosynthesis don’t necessarily lead to more biomass production, let alone to more carbon dioxide sequestration. At night, plants release CO₂ just like animals or humans, and if those respiration rates increase simultaneously, the turnover of carbon increases, but the carbon stock doesn’t. You can think of this like a bank account – if you earn more but also spend more, you’re not becoming any richer.

Even if plants grow more and faster, some studies show there is a risk for them to have shorter lifespans. This again can have negative effects on the carbon locked away in biomass and soils. In fact, fast-growing trees (e.g. plantation forests) store a lot less carbon per surface area than old, undisturbed forests that show very little growth. Another example shows that plants in the deep shade may profit from higher levels of CO₂, leading to more vigorous growth of vines, faster turnover, and, again, less carbon stored per surface area.

Read more: Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests

Water savings

The effect of CO₂ on the amount of water plants use may be more important than the primary effect on photosynthesis. Plants tend to close their leaf pores slightly under elevated levels of CO₂, leading to water savings. In certain (dry) areas, this may indeed lead to more plant growth.

But again, things are much more complex and we don’t always see positive responses. Research we published in Nature Plants this year on grasslands around the globe showed that while dry sites can profit from more CO₂, there are complex interactions with rainfall. Depending on when the rain falls, some sites show zero or even negative effects in terms of biomass production.

Currently, a net amount of three gigatons of carbon are thought to be removed from the atmosphere by plants every year. This stands against over 11 gigatons of human-induced release of CO₂. It is also unclear what fraction of the three gigatons plants are taking up due to rising levels of CO₂.

In summary, rising CO₂ is certainly not bad for plants, and if we restored forested land at a global scale, we could help capture additional atmospheric carbon dioxide. But such simulations are optimistic and rely on conversion of much needed agricultural land to forests. Reductions in our emissions are unavoidable, and we have very strong evidence that plants alone will not be able to solve our CO₂ problem.

Read more: Exaggerating how much CO₂ can be absorbed by tree planting risks deterring crucial climate action

– ref. Climate explained: why plants don’t simply grow faster with more carbon dioxide in air – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-plants-dont-simply-grow-faster-with-more-carbon-dioxide-in-air-115907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Garrick, University Fellow in Law, Charles Darwin University

What’s happening in Hong Kong right now has direct bearings on Australia. It goes to an issue crucial to our position in a world economic order that is likely to be shaped less by the United States, still our most important ally, and more by China, our ever more valuable trading partner.

At the heart of the Hong Kong protests is the same issue that causes concern about China’s ambitions from the South China Sea to the South Pacific. It’s about the Chinese government’s commitment to an idiosyncratic idea of the rule of law.

Hong Kong has something like a constitution or bill of rights, called the Hong Kong Basic Law. It’s a legacy of British colonial rule, which the Chinese government agreed to preserve because there was value in keeping Hong Kong the prosperous city it had become.

China has a very different approach to law. Its constitution can and has been changed at the whim of the ruling party. There is no separation of powers, and no such thing as an independent judiciary.

Removing the judicial firewall

The trigger for the Hong Kong protests was a proposed law enabling China to extradite Hong Kong residents and visitors. Protesters foresaw democrats and dissidents disappearing into China’s prison system. The judicial “firewall” giving meaning to the notion of “one country, two systems” would be fatally undermined. Hong Kong’s distinctive culture and economy would be destroyed with it.

Read more: The Hong Kong protesters have turned militant and more strategic – and this unnerves Beijing

The idea of law as an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party shapes the Chinese government’s domestic policies, and also its approach to international law. It respects international conventions when it has to, and when it is in the national interest. But there’s a point where it is quite willing to thumb its nose at the whole idea.

This willingness has stiffened under the leadership of Xi Jinping, who has reaffirmed in word and deed that the Chinese Communist Party “is the highest force for political leadership”.

Law of the sea

An example is China’s view of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in its dispute with the Philippines over island territory in the South China Sea.

In 2016 a UN tribunal unanimously found in favour of the Philippines. China refused to accept the verdict. It declared it “would continue to abide by international law and basic norms governing international relations”, but also added:

The Chinese government reiterates that, regarding territorial issues and maritime delimitation disputes, China does not accept any means of third party dispute settlement or any solution imposed on China.

It therefore continues to claim the South China Sea as an “inalienable” part of its territory. In direct defiance of the ruling, it has also built artificial islands within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and built military bases on those islands.

Wider implications

China’s official narrative is that it doesn’t reject international law per se, but simply wants law that accommodates “Chinese characteristics”, including China’s preference for resolving disputes one on one.

Read more: Australians’ feelings sour towards China: Lowy poll

Given that the point of establishing the United Nations and other multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organisation was to replace “might makes right” with something like an international rule of law, this is likely to prove cold comfort for smaller nations.

As Xi told the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017:

• the overall goal of “comprehensively advancing law-based governance” is to “establish a system of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and build a country of socialist rule of law”

• “major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics aims to foster a new type of international relations and build a community with a shared future for mankind”

• the defining feature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is “the leadership of the Communist Party of China”.

Read more: Australia has too few home-grown experts on the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a problem

Beijing’s view of the rule of law is thus very different to what most of the rest of the world understands. The potential consequences are not lost on the citizens of Hong Kong, and they should not be lost on China’s neighbours and trading partners.

– ref. Hong Kong fears losing its rule of law; the rest of the world should worry too – http://theconversation.com/hong-kong-fears-losing-its-rule-of-law-the-rest-of-the-world-should-worry-too-121807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Latty, Senior Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

Insects have always been intimately connected with agriculture. Pest insects can cause tremendous damage, while helpful insects like pollinators and predators provide free services. The relatively young field of agricultural entomology uses knowledge of insect ecology and behaviour to help farmers protect their crops.

One of the most influential agricultural entomologists in history was an insatiably curious and fiercely independent woman named Eleanor Anne Ormerod. Although she lacked formal scientific training, Ormerod would eventually be hailed as the “Protectress of British Agriculture”.

Eleanor was born in 1828 to a wealthy British family. She did not attend school and was instead tutored by her mother on subjects thought to increase her marriageability: languages, drawing and music.

Like most modern entomologists, Eleanor’s interest in insects started when she was a child. In her autobiography, she tells of how she once spent hours observing water bugs swimming in a small glass. When one of the insects was injured, it was immediately consumed by the others.

Shocked, Eleanor hurried to tell her father about what she had seen but he dismissed her observations. Eleanor writes that while her family tolerated her interest in science, they were not particularly supportive of it.

Securing an advantageous marriage was supposed to be the primary goal of wealthy young women in Eleanor’s day. But her father was reclusive and disliked socialising; as a result, the family didn’t have the social connections needed to secure marriages for the children. Of Ormerod’s three sisters, none would marry.

The Ormerod daughters were relatively fortunate; their father gave them enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Their status as wealthy unmarried women gave them the freedom to pursue their interests free from domestic responsibilities and the demands of husbands or fathers. For Eleanor, this meant time to indulge her scientific curiosity.

Foaming at the mouth

Ormerod’s first scientific publication was about the poisonous secretions of the Triton newt. After testing the poison’s effects on an unfortunate cat, she decided to test it on herself by putting the tail of a live newt into her mouth. The unpleasant effects – which included foaming at the mouth, oral convulsions and a headache – were all carefully described in her paper.

Omerod’s first foray into agricultural entomology came in 1868, when the Royal Horticultural Society asked for help creating a collection of insects both helpful and harmful to British agriculture. She enthusiastically answered the call and spent the next decade collecting and identifying insects on the society’s behalf.

In the process, she developed specialist skills in insect identification, behaviour and ecology.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Flos Greig, Australia’s first female lawyer and early innovator

During her insect-collecting trips, Ormerod spoke with farmers who told her of their many and varied pest problems. She realised that farmers were in need of science-based advice for protecting their crops from insect pests.

Yet most professional entomologists of the time were focused on the collection and classification of insects; they had little interest in applying their knowledge to agriculture. Ormerod decided to fill the vacant role of “agricultural entomologist” herself.

In 1877, Ormerod self-published the first of what was to become a series of 22 annual reports that provided guidelines for the control of insect pests in a variety of crops. Each pest was described in detail including particulars of its appearance, behaviour and ecology. The reports were aimed at farmers and were written in an easy-to-read style.

An early form of crowdsourcing

Ormerod wanted to create a resource that would help farmers all over Britain. She quickly realised this task would require more information than she could possibly collect on her own. So Ormerod turned to an early version of crowdsourcing to obtain data.

She circulated questionnaires throughout the countryside asking farmers about the pests they observed, and the pest control remedies they had tried.

Whenever possible, she conducted experiments or made observations to confirm information she received from her network of farmers. Each of her reports combined her own work with that of the farmers and labourers she corresponded with. The resulting reports cemented Ormerod’s reputation.

Ormerod was invited to give lectures at colleges and institutes throughout Britain. She lent her expertise to pest problems in places as far afield as New Zealand, the West Indies and South Africa.

In recognition of her service, she was awarded an honorary law degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1900 – the first women in the university’s history to receive the honour. Such was her fame that acclaimed author Virginia Woolf later wrote a fictionalised account of Ormerod’s life called Miss Ormerod.

While she undoubtedly contributed to the rise of agricultural entomology as a scientific field, Ormerod’s legacy is complicated by her vocal support of a dangerous insecticide known as Paris Green. Paris Green was an arsenic-derived compound initially used as a paint (hence the name).

Although Paris Green was used extensively in North America, it was relatively unheard of in Britain. Ormerod made it her mission to introduce this new advance to British farmers. So strongly did she believe in its crop-saving power, she joked about wanting the words, “She brought Paris Green to Britain,” engraved on her tombstone.

Unfortunately, Paris Green is a “broad spectrum” insecticide that kills most insects, including pollinators and predators. The loss of predators in the crop ecosystem gives free rein to pests, creating a vicious cycle of dependence on chemical insecticides.

Paris Green also has serious human health impacts, some of which were recognised even in Ormerod’s day. The fact that arsenic was a common ingredient in all manner of products – including medicines – may partly explain why Ormerod seems to have underestimated the danger of Paris Green to human and environmental health.

Ormerod’s steadfast promotion of Paris Green seems naïve in retrospect. But the late 1800’s was a time of tremendous optimism about the power of science to solve the world’s problems.

Paris Green and other insecticides allowed farmers to cheaply and effectively protect their crops – and thus their livelihoods. In fact, less than 50 years after Ormerod’s death, chemist Paul Muller won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the infamous (and environmentally catastrophic) insecticide DDT. When viewed in light of the “pesticide optimism” of her time, Ormerod’s enthusiasm about Paris Green is easier to understand.

Interestingly, Ormerod wasn’t just an insecticide evangelist. Her reports gave recommendations for a variety of pest control methods such as the use of exclusion nets and the manual removal of pests. These and other environmentally friendly techniques now form the core of modern “integrated pest management”, the gold standard for effective and sustainable pest control.

Eleanor Ormerod was devoted to the cause of protecting agriculture at a time when few “serious” entomologists were interested in applying their knowledge to agriculture. She recognised that progress in agricultural entomology could only happen when entomologists worked in close partnership with farmers.

She continued working and lecturing to within weeks of her death in 1901; in all of her years of service, she was never paid.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Eleanor Anne Ormerod, the self taught agricultural entomologist who tasted a live newt – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-eleanor-anne-ormerod-the-self-taught-agricultural-entomologist-who-tasted-a-live-newt-120158

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zac Rogers, Research Lead, Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and Governance, Flinders University

Back in the 1990s – a lifetime ago in internet terms – the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells published several books charting the rise of information networks. He predicted that in the networked age, more value would accrue in controlling flows of information than in controlling the content itself.

In other words, those who positioned themselves as network hubs – the routers and switchers of information – would become the gatekeepers of power in the digital age.

With the rise of internet juggernauts Google, Facebook, Amazon and others, this insight seems obvious now. But over the past two decades, a fundamentally new business model emerged which even Castells had not foreseen – one in which attracting users onto digital platforms takes precedence over everything else, including what the user might say, do, or buy on that platform.

Gathering information became the dominant imperative for tech giants – aided willingly by users charmed first by novelty, then by the convenience and self-expression afforded by being online. The result was an explosion of information, which online behemoths can collate and use for profit.

Read more: Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back

The sheer scale of this enterprise means that much of it is invisible to the everyday user. The big platforms are now so complex that their inner workings have become opaque even to their engineers and administrators. If the system is now so huge that not even those working within it can see the entire picture, then what hope do regulators or the public have?

Of course, governments are trying to fight back. The GDPR laws in Europe, the ACCC Digital Platforms report in Australia, and the DETOUR Act introduced to the US Congress in April – all are significant attempts to claw back some agency. At the same time, it is dawning on societies everywhere that these efforts, while crucial, are not enough.

Read more: Consumer watchdog calls for new measures to combat Facebook and Google’s digital dominance

Gatekeepers reign supreme

If you think of the internet as a gigantic machine for sharing and copying information, then it becomes clear that the systems for sorting that information are vitally important. Think not just of Google’s search tool, but also of the way Google and Amazon dominate cloud computing – the largely invisible systems that make the internet usable.

Over time, these platforms have achieved greater and greater control over how information flows through them. But it is an unfamiliar type of control, increasingly involving autonomous, self-teaching systems that are increasingly inscrutable to humans.

Information gatekeeping is paramount, which is why platforms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have risen to supremacy. But that doesn’t mean these platforms necessarily need to compete or collude with one another. The internet is truly enormous, a fact that has allowed each platform to become emperor of a growing niche: Google for search, Facebook for social, Amazon for retail, and so on. In each domain, they played the role of incumbent, disruptor, and innovator, all at the same time.

Now nobody competes with them. Whether you’re an individual, business, or government, if you need the internet, you need their services. The juggernauts of the networked age are structural.

Algorithms are running the show

For these platforms to stay on top, innovation is a constant requirement. As the job of sorting grows ever larger and more complex, we’re seeing the development of algorithms so advanced that their human creators have lost the capacity to understand their inner workings. And if the output satisfies the task at hand, the inner workings of the system are considered of minor importance.

Meanwhile, the litany of adverse effects are undeniable. This brave new machine-led world is eroding our capacity to identify, locate, and trust authoritative information, in favour of speed.

It’s true that the patient was already unwell; societies have been hollowed out by three decades of market fundamentalism. But as American tech historian George Dyson recently warned, self-replicating code is now out there in the cyber ecosystem. What began as a way for humans to coax others into desired behaviours now threatens to morph into nothing less than the manipulation of humans by machines.

The digital age has spurred enormous growth in research disciplines such as social psychology, behavioural economics, and neuroscience. They have yielded staggering insights into human cognition and behaviour, with potential uses that are far from benign.

Even if this effort had been founded with the best of intentions, accidents abound when fallible humans intervene in complex systems with fledgling ethical and legal underpinnings. Throw malign intentions into the mix – election interference, information warfare, online extremism – and the challenges only mount.

If you’re still thinking about digital technologies as tools – implying that you, the user, are in full control – you need to think again. The truth is that no one truly knows where self-replicating digital code will take us. You are the feedback, not the instruction.

Regulators don’t know where to start

A consensus is growing that regulatory intervention is urgently required to stave off further social disruption, and to bring democratic and legal oversight into the practices of the world’s largest monopolies. But, if Dyson is correct, the genie is already out of the bottle.

Entranced by the novelty and convenience of life online, we have unwittingly allowed silicon valley to pull off a “coup from above”. It is long past time that the ideology that informed this coup, and is now governing so much everyday human activity, is exposed to scrutiny.

Read more: Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

The challenges of the digital information age extend beyond monopolies and privacy. This regime of technologies was built by design without concerns about exploitation. Those vulnerabilities are extensive and will continue to be abused, and now that this tech is so intimately a part of daily life, its remediation should be pursued without fear or favour.

Yet legislative and regulatory intervention can only be effective if industry, governments and civil society combine to build, by design, a digital information age worthy of the name, which doesn’t leave us all open to exploitation.

– ref. Regulating Facebook, Google and Amazon is hard given their bewildering complexity – http://theconversation.com/regulating-facebook-google-and-amazon-is-hard-given-their-bewildering-complexity-111821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marnee Shay, Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow, School of Education and Centre for Policy Futures, The University of Queensland

When you think of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kid, or in fact any kid, imagine what’s possible. Don’t define us through the lens of disadvantage […] Expect the best of us. – Excerpt from the Imagination Declaration, August 2019.

A group of school students from across Australia have just shown what real leadership on Indigenous issues looks like.

At last week’s national Garma Festival, 65 Indigenous and non-Indigenous students from years six to 12 came together for a Youth Forum and wrote their own follow up to 2017’s Uluru Statement from the Heart. They called it the Imagination Declaration. It’s a challenge to the prime minister and education ministers to involve young people – and Indigenous Australians in particular – in making policy about their future.

With 60,000 years of genius and imagination in our hearts and minds, we can be one of the groups of people that transform the future of life on Earth, for the good of us all.

We can design the solutions that lift islands up in the face of rising seas, we can work on creative agricultural solutions that are in sync with our natural habitat, we can re-engineer schooling, we can invent new jobs and technologies, and we can unite around kindness.

We are not the problem, we are the solution.

Young people under 25 years make up more than half of the Indigenous population, even more than the one-third proportion of non-Indigenous Australians the same age. Yet we rarely hear the perspectives of the future leaders and custodians of the oldest living culture in the world.

That was true even of last week’s Imagination Declaration, which was briefly reported by just one media outlet, NITV.

But there’s a good chance you’ll hear more about “the Imagination agenda for our classrooms” at your local school, childcare centre or university in coming months, as Indigenous mentoring organisation AIME plans to share the declaration nationally for other Australians to sign if they support the students’ goals.

Read more: How a robot called Pink helped teach school children an Aboriginal language

The students invite the prime minister and education ministers to meet them and listen to their ideas. Cynics might dismiss that as too idealistic – but as education researchers, we’ve seen the genuine difference listening to and “expecting the best” of young people can make.

Lessons from Queensland and WA high schools

We’ve spent the past three years in six urban, regional and remote communities across Queensland and Western Australia, working with more than 100 young people in a diverse range of high schools.

One of the reasons for doing the “Our Stories, Our Way” project was that while you can find hundreds of studies about Indigenous young people – usually with a negative, “closing the gap” focus – when we searched for health or education research on identity from recent decades, we found just 14 studies that specifically included the voices of Indigenous Australians under 25.

We helped create spaces where Indigenous young people had a rare chance to share their hopes with their communities, schools and each other, ranging from “I want to go to uni and study physiotherapy” to:

No matter what happens we should all be proud of whatever culture we are, no matter what culture/colour. We are all people, our skin colour shouldn’t matter

Our project focused on identity, health and well-being. Young people were given resources to make a creative piece that reflects their identities, in their words.

Some chose to create clothes and posters with art representing their stories, with messages such as “our pride, our culture” and “strive with pride”. In two urban Brisbane schools, young people wrote and recorded their own rap songs, filled with powerful lyrics such as:

Listen to the medley, black and deadly
Searching for acceptance, we must be respected
You can say what you want friend or foe
I feel good in my skin wherever I go

In contrast with negative representations of Indigenous young people, the young people in our project spoke about their values, such as pride, respect for Elders, succeeding, family and being a collective when they explained how they express their identities.

But they also talked about the high levels of racism they experience.

Navigating everyday things, like going to a shop, was a cause of real stress and anxiety for some Indigenous young people. Being followed around, often with the assumption Indigenous young people don’t have money or are going to steal something, is an issue that was reported to us by young people consistently across the project.

Some young people even said they weren’t able to continue attending school due to racism. Asked to explain this, the young people we worked with were frank:

When young black kids, like ourselves, when we feel like we have nothing to do, that’s when we go out and break the law. Then when you’ve got the other good black kids staying in school and going to real good schools … coppers will look at them funny too just because their skin is black. It’s like, you know, not every blackfella is the same.

Lessons for educators from our project

What struck us most was that, in spite of the impacts of negative stereotyping and racism, the young people we worked with showed enormous resilience and ability to understand and navigate complex issues.

Nine local Indigenous researchers worked with our project team. They provided reflections on the impacts they had seen, observing a transformation in young people’s confidence, with a greater “sense of self worth among students … (and) sense of pride and belonging”.

The local researchers also reported that there was more talk within the high schools than before the project about the value of “embedding Indigenous culture in the curriculum” and that “community members were talking about the creative projects by young people and were proud of their achievements”.

One non-Indigenous school leader expressed surprise that even at a high school that had made an effort to embed Indigenous culture into the curriculum, “it was a bit of an eye opener that there is still really a place for the kids for an Indigenous space”.

Read more: Indigenous art centres that sustain remote communities are at risk. The VET sector can help

An Imagination agenda, from childcare to Canberra

The students behind the Imagination Declaration have called on politicians “to establish an imagination agenda for our Indigenous kids and, in fact, for all Australian children”, which stops “looking at us as a problem to fix”.

That hope of being included in making solutions – rather than having curricula or policy written without them – was echoed by one of our project’s students:

Well if people just listen to us for once … we can make our own job. We can make our own shop, with all the art stuff or Aboriginal kids have grown up in dance and stuff. But the government just (needs to) listen to us. We reckon we’ll make a future. We’ll go all the way.

– ref. The Imagination Declaration: young Indigenous Australians want to be heard – but will we listen? – http://theconversation.com/the-imagination-declaration-young-indigenous-australians-want-to-be-heard-but-will-we-listen-121569

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

Scott Morrison has voiced his intention to shake up the federal public service – seeking to make it more efficient in implementing the government’s agenda. A review of the public service led by David Thodey is now finished.

Meanwhile, Professor Beth Noveck and Professor Rod Glover have released a timely study of the public service, titled Today’s problems, Yesterday’s toolkit. Commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, it builds on interviews with almost 400 public servants – most of them Australians.

In this podcast episode, Noveck and Glover discuss the “creeping crisis” of effectiveness and legitimacy the Australian public service is facing.

Blunt public sector management tools, including hiring freezes, efficiency dividends, and funding cuts that hobble innovative or experimental initiatives, are creating what interviewees for this study describe as a creeping crisis for the public sector.

To reverse this trend, they say the government must ensure public servants have a “ 21st century toolkit” to solve public problems. They point to the private sector’s “use of creative problem-solving methods, enabled by new technologies” as an example to follow.

They argue that “improving individual skills provides the linchpin for tackling public problems and restoring trust in government”.

The report is .

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Additional audio

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

Image:

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– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: on the ‘creeping crisis’ in the public service – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-on-the-creeping-crisis-in-the-public-service-121818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Neuropsychology, University of Melbourne

From young adults to people in their 60s, everyday functioning in today’s world can place high demands on our attention and memory skills.

Memory lapses such as forgetting an appointment, losing our keys, forgetting a distant relative’s name or not remembering why you opened the fridge can leave us believing our thinking skills are impaired.

But you might be too hard on yourself. Tiredness, stress and worry, and feeling down or depressed are all common reasons adults experience attention and memory difficulties.

Read more: What is ‘cognitive reserve’? How we can protect our brains from memory loss and dementia

Attention and memory systems

Attention and memory skills are closely connected. Whether we can learn and remember something partly depends on our ability to concentrate on the information at the time.

It also depends on our ability to focus our attention on retrieving that information when it’s being recalled at a later time.

This attention system, which is so important for successful memory function, has a limited capacity – we can only make sense of, and learn, a limited amount of information in any given moment.

Being able to learn, and later successfully remember something, also depends on our memory system, which stores the information.

Changes in attention and memory skills

In people who are ageing normally, both attention and memory systems gradually decline. This decline starts in our early 20s and continues slowly until our 60s, when it tends to speed up.

During normal ageing, the number of connections between brain cells slowly reduce and some areas of the brain progressively work less efficiently. These changes particularly occur in the areas of the brain that are important for memory and attention systems.

This normal ageing decline is different from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, which cause progressive changes in thinking skills, emotions and behaviour that are not typical of the normal ageing process. Dementia comes from a group of diseases that affect brain tissue and cause abnormal changes in the way the brain works.

Read more: Why people with dementia don’t all behave the same

If you’re concerned your memory difficulties may be a symptom of dementia, talk to your GP, who can refer you to a specialist, if needed, to determine whether these changes are due to normal ageing, dementia or some other cause.

If you experience persistent changes in your thinking skills, which are clearly greater than your friends and acquaintances who are of a similar age and in similar life circumstances, see your GP.

Normal attention and memory difficulties

Broadly, there are two main reasons healthy adults experience difficulties with their memory and/or attention: highly demanding lives and normal age-related changes.

A person can be consistently using their attention and memory skills at high levels without sufficient mental relaxation time and/or sleep to keep their brain working at its best.

Young adults who are working, studying and then consistently using attention-demanding devices as “relaxation” techniques, such as computer games and social media interaction, fall into this group.

Adults juggling the demands of work or study, family and social requirements also fall into this group.

Most adults need around seven to nine hours of sleep per night for their brain to work at its best, with older adults needing seven to eight hours.

The second common reason is a combination of ageing-related brain changes and highly demanding work requirements.

For people in jobs that place a high load on thinking skills, the thinking changes that occur with normal ageing can become noticeable at some point around 55 to 70 years of age. It’s around this time age-related changes in the ability to carry out complex thinking tasks become large enough to be noticeable. People who are retired or don’t have the same mentally demanding jobs generally experience the same changes, but may not notice them as much.

This is also the age many people become more aware of the potential risk of dementia. Consequently, these normal changes can result in high levels of stress and concern, which can result in a person experiencing even greater difficulties day to day.

Emotional distress can take its toll

Feeling down and sad can affect memory and concentration. When a person is feeling worried and/or down regularly, they may become consumed by their thoughts.

It’s important to recognise how you’re feeling, to make changes or seek help if needed. But thinking a lot about how you’re feeling can also take a person’s attention away from the task at hand and make it difficult for them to concentrate on what is happening, or remember it clearly in the future.

So feeling worried or down can make it seem there is something wrong with their memory and concentration.

Boosting your attention and memory skills

There are a number of things that can be done to help your day-to-day memory and attention skills.

First, it’s important to properly rest your mind on a regular basis. This involves routinely doing something you enjoy that doesn’t demand high levels of attention or memory, such as exercising, reading for pleasure, walking the dog, listening to music, relaxed socialising with friends, and so on.

Playing computer games, or having a lengthy and focused session on social media, requires high levels of attention and other thinking skills, so these are not good mental relaxation techniques when you are already mentally tired.

Read more: Why two people see the same thing but have different memories

It’s also important to get enough sleep, so you are not consistently tired – undertaking exercise on a regular basis often helps with getting good quality sleep, as does keeping alcohol consumption within recommended limits.

Looking after your mental health is also important. Noticing how you are feeling and getting support (social and/or professional) during longer periods of high stress or lowered mood will help ensure these things are not affecting your memory or concentration.

Finally, be fair to yourself if you notice difficulties with your thinking. Are the changes you notice any different to those of other people your own age and in similar circumstances, or are you comparing yourself to someone younger or with less demands in their life?

If you have ongoing concerns about your attention and memory, speak with your GP, who can refer you to a specialist, such as a clinical neuropsychologist, if needed.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do I sometimes forget what I was just going to say?

– ref. Memory and attention difficulties are often part of a normal life – http://theconversation.com/memory-and-attention-difficulties-are-often-part-of-a-normal-life-119539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gillian Triggs, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne

If anyone doubts the need for a charter of rights in Australia, the Banerji decision of the High Court handed down last week demonstrates why legislative protection for our common law freedoms has become a matter of national urgency.

We have it from the most authoritative source. The High Court has confirmed unanimously that Australians do not have a personal right to freedom of speech.

Most Australians might be surprised to learn this, but this is one of the consequences of Australia being the only Western democracy without some form of charter of rights legislated by parliament or entrenched in the constitution.

A ‘freezing’ effect on free speech

The High Court is technically right. The constitution does not explicitly protect the right to freedom of speech. In its ruling, the court upheld the government’s right to sack Michaela Banerji, a public servant, for her critical tweets about the indefinite detention of refugees offshore, among other concerns.

It was a highly technical and narrow interpretation of the law. It failed to acknowledge the common law right to freedom of expression, which is as ancient as the English Bill of Rights 1689. It also failed to recognise Australia’s international treaty obligations.

Read more: Will the High Court ruling on public servant’s tweets have a ‘powerful chill’ on free speech?

The High Court acknowledged that, had this case arisen in Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms might have provided some protection.

With respect to free speech, the Canadian Supreme Court has adopted the test of “minimum impairment” guaranteed by its charter. The court has said that a blanket ban on critical comments by public servants is not “justified in a free and democratic society”. Any restriction on the freedom of expression of a public servant must not go

beyond what [was] necessary to achieve the objective of an impartial and loyal civil service.

A similar charter protection in Australian law may not have saved Banerji on the facts of her case, as it is arguably necessary to protect the integrity of the public service. But the impact of the High Court’s decision is likely to have a chilling, if not freezing, effect on the liberty of public servants to speak up fearlessly when governments abuse their powers or trample on fundamental freedoms.

This is especially worrying as public officials are often in the best position to know.

Further restrictions on common law freedoms

Timing, of course, is everything. The Banerji decision comes in the middle of a national debate about the need for religious freedom protections in the Israel Folau case, and the threats to press freedom posed by recent federal police raids on a News Corp journalist and the ABC.

It is more than ironic the government should also be prosecuting Bernard Collaery, a former attorney-general for the ACT, for espionage. His alleged offence was to provide legal advice to Witness K, a whistleblower who recently agreed to plead guilty to releasing information about Australia’s spying activities in Timor-Leste.

Less sensational, but a serious restriction on our common law freedoms, are the laws introduced since 2001 to counter the threat of terrorism. These laws have been coined “hyper-legislation”, as they are more extensive and intrusive than those adopted by other nations.

Read more: How a charter of rights could protect Australians’ fundamental freedoms

The UK’s Human Rights Act has provided guidance to courts when rejecting laws passed in the name of national security that breach fundamental freedoms.

In the Belmarsh case in 2004, for example, the House of Lords condemned the detention of suspected terrorists who had not had the benefit of a criminal trial. The court found their detention was not rationally related to the perceived threat to national security and was illegal.

Since 2001, respective Australian governments, supported by opposition parties, have granted unprecedented powers to security and intelligence agencies and discretionary powers to ministers. There have not been compelling national security reasons for granting these powers, nor are these powers reviewable, for practical purposes, by our courts.

Among the many examples of legislative overreach in Australia since then are the Data Retention Act, Foreign Fighters Act, Espionage and Foreign Interference Act, de-encryption provisions, laws expanding detention for questioning, and secrecy laws applicable to offshore detention and security operations.

There are also countless apparently minor intrusions on our rights. In 2014, the Australian Law Reform Commission found at least 121 laws infringe our democratic freedoms, from mandatory sentencing laws to restrictions on environmental protests.

Sadly, traditional common law rights that might protect us from such legislative excesses are all too readily ignored by the courts.

Would a charter lead to greater judicial power?

How would a charter of rights ensure that government intrusions on our liberties are reasonable and proportionate to achieve a legitimate end – the test adopted by the High Court to assess the validity of federal laws?

A charter is not a sole solution. Many nations that abuse human rights have one. But under Australian law, a charter would give greater power to the courts to ensure that common law freedoms were respected.

Read more: Gillian Triggs: How the ‘fair go’ became the last bulwark for Australia’s freedoms

A judge could, for example, apply charter law to prohibit indefinite detention without trial of stateless persons, the mentally ill and asylum seekers and refugees; ensure that juveniles are not held in adult facilities; require governments to provide adequate housing for all; ensure access to medical care and social justice; protect against disproportionate counter-terrorism and surveillance laws; and protect the culture and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Would this mean the expansion of judicial power at the cost of parliamentary sovereignty? Would it be a carbon copy of the US Bill of Rights?

Not if we adopt the so-called “dialogue model” of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. Under this model, a Victorian court cannot invalidate a law; it can only declare that a law does not comply with charter rights. It is then up to parliament to amend the offending law as it sees fit.

It would be a misunderstanding of the role of a rights charter to think only of judicial power. The real significance of a charter lies in the benchmarks it creates to influence the decisions of public officials and the standards demanded by the community. A charter is a check on government power that is vital to contemporary democracy.

We now have a serious deficit in legal protection for human rights in Australia, rights that have been in regression for 20 years. We now need to consider a legislated charter setting out the rights we care about.

Gillian Triggs will take part in a debate sponsored by La Trobe University on whether Australia needs a charter of human rights on Tuesday, Aug. 13, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

– ref. Why an Australian charter of rights is a matter of national urgency – http://theconversation.com/why-an-australian-charter-of-rights-is-a-matter-of-national-urgency-121411

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Banks, Professor of Conservation Biology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

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

Where did rats first come from? – Lewis, age 7, Brisbane.

Rats are everywhere – at least everywhere that humans are. In almost every big city in the world, rats are eating our rubbish, breeding in our buildings, and running through our streets.

But there are lots of different types of rat. And where they originally came from depends on which rat species you are talking about (species means they’re of the same animal type).

Read more: Curious Kids: Where did the first person come from?

Black rats and brown rats

There are two rat species that usually live in cities.

One is the black rat (what scientists would call Rattus rattus). They’re sometimes called the “ship rat” because they’ve been spread around the world on ships. They’re also known as the “roof rat” because they like to live in roofs. Rattus rattus is originally from India and began to live with humans more than 4,000 years ago, and slowly spread west into Europe about 3,000 years ago.

Then there’s the brown rat (which scientists would call Rattus norvegicus). They are twice as big as black rats. They’re the main city rat in Europe and America, but they live in Australia too. They’re also known as the sewer rat (because they like to live in drains) or the Norway rat (because people mistakenly thought they came from Norway.)

Most pet rats and lab rats are brown rats. They originally came from China and spread around the world later than black rats. They probably arrived in Europe around the 1300s and spread worldwide in the late 1700s.

Black rats are the most common species in Australian cities but brown rats can be more common in older inner-city areas. There are a lot of brown rats in Brisbane, so chances are you have seen one.

Both black and brown rats came to Australia with Europeans on ships, which is how they spread to many other places in the world too.

Skeletons of black rats were found in the gun barrels of Dutch ships that sank off the west coast of Australia in 1616, but black rats probably entered Australia with the First Fleet in 1788.

Some Europeans thought at first these rats were a native Australian species, as they look quite similar to local rats and liked living in our native trees. But now we know they arrived with the Europeans.

Brown rats also probably arrived with the British but we don’t know exactly when.

Cities are perfect for rats

City rats have three main secrets to their success.

First, they eat pretty much anything.

Second, they produce lots of babies, and fast. A female can have up to 12 pups in a litter, every month, and those babies can breed in just a few months.

And third, they’re bold but smart and have worked out what’s safe and what’s dangerous in the city.

It’s no wonder rats survive and thrive in the city.

Australian native rodents

Rats are a type of animal called a rodent. There are about 2,200 different species of rodents, including mice, squirrels, guinea pigs, beavers, and many more. Rodent-like mammals have been around for 66 million years, appearing soon after dinosaurs went extinct. They are now spread across the globe.

Australia has more than 60 species of native rodents that evolved here, and rodents make up a quarter of all our native mammal species.

Our largest is the water rat (Hydromys chrysogaster), which can weigh more than 1kg. That’s more than four times the size of black rats! You still sometimes see them in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.

The smallest is the delicate mouse (Pseudomys delicatulus), which weighs less than 10g and lives in Australia’s central deserts.

Unfortunately, many of Australia’s native rodents are threatened with extinction, mostly due to introduced predators like foxes and feral cats.

Read more: Curious Kids: how can penguins stay warm in the freezing cold waters of Antarctica?

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: where did rats first come from? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-where-did-rats-first-come-from-121307

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew King, ARC DECRA fellow, University of Melbourne

Many Australians have just shivered through a cold weekend of wintry weather, with widespread snowfall across Victoria and parts of New South Wales.

The snow was welcomed by skiers and snowboarders alike, with over a metre of snow at the major resorts, but was less fun for people travelling on icy roads across the southeast.

Snow also fell on an AFL match for the first time. So how unusual was last weekend’s dose of winter weather and does a changing climate mean we’ll see more or less snow in winters to come?

Firstly, let’s look at what happened.

A succession of cold fronts brought wind, rain and snow to the southeast of Australia and strong southerly winds kept days and nights much cooler than average. This kind of weather setup where we get sustained southerlies and cold fronts over several days is unusual but by no means unprecedented.

Often, strong cold outbreaks will pass within a day or so, but this event was more prolonged than most because we had multiple blasts of cold air.

Snow fell on and off for two days in places like the Dandenong Ranges and around Orange, and many areas above 1,000 metres in the NSW Central Tablelands were still snow-covered on Monday. Among the lowest places where snow settled were Tumut (New South Wales) and Maldon (Victoria), both at about 300 metres elevation.

Read more: Why snowfall is one of the hardest predictions for a meteorologist

Snow also fell during the AFL match between the GWS Giants and Hawthorn at Canberra on Friday night. While this is the first time snow is known to have fallen during an AFL/VFL match, on average over the last few decades snow falls without settling in Canberra once every year or two. It is only recently matches have started being played in Canberra; until the 1980s, almost all matches were in Melbourne, which has only seen falling snow a handful of times since European settlement.

How unusual was it?

When we delve into the past, we can find lots of incidences of widespread snowfalls and freezing conditions in areas of Victoria and New South Wales going back to early British colonisation.

Some of the most memorable widespread events of the past include those of 1900, when 60 centimetres fell in Bathurst; 1965, when snow fell as far north as the ranges west of Mackay; and 1984, when most of the Great Dividing Range was covered as far north as southern Queensland.

The most widespread snowfall of the last 20 years was probably that of May 2000, when snow fell as low as 250 metres in northeast Victoria. 2000 was also the last time substantial snow settled in central Canberra.

Last weekend’s event was probably the most significant snowfall since 2000 in parts of Victoria north of the ranges, and in southern inland New South Wales. In central and northern New South Wales, the last snowfall on this scale was in 2015, while in the hills around Melbourne it was on a par with 2008.

Will snowy winters be a thing of the past?

As the climate warms up, we generally expect to see more of what falls out of the sky to be rain than snow. Winter temperatures across the south of Australia are warming and that’s why it’s become so hard to break existing cold records and much easier to break warm records.

In addition, our rain- and snow-bearing winter storms are tending to move slightly southwards, meaning they miss the south of Australia and head into the Southern Ocean. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect events like this in the future. They may become less frequent and slightly less cold when they do occur, but we still expect winter cold snaps like this one to remain a feature of a warmer climate.

As many a keen observer of Australia’s ski season will know, a good season can really depend on the timing of a massive cold outbreak like the one we have just experienced. This can make it hard, anecdotally, to see the changes to our ski seasons in real time.

Analysis of daily snowfall data from the major Victorian ski resorts suggests that while the average number of days in which snow accumulates has declined since the 1990s, the number of heavy snowfall events has remained unchanged.

However, at lower elevations, such as at Bukalong, NSW (790m above sea level), the reduced number of snowfall days and depth is very clear. Over a 50 year time period, there has been a 38% decline per decade in the June maximum snow depth (as a percentage of the June average).

Projections of future snowfall conditions across southeast Australia indicate that while extreme cold events such as last weekend may still occur, it may be harder for snow to stick around once on the ground, with near-surface temperatures expected to increase significantly.

Read more: Why does a bit of snow plunge Britain into transport chaos?

Combining this with a continued decrease in non-extreme snowfall events, largely due to changing air temperatures, has lead climate scientists to predict Australia’s snow-cover will be reduced by about 60% by 2070. This is bad news for endemic alpine species such as the endangered pygmy possum, for our water resources, and also for the snow-obsessed among us who enjoyed our recent winter wonderland.

– ref. Snow at the footy? Just how unusual was last weekend’s weather? – http://theconversation.com/snow-at-the-footy-just-how-unusual-was-last-weekends-weather-121802

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne

Review: My Dearworthy Darling, Malthouse

My Dearworthy Darling is a collaboration between playwright, fantasy novelist, poet, and theatre critic Alison Croggon and feminist theatre company The Rabble (Kate Davis and Emma Valente).

In her criticism, Croggon champions good writing for the stage, rejecting the idea that the literary and the theatrical are opposing concepts. In their dramaturgy, The Rabble reject the male-dominated tradition of play scripts, instead pursuing experimental, design-led re-imaginings of iconic stories from the Western canon.

Their philosophies met and sometimes clashed in My Dearworthy Darling, which was inspired by the autobiography of an illiterate woman, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe. It attempted to help us hear women’s voices by making them strange, asking us to listen across time and idiom.

The story happens across two times and places, contemporary Australia and medieval England. In Australia there are three nameless characters, a woman (Jennifer Vuletic), her insurance agent husband (Ben Grant), and her sister (Natalie Gamsu). The woman is possibly having a breakdown but definitely being gaslit by her husband and sister, who tell her at every opportunity that there is something wrong with her mind, memory, or behaviour.

Read more: Explainer: what does ‘gaslighting’ mean?

The woman has visions that connect her to a medieval mystic, also played by Vuletic, whose physicality and resonant voice are compelling. A chorus in monastic robes (played by Monash University performance students) supports and listens to her.

Croggan’s script and Valente’s sound design encourage us to listen, too. The three main actors were miked in a way that drew attention to the amplification of their voices, rendering them slightly alien in their audibility.

The sounds of contemporary Australia were the drone of a vacuum cleaner, the hum of an electric toothbrush, the crunch of ice cubes in a plastic cup, and the ringing of mobile phones. The sounds of medieval England were more human and less prosaic —speaking, chanting, and singing.

But one time also seemed to bleed through to the other: a vacuum switches itself on with mundane supernaturalism; a mobile phone rings in medieval England. At one point the woman places a drinking glass on the ground and then her ear to the glass, as though trying to hear the other time.

Croggan’s program note suggests the three Australian characters are “pressured and broken by the dehumanisations of modern capitalism” and “don’t know how to communicate and so hurt each other.”

These themes were perceptible in the play, but I found the husband and sister so unpleasant there seemed no reason for the woman to attempt communication with these characters, or to remain in their prosaic world. They repeatedly tried to convince the woman that she was crazy by lying to and about her, including a scene in which the husband unconvincingly tells an emergency operator that his unconscious wife has a knife and is trying to kill him. I preferred the appliances to these characters, though Grant and Gamsu are skilled actors.

In Australia, the woman repeatedly says that she doesn’t have the words to express what she is experiencing. Nor are the husband and sister inclined to listen. In medieval England, on the other hand, the woman joins the chorus in speaking words from The Book of Margery Kempe. In this way she finds a voice and the chorus become her onstage auditors and supporting singers.

The Book of Margery Kempe is often called the earliest autobiography in English. Kempe could not write and so dictated her visions and feelings to male scribes who wrote them down in the third person. Although Kempe was more than once accused of being a heretic during her lifetime, she is now celebrated as a woman who claimed a public voice to express her emotional, sexual, and religious experience.

Text from Kempe’s book appears throughout My Dearworthy Darling as electronic surtitles and spoken or sung dialogue. The actors’ facility with the Middle English was impressive and beautiful.

Because the Middle English overlaps with but is different from our own idiom, the audience must listen carefully, or relinquish conventional ideas about meaning and communication in favour of the sounds and aesthetics of Kempe’s words.

That these words are a third-person, dictated, 14th-century memoir should caution us against simplistic morals about restoring and listening to women’s voices — a problem The Rabble also grappled with in their 2017 show about another illiterate medieval heroine, Joan.

My Dearworthy Darling’s use of electronic surtitles, time travel, and Middle English show how the mediations that stand between us and Kempe’s voice are also what allow us to hear it. Going back in time, shifting place and idiom, the woman finds she has both words and listeners.

Are the words her own? Croggan’s citations of Kempe and the play’s shift to chanting and choral song suggest this is the wrong question. If we want to give women words and hear their voices, the play implies, we must also disrupt and complicate the conventions of authorship and public speech that write them out of history.

We must see how mediation, estrangement, and ventriloquism facilitate as well as thwart expression.

My Dearworthy Darling is at The Malthouse until August 18.

– ref. Contemporary and medieval women’s voices collide in My Dearworthy Darling – http://theconversation.com/contemporary-and-medieval-womens-voices-collide-in-my-dearworthy-darling-120590

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Agostini, Post doctoral research fellow, University of South Australia

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

How do people know not to fall out of their beds when they are sleeping? – Louisa, age five.

You might think that when we sleep we are completely unconscious and we have no idea what is happening around us. But that isn’t quite true.

When we’re sleeping, our bodies and brains are still working to keep us healthy and happy. We also still have some idea of where we are.

Read more: Curious Kids: What happens in our bodies when we sleep?

Our body knows how it is moving and where it is because of a sense called “proprioception”. It’s like a “sixth sense” that helps your body know where it is in the world and where all the parts of your body are in relation to each other.

When we are awake, this sixth sense stops us from walking into things or falling over.

You might think that it would switch off when we’re sleeping. But because our bodies still work while we’re sleeping, our sixth sense is still working too.

Even though we are asleep, we can still feel if we are comfortable and our sixth sense is working to let us know where we are in our beds. This helps us know not to fall out.

But the system doesn’t always work very well when we are young. This is why kids fall out of bed sometimes.

We get better at this as we get older, so older children and adults are less likely to fall out of bed.

The different stages of sleep

Our sleep isn’t the same the whole night through. It goes through different stages, from light sleep to deep sleep and back again.

One special stage of sleep, where we have our most exciting dreams, is called REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. That’s when our eyes are moving around to try to see everything that is happening while we are dreaming.

During this stage, our brain sends a message to our body to stop moving to make it less likely we will get up or fall out of bed.

If our body didn’t send this message to our brain, we would act out our dreams!

Message not recieved

Some people’s brains don’t send this message and these people do act out their dreams. This is called “rapid eye movement behaviour disorder”. It is very rare.

There are stories of people with this disorder doing things like patting imaginary cats or hurting themselves by trying to jump out of bed while they’re still asleep. Most of them wake up not knowing they did anything unusual until someone tells them.

Sleep is very important to help us grow big and strong. Our bodies and brains are still working while we are asleep to heal any injuries and help keep us happy and healthy.

Read more: Curious Kids: Where do dreams come from?

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 don’t people fall out of bed when they are sleeping? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-dont-people-fall-out-of-bed-when-they-are-sleeping-120282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Ferris, Associate Professor, Program Leader for Research and Statistical Support Service and Program Leader for Substance Use and Mental Health, Centre for Health Services Research, The University of Queensland

This is the second in a series of articles discussing a recently released comprehensive evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 policy reforms to tackle alcohol-fuelled violence and the implications for liquor regulation and the night-time economy in Queensland and Australia. A summary report is also available.

Our evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 “Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence” (TAFV) policy has found Queenslanders are still drinking more heavily than people in other states when going out at night.

Despite significant reductions in serious assaults and other health-related outcomes, reported levels of aggression are also high.

Read more: Lessons from Queensland on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy

Queenslanders report much higher levels of aggression than reported in our previous studies, which asked the same question in Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Wollongong, Geelong and Newcastle.

Female patrons reported experiencing more of all types of aggression than men across all precincts. The next article in this series highlights the worrying number of women who experience unwanted sexual attention while out.

To measure the impact of the 2016 policy changes on alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and aggression, our research teams conducted street intercept surveys on Saturday nights in Fortitude Valley (Brisbane), Surfers Paradise and Cairns between 2016 and 2018. All participants were breathalysed. Every fifth person was invited to participate in a saliva drug swab.

Across the precincts, 4,401 people – 57% of them male – completed surveys.

Blood alcohol concentration (BAC)

Half of patrons’ blood alcohol concentration (BAC in g/dL) readings were over 0.077 (the median value, with a range of 0.000-0.300) in Fortitude Valley, 0.086 (range 0.000-0.290) in Surfers Paradise and 0.087 (range 0.000-0.289) in Cairns. The highest reading, 0.300, is six times the legal driving limit.

These median BAC levels are much higher than other, previously studied cities. The results highlight the challenges of achieving change in Queensland’s drinking culture.

Interestingly, most patrons are more drunk than they think they are. Before undertaking a breath test patrons were asked to guess their level of intoxication. For example, in Cairns, patrons’ median guess of their BAC reading was 0.070, compared to the measured median of 0.087.

Pre-drinking

High alcohol consumption when going out to night-time entertainment precincts includes pre-drinking (drinking at home before going out; also known as pre-gaming, pre-partying or pre-loading in other countries). As our research teams have documented since 2012, pre-drinking has continued to increase.

With 84% of all patrons reporting pre-drinking before going out, Queensland shows higher levels than in most other previously studied cities.

Overall, male patrons drank significantly more than female patrons when pre-drinking. In Fortitude Valley, though, female patrons were significantly more likely to pre-drink than males.

Read more: Women’s alcohol consumption catching up to men: why this matters

It’s a common belief that patrons choose to pre-drink to avoid buying more expensive drinks while they’re out in bars or clubs. But we found patrons who reported pre-drinking were more likely to drink more heavily across the night. They also reported drinking for longer than those who did not pre-drink.

Our report also shows the rate of pre-drinking across the precincts remained mostly stable in the two years after the TAFV policy was introduced in 2016. This suggests it did not affect rates of pre-drinking.

Illicit drug use

Rates of self-reported illicit drug use varied between precincts, from 13% of patrons in Fortitude Valley to 25% of all patrons in Surfers Paradise.

Ecstasy was the most commonly used illicit substance reported by patrons (5.5%), followed by cannabis (4%).

Among those who completed saliva drug swabs, the most commonly detected substances were amphetamines in Fortitude Valley and Cairns. In Surfers Paradise, however, it was methamphetamine; with 23.5% of patrons interviewed in Surfers Paradise testing positive for the substance.

Although rates of illicit drug use fluctuated in the two years after the TAFV policy was introduced, overall rates remained largely stable. This indicates the policy did not result in a clear increase or decrease in illicit drug use.

Read more: Fact check: only drugs and alcohol together cause violence

So what does it all mean?

Historically, Queensland has high levels of harmful consumption of alcohol, especially in high-risk groups. Around 46% of Queenslanders have exceeded single-occasion risk guidelines in the past year, higher than in New South Wales and Victoria.

There has been significant investment in education campaigns across social media and in schools. Despite this, Queenslanders continue to show hazardous levels of alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and experiences of aggression.

Changing cultural patterns relating to pre-drinking and alcohol-related harms will not be easy. Previous research suggests further tightening of licensed venues’ trading hours will help. Our report recommendations include introducing a minimum unit price on alcohol and promoting low-risk drinking guidelines at all points of sale across Queensland.

Our report also recommends trialling live music early in the night to try to bring people into entertainment districts earlier.

Despite the promising results of government policy efforts to date, our evaluation suggests the work to reduce alcohol-related harm across Queensland is not finished.

Read more: FactCheck: can you change a violent drinking culture by changing how people drink?

– ref. Queenslanders are among our heaviest drinkers on nights out, and changing that culture is a challenge – http://theconversation.com/queenslanders-are-among-our-heaviest-drinkers-on-nights-out-and-changing-that-culture-is-a-challenge-121115

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

The announcement by Suncorp that it will no longer insure new thermal coal projects, along with a similar announcement by QBE Insurance a few months earlier, brings Australia into line with Europe where most major insurers have broken with coal.

US firms have been a little slower to move, but Chubb announced a divestment policy in July, and Liberty has confirmed it will not insure Australia’s Adani project.

Other big firms such as America’s AIG are coming under increasing pressure.

Even more than divestment of coal shares by banks and managed funds, the withdrawal of insurance has the potential to make coal mining and coal-fired power generation businesses unsustainable.

As the chairman and founder of Adani Group, Gautam Adani, has shown in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, a sufficiently developer can use its own resources to finance a coal mine that banks won’t touch.

Read more: Echoes of 2008: Could climate change spark a global financial crisis?

But without insurance, mines can’t operate.

(Adani claims to have insurers for the Carmichael project, but has declined to reveal their names.)

Why are insurers abandoning coal?

By the nature of their business, insurers cannot afford to indulge the denialist fantasies still popular in some sectors of industry. Damage caused by climate disasters is one of their biggest expenses, and insurers are fully aware that that damage is set to rise over time.

Even so, a sufficiently hard-headed company might choose to work both sides of the street – continuing to do business with fossil fuel companies, while also writing more expensive insurance against climate damage.

The bigger problem insurers face is the risk of litigation holding fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-related damage. For the moment, this is a potential rather than an immediate risk.

As US insurer AIG, yet to announce a divestment policy, has observed:

Based on our monitoring, while the overall volume of litigation activity has increased, past litigation seems to have largely been unsuccessful on numerous grounds including difficulties in determining and attributing fault and liability to a particular company, and the judiciary’s deference to the political branches of government on questions relating to climate change.

Recent development suggest these difficulties will be overcome.

It’s becoming easier to finger climate culprits…

Until recently, the most immediate problem facing potential litigants has been demonstrating that an event was the result of climate change as opposed to something else, such as random fluctuations in climatic conditions.

Scientific progress on this “extreme event attribution problem” has been rapid.

It is now possible to say with confidence that climate change is causing an increase in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and weather-related events such as extreme heatwaves, drought, heavy rains, tropical storms and bushfires.

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has highlighted three extremes in 2016 that would not have occurred if not for the added influence of climate change:

• a persistent area of unusually warm water that lingered off the Alaskan coast, causing reduced marine productivity and other ecological disruptions

• the extreme heatwave that happened in Asia, killing hundreds and destroying crops

• the overall global atmospheric heat record set that year.

…and to allocate liability

The second line of defence against climate litigation that has held so far is the difficulty of imputing damage to the companies that burn fossil fuels.

While it is true that all weather events have multiple causes, in many circumstances climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been a necessary condition for those events to take place.

Courts routinely use arguments about necessary conditions to determine liability.

For example, a spark from a power line might cause a bushfire on a hot, dry, windy day, but would be harmless on a wet cold day. That can be enough to establish liability on the part of the company that operates the power line.

These issues are playing out in California, where devastating fires in 2017 caused damage estimated at US$30 billion and drove the biggest of the power companies, PG&E, into bankruptcy.

As a result there has been pressure to loosen liability laws, leaving the cost of future disasters to be borne by Californians in general, and their insurers.

Lawyers will be looking for someone to sue.

Adani is a convenient target

The question facing potential litigants is whether any single company contributes enough to climate change to make it meaningfully liable for particular disaster.

Adani’s Carmichael mine provides a convenient example.

Adani says the 10 million tonnes of coal it plans to mine will produce only 240,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but this is semantic trickery. The firm is referring only to so-called “scope 2” emissions associated with the mining process itself.

When the coal is burned it might produce an extra 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, amounting to about 0.05% of global emissions.

A 0.1% share of the damage associated with the California fires is US$15 million, enough to be worth suing for. Other similarly sized mines will face similar potential liabilities.

Once a precedent is established, any company in the business of producing or burning fossil fuels on a large scale can expect to be named in a regular stream of suits seeking substantial damages.

When governments are successfully sued…

The remaining line of defence for companies responsible for emissions is the history of courts in attributing climate change to decisions by governments rather than corporations.

In the Netherlands, a citizen action group called Urgenda has won a case against the Dutch government arguing it has breached its legal duty of care by not taking appropriate steps to significantly restrain greenhouse gas emissions and prevent damage from climate change.

The government is appealing, but it has lost every legal round so far. Sooner or later, this kind of litigation will be successful. Then, governments will look for another party that can be sued instead of them.

…they’ll look for someone else to blame

Insurance companies are an easy target with deep pockets. Despite its hopeful talk quoted above, AIG would find it very difficult to avoid paying up if Californian courts found the firms it insured liable for their contributions to a climate-related wildfires or floods.

This is not a message coal-friendly governments in the US or Australia want to hear.

But the decision of Suncorp to dump coal, just a couple of months after the re-election of the Morrison government, makes it clear that businesses with a time horizon measured in decades cannot afford wishful thinking. They need to protect themselves against what they can see coming.

Read more: Explaining Adani: why would a billionaire persist with a mine that will probably lose money?

– ref. Adani beware: coal is on the road to becoming completely uninsurable – http://theconversation.com/adani-beware-coal-is-on-the-road-to-becoming-completely-uninsurable-121552

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Crosby, Senior Lecturer, Design, University of Technology Sydney

Indigenous Australians have influenced modern Australian dress since first contact. From possum skin cloaks and booka kangaroo capes to shell necklaces in Tasmania, Europeans have been fascinated with Indigenous materials, skills and aesthetics. They have stolen, purchased, borrowed and worn them for more than 200 years.

In turn, Indigenous Australians have at times enjoyed wearing soldiers’ red jackets as battle spoils and possibly mocked the Europeans by wearing their top hats cockily in the early streets of Sydney.

Later, as First Australians were dispossessed from their lands and herded into reserves and missions, clothing was imposed on them, ranging from shapeless “mother hubbard” dresses for women to shabby but respectable woollen two-piece suits for men.

Traditional dress practices, along with ceremony, language and music-making, were often banned by the colonisers. Missionaries often taught western-style leatherwork to men and needlecraft to women – yet powerful hybrids of self-determined dress also emerged, expressing subversive gestures and quiet resistance.

In the mid 20th century, missionary nuns in Far North Australia began to allow Indigenous women to craft their own textiles. Brightly coloured fabrics were the result, with unusual combinations of motifs. As Indigenous Art Centres were developed across Australia from the 1970s, mostly in remote communities, the fertile hybrid of painting and textile design generated wholly new looks – leading to the Indigenous textile revolution.

For some time, Indigenous Australian art was often seen as the future of a distinctively Australian design, as evident in the 1970s energy of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, but on the whole, Indigenous design was not recognised in its own right. This is now changing – Indigenous fashion design today is being shaped by First Nations people at every level.

Last weekend, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair was held on Larrakia Country. For the second year in a row, a major fashion parade more akin to a performance filled Darwin’s large Convention Centre. The fashion event From Country to Couture, held on 7 August, showcased fashion and textile design. But there was a very big difference from the way such a parade would have appeared in the 1980s or even the 1990s.

Indigenous Fashion is about a new framing of self-determination. From Country to Couture was designed, coordinated, produced, curated and mobilised from wholly Indigenous standpoints. This was apparent in many striking ways – from the inclusion of Indigenous models, to the deep strains of a “black power” music track.

This year’s creative director of the event was Grace Lillian Lee, whose own designs are in major collections including the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Sydney). Grace also leads a project called First Nation Fashion + Design which nurtures relationships between Indigenous artists and the fashion industry. Lee notes that she is “empowering black women and men to have their voices in the fashion space, which doesn’t always have to be overtly political, and can just be beautiful, and a lot of fun”.

Lee worked with dozens of artists, mainly from remote Indigenous Art Centres. Textile approaches ranged from silkscreen, batik, weaving, natural dying, digital printing, and embroidery. Some of these collaborations had the energy of new experiments, and others are ongoing.

The anniversary collection of Tiwi clothing label Bima Wear, in collaboration with Clair Helen celebrated 50 years of the women’s creative enterprise. The designs worked with the quintessential geometric patterns of Bima in bold combinations. The message was as much about ethical, community-led industry as it was about beautiful textiles and clothes.

Fashion has always been collaborative. It relies on the varied skills of textile designers, manufacturers, hidden hands or makers (petits mains in French), stylists, marketers, photographers, distributors, as well as designers. Yet since the late 18th century, the idea of fashion has been generated around one powerful individual – the high fashion designer.

Indigenous fashion challenges this focus on hero designers – many of whom are men in western society. Based on deep community engagement, it challenges the conventional understanding of the fashion designer as sole, individual author and draws on the talents of large numbers of women.

As much a cultural performance as a fashion parade, Lee’s Darwin event featured a set and a narrative of smoking, burning, and regeneration to thread the six collections together, interspersed with dance performances by Luke Currie-Richardson and Yolanda Lowatta.

From Country to Couture highlighted how the success of the textile design movement in remote Indigenous communities has shaped high-end fashion in Australia. But it also signalled a new way forward, grounded in community relationships, for Indigenous fashion design.

– ref. How Indigenous fashion designers are taking control and challenging the notion of the heroic, lone genius – http://theconversation.com/how-indigenous-fashion-designers-are-taking-control-and-challenging-the-notion-of-the-heroic-lone-genius-121041

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Glover, Professor and Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University

Around the world, the most informed and effective public servants are changing the way they develop policy and services. Australian public servants are eager to do the same, but their leaders are not supporting them to do so.

This is the key message from our new research on innovation in the public service, conducted for the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG).

With the final report of the independent review of the Australian Public Service by former Telstra CEO David Thodey expected to be published any day, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has signalled the need for a fundamental shake-up of the public service to improve the implementation of policies and strengthen accountability.

The prime minister is right to stress the performance of the public service. Concerns that it has lost capability and confidence in recent years are widespread, and important public outcomes are not being met.

Read more: Australia’s public servants: dedicated, highly trained … and elitist

This struggle to deliver solutions to crucial public challenges, such as tackling greenhouse gas emissions or reducing Indigenous incarceration rates (the highest for any people in the world), helps explain why trust in Australian government is at an all-time low. Fewer than 41% of citizens are satisfied with the way democracy works, a decline from 86% in 2007.

To avoid making this worse, our leaders need to make sure they do not strip the public service of its ability to advise governments wisely and truthfully, and resist relying excessively on private sector consultants for solutions to public problems.

If Morrison wants a more effective public service, he instead needs to focus on investing in talent and letting the creative thinkers in the service advance innovative ideas that improve people’s lives.

Our governments also need to better understand public problems and how communities experience them – a challenge we can meet with better use of data-driven and participatory practices.

The findings of our research

Our report’s world-first survey of nearly 400 public servants shows that public servants are eager to become innovative public problem solvers, or what we call “public entrepreneurs”. Of the respondents who were not aware of specific innovation skills, for example, two out of three wanted to learn more about them.

The skills such public servants possess are specific and concrete. They know how to define actionable and specific problems. They consult data, and design effective solutions in partnership with the public. Above all, they recognise that we cannot be as smart alone as we are together, so they collaborate.

Our survey sets out nine specific skills – such as data anaytics, behaviour change and systems thinking – that make up a 21st century toolkit for public problem solving. We believe this toolkit is the strongest response yet to concerns about silo mentalities and risk aversion in the public service.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Morrison can learn a lot from the public servants, but will he listen?

Such tools are powerful. For instance, the city of New Orleans used data analytics to reduce its murder rate by 20% in one year. However, we argue against over-hyping any one method, as they are most powerful when used in combination.

Along with this new mindset comes a need to rethink how these skills are taught. Our analysis of the best public sector training programs from around the world suggests a need for more online learning, flexible and self-paced formats, and hands-on coaching in problem-solving.

Another important change to implement here in Australia: learning how to work smaller and think bigger.

For instance, instead of researching and planning a project, policy or service from start to finish, some practitioners are breaking down big projects into smaller chunks. They develop projects incrementally and assess progress frequently, assessing the success of a small product before it is rolled out on a larger scale.

Public servants also need to make better use of digital technologies to amplify the impact of these new approaches. This enables conversations with the community about both problems and solutions, which leads to better-informed and more effective policy-making.

Innovations that are making a difference

To date, the adoption of these innovative ways of working in the public sector is not widespread in Australia.

The structures, incentives and cultures within the public sector are not set up to encourage innovation. In our interviews, middle management was pinpointed as a key blocker to innovation, while only 40% of respondents said that senior management was willing to take risks to support new ideas. The problem is pervasive.

But there are signs of hope, such as Australia’s early experiments with policy labs and mission-driven ways of working to tackle important problems.

For example, Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission and its many partners have employed a host of innovations to prevent injuries, save lives and optimise recovery for accident victims. These have included seat belt legislation, new road design, vehicle safety standards, case-managed rehabilitation, speed cameras and sophisticated advertising campaigns. Such initiatives have together reduced the road fatality rate in the state by 85% over the past 50 years.

Read more: Dealing with ministerial advisers: a practical guide for public servants

The scale of the changes needed is not small. Indeed, Australia may even require an innovation reset, through the creation of a new institution (like Nesta in the UK or Sitra in Finland) dedicated to advancing public problem-solving.

The consequences of inaction cannot be more serious. Although Australia’s public sector is generally well-functioning, there is a creeping crisis of effectiveness in the sector that must be addressed.

This radical re-imagining of the role of government and the public servant will be a defining challenge for the Thodey review and all Australian governments.

– ref. To restore trust in government, we need to reinvent how the public service works – http://theconversation.com/to-restore-trust-in-government-we-need-to-reinvent-how-the-public-service-works-121634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joachim Sturmberg, Conjoint Associate Professor of General Practice, University of Newcastle

Last week’s hearings at the aged care royal commission in Brisbane looked at regulation in aged care. While rules and regulations are designed to safeguard residents, bureaucratic “red tape” also contributes to the failings in aged care.

The fear among nursing home staff of failing a review visit by an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission surveyor has been known to shift the focus from care for residents to meeting paper trail requirements.

The best outcome for aged care residents and their families would be new reporting requirements centred on outcomes rather than processes. Their primary focus should be on the mediation of critical incidents – that is, looking at what caused them and how they could be prevented in future – and the maintenance of health.

Read more: Our ailing aged care system shows you can’t skimp on nursing care

How did we get here?

The crisis in the aged care sector has emerged over time. At least in part, systemic problems in organisations arise from interactions among its key players. These interactions must be aligned to achieve its common goals.

But the key players in the aged care system pursue divergent agendas. Regulators focus on process adherence, while staff struggle with their limited capacity to manage the complex needs of residents. Meanwhile, proprietors focus on economic viability.

The prevailing approach of dealing with the problem of a particular key player in isolation will not solve the problems of aged care as a whole.

Governance and accountability

Our research suggests the need for a major culture shift in the aged care system.

Around the world, governments are being urged to put less emphasis on process measurement and more on outcome transparency.

Read more: We’ve had 20 aged care reviews in 20 years – will the royal commission be any different?

Peter Drucker, a well-known management consultant, educator and author, once said “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”.

Ticking the boxes of a protocol to demonstrate “regulatory compliance” – that is, doing things right – is no longer an option on its own. Residents and their families expect staff to be attentive to residents’ changing physical, emotional, social and cognitive needs; that is, doing the right things.

These insights tell us the aged care system needs to be redesigned.

Read more: Nearly 2 out of 3 nursing homes are understaffed. These 10 charts explain why aged care is in crisis

What would this look like in practice?

Let’s consider two common aged care problems – falls and diabetes – whose management is significantly influenced by the chosen accountability framework. The differences between an outcomes-based approach (that is, adapting care to problems in their context) and a process-based approach (adhering to a protocol) are stark.

The first example: a resident has a fall. Rather than only assessing her for injuries and vital signs (as per protocol), staff would also assess potential reasons for the fall – for example, lack of mobility, pain, low blood pressure, or polypharmacy (taking multiple prescription medications at once) – and involve allied health professionals in preventive and rehabilitative care. This could include muscle strengthening exercises, gait and balance retraining, pain management and medication review. These are measures that could reduce the likelihood of the patient falling again, thereby improving her outcomes.

And let’s take a resident with normally stable diabetes, who one day records an elevated blood sugar reading. Rather than just giving him more insulin, staff would also assess potential underlying reasons for the elevated reading. These could include loss of appetite, an infection, or an episode of delirium.

The royal commission should do many things, but adding red tape isn’t one of them

Increasing frailty and/or significant memory decline are the main reasons for admission to an aged care facility. These people are particularly vulnerable as their health changes frequently and rapidly.

Being bogged down by regulatory ritualism reduces the time staff have available to spend on residents’ physical, social, emotional and cognitive needs.

Read more: Don’t wait for a crisis – start planning your aged care now

True accountability in aged care is achieved by demonstrating how the provided care has impacted a resident’s well-being. In that regard, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission should provide leadership and primarily act as an educator, helping facilities to become learning organisations. If an aged care facility fails to “learn and improve”, then sanctions and penalties become necessary.

More bureaucracy would only serve to perpetuate the current crisis, and would fail those residents and families who have suffered from the current failings in the sector.

Len Gainsford, a former adjunct research fellow in accounting & governance at Swinburne University of Technology, contributed to this article.

– ref. Red tape in aged care shouldn’t force staff to prioritise ticking boxes over residents’ outcomes – http://theconversation.com/red-tape-in-aged-care-shouldnt-force-staff-to-prioritise-ticking-boxes-over-residents-outcomes-121561

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jaime Gongora, Associate Professor, Animal and Wildlife Genetics and Genomics, University of Sydney

Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world with more than 56,000 recorded species, some 9,000 of which are unique. However protecting and researching this natural treasure has been extraordinarily difficult during Colombia’s nearly 55 years of internal conflict.

Since the 2016 peace agreement 21 scientific bio-expeditions have been carried out, most in areas that were previously conflict zones. This has led to the discovery of more than 150 new animal and plant species.

Read more: Ecotourism could be making animals less scared, and easier to eat

This flowering of research offers a new opportunity to the thousands of ex-combatants now looking for productive and peaceful work. We worked with former guerrillas in our project GROW-Colombia to train them to protect Colombia’s biodiversity.

Who are the ex-combatants?

A huge effort to reincorporate these combatants back into civilian life is under way. Paramount is finding suitable jobs, to rebuild the country and offer stable wages.

A recent census found the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC-EP) consists of some 10,000 people. Ranging between their 20s and 40s, around three-quarters are men.

Around 40% of these ex-guerrillas have experience in environmental conservation, and 70% have agricultural skills. Some 10% would like to work in veterinary, aquaculture and animal production fields, 60% in agriculture, and 84% in terrestrial and river environmental restoration.

There is also increasing interest in ecotourism in the 26 Territorial Training and Reincorporation Spaces (ETCRs) where the ex-combatants are currently based.

Their interests, the new political environment, and nearly 20 tourism initiatives in the ETCRs provide a unique opportunity to promote biodiversity as part of the peace process.

Training ex-combatants to protect biodiversity

We wanted to teach ex-FARC-EP combatants some basic conservation skills and identify the potential of nature to create sustainable business opportunities.

We started with a national workshop with the representatives of 16 ETCRs from across the country. These members reflected on their personal and scientific perceptions of the natural world, mapped ecosystems in their local areas and canvassed ecotourism projects. We then discussed the contributions they made to protecting biodiversity before the peace agreement.

One participant, Curruco* had his own farm before being displaced by the armed conflict. He told us,

our participation in the workshops is evidence of our commitment to peace. We protected the fauna and flora during the conflict.

We then used case studies to teach our workshop members how to take inventory of the species in a given area, explored tourism of nature and conservation in Colombia and discussed business models for the use of biodiversity in ecotourism enterprises.

One of the most interesting parts for the ex-combatants was learning techniques for making inventories. We used teaching stations where they learnt about indirect surveys, for example using footprints and faeces, and direct observation and capture. We covered the use of binoculars, trapping cameras, tablets and mobiles, access to taxonomic identification resources and some basic non-invasive sampling methods.

One of the participants, Solangie, had a remarkable knowledge of the Amazon forest. She said:

I enjoyed all the content of the training but I like the bird sightings and plant cataloguing the most because during my time as a combatant we were living among the fauna, including tapirs, reptiles, frogs and butterflies.

I was impressed with the training about plants because in our time in the jungle we used plants as medicine and health treatments.

We then used these skills in practical field work to collect and inventory plants, sight birds and explore caves. The resulting notes and photographs were documented with iNaturalist, an online repository considered a major drawcard in engaging the public in science around the world.

Turning knowledge into business

We also wanted to give our participants a clear idea of how this knowledge could become profitable work. We hosted a business network forum, and 60 meetings were organised so FARC-EP ex-combatants could meet representatives of the major Colombian research institutions and agencies and gain support for their ecotourism and biodiversity initiatives.

Yesenia*, a mother of two, joined FARC at a young age after the paramilitary killed her parents. During the research, she said:

If we want this peace process to succeed it will require the continued involvement of the various components of society, including scientific institutions and universities.

Our work established two levels of organisation: a national biodiversity committee of ETCR representatives from across the country, and a committee of government and non-government institutions and agencies to coordinate and support their biodiversity and ecotourism initiatives.

All of this may sound relatively simple, but this is new and life-changing knowledge for people who were part of an armed conflict, fighting in the jungle against the government.

Read more: Violence and killings haven’t stopped in Colombia despite landmark peace deal

One of us, Jaime, lived part of his life under this conflict, and found it very moving to see how the climate of trust has been changing. While there are, of course, considerable challenges, this was unimaginable before the peace agreements.

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Amazonia, Research Institute of Biological Resources Alexander Von Humboldt, Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research, COLCIENCIAS-Colombia BIO, United Nations Development Programme, National Natural Parks Colombia, Vice-Ministry of Tourism, Social Economies of the Common, Agency for Reincorporation and Normalisation, Verification Mission of the United Nations, British Embassy in Colombia, ETCR participants, the GROW Colombia team at Earlham Institute, The University of East Anglia and The University of Sydney.

– ref. Peace with nature: helping former Colombian guerrilla fighters to become citizen scientists – http://theconversation.com/peace-with-nature-helping-former-colombian-guerrilla-fighters-to-become-citizen-scientists-121695

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Graham, Executive Director, La Trobe Asia, La Trobe University

Concerns are growing about Chinese influence on Australian universities. Some universities are reviewing research partnerships with Chinese state-owned companies after the ABC’s Four Corners revealed links to technology being used by the Chinese Government to carry out mass human rights abuses against the Uygur ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

There are also reports the attorney-general’s department is looking into whether activities conducted by Confucius Institutes at Australian universities potentially fall foul of Australian’s foreign interference laws.

And the protests in Hong Kong against China’s controversial extradition laws have spilt over onto Australian university campuses, leading to scuffles between pro-Hong Kong and pro-China activists.

It’s a tough balancing act for Australia: being alert to the Chinese Communist Party’s potential for domestic influence and interference, while maintaining a relationship critical to our economic and strategic interests.

In March, foreign minister Marise Payne announced a A$44 million National Foundation for Australia-China Relations to “turbo-charge our national effort in engaging China”.

If Australia wants to understand China as a foreign policy partner and strategic actor, some of that effort should be directed at improving our collective understanding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP): its structures, its leaders and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Such expertise is spread dangerously thin across Australia’s universities and, to a lesser extent, think tanks.

The CCP calls the shots in China, internally and externally. Unless we understand the Party’s objectives, how its leaders think and make decisions, our policies are likely to come up short. Australia must develop the intellectual acumen to see the world through China’s leaders’ eyes to manage the relationship on its own terms.

The knowledge gap

During the Cold War, Western governments recognised a strategic requirement to better understand the Soviet Union. They encouraged universities to develop specialist language skills and expertise on the Communist world.

Australia’s location, its alliance with the United States and its reliance on China for trade, mean knowledge of the party leadership’s machinations matters more to Australia than Cold War Kremlinology ever did.

Chinese language is widely taught in Australia, including through Confucius Institutes. But China Studies, as a discipline, is not currently structured or incentivised to develop expertise on China’s ruling CCP or the PLA.

Read more: Explainer: what are Confucius Institutes and do they teach Chinese propaganda?

Since the mid-1990s, Australia’s empirical research expertise on China (and Asia more broadly) has declined.

Few Australian universities offer courses on Chinese politics, while those that do tend to be historically focused. The study of Chinese culture, literature and philosophy and other subjects commonly featured in the curriculum of China Studies, is perfectly legitimate.

But China-literate expertise in the contemporary political and security fields has atrophied to such a point that it needs to be addressed head-on, through active partnership between universities and government.

The knowledge gap is not only impoverishing the public debate. Universities are also incubators for Australia’s next generation of China experts who will populate government, business and academia itself.

This is a sensitive point, but universities should resist the temptation to hire China-trained academics as a quick fix to plug the expertise gap. Chinese-born Australians should of course be welcomed if they have received a liberal education outside of China. The language skills and knowledge they bring are invaluable.

But Australia needs a cohort of homegrown analysts, with the ability to read source material in Mandarin, who are motivated to pursue a career here, whether in academia or in government.

A healthy public discourse requires strategists, linguists, economists, historians and political scientists to contribute, as each sees the “problem” from a different angle. Moreover, the China debate is too important to leave exclusively to country experts, some of whom have a vested interest in preserving their access and networks in the PRC.

Academia is not playing the role it could and should to raise Canberra’s policy game and elevate the public debate on China. The government should explicitly identify this as a knowledge gap for Australian universities to fill.

How should the government do this?

The focus of these efforts should be on investing in individuals rather than on setting up new centres. An external review completed last year judged that the Australian Centre on China in the World, set up in 2010 at the Australian National University and the recipient of A$53 million in federal funding, was “faltering and cannot be said to be meeting expectations”.

This is a salutary reminder of the potential wastage of a centre-led approach.

Instead, resources should be invested in funded positions, scholarships and tied research programs to support and incentivise a new generation of China scholars specialising in CCP elite politics, the Party’s influence over foreign policy, the PLA and other designated strategic subjects, such as cross-Strait relations.

More doctoral research should be encouraged, provided there are enough qualified supervisors in academia. The government should be explicit in its riding instructions, but the conduct of research and academic appointments must be left to universities.

Resources should also be spread to ensure a pool of expertise across universities and think tanks, to avoid over-dependence on any one institution. Given Australian universities’ financial reliance on Chinese international students, a diversified approach makes sense.

This could be achieved by creating research networks that pool expertise across institutional boundaries, linking universities and think tanks, and by selecting institutions that are less susceptible to self-censorship or pressure from pro-Beijing organisations, on or off campus. Universities that rely heavily on China for student recruitment or co-funded research are most vulnerable in this regard.

Read more: Australian universities must wake up to the risks of researchers linked to China’s military

Senior officials and diplomats could do more to engage leading scholars on China, including offering regular briefings and providing guidance from the intelligence community on partnership and interference risks. China experts schooled on elite politics and the PLA can contribute directly to government intelligence assessments by challenging or refining key judgements.

Unfortunately, academic freedom cannot be taken for granted on topics deemed sensitive by the CCP such as Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang or even Hong Kong.

Building a cadre of China experts with the necessary language skills and knowledge to help Australia meet the complex policy challenges ahead won’t have an instant payoff. This is a long game – but a crucial one.

This is a modified extract of an article that first appeared in Australian Foreign Affairs.

– ref. Australia has too few home-grown experts on the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a problem – http://theconversation.com/australia-has-too-few-home-grown-experts-on-the-chinese-communist-party-thats-a-problem-121174