Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

Aged care in Australia is underfunded. As a consequence, many older Australians don’t have the support they need.

Today’s federal government announcement of A$850 million for an additional 10,000 home care packages goes some way to addressing the long waiting list of people who need support at home. But it’s not enough.

The announcement, worth A$1 billion in total, is part of the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO). It also encompasses funding for various COVID-related response measures in aged care, such as further mental health and allied health support for people in residential aged care.

Read more: Morrison likely to elevate aged care to cabinet, as government boosts its funding by $1 billion

‘A cruel and discriminatory system’

When Australians need care and support in older age, the vast majority want to receive it at home. Yet most of Australia’s aged-care funding goes to people in residential care.

Unlike Medicare, where anyone can see a doctor without interminable waits, aged care is a rationed system, with available home-care plans limited by government planning and budget controls.

Australia’s capped system leaves many older Australians without the support they need, when they need it. As at June this year, 102,000 people were waiting for a home-care package at their level of need.

Currently, about 115,000 people receive care at their approved level, which means the number of people waiting is only marginally less than the number with a package that meets their needs. This is unacceptable.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, in its 2019 interim report, urged the government to immediately address this significant shortage of home-care packages, calling it a “cruel and discriminatory system”.

We need extraordinary measures, not dribs and drabs

The government’s recent announcements, in the October federal budget for an additional 23,000 packages, and now in the MYEFO for an additional 10,000 packages, recognises the increasing demand for home care. It will go some way in supporting many older Australians who are languishing on waiting lists for more than a year.

But these additional packages are still inadequate. They will not abolish the home-care waiting list, and nor does the government foreshadow a timeline to do so.

The royal commission handed down its interim report more than a year ago. Yet the waiting list has fallen by only 17,000 places between June 2019 and June 2020.

You would expect the extraordinary demand to call for extraordinary measures, yet the additional 10,000 packages announced in this MYEFO is nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated the government has provided “10,000 additional home care packages at MYEFO every year for the past three years”.

These 10,000 packages bring the total number of new packages since the royal commission’s report to just over 50,000 — not enough to make an acceptable dent in the waiting list.

Read more: Australians want more funding for higher-quality aged care — and most are willing to pay extra tax to achieve it

Catering to need

Home-care packages operate on a spectrum from level 1 to level 4. Level 1 is designed for people with the lowest needs, and level 4 is for those with the highest needs.

The 23,000 additional packages announced in the October budget included a disproportionate number of cheaper, lower-level packages. About 22% of new packages were at level 1, even though people assessed as needing a level 1 package made up only 3% of people waiting for a package at their level.

The misallocation problem looks set to continue; it’s been reported that one-quarter of the 10,000 new packages are also at level 1.

There’s no time to wait

It’s not enough for the government merely to dribble out more packages to look like it’s doing something.

What’s more, simply announcing more packages, without also introducing improvements to how the money is used, just puts more money into a flawed system.

The government must do more to solve the problems in the home-care system, such as bloated administrative fees — which average almost one-third of package costs — and a lack of information to help people choose the most appropriate home-care provider.

Importantly, the government should immediately phase in the obvious changes needed to improve the system — especially to expand home care to reduce the waiting list for higher-level care, as flagged in the royal commission’s interim report.

Last year’s interim report, the many hearings since, and Counsel Assisting submissions, provide ample evidence that the aged-care system needs to be fundamentally transformed. This will take years, and the government cannot afford to wait for the royal commission’s final report due to be released in February 2021.

Read more: 3 ways to transform our ‘Soviet-style’ aged-care mess into a system that puts older Australians first

– ref. Yes, older Australians need more home-care funding. But these dribs and drabs only make a dent in the waiting list – https://theconversation.com/yes-older-australians-need-more-home-care-funding-but-these-dribs-and-drabs-only-make-a-dent-in-the-waiting-list-152165

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Nugent, Co-Director, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University

Review: Biting the Clouds: a Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act by Fiona Foley, UQP

In late 1897, the colonial Queensland parliament introduced the oddly named the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, joining colonial panic about Aboriginal people’s opium use with a new regime of protective governance.

Concern about this — especially the use of charcoal opium, the toxic ash left in pipes — had been growing since the 1870s, and there was evidence opium was being used as payment for Aboriginal labour and sex.

Penalties for opium supply to Aboriginal people were included in the new legislation, but the Act was mainly designed as a program of protection, structured around establishing a series of large reserves to which Aboriginal people were forcibly removed.

Aboriginal people throughout the colony were placed under an intrusive and destructive regime. Few escaped the tendrils of the legislation into their lives during the 20th century. It affected every Aboriginal family in the state.

Memories of being “Under the Act” (the title which Willie Thaiday gave to his powerful memoir published in 1981) still remain strong.

Read more: Enforcing assimilation, dismantling Aboriginal families: a history of police violence in Australia

Making the hidden visible

Badtjala woman and visual artist Fiona Foley has re-searched and re-presented the 1897 Act through her art and, more recently, in her doctoral studies.

This has involved creating a series of public artworks that engage with the Act and what she describes as a “hidden history” of the use of opium as payment to Aboriginal people.

One such a work is Black Opium (2006): 777 cast aluminium poppy heads arranged in an infinity shape hang from the ceiling at the State Library of Queensland.

Foley describes the work’s effect as “stunning and sombre”.

Located in a void in the building and looking down over four stories, she says the piece references a “collective amnesia” about opium in colonial Queensland.

Foley spells out her long engagement with colonial and Badtjala history and The 1897 Act in her new book, Biting the Clouds, a euphemism for opium use.

Based on Foley’s doctoral thesis, Biting the Clouds is designed to accompany the short films, public art installations and other creative works she has produced over her career. Taken together, they provide powerful interpretations and accounts of a history so violent, so elusive, and so destructive it takes a mammoth effort to fathom.

This is Foley’s gift: she refuses to turn away from this difficult-to-detect and hard-to-face past.

Grasping for truth

In her photographic series Horror Has A Face (2017), Foley creates vividly and opulently imagined scenes of opium dens.

“As I am not bound by accuracy”, she writes, “here I have allowed this scene to be as rich and flamboyant as I dare imagine”. These creatively reenacted scenes open out onto new understandings of Aboriginal people on Queensland’s colonial frontiers.

In other images in the series, she uses models to re-photograph notorious historical figures in Queensland, such as erstwhile politician and protector Archibald Meston and Anglican missionary Ernest Gribble.

In these images, Foley prompts the viewer to see beneath the casual respectability presented by their faces to the world, and to bring to mind the part the archetypal “protector” and “missionary” played in determining Aboriginal people’s lives and futures.

History’s hurts

One of Foley’s themes throughout the book is the ways in which history hurts — and not only history in the sense of what has happened in the past. Rather, history as the accumulated and authorised body of knowledge: knowledge subsequently produced and consumed as a truthful account of what happened.

Read more: For Aboriginal artists, personal stories matter

For Foley — as for others — the silences, obfuscations, mistakes, denials and rationalisations of history have the power to produce a new set of harms, experienced by later generations as a form of re-traumatisation.

Biting the Clouds is an eloquent example of the ways in which the visual arts — through a deep and visceral engagement with memory, experience, emotion and story — can mediate and remediate the force of inherited histories on contemporary experience.

In this regard, the book’s title takes on another meaning: an evocative metaphor for the experience of trying to reach back into the past and grasp its truths. Like clouds, the complex reality which one tries to grab dissipates or shifts shape the closer one gets to it.

That is the quality of the frontier.

The historian Tom Griffiths once remarked: “When, as historians, we get close to the ‘frontier’ — that dangerous site of cultural encounter — we often find it evaporating either into intimacy or distance.”

Facing horrors

This work of approaching the frontier is not the preserve of professional historians alone. We all must turn to face the colonial past. When we do, the challenge is to see it with the clear-eyed and steely gaze it requires.

That is what Foley offers us in this book: a candid account of her own monumental effort to look and to see.

And by giving colonial horror a face that appears at once familiar and strange, she challenges us all to do the same.

– ref. Review: Fiona Foley’s Biting the Clouds is a visceral look at opium and control on the colonial frontier – https://theconversation.com/review-fiona-foleys-biting-the-clouds-is-a-visceral-look-at-opium-and-control-on-the-colonial-frontier-151748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Allen, Swinburne Space Office Project Coordinator | Manager Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Swinburne University of Technology

Since time immemorial, humans have been fascinated by the night sky.

Our relationship with it was forever changed in the early 1600s, when Galileo Galilei raised a small hand-held telescope to the sky and became the first person to see Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings.

Optical telescopes today range from pocket telescopes just a few inches long, to the colossal Thirty Meter Telescope being built in Hawaii (which will weigh more than 1,400 tonnes).

There are even bigger arrays of telescopes that observe in radio wavelengths, such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

Read more: We’ve mapped a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Take the virtual tour here.

These large telescopes used for research don’t have a typical “eyepiece”. Rather, they use highly specialised computer-connected sensors that record signals from the sky.

The good news, however, is there are plenty of telescopes in more manageable sizes which you can use at home to observe moons, gas giant rings and maybe even deep sky objects such as nebulae or the Andromeda galaxy.

But before buying a home telescope, there are some points to consider. Who will be using it (other than you)? What do you want to observe? And just as important, how much are you willing to spend?

Reflectors and refractors

Optical telescopes are designed to capture light emitted by stars and reflected by planets and moons. You can think of them as light-collecting buckets. The bigger they are, the more light they’ll catch.

This light then has to be focused to form an image. There are two types of optical telescopes available on the market today: reflectors and refractors. Reflectors use mirrors to bend incoming light; refractors use lenses.

Of the two options, reflectors are relatively cheaper. A few hundred dollars will buy you an instrument much larger than the refractor Galileo used. But bigger also means heavier and harder to transport.

Refractors are smaller, easier to transport and produce sharp images — but they’re more expensive, with a 100mm diameter telescope costing about A$500.

The larger the primary glass lens (where the light enters) of a refractor, the longer the whole telescope must be to focus the light rays. At the same time, the larger a lens, the harder it is to make. So there’s a limit to how big refractors can be.

Although refractors and reflectors are the two classic telescope designs, today there are many types of hybrid telescopes that combine elements of both.

The best choice for beginners

Dobsonian reflector telescopes are often recommended as a great first telescope for budding astronomers. They can be set up in as little as 20 minutes.

Dobsonians have very simple mounts called “Altitude-Azimuthal” mounts, which are moved by hand to a target of choice. They move in the up-and-down (altitude) and left-to-right (azimuthal) directions.

To get the most from your telescope, you’ll need accessories. You’d probably want some different-sized eyepieces to change the telescope’s magnification. Also, anti-glare and anti-light pollution filters are highly recommended if you live in a residential area.

The simplicity of Dobsonians makes them great for observing our Moon and other planets in the Solar system. A good size to start with is a 6″ (150mm) Dobsonian. On average, this will set you back about A$500.

Astrophotography

At-home astrophotography can be done with either type of optical telescope but requires more specialised equipment. For deep-sky photos, the more you spend, the better your results will be.

You’ll need a telescope with very good optics and a computerised “GoTo” equatorial mount.

These motor-powered mounts take into account Earth’s rotation and can automatically point you to a selected object. This feature is very popular, so most major brands sell telescopes with it built in.

You’ll also need an external power source and accessories including a DSLR camera, camera adaptor, timer shutters and filters (depending on the type of astrophotography you want to do). Once you’re set up, your camera can capture the night sky.

There are many processing techniques you can use after to help you get incredible compositions, as well as dedicated online forums for advice.

Cosmic contributions by the public

Amateur astronomers do much more than just take beautiful photos. They also help professionals. Over the decades, citizen scientists have discovered a plethora of comets and asteroids.

Now they’re helping with larger projects, too. One example is Galaxy Zoo, a crowdsourced project that asks volunteers to sort thousands of galaxies into different groups based on appearance.

There have been more than 60 scientific papers published as a result of these volunteering efforts. In 2017, some viewers of the ABC’s Stargazing Live program discovered a five-planet system orbiting a star. It became the subject of a paper on which they were credited as authors.

For anyone considering astronomy as a hobby, a good start would be to visit your local astronomical society. There are now more than 30 across Australia.

Society members are passionate about astronomy, often own a wide range of equipment and hold regular meetings for people with all levels of experience.

Read more: SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone

– ref. The best gift in the galaxy: an astronomer’s guide to buying a home telescope – https://theconversation.com/the-best-gift-in-the-galaxy-an-astronomers-guide-to-buying-a-home-telescope-151374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cath Pearn, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Council for Educational Research

I’m sure most people can remember trying to master a certain maths rule or procedure in primary or secondary school.

My elderly mother has a story about a time her father was helping her with arithmetic homework. She remembers getting upset because her father did not do it “the school way”. I suspect her father was able to do the calculation mentally rather than the school way, which was to use the vertical algorithm.

Students are expected to add the numbers in the ones (right) column first, before adding the numbers in the tens (left) column. The task becomes more difficult when the total of the ones column is more than 10 — as you then have to “trade” ten ones for one ten.

Students who give the answer as 713 rather than the correct answer of 83 may well have started with the tens column first. Or they may have written 13 in the ones column rather than trading ten ones for one ten.

The formal school algorithms are still used for larger numbers and decimals but we encourage students to use whichever strategy they prefer for two-digit addition.

The trouble with teaching rules is many students then struggle to remember when to apply the rule because they don’t understand how or why the rule works.

Read more: Weapons of maths destruction: are calculators killing our ability to work it out in our head?

The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics states that by the end of year 2, students will “perform simple addition and subtraction calculations using a range of strategies”. By the end of year 4, they will “identify and explain strategies for finding unknown quantities in number sentences”.

We want children to remember how to do these equations in their head, rather than relying on writing down the process. Here are three strategies schools use to teach children how to add and subtract two-digit numbers.

1. Split strategy

This is sometimes called the decomposition, partitioning or partial-sums strategy.

You can add or subtract the tens separately to the ones (or units). For example, using the split strategy to add 46 + 23, you would:

• split each number (decompose) into tens and ones: 46 + 23 = 40 + 6 + 20 + 3

• rearrange the tens and ones: 40 + 20 + 6 + 3

• add the tens and then the ones 60 + 9 = 69

Using the split strategy for addition such as 37 + 65 would be similar, but there would be an extra step:

• split or decompose the numbers into tens and ones: 30 + 7 + 60 + 5

• rearrange the tens and ones: 30 + 60 + 7 + 5

• add the tens and then the ones: 90 + 12

• split 12 (10 + 2) to give: 90 + 10 + 2 = 100 + 2 = 102

Many students find the split strategy more difficult for subtraction than addition. This is because there are more steps if performing this strategy mentally.

For a subtraction such as 69 – 46, you would:

• split or decompose each number into tens and ones: 60 + 9 – (40 + 6)

• remove bracket: 60 + 9 – 40 – 6

• rearrange tens and ones: (60 – 40) + (9 – 6)

• subtract the tens, then the ones: 20 + 3 = 23

Students often make mistakes in the third step. Successful students may say: “I take 40 from 60, then 6 from 9”. Unsuccessful students will say “I take 40 from 60 then add 6 and 9”.

Students who use this strategy successfully are showing they understand place value (the value of each digit in a number) and their knowledge of maths rules needed for algebra.

2. Jump strategy

This is sometimes called the sequencing or cumulative sums strategy. The actual steps taken depend on the confidence and ability of the students.

Some students add increments of tens or ones, while others add or subtract multiples of tens then ones.

For example, adding 46 + 23 using the jump strategy might look like this:

• add two lots of ten to 46: 46 + 10 = 56, then 56 + 10 = 66

• add the remaining 3: 66 + 3 = 69

or

• add 20 to 46 which becomes 66

• add the remaining 3: 66 + 3 = 69

The two versions of this strategy can be shown using an empty number line. Using a blank or empty number line allows student to record their thinking and for teachers to analyse their thinking and determine the strategy they have attempted to use.

Subtracting 69 – 46 with the jump strategy could be done by:

• subtracting four lots of ten (40) from 69: 69 – 10 = 59; 59 – 10 = 49; 49 – 10 = 39; 39 – 10 = 29

• then finally subtracting the remaining 6: 29 – 6 = 23

or

• subtract 40: 69 – 40 = 29

• then subtract 6: 29 – 6 = 23

3. ‘Make to the next ten’ strategy

This is sometimes called the compensation or shortcut strategy. It involves adjusting one number to make the task easier to solve.

The “make to the next ten” strategy builds on the “friends of ten” strategy.

Many students in the first years of primary school create all the combinations of two single digit numbers that give a total of ten.

9 + 1, 8 + 2, 7 + 3, 6 + 4, 5 + 5 …

These are sometimes called the rainbow facts as the children create rainbows as they connect two numbers together. For instance, 9 may be on one end of a rainbow colour and 1 on the other.

By combining the numbers in this way teachers hope students will realise the answer for 9 + 1 is the same as 1 + 9.

In the “make to the next ten” strategy, you add or subtract a number larger than the number given (such as the next multiple of ten) and then readjust the number by subtracting what was added or adding what was subtracted.

In the diagrams the relationships are indicated by the use of arrows.

So, to add 37 + 65, you would

• add 3 to 37 to give 40.

• subtract 3 from 65 to get 62

• this becomes: 40 + 62 = 102.

If subtracting 102 – 65, you would:

• subtract 2 from 102 to make 100

• subtract 2 from 65 to maintain the balance

• this becomes 100 – 63 = 37.

Many students using this strategy incorrectly add 2 to 65 instead of subtracting 2.

Why these strategies?

Students would have been using all these strategies, or some forms of them, in their head for generations. But for many years, the expectation was that students use the formal written algorithm rather than their own mental strategies.

The introduction of the empty or blank number line allowed students to record their mental strategies, which allowed teachers and parents to see them. Naming these strategies has allowed teachers and students to discuss possible strategies using a common vocabulary.

Read more: Kids prefer maths when you let them figure out the answer for themselves

Rather than teach rules and procedures, we now need to encourage students to explain their strategies using both concrete materials and diagrams to demonstrate their knowledge of addition and subtraction.

– ref. Jump, split or make to the next 10: strategies to teach maths have changed since you were at school – https://theconversation.com/jump-split-or-make-to-the-next-10-strategies-to-teach-maths-have-changed-since-you-were-at-school-150262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Lau, Research fellow, James Cook University

In March 2020, Papua New Guinea went into a state of emergency to contain the spread of COVID-19. For Ahus Island — a small atoll community of around 600 people off the north coast of Manus Island — the state of emergency had far-reaching consequences.

In July and August, we interviewed Ahus islanders about their experience of COVID-19, and what they did to cope.

Their stories from the first six months of COVID-19 offer insight into the impacts of the pandemic on small-scale fishing communities and isolated islands.

As the new normal unfolds, the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to reverberate across fishing communities. The stories from Ahus island reflect the experiences of other fishing communities across the Pacific. Other Papua New Guinean coastal communities struggled with food shortages, and needed external support for basic foods and services. Getting cut-off from markets and food can affect people’s livelihoods and well being in unforeseen ways.

Globally, there is a need to coordinate short and long-term responses to support small-scale fisheries, especially across the Indo-Pacific, where food insecurity is already a concern.

Fishing pressure on island’s reefs decreased, but at the cost of people’s livelihoods

In Ahus, most people earn a livelihood selling fish — almost no food is grown on the island itself, and there are almost no other jobs.

During the state of emergency, fishers and fish sellers struggled to get to markets and to sell fish, which put stress on fishing families. Normally, fishers sell fish at the town market, a 40-minute boat ride from the island. During the state of emergency, the market was deserted and there was almost no demand for fish. With no customers, people stopped earning income and were unable to buy food:

We found it hard because you go to the market and there’s not one person who’ll buy fish from you.

If you have money, you get food, if you don’t have money you can’t get food. And the way we get money is from the sea alone.

Passenger restrictions meant fewer passengers could get to town. And trips took three times as long because boat owners switched to smaller motors to save petrol.

One man explained:

For us on this island, it is hard … We travel by sea. We go by boat. Now, if only limited people can get on a boat, then that affects us.

The island’s market also closed briefly at the beginning of the pandemic, and travel to the mainland was restricted, leaving some people with no way to access food. Some people secretly bartered fish with relatives on the mainland, but others had to wait for markets to reopen.

When they did reopen, there was limited cash in the community, and many returned to a traditional system of bartering fish for vegetables.

The combination of disruptions of markets and transport restrictions impacted fishing. People explained that it was hard to get fuel from town to troll for ocean fish. Others fished less because they were afraid to leave the house for too long.

The town hospital was only accepting emergency patients. One woman said:

So I told our family, you can’t go to the sea, because if you get sick then how can we go to the hospital? So during that time no one went fishing, and we didn’t have money or enough food.

Fishing pressure on island’s reefs decreased, but at the cost of people’s livelihoods.

‘Little, little for each child and each adult’

To cope with lack of income and difficulty getting food, most households started reducing what they ate. One woman said:

Before, we’d all eat rice often. Not now. I’ve cooked sago over and over, and everyone complains … but there’s nothing else.

Many families rationed food. As one person said:

There was limited food … we’d serve just a little, little for each child and each adult. It doesn’t matter if you’re full up or only just full, that was your share.

Restricting food comes with risk. Diets of fish, sago and rice alone don’t contain enough essential nutrients to maintain health. Children’s physical and mental development can be permanently impaired if they are undernourished.

As families struggled to support themselves, some stopped sharing and helping others in the community. Several people mentioned that they’d received government support during past emergencies in the form of food and basic services. Others had heard other provinces were receiving support and were frustrated that their community had been left out.

The road ahead

Since these interviews, we have spoken again with people in the community. Their situation has improved since the state of emergency lifted.

The sea cucumber season opened in September, bringing a quick cash injection to the community. Markets have returned to business as usual, food is accessible and people have started sharing again.

But the last year has shown many communities are ill-prepared for the economic disruption that comes with a pandemic. Pandemic responses that do not account for impacts on food and nutrition security may lead to non-compliance and foster distrust in the legitimacy of future directives.

Decision-makers, locally and globally, must balance management of pandemics with a recognition that fish and fishing communities are essential to local well being.

Our research report can be found here.

Wilda Hungito, a PNG-based private research consultant and co-author on the report, contributed to this article.

– ref. ‘We didn’t have money or enough food’: how COVID-19 affected Papua New Guinean fishing families – https://theconversation.com/we-didnt-have-money-or-enough-food-how-covid-19-affected-papua-new-guinean-fishing-families-152009

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Boucher, Associate Professor in Public Policy and Political Science, University of Sydney

Many opinion polls on migration in Australia have limited sample sizes, such as the Essential poll, which often interviews around 1,000 people.

This is small when you consider there are over 215 languages other than English spoken in Australia. Running a survey, even a multi-lingual one, will only ever capture so much variation and complexity.

I have recently conducted a study with Elisa Choy, founder of Maven Data, an AI-powered strategic market research company, to gauge public sentiment toward migration. To do this, we used a much larger data pool — all open-access internet sources across the globe.

Our aim was to find out what Australians think about migration through an analysis of how people engaged with all publicly available online sources on this topic. This includes what they searched for on Google, what they read and how they discussed the topic with others on blogs, social media and online comments.

Our study included both Australian and foreign websites, as Australians often consume overseas English-language media.

We found Australians overall have a neutral view towards migration — in that they are neither strongly opposed or in favour of it. But from their internet usage, we can tell they are highly engaged on the topic.

As part of our research, we also sought to gauge what potential migrants around the world think about Australia as a destination, using the same research method in countries where most migrants come from.

Surprisingly, we found a high degree of interest in Australia in only one country – India. In other countries, such as China, there was relatively low online engagement on Australian immigration. However, with China, this could have been the result of state control of the media.

Read more: Australia’s jobs and migration policies are not making the best use of qualified migrants

How AI can measure people’s opinions without bias

Traditional opinion polling relies on weighted samples of a population that are usually benchmarked against statistics sourced from a census or other large demographic surveys.

Another downfall of polling is that it seeks to elicit people’s opinions through interviews or surveys, which are inherently biased and do not always reflect respondents’ actual beliefs or behaviour.

These traditional methods can underestimate how much human behaviour is driven by emotion and unconscious bias, which people may try to hide when answering a poll. This is particularly true with contentious issues like religion, politics and migration.

In contrast, when people engage with content online, there is no scope to lie, even to themselves. This provides the opportunity for a new type of data-driven, predictive, opinion research — without bias.

In our study, we searched and extracted all the online content we could find related to immigration — everything available through open-sourced websites, blogs and social media.

Using advanced analytics, Maven Data can measure the intensity of people’s emotions on a topic to predict both their actual beliefs and future behaviour. The researchers do this by analysing the specific websites people visit — including Google, media and government websites, blogs and social media. They then measure the emotional tone of these sources and people’s engagement with them using an algorithm.

The company has a proven track record, too. Choy successfully predicted the winners of The Voice in 2019 and 2020, MasterChef Australia in 2020 and seven of the nine battleground states in the 2020 US presidential election.

What Australians think about migration

In our analysis, we found Australians are engaging heavily with government websites in particular, as well as media websites and social media. They are highly engaged on this topic and watching closely at how the government plans to act.

Further, much of Australians’ interest in this subject is focused on “gaining facts” rather than forming or reinforcing opinions, which means the government has the power to shape opinion on this issue in the future.

Based on this, we would classify immigration as a “timeless” topic in AI terminology, meaning it is of enduring interest and deeply relevant to Australians.

Read more: We need to restart immigration quickly to drive economic growth. Here’s one way to do it safely

What potential migrants think about coming to Australia

We then analysed what the world thinks about Australia as an immigration destination.

To do this, we looked at how people in Australia’s major migration source countries engaged with not just Australian and other English-language media, but also Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Vietnamese and Spanish online information sources.

Read more: Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

The short story is that the world is largely neutral on Australia as a major migration destination at the moment.

Chinese speakers were generally not engaged with Australia as a potential destination. However, when they did look at information about Australia online, it was centred on the country’s healthcare system, management of COVID-19 and the government’s relationship with China.

Spanish speakers were more interested in the US as a potential immigration destination (despite high levels of COVID-19 cases). This is a key finding, as Spanish speakers are a potential source of increasing migration for Australia given population growth in Latin America.

Indians, on the other hand, were highly interested in Australia as a migration destination. For Indians, the central concerns were related to visas to Australia (including the Global Talent Visa), Australia’s COVID-19 recovery, opportunities for migrants and how migration agents worked.

Key online sources that Indians looked to for information included major media outlets like the ABC, Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald, as well as government websites and Y-Axis Australia (an immigration agency).

Given India was the largest source country of immigrants to Australia in 2018–19, these findings should be of great interest to government.

What does this mean for government?

Our research tells us Australians are actively watching the government’s next move on migration and expecting it to demonstrate leadership in this area.

When we considered the global views of potential migrants, we can see Australia is perhaps no longer seen as the key destination it once was and immigration may not rebound as expected or hoped after the pandemic.

In 2019, the OECD ranked Australia as the top immigration destination in terms of attracting and retaining “high talent” migrants — highly educated workers, entrepreneurs and university students — but we may now face tough competition from other countries, such as Canada.

Another finding from our research is that migrants overseas are often reliant on translations of government websites for information rather than official Australian government websites in English.

This means there is scope for the government to translate its online immigration sources into other languages to reach more potential migrants.

Our findings should be particularly relevant to sectors reliant on immigration, such as the tertiary education, retail, hospitality, health and IT sectors, as we come out of the COVID-19 crisis.

Elisa Choy, founder of Maven Data, conducted the data analysis for this article. We would also like to thank Dr Lucia Sorbera, Chair of Arabic Studies at the University of Sydney, for her assistance with translation of our coding frame into Arabic.

– ref. What do people really think about immigration to Australia? We analysed their internet usage to find out – https://theconversation.com/what-do-people-really-think-about-immigration-to-australia-we-analysed-their-internet-usage-to-find-out-151026

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ayesha Tulloch, DECRA Research Fellow, University of Sydney

When it comes to threatened species, charismatic animals usually get the most attention. But many of Australia’s plants are also in grave danger of extinction, and in many cases, the problem is getting worse.

New Australia-first research shows the population sizes of our threatened plants fell by almost three-quarters, on average, between 1995 and 2017. The findings were drawn from Australia’s 2020 Threatened Species Index, which combines data from almost 600 sites.

Plants are part of what makes us and our landscapes unique. They are important in their own right, but also act as habitat for other species and play critical roles in the broader ecosystem.

This massive data-crunching exercise shows that a lot more effort is needed if we want to prevent plant extinctions.

Spotlight on plants

Australia’s plant species are special – 84% are found nowhere else in the world. The index shows that over about 20 years up to 2017, Australia’s threatened plant populations declined by 72%. This is faster than mammals (which declined by about a third), and birds (which declined by about half). Populations of trees, shrubs, herbs and orchids all suffered roughly similar average declines (65-75%) over the two decades.

Of the 112 species in the index, 68% are critically endangered or endangered and at risk of extinction if left unmanaged. Some 37 plant species have gone extinct since records began, though many others are likely to have been lost before scientists even knew they existed. Land clearing, changed fire regimes, grazing by livestock and feral animals, plant diseases, weeds and climate change are common causes of decline.

Read more: Undocumented plant extinctions are a big problem in Australia – here’s why they go unnoticed

Vulnerable plant populations reduced to small areas can also face unique threats. For example, by the early 2000s Foote’s grevillea (Grevillea calliantha) had dwindled to just 27 wild plants on road reserves. Road maintenance activities such as mowing and weed spraying became a major threat to its survival. For other species, like the button wrinklewort, small populations can lead to inbreeding and a lack of genetic diversity.

Fire, interrupted

Threatened plant conservation in fire-prone landscapes is challenging if a species’ relationship with fire is not known. Many Australian plant species require particular intensities or frequencies of burns for seed to be released or germinate. But since European settlement, fire patterns have been interrupted, causing many plant populations to decline.

Three threatened native pomaderris shrubs on the NSW South Coast are a case in point. Each of them – Pomaderris adnata, P. bodalla and P. walshii – have failed to reproduce for several years and are now found only in a few locations, each with a small number of plants.

Experimental trials recently revealed that to germinate, the seeds of these pomaderris species need exposure to hot-burning fires (or a hot oven). However they are now largely located in areas that seldom burn. This is important knowledge for conservation managers aiming to help wild populations persist.

Success is possible

A quarter of the species in the threatened plant index are orchids. Orchids make up 17% of plant species listed nationally as threatened, despite comprising just 6% of Australia’s total plant species.

The endangered coloured spider-orchid (Caladenia colorata) is pollinated only by a single thynnine wasp, and relies on a single species of mycorrhizal fungi to germinate in the wild.

Yet even for such a seemingly difficult species, conservation success is possible. In one project, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, aided by volunteers, identified sites where the wasp was still naturally present. More than 800 spider orchid plants were then propagated in a lab using the correct symbiotic fungus, then planted at four sites. These populations are now considered to be self-sustaining.

In the case of Foote’s grevillea, a plant translocation program has established 500 plants at three new sites, dramatically improving the species’ long-term prospects.

But we aren’t doing enough

In 2020, both federal environment laws and the national threatened species strategy were reviewed. Each report found a lack of data, recovery actions and conservation funding for plants.

Our research found threatened plant populations at managed sites suffered declines of 60% on average, compared to 80% declines at unmanaged sites. This shows that while management is beneficial, it is not preventing overall declines.

New data on threatened species trends are added to the plant index each year, but many species are missing from the index because they aren’t being monitored.

Read more: Australia’s threatened birds declined by 59% over the past 30 years

Monitoring of threatened species is undertaken by government and non-government groups, community groups, Indigenous organisations, citizen scientists, researchers and individuals. Without it, we have no idea if species are recovering or heading unnoticed towards extinction.

Australia has about 1,800 threatened species. Of these, 77% – or 1,342 species – are plants. However the index received monitoring data for only 10% of these plants, compared to 35% of threatened birds, which make up only 4% of threatened species.

If you’re keen to get involved in plant monitoring, it involves just a few simple steps:

• find a local patch with a threatened plant species

• revisit it once or twice a year to count the number of individuals in a consistent, well-defined area

• use the same method and the same amount of effort each visit

• take great care to not disturb the plant or its habitat when looking for it

• contribute your data to the index.

Saving Australia’s flora

Australia must urgently change the way we prioritise conservation actions and enact environment laws, if we hope to prevent more plant extinctions.

Critical actions include stopping further habitat loss and more funding for recovery actions as well as extinction risk assessments. It is important that these assessments adhere to consistent IUCN criteria – something that will be facilitated by the Common Assessment Method that has been agreed to by all States and Territories.

Finally, more funding for research into the impacts of key threats (and how to manage them) will help ensure our unique flora are not lost forever.

– ref. Australia-first research reveals staggering loss of threatened plants over 20 years – https://theconversation.com/australia-first-research-reveals-staggering-loss-of-threatened-plants-over-20-years-151408

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien Field, Associate Professor, Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney

Agriculture will soon be worth A$100 billion a year to Australia. The industry employs more than 250,000 people, stewards 80% of our land area and drives world-class agribusiness and food sectors. In an uncertain employment market, every new agriculture graduate has a choice of six job opportunities.

Read more: Don’t panic: Australia has truly excellent food security

Agriculture today is fast-paced, global, diverse, reliant on high-end scientific discovery and increasingly responsive to consumers’ concerns about provenance, ethics and health. Despite all this, agriculture still fails to grip the imagination of many of our brightest students.

In Australia about 300 to 400 students graduate with some form of agriculture degree each year. With 17 universities offering significant agriculture studies, this would amount to only 23 students per university each year. And the numbers are declining.

As a growth sector with many jobs on offer, why does it lack appeal for students? Do we have the right model to attract the school leavers agriculture needs?

Part of the problem is social: agriculture doesn’t attract much attention apart from when Australia is on fire, covered in dust, flooded by water or when crops are dying of thirst. Parents and students associate agriculture with rural parched landscapes and struggling farmers, not high-technology science and genetics to produce the best meat or crops.

Read more: Technology is changing the face of northern Australian cattle farming

What do students need to know?

The world of agriculture may start in a rural town far from Sydney Harbour, but it ends up in the commodity markets of London, Paris and New York and underpins some of the world’s most successful companies. And it does this with the help of some of our most innovative scientists.

To attract the best school leavers, it is vital that what we offer students is as exciting, diverse and challenging as the sector is becoming. To borrow a federal government term, the job-ready (agriculture) graduate of tomorrow needs to experience and understand best-practice regional farming systems. This is agriculture that’s in sync with a diverse landscape and resilient to climate change.

Read more: New study: changes in climate since 2000 have cut Australian farm profits 22%

Students’ knowledge needs to be across the many ways to practise agriculture. These range from organic and regenerative agricultural practices, focused on replicating natural processes, through to technology-driven precision farming and the emerging trend of using locally sourced inputs in circular farming systems.

The days of simply shearing and shipping are over. The importance of provenance now goes right through the supply chain – we need to be able to trace food from paddock to plate.

Graduates will also need strong statistical and experimental design skills to manage the science and economics of agriculture. Since the emergence of precision agriculture the quantitative skills graduates need have been totally transformed. They’ll have to manage big data sets to make informed decisions and optimise farm production.

The curriculum has had to expand beyond its historical focus on experimental design to include teaching spatial and temporal data combined with ecological statistics. Farmers want data in real time and mapped across their farm to optimise management and make spatially mapped yield predictions.

A rising awareness of ethics

The impact of producing food is under increasing scrutiny, too, exemplified by recent films Kiss the Ground and David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet.

Consumers are demanding more of food producers. They are represented by groups concerned with better health and nutrition, more diverse diets, or advocates for differing ethical opinions.

The current student cohort is also the most socially aware we have had in decades. The new agriculture curriculum must give them the tools to address these diverse agendas.

Read more: Australia’s farmers want more climate action – and they’re starting in their own (huge) backyards

The rise of digital agriculture will further increase use of technology and data for decision-making along the entire supply chain from farm to consumer. Graduates must be aware of how digital technologies can be used to decommoditise – presenting products as unique that are strongly linked to priorities such as sustainability – and add value to farm outputs. Complex value-added products will allow producers to take advantage of rapidly expanding world markets, particularly on our doorstep in Asia.

Farmers continue to strive to protect the land. This is being recognised with calls for payments for ecosystem services that support biodiversity.

Future graduates will be armed with greater understanding of what makes a resilient landscape. They will be able to draw on scientific evidence to support on-farm management decisions and ensure their ecosystem service payments. They will be able to tailor land-management strategies to each farm.

Read more: Climate explained: regenerative farming can help grow food with less impact

Wanted: a visionary curriculum

A renewed agriculture curriculum will open up tremendous opportunities for students. Data science, bioinformatics and genetics now form the basis of much of the activity in agriculture. This is dramatically extending the skill set of graduates.

While animal husbandry and crop cultivation remain central to our sector, the ag students of the future must strive to be the best geneticists, pathologists and ecologists. Sometimes all rolled into one.

A visionary new curriculum must also include a focus on entrepreneurship and market prospecting – leading to innovative start-ups – and ensure graduates have a global outlook.

They should be able to build agribusinesses that are responsive to the increasing risks, such as climate change, and agile enough to respond to volatility or to restructure to take advantage of new markets. Entrepreneurial skills will be needed too, to meet consumers’ expectations.

Universities must continue to listen and work with industry and consumers and be responsive to global trends and concerns. Agriculture will remain a growth industry. Careful management and investment in preparing students for the future of agriculture will ensure they can be tomorrow’s leaders of positive change and opportunity for the planet.

– ref. The future of agriculture: why unis must prepare students to secure both our food and our planet – https://theconversation.com/the-future-of-agriculture-why-unis-must-prepare-students-to-secure-both-our-food-and-our-planet-150442

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joo-Cheong Tham, Professor, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne

It’s almost unimaginable: an Australian government proposes a law that would wipe out billions of dollars of employers’ entitlements.

Even more unimaginable: it does so on the basis of mistakes made by employees.

Yet right now a “Black Mirror” scenario lies before Australia’s federal parliament, in the form of the Morrison government’s “ominbus” industrial relations bill.

It proposes to extinguish entitlements owed to workers due to the mistakes made by employers. If passed, thousands of low-paid workers stand to lose billions of dollars in entitlements.

But that’s not even the worst thing that can be said of the bill. Worse still is the cynicism of its premise, the need to “fix” a problem that does not really exist.

To appreciate the depth of that cynicism, let’s recap the smoke and mirrors that have made “double-dipping” – the “horror scenario” of paying workers misclassified as casual employees both a 25% casual loading and paid leave entitlements – a hot-button issue.

Read more: So much for consensus: Morrison government’s industrial relations bill is a business wish list

Paying the costs of employer mistakes

Action is needed, the government claims, to address the “uncertainty” over employers incurring up to A$39 billion liabilities because of a Federal Court decision in May 2020.

Known as Rossato v Workpac, the case was unusual because the defendant, labour-hire company WorkPac – with the federal government’s support – funded the legal action against it by former mine worker Robert Rossato.

Rossato argued Workpac should have employed him as a permanent worker, rather than a casual worker, given his regular work roster. Workpac wanted the Federal Court to hear the case so its lawyers could try some arguments not used in Workpac’s unsuccessful defence of a 2018 court case (involving similar claims by fly-in-fly-out worker Paul Skene).

One of Workpac’s new defences was that Rossato (and workers in similar situations), even if misclassified as casual employees, had been paid a casual loading that should be “set off” against leave entitlements now accrued to them.

As Andrew Stewart summarised at the time: “In other words, if he was entitled to the benefits he claimed, he had already been paid for them.”

The Federal Court rejected this argument comprehensively.

In finding for Rossato, it ruled the casual loading paid any worker wrongly classified as a “casual employee” did not offset their separate entitlement to paid leave, as guaranteed to all permanent employees under the Fair Work Act.

Read more: The truth about much ‘casual’ work: it’s really about permanent insecurity

Different entitlement types

Presumably the Federal Court must have had its reasons – and indeed it did. It laid them out in terms so clear it is hard to see where uncertainty arises.

The key distinction, said the court, was that casual loading and paid leave are two different kinds of entitlements.

The casual loading is a monetary entitlement supposed to compensate casual employees for the downsides of being casuals. Casual employees are meant to get 25% more than what a permanent employee would be paid, though research suggests in reality the loading is often neglible.

Does the loading cover casual employees not accruing annual and other leave? That is a matter of confusion, with differing approaches taken by courts and industrial tribunals. It some cases, the casual loading might be framed as compensating for the disadvantages of casual employment. Sometimes the loading might simply be paid due to prevailing “market rates”, as a wage premium to attract workers to jobs with few other benefits.

Whatever the circumstances, the Federal Court stressed that paid leave was not just another monetary entitlement when it came to permanent employees (including those wrongly classified as casuals).

As the judges put in their Rossato ruling, there is a “temporal dimension” to paid leave.

That is, it was an entitlement to an absence from work “in order to facilitate rest and recreation”. This made it qualitatively different to a cash entitlement.

So the Federal Court’s ruling was clear. There was no uncertainty. It saw no double-dipping. Its ruling did not require employers to pay twice. It required them to honour different types of employee entitlements.

Read more: What defines casual work? Federal Court ruling highlights a fundamental flaw in Australian labour law

Return of a living dead argument

Now the federal government is arguing what WorkPac (with the government’s backing) argued unsuccessfully to the court. Its industrial relations bill proposes making that losing argument the law.

If passed, courts will be required to deduct the value of any casual loading paid to misclassified casual employees from any claim they now have to compensation for not being being given the leave entitlements owed to permanent employees.

It creates a “back door” for employers to cash out paid leave obligations, leaving even more workers in the “employees without leave entitlement” category.

In doing so, the bill doesn’t just strip rights from wrongly classified casual workers. It undermines a fundamental principle in Australia’s national employment standards – reflected by the Fair Work Act having limits on cashing out paid leave.

These limits recognise leave entitlements aren’t just a personal benefit. The the whole community benefits; and 2020 has shown the community costs of failing to ensure all workers have paid leave entitlements.

Workers in risky jobs – such as aged care and meat processing – without sick leave or other entitlements have been clear transmission vectors for COVID-19 outbreaks such as that which enveloped Melbourne.

Read more: Workplace transmissions: a predictable result of the class divide in worker rights

These limits have safeguarded low-paid workers signing away these rights out of financial need in lop-sided bargains.

If there’s only lesson one to be learned in the months since the Federal Court handed down its ruling, it’s this. Further impoverishing the value of leave entitlements is just about the last thing any COVID-inspired industrial relations reform should being doing.

– ref. Why the Morrison government’s ‘double-dipping’ gambit fails the pub test – https://theconversation.com/why-the-morrison-governments-double-dipping-gambit-fails-the-pub-test-152016

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shannon Foster, D’harawal Knowledge Keeper PhD Candidate and Lecturer UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Review: Loving Country by Bruce Pascoe and Vicky Shukuroglou (Hardie Grant Travel)

Travelling through the Australian landscape is an often breathtaking experience raising many questions in the traveller’s mind — none of which can be answered by an online search engine when your internet connection fails.

What everyone needs is a travel companion like Loving Country, co-authored by Aboriginal Elder Bruce Pascoe and artist Vicky Shukuroglou. At first glance, it is a travel guide to some of Australia’s most beautiful Country but on closer inspection, it reveals honest, riveting yarns about the true stories of Country told by the people who know her best: the local Aboriginal people with ancestral connections.

In Loving Country, the pair travel across the continent visiting 19 locations including Bruny Island in Tasmania, the Western Desert region, Margaret River, Alice Springs, Broome and Kangaroo Island.

Connecting with local Aboriginal people sounds common sense but in so many instances, visitors will grab the closest Aboriginal person, even if they are not from the area, and with a “you’ll do” mentality, recklessly erase local knowledges.

Loving Country highlights the inadequacy and tokenism of this “tick-a-box” approach, as it tells the rich and complex stories of local Aboriginal peoples and their unique understanding of Country, born of thousands of generations connected to place.

In Wiluna, at the edge of the Western Desert, the local Martu ladies love a yarn, telling ancient stories as readily as they share the contemporary love story of Warri and Yatungka, a couple who fell in love despite their relationship being forbidden by tribal laws. In Queensland’s Laura Basin, local Indigenous rangers and Elders share their living culture, teaching the young ones how to catch cherabin (yabbie).

The generosity of custodians and storytellers at each location is what makes Loving Country unique. The book also provides invaluable information on how to connect with local people and knowledge: a necessity for meaningful experiences with Country and culture.

Complex and nuanced

Loving Country consistently reiterates that Aboriginal cultures are as complex and nuanced as the Country we call “Mother”. The subtext here is that there is no pan-Aboriginality.

In any given place it is not one people, one place, one language. Single ownership is founded in the Eurocentric possession of land and resources — a colonial imposition on the complex kinship systems of Indigenous cultures and their approaches to care and custodianship of Country.

Loving Country will be important for Aboriginal people connected to a common body of Country but who come from multiple nation and clan groups. For others, if you are hearing just one group name, please look beyond it and take the time to find out if there are others. You will find contradictions, ambiguities and inconsistencies but that’s OK. Embrace them all. Country means different things to different people but it will always be the one uniting force between us.

Read more: Friday essay: this grandmother tree connects me to Country. I cried when I saw her burned

My only disappointment in the book was that Country was not capitalised. For Aboriginal people, the word Country is a proper noun, a name for the spiritual entity we understand her to be. Country does not just describe the physical landscape as it would for others. Country is our mother, we do not own her, we belong to her.

Rage and frustration

In Australia, we collectively idolise overseas tourist destinations for their apparent “antiquity”. Loving Country points out that as a nation, we give heritage listing to fence wire and bronze memorials to genocidal murderers. We then destroy sacred sites containing evidence of Aboriginal culture tens of thousands of years old.

Read more: Juukan Gorge: how could they not have known? (And how can we be sure they will in future?)

Pascoe’s rage and frustration at Australia’s ambivalence towards the astounding Country and culture right under our noses is palpable.

He writes that Moyjil (Point Ritchie) in Warrnambool, for instance, has memorials to colonial heritage and agriculture, the success of which relied heavily on the exquisitely fertile soils created and managed by Aboriginal communities for millennia prior.

The local Gunditjmara people have always spoken of an ancient site on the Hopkins River. Pascoe describes recent research undertaken on the blackened stones of an ancient hearth there providing evidence of human occupation for 80,000 years.

In Brewarrina, north-west New South Wales, 40,000-year-old stone fish traps are, he writes, “arguably the oldest human construction on earth”.

Just 80kms south-east, in Cuddie Springs, writes Pascoe, a stone dish was being used to grind grain for bread 35,000 years ago. Soon after this find, he notes, a seed-grinding stone was found in Arnhem Land, dated at 65,000 years old.

Read more: Friday essay: Dark Emu and the blindness of Australian agriculture

Loving Country reveals page after page of both the ancient and contemporary knowledges of these magnificent places, leaving you feeling equal parts wonder and despair. It is a beautifully composed, riveting read scaffolded by Pascoe’s signature commitment to watertight research of the colonial archives.

Shukuroglou’s unpretentious photography showcases the raw, intrinsic beauty of Country. This book will leave you famished for red earth, rainforests, billabongs and big sky Country.

By all means, revel in these far off and dreamy locations but please keep in mind, Sacred Country is everywhere. It doesn’t matter how much concrete, glass or steel you lay down, Country is still here. Her ancient stories and enduring spirit live on in the hearts of local Aboriginal people across the continent.

– ref. Ancient stories and enduring spirit: Loving Country reminds us of the wonders right under our noses – https://theconversation.com/ancient-stories-and-enduring-spirit-loving-country-reminds-us-of-the-wonders-right-under-our-noses-151571

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Victoria Stace, Senior Lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The last time you used a car parking building and paid for the service online, did you pause to read the terms and conditions? If not, you might be surprised to find the car park operator could have the right to remove your vehicle without having to give any reason — and would not be obliged to refund any charges you’ve paid.

This is just one example of commercial terms identified as potentially unfair in a new study by Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in association with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

The study compared contracts from 2015 and 2018 (the latest available data) to assess whether businesses are revising their contracts to remove “potentially unfair terms” in line with changes to the Fair Trading Act introduced in 2015.

Such terms are defined as those a court could find unfair, based on the law’s own criteria. Other examples of potentially unfair terms revealed in the study include:

We may choose not to connect […] services to your premises for any reason, including where we reasonably consider it uneconomic or unsafe to do so. We may exercise this right at any time, even after we have accepted your application for […] services.

You agree to pay any such charges and fees in addition to your membership fee and acknowledge that all fees in the agreement are subject to change at our discretion and without notice.

The study reveals potentially unfair terms are relatively common in standard form contracts — those terms and conditions for which most of us simply click “I agree”.

An increasing problem

Every one of the 134 contracts from 2018 contained at least one potentially unfair term. The most common penalises the customer but not the service provider for a breach or termination of the contract.

A previous study by the University of Auckland in 2015 had looked at contracts issued by New Zealand businesses. The new study was able to directly assess 119 of these to see whether they had amended their contracts to remove potentially unfair terms.

In fact, there was an overall increase of 9.2% in unfair terms between 2015 and 2018. Significant increases were seen in the health and fitness and telecommunications industries.

Just 22 of the 119 contracts reviewed had fewer potentially unfair terms in 2018. Significant declines were seen in banking, digital music and transport.

These results will disappoint those who had hoped the Fair Trading Act changes in 2015 would lead to a reduction in unfair terms in standard form consumer contracts.

More enforcement required

The study report makes several recommendations aimed at improving compliance with the law, including more active enforcement by the Commerce Commission.

So far, the commission has issued just two sets of court proceedings seeking declarations of unfair terms. One of these resulted in a declaration that certain terms in the contracts of mobile trader Home Direct relating to a voucher entitlement scheme were unfair. The other case concerned the terms of ticket re-seller Viagogo and is ongoing.

A key issue identified in the report is that consumers themselves can’t take action in court (or any other tribunal) when they have bought goods or services on potentially unfair terms.

The report recommends consumers should be able to take an unfair terms case to the Disputes Tribunal and that the tribunal be allowed to adjudicate.

Consumers need more information

Lower-level enforcement is also recommended, such as the commission issuing warning letters. Education would also improve the situation.

The establishment of a database of terms that New Zealand and Australian courts have found to be unfair would help both traders and consumers. Given the similarities in the jurisdictions, Australian cases are likely to be influential in New Zealand.

Commission reviews of telecommunications, electricity, gas and gym contracts have resulted in those industries reviewing contracts for potentially unfair terms. The report recommends more industry reviews.

Without such measures, it seems likely businesses will continue to include potentially unfair terms in their standard form contracts. New Zealand consumers deserve better protection.

– ref. NZ businesses are still including potentially unfair terms in their general contracts — consumers deserve better – https://theconversation.com/nz-businesses-are-still-including-potentially-unfair-terms-in-their-general-contracts-consumers-deserve-better-152079

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

The government will inject a further $1 billion into aged care, most of it for home care packages, in Thursday’s budget update.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is also likely to elevate the troubled policy area to cabinet, in his imminent ministerial reshuffle.

Some 10,000 home care packages will be provided, costing $850 million, in the latest funding – 2500 packages will be released across each of the four levels of care.

The funds – announced Wednesday and included in Thursday’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook – come ahead of the final report of the royal commission into aged care due in February. An interim report more than a year ago was scathing about conditions in the sector.

Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck is in the outer ministry and struggled during the pandemic. COVID’s largest death toll was in the residential aged care sector – approaching 700 deaths out of the total Australian deaths of just over 900.

Colbeck, a Tasmanian senator, was with Morrison in Tasmania on Tuesday and it is understood the Prime Minister went to Colbeck’s Devonport office after a function.

The reshuffle is expected to be modest, with most interest in who gets the trade portfolio, presently held by Simon Birmingham who took over finance when Mathias Cormann left parliament.

Trade is high profile with the attacks by China on a range of Australian exports. Education Minister Dan Tehan has been widely speculated for the post.

Tehan has experience in the area. He served in the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department; in 2002 he was seconded to the office of trade minister Mark Vaile as trade adviser. Later he worked for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as director of trade policy and international affairs.

If Tehan moved to trade, that would leave the education portfolio open – with the new incumbent facing the problems of a higher education sector that has taken a beating from the pandemic, which has blocked overseas students’ entry to Australia.

David Coleman, who has been on leave from the ministry for personal reasons for a year, is expected to step down from it in the reshuffle.

There is some room for backbench promotions to the frontbench.

The government said the new aged care money would bring to nearly 50,000 the number of home care packages funded since the commission’s interim report, at a cost of $3.3 billion.

In September more than 100,000 people were waiting for packages. The government says 99% of people on the home care waiting list are already receiving some level of support package.

The latest funding also includes $63.3 million for increased access to allied health services and improved mental health support for people in residential aged care.

An extra $57.8 million will be provided for aged care under the National Partnership on COVID-19 Response. This will strengthen protection, including training and and support in infection prevention and control.

There will be $8.2 million to extend the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre until June 30.

The budget update will show the projected deficit not to be as large as forecast in the budget only two months ago.

The update is expected to adopt conservative assumptions about the iron ore price which has skyrocketed recently.

– ref. Morrison likely to elevate aged care to cabinet, as government boosts its funding by $1 billion – https://theconversation.com/morrison-likely-to-elevate-aged-care-to-cabinet-as-government-boosts-its-funding-by-1-billion-152090

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

Australians became more satisfied with federal public services, and more trusting of them, during the first months of COVID-19, according to survey results released by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Between February and June this year, satisfaction with the public services delivered by the Commonwealth increased from 69% to 78%. In March 2019 it had been 71%. People were asked how satisfied they were overall with the Australian public services they had accessed in the last 12 months.

Trust in the federal public services rose from 57% to 65% from February to June this year, and compared with 59% in March 2019.

The results are in line with trends in trust and satisfaction in institutions and leaders that academic and other surveys have shown.

The Citizen Experience Survey, done regularly and nationally, measures public satisfaction, trust and experiences with Australian public services. It is led by the Prime Minister’s Department .

In total more than 15,000 Australians were surveyed over five waves. The first wave was in March 2019 and surveyed about 5,000 people; this was followed by four more waves, each surveying about 2,500 people.

These results dealt with services delivered at Commonwealth level, not state delivery.

The survey put a series of propositions to people who had accessed any federal services in the last year.

It found 57% agreed information from the service was easy to understand; 60% said the staff were knowledgeable; 62% said the staff did what they said they would do, 51% said the amount of time it took to reach an outcome was acceptable, and 66% said they were treated with respect. All the numbers had risen since February.

– ref. Australians became more trusting of federal public services during pandemic: survey – https://theconversation.com/australians-became-more-trusting-of-federal-public-services-during-pandemic-survey-152086

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tania Sorrell, Professor of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Director Sydney Institute for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, University of Sydney

By any global measure, Australia’s response to the COVID pandemic has been a spectacular success. Public health measures introduced by state, territory and federal governments, with the help of the Australian community, have significantly reduced the impact of the disease.

The response has come at significant economic and broader health costs, however. As the second wave in Victoria showed, success can be fragile. The strong measures needed to regain control of an outbreak bring unavoidable social and financial harms.

To avoid another surge in case numbers, it is crucial that we plan for the coming months as we head into 2021.

Emerging evidence suggests the first-generation vaccines currently in clinical trials have a good chance of preventing SARS-CoV-2 related illness, but they are less likely to prevent infection with the virus altogether. This means it is unlikely current vaccines will adequately suppress viral transmission.

This means there’s not yet a “silver bullet” that can return Australia and the world to pre-COVID normality. Instead, we anticipate a scenario in which vaccines, antiviral therapies and other tools that become available will help reduce COVID-associated hospitalisation and deaths.

Suite of measures

To be optimally effective, vaccines must be considered as part of a wider suite of measures. The advent of vaccines does not mean we can now weaken, much less abandon, the other public health methods developed and practised in their absence.

In a new review of likely next developments, published by the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, we found that for the foreseeable future, national control of the pandemic will need to be driven by:

• ongoing implementation of comprehensive public health measures. High levels of swab testing for the SARS-CoV-2 virus coupled with contract tracing, isolation and quarantine will be crucial. This should be set alongside physical distancing, enforced if needed, the judicious use of face masks, and effective controls at international borders. The communication and delivery of these approaches increasingly needs take into account differing socio-economic backgrounds, cultural diversity, and rural or suburban locations. To be most effective, they should be developed in consultation with these respective communities.

• optimal rollout of effective and safe vaccines, treatments and other interventions as they become available, including improved antigen testing to provide rapid options for active case detection

Read more: Antigen tests for COVID-19 are fast and easy – and could solve the coronavirus testing problem despite being somewhat inaccurate

• effective prevention and management of the long-term health issues arising from the pandemic, especially mental ill-health and the effects of “long COVID”. Prevention and treatment programs must especially target people who are most vulnerable to COVID, including health professionals, older people, those in low socioeconomic groups and our first nations peoples

• contributing to the global management of the pandemic, particularly by supporting our neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region

• sustained and enhanced support for research and innovation to deliver the knowledge and tools required to tackle the pandemic – even when case numbers are low.

The top priorities

In our review, we identify four areas for priority attention, subdivided into 15 specific actions, to ensure Australia is equipped to build a system that is robust and yet flexible enough to continue its successful management of the pandemic – at home and abroad.

We need to create effective systems and capabilities to develop, manufacture and distribute vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests.

We must monitor the health impacts of COVID within Australia, and the acceptability, safety, efficacy and uptake of vaccines, treatments and other interventions.

We have to enable ethical and equitable rollout of vaccines, treatments and other interventions.

And finally, we must be able to respond to the evolution of the pandemic through a readiness to modify public health measures appropriately. Frequent hand-washing and cough etiquette must be sustained. Strategies such as hotel quarantine for overseas travellers, and tightening of restrictions during periods of community COVID transmission, are major tools that have shaped Australia’s enviable achievement to date and will doubtless be needed again. This might mean periodic resumptions of strong social distancing, limits on gatherings (particularly indoors), safe use of public transport, wearing of masks, and isolation.

Read more: We modelled how a COVID vaccine roll-out would work. Here’s what we found

Australia’s capacity to deliver effective public health programs, together with our world-class research and innovation sector, mean we are well placed to execute this agenda.

Doing so successfully will bring additional, longer-term benefits, through enhancing our ability to respond to future pandemics.

– ref. Vaccines alone won’t keep Australia safe in 2021. Here’s what else we need to do – https://theconversation.com/vaccines-alone-wont-keep-australia-safe-in-2021-heres-what-else-we-need-to-do-152078

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hongzhi Gao, Associate professor, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand and China are being pushed toward further regional economic integration as part of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) signed last month.

On the face of it, the RCEP is a positive step for cross-border investments. It further integrates trade between the two nations, along with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the ten countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

But perhaps we should stop to ask whether the haste with which this is happening will generate equitable and sustainable benefits.

One of the main criticisms of globalisation is that, in an aggressive and politically driven push for economic integration, the institutional (legal, political) differences between trading and investment partner countries have been overlooked.

The US-China trade war in the past three years, and now COVID-19, have highlighted the differences in responses to trade, investment and the pandemic by countries with very different political and economic ideologies.

In particular, China is using its global power to expand its influence and reset the rules of trade relationships. New Zealand must be cautious about its exposure to Chinese influence at this level.

Rebalancing the books

Our analysis of foreign direct investment (FDI) application data from the New Zealand Overseas Investment Office from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2019 shows two conflicting trends.

In financial and insurance services, and the information, communications and technology sectors, application approvals favoured the US and Australia. But in manufacturing, even after the US–China trade war broke out, approvals favoured China.

Read more: An all-out trade war with China would cost Australia 6% of GDP

This greater receptiveness to Chinese investments in manufacturing might reflect the push for more economic integration with China in recent years.

But this approach needs to be scrutinised in light of the current stand-off between China and Australia.

The downside of economic integration

The recent call by Australia (supported by New Zealand, the EU and Canada) for an independent investigation into the origin of COVID-19 shows how much deeper institutional differences matter.

China imposed tariffs and other trade restrictions on Australian beef, barley, minerals, wine and most recently coal in response to that call and to Australian government criticism of Beijing’s suppression of political dissent in Hong Kong.

Read more: NZ remains unscathed by US-China trade war, but that’s no reason for complacency

In an ideal world, the free trade agreement between Australia and China and the much-hyped regional economic integration represented by the RCEP might have salvaged the relationship and allowed the parties to talk more openly about their disputes.

But the opposite has happened. The stronger economic relationship and mutual economic dependency have actually made China’s retaliation even more painful for Australia. The less powerful party is always hurt more when a relationship goes wrong.

The lessons for New Zealand

New Zealand and Australia are not alone in being at something of a crossroads with China. Many countries are confronting the difficulty (impossibility, even) of balancing the pressure to be part of China’s economic orbit and their fundamental institutional differences.

In essence, it is the tension between greater political and economic freedoms, and state intervention and control. The implications for resolving trade disputes and other economic disagreements are profound.

Read more: Beyond travel, a trans-Tasman bubble is an opportunity for Australia and NZ to reduce dependence on China

For that reason, New Zealand’s FDI policies and application approvals should reflect a preference for countries with similar institutional conventions. While balancing its trade interests is critical for New Zealand, it should not be driven purely by immediate economic benefits.

New Zealand’s FDI policies should reflect its own best long-term interests: continued regional economic integration with Australia, enhanced post-Brexit leverage of the political, historical and cultural links with the UK, and closer economic ties with developing economies (especially Commonwealth countries such as India and Malaysia).

In doing so, New Zealand will reduce the political and economic risks of over-integration with China and avoid the kind of conflicts based on deep institutional differences we are now witnessing.

– ref. As China’s trade war with Australia shows, New Zealand must be careful to balance its own economic priorities – https://theconversation.com/as-chinas-trade-war-with-australia-shows-new-zealand-must-be-careful-to-balance-its-own-economic-priorities-149966

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenni Downes, Research Fellow, BehaviourWorks Australia (Monash Sustainable Development Institute), Monash University

Last week, Australia took an important step towards addressing the ongoing effects of the 2018 waste crisis. The federal parliament passed legislation banning the export of unprocessed waste overseas via the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020.

The new law provides an impetus to reconfigure local infrastructure to reprocess and re-manufacture recyclables onshore. It should create local demand to reuse these recovered materials in infrastructure, packaging and products as part of a move towards a circular economy.

It’s encouraging to see the federal government finally providing clear policy direction for the waste industry and making Australia more responsible for how our waste is recovered. But it’s far from enough to temper the waste crisis.

Is exporting waste ‘bad’?

The total amount of waste generated in 2018-19 went up 10% from just two years earlier — and only half of that was recycled. Meanwhile, opportunities to export material for overseas recycling have been drying up.

In 2019, Australia exported an estimated 7% of all waste generated. The proportion is much higher for the household commingled recycling bin, where around one-third of all paper and plastics were exported to overseas trading partners, particularly in Asia.

Exporting material recovered from waste isn’t “bad” per se, particularly when you consider Australia imports more manufactured goods than we make locally. Currently, our economy remains structured around exporting virgin (new) and recyclable materials, which are made into products offshore and then re-imported.

So, when we export well-sorted, quality, recyclable material, it’s no different than exporting, say, iron ore.

However, just dumping “rubbish” on other countries is not acceptable. And even exporting potentially recyclable material without taking responsibility for how the material will be recovered overseas leads to a greater risk of it being dumped or burned.

Such an economic structure makes us reliant on international markets and the policy priorities of those countries.

This was highlighted in 2018 when China banned waste imports of all but the highest purity, with other countries in Asia following suit. This shocked Australia’s (and the world’s) recycling industry, and led to plummeting prices for certain waste materials and increased stockpiling and short-term landfilling.

Read more: China’s recycling ‘ban’ throws Australia into a very messy waste crisis

What’s more, when developing countries import too much waste or low-quality material, their infrastructure and markets can become overwhelmed. The waste then ends up “leaking” into the environment, including the ocean, as litter.

A ban on Australia’s waste export was first announced in August 2019 to help address our responsibility for ocean plastics. The ban could localise much of Australia’s reprocessing — and possibly, manufacturing — activity.

What does the ban involve?

The new law passed last week will complement and extend existing laws on hazardous waste and product stewardship.

Effectively, the ban prohibits the export of specific raw (unprocessed) materials collected for recycling: plastic, paper, glass and tires. Any materials that have been re-processed and turned into other “value-added” materials (those ready for further use) can still be exported under the law. For example, a single type of plastic cleaned and shredded into “flakes”, or cleaned packaging glass crushed into “cullet”.

The law is accompanied by commitments from the federal and state governments to help address some of the critical systemic barriers to onshore processing, such as the lack of existing infrastructure and domestic markets for reprocessed material.

No room for error

Without sufficient transition measures, it’s possible the ban could lead to more waste ending up in landfills, stockpiling or illegal dumping.

For the ban to be effective, a lot of things need to go right. This includes:

Getting the transition right will be critical for Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, which are particularly lacking in proper infrastructure.

Read more: Can we safely burn waste to make fuel like they do in Denmark? Well, it’s complicated

It’s also important for NSW and Victoria because of the high proportion of banned materials they currently export. For example, over 80% of Australia’s exported plastic was from NSW and Victoria, while 90% of exported glass was from Victoria.

Increasing momentum

Given exports are only a part of overall waste material flows, it’s great to see the ban is part of a suite of responses. This includes the Recycling Modernisation Fund, and the recent $10 million National Product Stewardship Investment Fund and Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence.

Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact these are predominantly “end-of-pipe” solutions.

While there are promising efforts from industry and government to minimise waste by improving the design of Australian-made products and packaging, more should be done.

Options include minimum design standards and extended producer responsibility, which would make manufacturers and retailers financially responsible for ensuring their products are recycled. This would incentivise better “up the chain” (design) choices.

Read more: Four bins might help, but to solve our waste crisis we need a strong market for recycled products

And as a major importer of manufactured products, Australia also needs to manage what’s coming into the country through improved standards, such as minimum requirements for recyclability and durability, or prohibiting problematic materials in inferior products that will quickly become waste.

Ultimately, it’s far better for the environment to reduce the generation of waste in the first place. Together with better design, this will move us towards a more circular economy.

If Australia’s new waste and recycling law represents increasing momentum towards a circular economy in Australia, rather than a pinnacle on which we rest, it will be an excellent step forward.

– ref. Australia’s waste export ban becomes law, but the crisis is far from over – https://theconversation.com/australias-waste-export-ban-becomes-law-but-the-crisis-is-far-from-over-151675

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne

Two years ago, the streets of France were filled with the gilets jaunes (yellow vests), a grassroots protest movement sparked by a proposed tax hike on petrol.

Though they have shed their yellow safety jackets, many of these disaffected people have joined a new wave of protests that has roiled France for weeks, presenting a major challenge for the government of President Emmanuel Macron.

The protests erupted in late October after the horrific murder of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who had used caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson. Thousands marched in tribute to Paty, but also in support of freedom of speech.

In the past month, protesters have also taken aim at a proposed new security law intended to combat what the government describes as “Islamic radicalism”. Nearly 150 people were arrested last weekend after protests became violent.

The roots of Macron’s current challenge

An explanation of the tensions connecting these protests takes us deep into the history of France, as well as to contemporary crises. It also suggests that there is no simple solution.

In 1789, French revolutionaries sought to capture their twin aspirations of religious tolerance and freedom of speech in articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Read more: For French Muslims, every terror attack brings questions about their loyalty to the republic

“No man may be harassed for his opinions, even religious ones”, they insisted, while asserting that “the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man”.

Should these natural rights be curtailed in any way? Yes, of course: as article 4 stipulates, they would be limited to “ensure the enjoyment of the same rights for other members of society”. As to how this would be achieved, “only the law may determine these limits”.

Therein lay the problem. Since “the law” would be made by national legislatures, these limits would always be instrumental — that is, made by elected politicians working within a social and political context. That is Macron’s wicked problem today.

The continuing debate over laïcité

Conflict over limits to freedom arose immediately between revolutionaries and their opponents after 1789. There were ribald, even pornographic, attacks on Marie-Antoinette and the Catholic Church, reflecting a deadly schism between secular, republican France and the church.

For republicans, a central legacy of the revolution has been the principle of laïcité, that is, of a secular public space.

Freedom of religion has been guaranteed in France so long as it does not disturb public order. Religion is seen as a private matter and its observance strictly separated from public life.

This is a deeply held conviction in France. It explains the 2010 law that bans the wearing of full-face coverings in public, including but not limited to burqas and niqābs.

French supporters of laïcité would find it perplexing, if not offensive, to see one Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, holding Sunday press conferences outside his church, or another, Scott Morrison, welcoming the media inside his church and describing secular events (such as an election victory) as a “miracle”. In France, this might end political careers.

Australian and US commentators have been too ready to criticise France for not being as accepting of difference as their own societies, ignoring France’s different history and present.

Read more: France’s laïcité: why the rest of the world struggles to understand it

From 1789, Jews, Protestants, Muslims — as well as Catholics — were guaranteed the freedom to worship, but the fine line between religious freedoms and secular public space has always been blurred, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Take Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s false conviction for treason in 1894, followed by his imprisonment and eventual exoneration in 1906. This was profoundly polarising because it embodied the violent divisions in France about the place of Jews in public life at a time of acute anti-semitism.

Dreyfus’s anti-semitic and anti-republican accusers included many clergy — one of the reasons behind the formal separation of church and state in 1905.

Deep national tensions over Islam

Similarly, the beheading of Paty and subsequent terror attack in Nice in late October sparked a profound response because they occurred amid deep national tensions over the place of Muslims in France.

These tensions go back to wars of decolonisation in the 1960s, but were heightened by recent attacks at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre in 2015.

While almost all Muslim organisations in France were prompt and unequivocal in repudiating those murders, elsewhere in the Muslim world, some were hostile to the freedoms accorded to media outlets such as Charlie Hebdo to publish caricatures mocking Islam and its prophet.

Leaders in Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere condemned the magazine and called for consumer boycotts of French products.

Charlie Hebdo’s defence was that it mocks everybody, and it followed with an obscene cartoon of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Read more: Liberty, equality, fraternity: redefining ‘French’ values in the wake of Charlie Hebdo

Macron has insisted the respect due to all religions must be balanced by the right to freedom of expression, no matter how offensive some caricatures might be to people of faith.

He has defended the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish the caricatures, even though some might be banned in other countries as deliberately offensive, even racist. While France has anti-hate laws, its highest courts have also been very reluctant to penalise satire.

At the same time, Macron’s minister of national education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has targeted “Islamo-gauchisme”, the supposed undermining of French republican values by left-wing academics and intellectuals infected by feelings of guilt for France’s colonial past.

Can Macron find a solution?

These tensions have now spilled onto the streets in unanticipated ways, as they have become embroiled with deep anxieties and divisions about decolonisation, policing and the limits to secularism. All of this comes at a time of economic despair and strident criticism of the government’s mishandling of the pandemic.

In this context, violent police raids and a sweeping national security law, which would make a criminal offence to publish photos or film identifying police officers and expand police surveillance powers, have sparked widespread discontent.

In early December, the Macron government announced a revision of the security bill. This alone will not staunch a profound crisis of confidence in the foundational values of the republic: secularism, freedom of speech and respect for religious plurality.

In such a situation, the siren calls of cultural stereotyping may become louder, and Macron may need a “miracle” of his own to keep France out of the hands of Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (National Rally), formerly known as the Front National, at the presidential elections of April 2022.

– ref. As protests roil France, Macron faces a wicked problem — and it could lead to his downfall – https://theconversation.com/as-protests-roil-france-macron-faces-a-wicked-problem-and-it-could-lead-to-his-downfall-151206

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary-Louise McLaws, Professor of Epidemiology Healthcare Infection and Infectious Diseases Control, UNSW

As many of us return to the office, and congregate indoors over dinner and drinks during the summer holidays, we need to think about ventilation to minimise the indoor spread of COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, is spread mostly by larger particles called droplets, but also by smaller particles called aerosols, and by touch from contaminated surfaces.

Aerosol particles are lighter than droplet-sized particles, and can be suspended in the air for longer. The suspension and therefore transmission of aerosols is facilitated by poor ventilation.

Increasing ventilation indoors, with fresh outdoor air, is a key method of dispersing viral particles. Ventilation can reduce the risk that just one COVID-positive person (who might not yet know they’re infectious) will infect others.

There are some simple measures you can take, both at home and at work, to improve ventilation over the holiday period and beyond.

Read more: Poor ventilation may be adding to nursing homes’ COVID-19 risks

1. Open windows and doors

The best strategy at home and at work is simply to open windows and doors.

If you’re having friends and family over for a meal, or your office Christmas party, consider moving tables and chairs closer to open windows and open up a door to create a through breeze.

Or, if weather permits, eat outside.

2. Set your air conditioner to pull fresh air from outside

Air conditioners can help, but they must be on the right setting.

At work or home you don’t want to recirculate indoor air, as this just fans the same air around the room (but now colder or warmer).

Instead, always make sure your air conditioner is set to bring in 100% fresh air from outside. There are settings in offices that allow the system to increase air change per hour, meaning it can reduce the time it takes for all the air inside the room to be completely replaced with outside fresh air.

But the direction of the airflow is also important. For example, airflow from an air conditioner (that was recirculating air rather than pulling it from outside) was implicated in spreading the virus to a number of diners at tables downstream in a restaurant in China.

Offices welcoming back staff should prepare their air conditioners by having their engineers service the system to pull in fresh air faster than the pre-COVID setting (which may have been around 40 litres per second per person) at no less than 60 litres per second, per person.

In hospitals, aged-care facilities and hotel quarantine, qualified engineers should be brought in to assess the adequacy of the air conditioner’s airflow. This is particularly crucial for any “hot zones” accommodating people who are COVID-positive.

The World Health Organisation recommends hot zones have 12 airflow changes per hour (that’s 80 litres per second per person), meaning the air is totally replaced 12 times every 60 minutes. This is the gold standard for ventilation, and can be very hard to achieve in many buildings.

Read more: Many of our buildings are poorly ventilated, and that adds to COVID risks

3. Use fans

Guidelines released last week by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend placing fans near open windows to enhance airflow. The recommendation is to keep fans on at all times when a room is occupied, for example at restaurants.

As with aircons, fans can be dangerous if they push the air directly from one person to another, and one is infectious. You should place the fan so it increases the flow of fresh air into the room, and shouldn’t be placed so the air moves from the room towards the open window or open door.

4. Don’t bother with HEPA filters at home

High-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters have been marketed as a way to reduce the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 particles in the air.

Their effectiveness is dependent on the airflow capacity of the unit, the configuration of the room, the number of people in the room, and the position of the filter in the room.

But there’s no evidence to suggest a portable HEPA filter unit will help in your home. So don’t rush out and buy one for Christmas.

They may be effective in some areas of health care, such as a COVID ward in a hospital or in aged care homes, particularly when used in negative-pressure rooms. The combination of the HEPA filter and negative air pressure reduces the risk of aerosol particles escaping into the corridor.

5. In public transport, taxis and Ubers

COVID outbreaks have been traced back to exposure on public transport. For example, a young man in Hunan Province, China, travelled on two buses and infected multiple people who were sitting in different areas of the buses. A study of this cluster was carried out by Chinese researchers, who put forward one theory regarding air flow:

The closed windows with running ventilation on the buses could have created an ideal environment for aerosol transmission […] the ventilation inlets were aligned above the windows on both sides, and the exhaust fan was in the front, possibly creating an airflow carrying aerosols containing the viral particles from the rear to the middle and front of the vehicle.

The study’s authors recommend all windows be open on public transport to help disperse viral particles. If you’re on a tram or a bus, you should open them if you can.

However, on some forms of public transport it might be impossible, like trains. In these instances, you should wear a mask.

Likewise, it’s ideal to have the windows down in Ubers and taxis. But if you can’t or don’t want to, turn on the air conditioner and have it pull fresh air from outside. And still wear a mask!

– ref. 5 tips for ventilation to reduce COVID risk at home and work – https://theconversation.com/5-tips-for-ventilation-to-reduce-covid-risk-at-home-and-work-151758

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Australians receiving unemployment payments are often negatively portrayed as a relatively small group of people with personal or behavioural problems that stop them from getting a job.
The unparalleled growth in unemployment during COVID-19 has opened up significant space to challenge long-held perceptions of “them and us” when it comes to welfare.

Read more: Who’s really behaving badly? Confronting Australia’s cashless welfare card

Nevertheless, extra support to Australia’s unemployed has already been substantially wound back — with plans to do so again by the end of the year.

Our new study, by a team at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, RMIT University and the Australian National University, highlights significant misunderstandings about the scale and scope of Australians who received Newstart — the unemployment payment replaced by JobsSeeker Payment earlier this year.

Bottom line? It’s much more common to get the payment than you think.

‘Everyone counts’: our research

This study makes use of a Department of Social Services database that records every interaction with Centrelink. This is the first time results from this database have been published by independent researchers.

It has given us an important opportunity to track how people have used unemployment payments — specifically Newstart Allowance — from 2001 to 2016 (the years available for study).

Read more: Forget JobSeeker. In our post-COVID economy, Australia needs a ‘liveable income guarantee’ instead

We took a simple but new approach: to count every individual who ever received Newstart between those years.

Most statistics on the number of people receiving payments are reported as the “stock”, which is the number of recipients on a specific date in that year. With these new data, we are able to measure the “flow”, which is the number of people who ever received a payment during the course of each year, as well as over the whole period since 2001.

Our analysis is part of broader research that aims to gain a clearer understanding of the dimensions of “income volatility” (sudden changes in income) in Australia.

How many people receive payments?

We found receiving unemployment payments was much more common than previously thought during the study period.

For example, between 2013 and 2016, the number of people receiving Newstart at the end of the financial year ranged between 660,000 and 750,000. But over the course of each of those years, well over 1.1 million separate individuals received an unemployment payment.

This suggests approximately one in 11 people (9%) in the labour force received Newstart in any of these years.

Overall, when we look at the “flow” figures, more than 4.4 million people received Newstart between 2001 and 2016 (nearly 2.5 million men and 2 million women). This is nearly one quarter of the qualified working-age population over this period.

We also found the proportion of women receiving Newstart increased from 30% in 2001 to 46% in 2016. In part this reflects policy changes that predominantly affected women, such as restricting access to parenting payments and the increase in the Age Pension age for women.

Time spent on welfare varies

There is a widely-held view that many unemployed people rely on the payment for a long time. But our analysis provides a mixed picture on this point.

Nearly half of the Newstart population of 4.4 million (47%) received the payment for less than a year. Over two-thirds (68%) received it for less than two years.

So this would appear to contradict the idea most people rely on it long-term. However, it remains important to recognise that a significant minority still do.

At the other extreme, around 15% were on the payment for a total of five or more years. About 3.6% had been on it for ten or more years.

Between the two extremes — people who had only one short period on Newstart and people who spent most of these years on it — there are a multitude of differing patterns. This reflects both the ups and downs of the Australian labour market and the volatile circumstances experienced by many working-age Australians.

Dramatic rise in payment suspensions

Fluctuating income is a key cause of household financial and emotional stress. It can affect well-being as much as (if not more than) low wages.

For people receiving an income support payment, the disruption caused by uncertain income is even worse — even a day’s delay in payment can have major consequences when it comes to paying bills or rent.

People on Newstart (now JobSeeker) can have their payments suspended either for not reporting their income correctly or not meeting job-seeking requirements. Successive governments have increasingly sought to enforce this — which has led to more uncertainty around the payment.

Our study found rates of suspension increased dramatically over the study period, from 2% in 2001 to 11% to 2016. Of those who were suspended, the likelihood of experiencing multiple suspensions increased from 2.3% to 14%.

Women were more likely to have been suspended on multiple occasions than men. In 2016, 12.7% of the 556,000 women who received Newstart were suspended, compared to 9.8% of the 653,000 men.

Social security is not a ‘marginal’ issue

The biggest lesson of our study is that the idea social security payments are confined to a group of unfortunate individuals and families living at the margins of society is incorrect.

Our findings show how short-term reliance on unemployment benefits is relatively common. Social security, like healthcare and education, should be viewed as a core part of mainstream Australian life.

Read more: When the Coronavirus Supplement stops, JobSeeker needs to increase by $185 a week

Our insights also demonstrate that while longer-term reliance on Newstart is an important policy issue, short-term reliance is underestimated. They also shed new light on the increasing share of recipients — especially women — who are facing irregular payments due to suspensions.

Along with ongoing concerns about the adequacy of income support payments – highlighted once again by a recent Senate inquiry, as well as by business groups like the Australian Retailers Association — this raises questions about the extent to which the Australian social security system is effectively fulfilling its stated mission,

to improve the lifetime well-being of individuals and families.

– ref. Our research shows more Australians receive unemployment payments than you think – https://theconversation.com/our-research-shows-more-australians-receive-unemployment-payments-than-you-think-151289

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Costanza, Professor and VC’s Chair, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

As JobKeeper is wound back, businesses are tentatively preparing to stand on their own feet.

What follows is a simple proposal to help them share the risk (and rewards) with their workers.

It has features in common with the government’s Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS) in which university students get help with fees in return for making their own contribution when (and if) circumstances allow.

Recently a variant has been suggested for farms, whose income is notoriously variable and unsuited to conventional loans with regular repayment schedules.

What’s proposed is an arrangement contingent on business revenue rather than personal income as with HECS.

Farm businesses would borrow from the government or banks and make repayments when conditions permitted. It would cost taxpayers much less than subsidies or grants.

Employers could ‘borrow’ from workers

We are proposing the same sort of arrangement between employers and employees.

Universities, for example, might consider revenue-contingent salary reductions as an alternative to redundancies.

All staff or staff at risk of being made redundant might be offered a 10% salary reduction that would be refunded by the university when (and only if) its revenue bounced back by a agreed amount in the future.

Read more: Bowing out gracefully: how they’ll wind down JobKeeper

If the university’s fortunes did bounce back, the staff affected would be repaid the income they lost.

Such a scheme would support employees at risk as did JobKeeper, while maintaining the employeer-employee relationship as did JobKeeper.

It ought to work in all sorts of enterprises.

For many, jobs matter more than income

Wellbeing and life satisfaction are often more dependent on job security than they are on salary, suggesting that many people would be willing to trade-off one for the other.

Introduced through enterprise bargaining and policed by Fair Work Australia, such an arrangement might well be a win-win for workers and the enterprises they work in.

It ought to be added to the menu of possibilities being considered to support businesses and workers when JobKeeper ends on March 28.

– ref. Revenue-contingent wage loans, a proposal for supporting jobs in times of crisis – https://theconversation.com/revenue-contingent-wage-loans-a-proposal-for-supporting-jobs-in-times-of-crisis-151565

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoltan Szabo, Cellist and musicologist, University of Sydney

The tradition of performing George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is as inseparable from festivities preceding Christmas as the oversweet carol arrangements oozing through loudspeakers at shopping centres.

It’s a tradition worth noticing, as the Messiah was originally composed as an Easter offering, first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742. With lines such as, “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”, this is understandable.

It is curious why this masterpiece, structured in three parts and performed for hundreds of years at Easter, gradually became a ubiquitous element of the Christmas traditions. After all, once Part I finishes, the narrative focuses on the life, suffering, death and eventual resurrection of Jesus. But over the past 70 or so years, it has become a Christmas staple, almost guaranteeing sell-out performances.

Messiah performances come in all sizes. The original one featured the voices of 16 men and 16 boys, accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble (most likely one player per part).

For many an amateur choir, this work is a recurring highlight of their repertoire. Before coronavirus destroyed so many plans, festive presentations of the oratorio included full orchestras and a large choir.

Though not for the purist, there have been even mightier performances in the past, where certain numbers (including the celebrated Hallelujah chorus) were sung by up to 600 non-professional, but enthusiastic singers, supported by a large orchestra and a grand organ.

A remarkable talent

Handel was not an Englishman, notwithstanding the fact he spent a large part of his life in London: from 1710 until his death 49 years later. He was born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, the same year as his compatriot, Johann Sebastian Bach.

Unfortunately, the two giants of Baroque music never met — what a conversation that could have been.

From his adolescence, the young Händel exhibited a remarkable talent composing, and playing organ and keyboard. He composed his first opera, Almira, at the age of 18.

He travelled extensively in Italy, mastering the local language and the traditions of writing opera before moving to London in 1712. He adapted to the English lifestyle well.

His reputation as an exceptional opera composer was such that, due to the constant demand, he composed 40 operas during the next three decades. He developed his own, idiomatic style of writing opera in Italian to such heights that he was able to write his brilliant Rinaldo in merely two weeks.

Some of Rinaldo’ s arias, such as Lascia ch’io pianga, became so famous they are regularly performed in concert performances on their own.

Read more: Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini’s opera, Otello

From operas to oratorios

The much-celebrated composer was also known for his astute business acumen. His investments brought him an excellent return, and he was even active on the London share market. The same shrewd sense of recognising how his artistic investments would best work helped him to change his central interest gradually from operas in Italian to oratorios in English.

An oratorio is somewhat similar to an opera: it is performed by solo singers, a chorus and an orchestra. Unlike an opera, however, its narrative is always based on a religious topic and it is unstaged.

Due to the lack of scenery, costumes and visible interaction between the singers on stage, the action in an oratorio has to be described, rather than played out.

The role of the chorus is also more important, reminiscent of the traditions of ancient Greek dramas. On the practical side, putting on an oratorio was less expensive, as its success did not depend on hiring foreign (mostly Italian) star singers.

A lightening pace

From the early 1730s, Handel recognised a change in the taste of his audience and turned more towards writing oratorios. Messiah is his sixth work in this genre, (he wrote 25 oratorios in total).

As if in a frenzy, he composed the complete work in 24 days, taking about a week for each of its three parts. To assist this pace, he did recycle some of his earlier composed music, a common practice at the time.

The text of the oratorio is the work of Charles Jennens. It is based mostly on the Old Testament, as it celebrates the arrival of the Messiah, the saviour of mankind, also called Jesus Christ. Unusually, there is no dialogue in it.

The oratorio vaguely follows the events of the liturgical year, from the virgin birth prophesied at the beginning of Part I, through the life, suffering and death of Christ in Part II, to the promise of redemption in Part III.

Almost all movements are vocal, with only the Pifa (the sound of bagpipes, representing the shepherds arriving to Bethlehem) and the opening movement being fully instrumental. The Ouverture sets the mood of the work with a slow and majestic beginning, continuing with a lively fugue.

Read more: Decoding the music masterpieces: Bach’s The Art of Fugue

Most of the movements are either chorus or solo numbers, the solos being a combination of arias and recitativos. The arias usually express emotions, whereas the narrative is typically transmitted through the recitativos.

The latter are either accompanied by all the string players, a method called recitativo accompagnato (as in “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”), or by a few bass instruments, in which case they are called recitativo secco (for example, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive”).

There are an unusually high number of chorus movements in Messiah. No wonder it is such an eternal favourite for choirs, amateur or professional. Best loved among them is the Hallelujah chorus, ending Part II.

There is an endearing tradition of the audience rising from their seats as one upon hearing the opening sound. The reason for this is a mystery. The commonly cited explanation is that King George II stood up at this point at the 1743 London premiere of the work.

However, this seems unlikely, as His Majesty could not possibly have known what glorious piece of music was about to begin. Could the explanation for such a magisterial gesture be simply a severe case of pins and needles or some other trivial cause?

Re-orchestrated by Mozart

Messiah conquered in England and on the continent. In 1776, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian diplomat, librarian, connoisseur of music and patron and friend of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, brought the newly published score of the Messiah from London to Vienna. He wanted to hear it in a full-scale performance and commissioned Mozart to re-orchestrate the oratorio to appeal to contemporary tastes.

Mozart decided to use a German text based on Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and added new parts for woodwind and brass instruments. He also cut a few movements and rearranged the order of others. Undoubtedly, this version sounds more powerful with the enlarged orchestral powers; there are, for example, three trombones added to the opening of the oratorio.

On the sixth day of April 1759, George Frideric Handel, in poor health, bedridden and almost completely blind, made an unusual request. He wanted to go to the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden, to attend a Messiah performance.

Very possibly, this was the last music he ever heard; barely a week later, the 74-year-old composer was dead.

A COVID-safe performance of Handel’s Messiah was performed last week in Sydney and streamed via Melbourne Digital Concert Hall. You can listen to it here. The Messiah will also be performed at Perth Concert Hall on December 19.

– ref. Decoding the music masterpieces: Handel’s Messiah oratorio, composed in just 24 days – https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-handels-messiah-oratorio-composed-in-just-24-days-151092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury

Kate Sheppard was around 40 in 1888, the year she and her family moved into the brand-new wooden villa at 83 Clyde Road, Ilam. Now part of inner Christchurch, it was then a rural section some five kilometres from the city centre.

Today, 132 years later, what is now known as Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House will be opened by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The government bought the house in 2018 to mark the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage and its former owner’s pivotal role in the movement. The landmark property will now be open to the public as a museum promoting and and celebrating Sheppard’s life and achievements.

The feminist pioneer had migrated to Christchurch from Scotland in 1869. She married city councillor and merchant Walter Sheppard in 1871. Their son Douglas was seven when they moved into Clyde Road, which was near where her two sisters, a brother and friends already lived.

Because women were largely excluded from the male world of politics, the house served as both home and unpaid workplace. Emblematically, a domestic space was the epicentre of woman’s suffrage, birthplace of the campaign that would see New Zealand become the first country in the world to enfranchise all women, regardless of race, class or creed, on September 19, 1893.

A centre of activism

During the prime years of her activism, from 1888 until 1902, Sheppard worked in the house, writing letters, speeches and articles. It was where newspapers and books were read, ideas formed and actions plotted. Other women activists, such as Ada Wells, and male supporters Alfred Saunders and John Hall were regular visitors.

It was in the dining room that the iconic third petition, with 32,000 signatures from around the country, was pasted together and wrapped around a wooden handle for Hall to roll down the aisle in parliament. And it was where the suffrage victory was celebrated.

Read more: Why New Zealand was the first country where women won the right to vote

After 1893 the property remained a hub of feminist ideas for social change. As Sheppard later put it, there were still many “fossilised prejudices” to work on. In 1896, she became the founding president of the National Council of Women, directing activities and fostering international connections from the house.

Sheppard worked hard, advocating for health and well-being, education and social, political and economic justice. The Married Women’s Property Act 1884 and the Divorce Act 1898 were two further important feminist victories, but it took until 1910 for the repeal of the 1869 Contagious Diseases Act, which unfairly targeted prostitutes.

Sheppard believed in women’s economic independence, their place in the professions and equal pay for equal work. She campaigned for women to be able to stand for parliament, to be appointed as justices of the peace, to act as jurors and to be guardians of children.

Despite its illustrious history, the Clyde Road house was mostly overlooked for decades. But thanks to a succession of owner-occupiers who poured love and money into the villa, it has not only survived but thrived.

John Joseph Dougall, lawyer and mayor of Christchurch from 1911 to 1912, bought the house from Walter Sheppard and undertook grand Edwardian improvements. It was further extended and modernised during the ownership of Julia Burbury and family, who for 33 years were the last private owners.

Read more: Did a tragic family secret influence Kate Sheppard’s mission to give New Zealand women the vote?

Unlisted and largely unknown when Burbury bought it, the house eventually became a category one historic place in 2010. By then, a second wave of feminism had raised the status of women’s history, recovering and celebrating Sheppard and her colleagues as role models.

A feminist shrine?

With the 1993 suffrage centenary and Sheppard’s likeness gracing the New Zealand $10 note, she has become a national heroine. Is her house likely to become something of a feminist shrine, too? If so, it would be part of a global trend.

In 1965, the family home of US women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York, became a National Historical Landmark. She lived there from 1847 until 1862, and referred to the farmhouse as the “centre of the rebellion”.

It is now part of the extensive Women’s Rights National Historical Park. Opened in 1980, it focuses on the first Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848, but claims a broad philosophical brief:

It is a story of struggles for civil rights, human rights, and equality, global struggles that continue today. The efforts of women’s rights leaders, abolitionists, and other 19th century reformers remind us that all people must be accepted as equals.

The former home of Cady Stanton’s suffrage partner, Susan B. Anthony, also became a National Historic Landmark in 1965. The celebrated American civil rights leader ran the National American Woman Suffrage Association from the house in Rochester, New York, where she lived until her death in 1906.

Today, the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House “collects and exhibits artifacts related to her life and work, and offers tours and interpretive programs to inspire and challenge individuals to make a positive difference”.

In Britain, Manchester’s Pankhurst Centre opened in 1987 as “an iconic site of women’s activism, past and present”. The home of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her family from 1898 to 1907, the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) took place in its parlour.

Read more: NZ was first to grant women the vote in 1893, but then took 26 years to let them stand for parliament

Keeping activism alive, the house is also a women’s centre and home to Manchester Women’s Aid, a service for victims of domestic abuse. It seeks to be a “unique and vibrant place where women can learn together, work on projects and socialise”.

With hindsight, early European feminists were reformers, but they could also be agents of colonisation. In Aotearoa New Zealand, their connections with Māori focused on temperance and they tended to assume assimilation was inevitable.

In the US and Britain the emerging feminist “shrines” have attempted to widen their remits accordingly. How Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House views its purpose and makes public history is a story that begins today.

– ref. The ‘epicentre of women’s suffrage’ — Kate Sheppard’s Christchurch home finally opens as a public museum – https://theconversation.com/the-epicentre-of-womens-suffrage-kate-sheppards-christchurch-home-finally-opens-as-a-public-museum-151828

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasha Blaize Gardiner, PhD Candidate, University of Canterbury

Two-thirds of the world’s oceans fall outside national jurisdictions – they belong to no one and everyone.

These international waters, known as the high seas, harbour a plethora of natural resources and millions of unique marine species.

But they are being damaged irretrievably. Research shows unsustainable fisheries are one of the greatest threats to marine biodiversity in the high seas.

According to a 2019 global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services, 66% of the world’s oceans are experiencing detrimental and increasing cumulative impacts from human activities.

In the high seas, human activities are regulated by a patchwork of international legal agreements under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But this piecemeal approach is failing to safeguard the ecosystems we depend on.

Read more: The world’s ocean is bearing the brunt of a changing climate. Explore its past and future in our new series

Empty pledges

A decade ago, world leaders updated an earlier pledge to establish a network of marine protected areas (MPAs) with a mandate to protect 10% of the world’s oceans by 2020.

But MPAs cover only 7.66% of the ocean across the globe. Most protected sites are in national waters where it’s easy to implement and manage protection under the provision of a single country.

In the more remote areas of the high seas, only 1.18% of marine ecosystems have been gifted sanctuary.

The Southern Ocean accounts for a large portion of this meagre percentage, hosting two MPAs. The South Orkney Islands southern shelf MPA covers 94,000 square kilometres, while the Ross Sea region MPA stretches across more than 2 million square kilometres, making it the largest in the world.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is responsible for this achievement. Unlike other international fisheries management bodies, the commission’s legal convention allows for the closing of marine areas for conservation purposes.

A comparable mandate for MPAs in other areas of the high seas has been nowhere in sight — until now.

Read more: An ocean like no other: the Southern Ocean’s ecological richness and significance for global climate

A new ocean treaty

In 2017, the UN started negotiations towards a new comprehensive international treaty for the high seas. The treaty aims to improve the conservation and sustainable use of marine organisms in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It would also implement a global legal mechanism to establish MPAs in international waters.

This innovative international agreement provides an opportunity to work across institutional boundaries towards comprehensive high seas governance and protection. It is crucial to use lessons drawn from existing high seas marine protection initiatives, such as those in the Southern Ocean, to inform the treaty’s development.

The final round of treaty negotiations is pending, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and significant detail within the treaty’s draft text remains undeveloped and open for further debate.

Lessons from Southern Ocean management

CCAMLR comprises 26 member states (including the European Union) and meets annually to make conservation-based decisions by unanimous consensus. In 2002, the commission committed to establishing a representative network of MPAs in Antarctica in alignment with globally agreed targets for the world’s oceans.

The two established MPAs in the high seas are far from an ecologically representative network of protection. In October 2020, the commission continued negotiations for three additional MPAs, which would meet the 10% target for the Southern Ocean, if agreed.

But not a single proposal was agreed. For one of the proposals, the East Antarctic MPA, this marks the eighth year of failed negotiations.

Fisheries interests from a select few nations, combined with complex geopolitics, are thwarting progress towards marine protection in the Antarctic.

CCAMLR’s progress towards its commitment for a representative MPA network may have ground to a halt, but the commission has gained invaluable knowledge about the challenges in establishing MPAs in international waters. CCAMLR has demonstrated that with an effective convention and legal framework, MPAs in the high seas are possible.

The commission understands the extent to which robust scientific information must inform MPA proposals and how to navigate inevitable trade-offs between conservation and economic interests. Such knowledge is important for the UN treaty process.

Read more: Why are talks over an East Antarctic marine park still deadlocked?

As the high seas treaty moves closer to adoption, it stands to outpace the commission regarding progress towards improved marine conservation. Already, researchers have identified high-priority areas for protection in the high seas, including in Antarctica.

Many species cross the Southern Ocean boundary into other regions. This makes it even more important for CCAMLR to integrate its management across regional fisheries organisations – and the new treaty could facilitate this engagement.

But the window of time is closing with only one round of negotiation left for the UN treaty. Research tells us Antarctic decision-makers need to use the opportunity to ensure the treaty supports marine protection commitments.

Stronger Antarctic leadership is urgently needed to safeguard the Southern Ocean — and beyond.

– ref. Marine protection falls short of the 2020 target to safeguard 10% of the world’s oceans. A UN treaty and lessons from Antarctica could help – https://theconversation.com/marine-protection-falls-short-of-the-2020-target-to-safeguard-10-of-the-worlds-oceans-a-un-treaty-and-lessons-from-antarctica-could-help-151282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Lubman, Executive Clinical Director, Turning Point & Director of Monash Addiction Research Centre, Monash University

The year 2020 has challenged us all. The bushfires and then the pandemic forced us to reflect on what’s important, how we respond to crises as a community, and the ways we connect and support each other.

We’re still grappling with what the long-term mental health effects of this period of fear, insecurity and social disconnection might be.

At the start of the pandemic we saw a surge in alcohol sales and reported drinking. Almost one-third of people who purchased more alcohol expressed concerns about their own drinking, or that of someone in their household.

People often turn to alcohol or other drugs to help cope with stress, financial pressures, loss and trauma. Increases in drinking are consistently reported after natural disasters, acts of terrorism and economic crises.

It’s therefore timely to reflect on our perceptions of addiction, who is affected, and how we respond.

What is addiction?

In simple terms, addiction is the inability to stop consuming a drug or cease an activity, even if it’s causing physical or psychological harm.

A common misconception is that it’s a result of a lack of willpower or poor self-control. But in reality, addiction is a complex health disorder with a range of biological, developmental and environmental risk factors, including trauma, social isolation or exclusion, and genetics.

Around one in four Australians will develop an alcohol, drug or gambling disorder during their lifetime, and around one in 20 will develop addiction, the most severe form of the disorder.

Despite common stereotypes, addiction doesn’t discriminate. It affects people of all ages and from all backgrounds.

Stigma is disabling

Addiction remains one of the most stigmatised of all health conditions globally. We grant compassion to people with health conditions like cancer, heart disease or diabetes, yet society doesn’t offer that same concern to someone with an addiction.

Too often, we blame the individual, believing the addiction is their fault. But addiction is an unfortunate consequence of something much more complex.

Read more: Drug rehab: what works and what to keep in mind when choosing a private treatment provider

As a consequence of feeling shame and judgement, it can often take people many years to seek help. This is compounded by multiple barriers to treatment (such as geography, cost, waiting times and concerns about privacy).

Yet our refusal to have an honest conversation about how we respond to tobacco, alcohol, drug and gambling-related harm comes at a significant cost to the Australian community, exceeding A$175 billion annually.

A broken system

Across Australia, treatment for addiction remains fragmented, with limited opportunities for ongoing care. There’s no consistent national planning, despite evidence that for every $1 invested in treatment, society gains $7.

The situation is exacerbated by a health workforce that has had limited opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate training in addiction, meaning emergency and primary care systems frequently struggle to respond.

This is in stark contrast with other chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease, where there are clear training pathways, clinical guidelines and national models of care.

So, many individuals suffering from addiction and their families are left to navigate their own pathways to treatment.

A tragic consequence of this fragmented and failing system is that we continue to see preventable deaths associated with different types of addiction.

Read more: How a simple brain training program could help you stay away from alcohol

Tackling the stigma

The recent SBS documentary series Addicted Australia follows ten brave Australians and their families as they seek professional help for addiction over a six-month period. It’s an important step in challenging prevailing myths and stereotypes around addiction.

The series opens the door to the realities of addiction, providing viewers with a deeper understanding of the disorder, the devastating effect it has on individuals and families, and what effective treatment and recovery looks like when people have access to a holistic model of care.

The hope is that this series will help change community perceptions about the reality of addiction, elevate expectations about what treatment should look like, and alter the narrative such that recovery is not just a possibility, but like for other health conditions, is a realistic goal.

A call to action

Treating addiction like any other health disorder has to start with strong public policy reform and intervention to ensure the health system is adequately supported and resourced, so accessible and timely treatment is available to people who need it.

Until we change how we view addiction — from personal failure to a mental disorder, something we cannot control any more than we can control cancer — Australians, and millions globally, will continue to suffer.

We’ve partnered with more than 40 organisations to develop a national campaign, “Rethink Addiction”, that calls for a national action plan for addiction treatment and advocates for a change to Australia’s attitude and response to addiction.

We encourage anyone who has been touched by addiction or is passionate about reducing stigma to share their story and get involved in making the case for change.

After the year we’ve all had, there’s no better time to rethink addiction.

Read more: We’re told to ‘gamble responsibly’. But what does that actually mean?

– ref. A mental disorder, not a personal failure: why now is the time for Australia to rethink addiction – https://theconversation.com/a-mental-disorder-not-a-personal-failure-why-now-is-the-time-for-australia-to-rethink-addiction-151686

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasha Blaize Gardiner, PhD Candidate, University of Canterbury

Two-thirds of the world’s oceans fall outside national jurisdictions – they belong to no one and everyone.

These international waters, known as the high seas, harbour a plethora of natural resources and millions of unique marine species.

But they are being damaged irretrievably. Research shows unsustainable fisheries are one of the greatest threats to marine biodiversity in the high seas.

According to a 2019 global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services, 66% of the world’s oceans are experiencing detrimental and increasing cumulative impacts from human activities.

In the high seas, human activities are regulated by a patchwork of international legal agreements under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But this piecemeal approach is failing to safeguard the ecosystems we depend on.

Read more: The world’s ocean is bearing the brunt of a changing climate. Explore its past and future in our new series

Empty pledges

A decade ago, world leaders updated an earlier pledge to establish a network of marine protected areas (MPAs) with a mandate to protect 10% of the world’s oceans by 2020.

But MPAs cover only 7.66% of the ocean across the globe. Most protected sites are in national waters where it’s easy to implement and manage protection under the provision of a single country.

In the more remote areas of the high seas, only 1.18% of marine ecosystems have been gifted sanctuary.

The Southern Ocean accounts for a large portion of this meagre percentage, hosting two MPAs. The South Orkney Islands southern shelf MPA covers 94,000 square kilometres, while the Ross Sea region MPA stretches across more than 2 million square kilometres, making it the largest in the world.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is responsible for this achievement. Unlike other international fisheries management bodies, the commission’s legal convention allows for the closing of marine areas for conservation purposes.

A comparable mandate for MPAs in other areas of the high seas has been nowhere in sight — until now.

Read more: An ocean like no other: the Southern Ocean’s ecological richness and significance for global climate

A new ocean treaty

In 2017, the UN started negotiations towards a new comprehensive international treaty for the high seas. The treaty aims to improve the conservation and sustainable use of marine organisms in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It would also implement a global legal mechanism to establish MPAs in international waters.

This innovative international agreement provides an opportunity to work across institutional boundaries towards comprehensive high seas governance and protection. It is crucial to use lessons drawn from existing high seas marine protection initiatives, such as those in the Southern Ocean, to inform the treaty’s development.

The final round of treaty negotiations is pending, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and significant detail within the treaty’s draft text remains undeveloped and open for further debate.

Lessons from Southern Ocean management

CCAMLR comprises 26 member states (including the European Union) and meets annually to make conservation-based decisions by unanimous consensus. In 2002, the commission committed to establishing a representative network of MPAs in Antarctica in alignment with globally agreed targets for the world’s oceans.

The two established MPAs in the high seas are far from an ecologically representative network of protection. In October 2020, the commission continued negotiations for three additional MPAs, which would meet the 10% target for the Southern Ocean, if agreed.

But not a single proposal was agreed. For one of the proposals, the East Antarctic MPA, this marks the eighth year of failed negotiations.

Fisheries interests from a select few nations, combined with complex geopolitics, are thwarting progress towards marine protection in the Antarctic.

CCAMLR’s progress towards its commitment for a representative MPA network may have ground to a halt, but the commission has gained invaluable knowledge about the challenges in establishing MPAs in international waters. CCAMLR has demonstrated that with an effective convention and legal framework, MPAs in the high seas are possible.

The commission understands the extent to which robust scientific information must inform MPA proposals and how to navigate inevitable trade-offs between conservation and economic interests. Such knowledge is important for the UN treaty process.

Read more: Why are talks over an East Antarctic marine park still deadlocked?

As the high seas treaty moves closer to adoption, it stands to outpace the commission regarding progress towards improved marine conservation. Already, researchers have identified high-priority areas for protection in the high seas, including in Antarctica.

Many species cross the Southern Ocean boundary into other regions. This makes it even more important for CCAMLR to integrate its management across regional fisheries organisations – and the new treaty could facilitate this engagement.

But the window of time is closing with only one round of negotiation left for the UN treaty. Research tells us Antarctic decision-makers need to use the opportunity to ensure the treaty supports marine protection commitments.

Stronger Antarctic leadership is urgently needed to safeguard the Southern Ocean — and beyond.

– ref. Marine protection falls short of the 2020 target to safeguard 10% of the world’s oceans. Lessons from Antarctica and a UN treaty could help – https://theconversation.com/marine-protection-falls-short-of-the-2020-target-to-safeguard-10-of-the-worlds-oceans-lessons-from-antarctica-and-a-un-treaty-could-help-151282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeremy Moss, Professor of Political Philosophy, UNSW

On Saturday, more than 70 global leaders came together at the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was denied a speaking slot, in recognition of Australia’s failure to set meaningful climate commitments. Meanwhile, the European Union and the UK committed to reduce domestic emissions by 55% and 68% respectively by 2030.

As welcome as these new commitments are, the Paris Agreement desperately needs to be updated. Since it was passed, the production and supply of fossil fuels for export has continued unabated. And the big exporters — such as Norway, Canada, the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia and of course Australia — take no responsibility for the emissions created when those fossil fuels are burned overseas.

It’s time this changed. Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter. And in 2019, emissions from fossil fuels exported by this nation, as well as the US, Norway and Canada, accounted for more than 10% of total world emissions, according to calculations from a research project on Australia’s carbon budget at the University of NSW, which I run. Exporting nations are not legally responsible for these offshore emissions, but their actions are clearly at odds with the climate emergency.

Business as usual

A 2019 UN report notes governments are planning to extract 50% more fossil fuels than is consistent with meeting a 2℃ target and an alarming 120% more than a 1.5℃ target, by 2030. Coal is the main contributor to this supply overshoot.

But rather than reducing their production of fossil fuels, many countries are doubling down and actually increasing supply. For example, in Australia, government figures show the greenhouse gas emissions from Australia’s exported fossil fuels increased by 4.4% between 2018 to 2019.

Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter and approved three new fossil fuel projects in recent months: the Vickery coal mine extension, Olive Downs and the Narrabri Gas Project

This is a worldwide trend. Let’s take Norway as another example. Norway gets the bulk of its electricity from hydropower and has partially divested its Government Pension Fund from some fossil fuels. Yet it’s also one of the largest exporters of greenhouse gases through its gas exports, behind Qatar and Russia.

Read more: 3 reasons meeting climate targets and dumping Kyoto credits won’t salvage Australia’s international reputation

The situation is mirrored in the corporate world. Many large fossil fuel companies are trumpeting their emissions reductions targets while continuing to push for new fossil fuel mining projects. BHP, one of the world’s biggest miners, stated it is reducing its emissions, yet in October the company increased its stake in an oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.

Responsibility doesn’t stop at the border

What underpins this situation is an outdated “territorial” model of responsibility for climate harms. Governments and companies seem to think responsibility stops at the border, not with the overall livability of the global climate. Once the coal, oil and gas products are loaded onto ships, they are no longer our problem.

Unfortunately, the accounting rules of the United Nations, under the Paris Agreement, currently allow exporters to pass on responsibility for fossil fuel emissions.

We must move from this territorial model of responsibility to one that considers the whole chain of responsibility for climate harms.

So what should Australia, Canada, the US, Norway and other exporting countries do to address the over-supply of fossil fuels?

First, they need to acknowledge their responsibility, at least in part, for the emissions and associated harms caused by their exports. Allowing compensation and funding for mitigation to track the role played in the causal chain better attributes responsibility and places mitigation burdens back on the exporting countries.

Read more: Global emissions are down by an unprecedented 7% — but don’t start celebrating just yet

Future climate negotiations, such as in Glasgow in 2021 (COP26), need to adjust the scope of their targets to include robust reductions in the supply of fossil fuels in the next round of agreements.

Instead of just focusing on reducing demand, the process needs to function as a kind of “reverse OPEC” (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), where exporting countries are given ambitious phase-out targets for their fossil fuel exports.

Drastic emissions cuts needed

The 2020 Production Gap report notes global fossil fuel production will have to decrease by 6% a year between 2020-30 to meet a 1.5℃ target.

For Australia, this must mean we include the reduction in “exported emissions” as part of any net-zero target. Australia’s exported emissions are double our domestic emissions – a situation that cannot continue.

Top of the list of what’s needed, is the phasing out of generous subsidies for fossil fuel producers. The billions of dollars currently spent annually in Australia on subsidising and encouraging fossil fuel exports are simply not compatible with the aims and spirit of the Paris Agreement.

Read more: Matt Canavan says Australia doesn’t subsidise the fossil fuel industry, an expert says it does

Phasing out the supply of fossil fuels also needs to occur in a way that doesn’t just pay the current big suppliers to stop. Governments implementing a transition ought to think very carefully about how to fairly deploy scarce resources to ensure a just transition.

Last but not least, governments need to accept that the strong influence fossil fuel corporations wield over the political process is hindering global efforts to address climate change. The donations , rotation of industry staff to government positions and influence of fossil fuel lobby groups cannot lead to good decisions for the climate.

Placing a ban on such influence, particularly at future climate negotiations, would go a long way towards addressing the undue influence of the fossil fuel industry.

Until the fossil fuel export industry is subject to demanding targets, and made to accept responsibility for the emissions associated with their products, Earth will continue on its highly dangerous global warming trajectory.

– ref. The Paris Agreement 5 years on: big coal exporters like Australia face a reckoning – https://theconversation.com/the-paris-agreement-5-years-on-big-coal-exporters-like-australia-face-a-reckoning-151915

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miranda Kaye, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney

As federal parliament heads off on its Christmas break, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the legal community and the Australians who use the family law system.

Amid a busy final sitting week, the Morrison government’s controversial plan to merge the Family Court of Australia and the Federal Circuit Court — which both have responsibility for family law — has been shelved until next year.

This merger has been on the cards for some time. It passed the lower house earlier this month, despite fierce opposition from Labor, the Greens and legal experts.

The Coalition is now seeking Senate crossbench support to create a single court known as the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia.

My new research, together with colleagues Jane Wangmann and Tracey Booth, provides further evidence as to why this would be an unhelpful move.

The high number of family law cases involving both family violence allegations and self-representation shows how safety and improved resourcing must be central to all family law proceedings — not just improved “efficiency”.

Plan for single court opposed

The government claims the merger will “help reduce delays and backlogs in the family law courts”.

But there is little, if any, evidence to support this. The government says a PwC review proves there will be new efficiencies. However, this review did not put a cost on merger models or consider the potential impact of the proposal.

At the outset, the government’s plans have been contentious — with legal experts seeing it as the effective abolition of the specialist Family Court of Australia. It has generated opposition from peak legal bodies such as the Law Council of Australia, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Legal Services, Women’s Legal Services Australia and Community Legal Centres Australia.

Read more: A new family ‘super court’ may not save time or result in better judgments

More than 110 organisations signed a letter attached to a Labor senators’ report to a recent Senate inquiry, saying “safety must come first in family law”.

These signatories have no personal gain in opposing the merger. Lawyers will continue to have work from the breakdown of family relationships whatever structure is in place.

Merging makes sense … if done properly

Superficially, merging the two courts, which have almost the same jurisdiction in family law, is an attractive proposal.

Legal experts agree duplication between the two courts has created a range of difficulties for litigants.

Due to Australia’s constitutional arrangements, there is already a complex network of courts to be navigated by parties dealing with family violence and family law issues. Legal responses may require involvement in magistrates’ courts, children’s courts, district and county courts as well as the two possible courts for hearing family law matters.

Read more: The family court does need reform, but not the way Pauline Hanson thinks

Many of the opponents of the current bill see advantages in a merger, but only in a way that would retain specialisation. For example, the NSW Bar Association has proposed making the Federal Circuit Court’s family law jurisdiction a new, lower division within the specialist Family Court.

Family law needs family law specialists

We need to keep a specialist court because family law is incredibly complex.

• The Family Law Act is a long and complicated piece of legislation. Family law judges require knowledge of the act as well as tax law, constitutional law, trusts, evidence law, and international property arrangements.

• Family law judges also need to understand family violence and its implications for the safety of women and children. Numerous studies have shown allegations of family violence and child abuse are the core business of the family law system. A specialist court, with expert supports, is required for cases involving violence, abuse, mental health and/ or drug and alcohol issues.

• Family law judges have to deal with high rates of self-represented litigants. In 2019-20 the Family Court noted at least one party is unrepresented in 40% of trials .

Our research on family law proceedings

My colleagues and I have just completed a large study looking at people who represent themselves in family law matters involving family violence allegations.

Funded by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, our research included court observations at eight Family and Federal Circuit Court sites. We observed a total of 512 court events, 243 of which involved a self-represented litigant.

This is problemative because self-represented litigants can slow down proceedings. Judges have the difficult task of explaining requirements to self-represented parties, while ensuring they remain impartial.

We also examined 180 court files of the matters involving a self-represented litigant. Of the examined files, 82% raised allegations about family violence.

‘Like a zoo’

During our observations, we also observed judges with huge caseloads and large daily court lists. At one Federal Circuit court, there were over 70 cases all listed for hearing at 10am before a single judge — the judge’s associate said this was a small list compared to other circuits.

One duty lawyer we interviewed described some regional circuit sitting days as

like a zoo […] there’s so many people and it’s so noisy and it’s so confusing.

We also observed run-down state Federal Circuit Court buildings, which are not suitable for cases involving family violence allegations. This includes a lack of safe rooms and separate entrances and exits. Even where safety measures, such as video links or screens, were available in the courtroom, self-represented litigants were often unaware of them.

Alternatives to merging

It is impossible to see how these matters would be improved by the current proposal to merge the courts. Instead, recent court initiatives — supported by government funding — such as harmonising forms and rules, a risk-screening system for parenting matters, a simplified process for property cases with small asset pools and upgrading particularly poor court facilities, will have a much greater impact.

So would more judicial officers and family consultants — who advise the court on parenting matters — and increased funding for legal aid and services to help self-represented litigants at court.

It is disappointing to see the government ignoring all the expert evidence and ploughing ahead with this merger, describing it as a “priority” when parliament returns next February.

Read more: Book review: The Death of Expertise

Hopefully, the Senate crossbench does not do the same. Improving the safety of litigants and their children should be the underlying reason for changes to the family law system. Not unproven efficiency gains which may actually undermine safety.

– ref. The government still wants a Family Court merger — new research shows why this is not the answer – https://theconversation.com/the-government-still-wants-a-family-court-merger-new-research-shows-why-this-is-not-the-answer-151481

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smerdon, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

Unlike the wildly popular Netflix chess-themed series The Queen’s Gambit, female players have struggled to climb to the top of the real-life chess world. Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess grandmasters are women. The current top-rated female, Hou Yifan, is ranked 89th in the world, while the reigning women’s world champion Ju Wenjun is 404th.

Why? There are certainly fewer female chess players to begin with, but it appears unlikely participation can explain the whole story.

The argument about chess’s gender gap often follows the classic nature-versus-nurture debate. On one side are those who believe men are “hardwired” to play chess, such as former World Championship challenger Nigel Short.

His comments caused a media storm in the United Kingdom. It’s true women have been shown to exhibit higher risk aversion and lower competitiveness across many domains, including chess, possibly driven by differences in testosterone. However, evidence is mixed on whether or how these traits affect performance over the chess board.

‘We are capable of the same fight as any man’

On the other side are those who argue the gender gap in chess is mainly due to societal and cultural pressures that put women off the game. A commonly cited example is Hungary’s Judit Polgár, considered the strongest female player of all time, and the only woman ever to be ranked in the world’s top ten. Her psychologist father believed geniuses are created, not born. His three daughters, home-schooled in chess from the age of three, each achieved groundbreaking success in the game.

Judit Polgár reached a peak ranking of eighth in the world and shared the same view as her father when she retired in 2015, saying:

We are capable of the same fight as any man. It’s not a matter of gender, it’s a matter of being smart.

The stereotype threat effect

Despite Judit Polgár’s success, stereotypes about female chess players remain. Her older sister Susan, a former women’s world champion, noted:

When men lose against me, they always have a headache… I have never beaten a healthy man.

The American Bobby Fischer, on whom The Queen’s Gambit’s lead character is largely based, once said women are “terrible chess players”, later opining that “I don’t think they should mess into intellectual affairs; they should keep strictly to the home”.

Another former world champion, Garry Kasparov, said in a 1989 issue of Playboy Magazine that “there is real chess and women’s chess”.

These sorts of beliefs may induce a “stereotype threat” that can explain part of the performance gap.

Stereotype threat is where minorities underperform solely because they’re aware of a stereotype that people of their group do worse. Confidence flags, interest wanes and a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophesy follows. The stereotype threat effect has been observed in experiments involving women and mathematics performance and in studies on lower representation of women in leadership positions.

In one study, researchers pitted male and female chess players against each other online. The sexes performed equally when identities were anonymous, but when the sex of the opponents was known, female players performed worse against male players and better against other female players.

Using a dataset of more than 180,000 players and 8 million rated tournament games, my colleagues and I recently found evidence to support a stereotype threat effect for female chess players. Female players tend to perform worse against male opponents than against female opponents, even after accounting for chess strength.

The performance drop is roughly equivalent to a woman giving her male opponent the advantage of the first move in every single game.

The winds of change

There is still much to discover about what play the biggest roles in driving the gender performance and participation gaps in chess, what policies can be used to narrow them, and what these insights tell us about other male-dominated fields.

What we do know, however, is the chess world is starting to change. In 2001, only 6% of internationally rated players were female. By 2020 this had risen to more than 15%.

Part of this may be due to “affirmative action” policies, such as chess league mandates that clubs include at least one female player in their (typically eight-player) teams. This not only increases female earnings but also has a trickle-down effect for female participation.

Two economists recently looked at the effect of this policy in the French chess league. The study, which is yet to undergo peer review, found not only that the share of female chess players in France significantly increased in subsequent years, but that the ratings gap for elite male and female players also narrowed.

Attitudes are starting to change, too. After his famous loss to Judit Polgár in 2002 — the first time a female player had beaten a reigning world champion in a rated game — Kasparov was asked about his past opinions about women’s chess. His reply: “I don’t believe that now.”

The current world champion, Magnus Carlsen, said in a recent interview:

Chess societies have not been very kind to women and girls over the years. Certainly, there needs to be a bit of a change in culture.

Could The Queen’s Gambit spark that change? The show is Neflix’s most-watched scripted limited series, reaching number 1 in more than 60 countries.

Chess-related Google searches have soared since its debut. And past research has shown popular television can have a significant impact on real-world outcomes related to gender.

As to whether we’ll see a “Netflix Effect” on the chess gender gap, only time will tell.

– ref. What’s behind the gender imbalance in top-level chess? – https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-the-gender-imbalance-in-top-level-chess-150637

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

Once upon a time, there was a happy land that had no need of heroes. It had its problems, of course, but there were very few whose solution could not be put off until next year, next decade, or next century. The Great Warming was the most difficult, but the kingdom’s rulers did not worry over this very much, trusting the future to look after itself.

Life was sweet for most, and that produced a certain kind of ruler. He – and most of them were still men – was very good at creating the impression of frenzied activity while achieving very little. Many in government and parliament were graduates of student politics, and their aptitude for counting numbers and backstabbing rivals was highly valued in the Grand Palace on the Hill.

The rulers collected taxes and spent them according to formulas established long ago, while leaving over more than a little treasure to pass on to friends, patrons and favourites. They lived off the cleverness of the more able rulers of the past, those who governed in The Golden Age of the Eighties. Elections were now fought over whether shareholders should be given extra gold by the government, and how many coins landlords should be given to help them rent out cottages to poorer subjects.

The life even of rulers was cheap in the olden days, and kings and queens came and went with great regularity, the drama of it all keeping the people entertained when they became bored of Punch and Judy shows and maypole dancing. But this churn did not otherwise matter very much, as it affected only courtiers and politicians who hung around the bars near the Grand Palace on the Hill on Wednesday evenings.

Occasionally, a new monarch would come along and get excited about some unexpected happening, such as the sad time someone put some pins in the kingdom’s strawberries. Or the parliament would face a wicked problem such as how much tax backpackers should pay for the right to pick those strawberries. But generally, the rhythms of the court and the parliament were dull and predictable, and they engaged the attention of the common people very little.

“Go the Sharkies!”, said the king, and his affectionate subjects smiled knowingly. Many of them had dads, granddads, uncles, parrots and dolls with strings on their backs that you pull who said similar things.

Then along came the summer of 2019-2020. The king who said “go the Sharkies!” also said “I don’t hold a hose, mate”. As his subjects choked on thick and poisonous smoke and saw their modest cottages razed to the ground, they began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have a superannuated town crier for their ruler. There was much talk at court of arsonists, who seemed remarkably like the people who put pins in strawberries. There were ideas about clearing bush and felling trees like the pioneers of old had done. There were also evil people called “Greens” who, it was claimed, were at fault for the fires. The rulers and their scribes occasionally mentioned The Great Warming, but not if they could avoid it.

A few weeks later, The Great Pestilence came from the Rising Empire of the East. The king told the people they shouldn’t worry too much and should just be themselves, and he was off to the footy. “Go the Sharkies!”, he said.

Read more: Australia’s politicians have learned that in the era of coronavirus, the future comes at you fast

In the Great City of the South, there was agonised debate about whether a big carriage race called The Grand Prix should be held, an occasion that each year brought together the people of many kingdoms in a grand festival. But people turned on their TVs and saw that in kingdoms far away, all was not well. They saw people dying. They saw infirmaries choked with patients, corpses on the streets.

It now occurred to the rulers that pins in strawberries and backpacker taxes were no longer worthy of their attention. It was time to put away childish things. For the first time in their lives, the king and his ministers were making decisions that would decide whether their subjects lived or died. They could not pretend that it was someone else’s job to hold the hose. In an amazing metamorphosis, some even began to look grown up.

New men and women emerged. The heroes before The Great Pestilence were sports stars and the winners of cooking programs. The new heroes were winsome professors of medicine.

The king got together with the dukes and duchesses around the kingdom to create what they called the National Cabinet. The National Cabinet was not a real government, but it gave the impression everyone agreed about everything, even when they didn’t.

Some people in the kingdom found this reassuring, because they worried the king might again decide it was not his job to hold the hose and he would throw himself into home improvements.

But the dukes and duchesses influenced the king for good, moderating his worst instincts toward “keeping things open”. The king and his ministers also influenced the dukes and duchesses for good, moderating their cautious instinct toward “shutting things down”.

The king made a decision to stop people from entering the kingdom, unless they were his subjects returning from their crusades and adventures abroad. Such people were placed in solitary confinement for two weeks in four-star inns. The dukes and duchesses closed the borders of their territories, ordered their merchants to shut their doors, and told the people to stay home.

The streets of the kingdom were almost deserted, except for the lines of unemployed people applying for help under the Poor Law and people buying take-away coffee. The benevolent king doubled the amount paid to the indigent, and he paid to support merchants, journeymen and labourers while they were unable to ply their trade.

This cost many billions in gold and the people were astonished, for they had been told for generations there was not enough money to support the indigent. Giving money to people for doing nothing only encouraged vagrants and vagabonds, it was often said. In any case, a mistake with a slide rule and abacus meant the king did not have to spend as much treasure as he had expected.

Some worried that with so much money being thrown around, the more cunning among the nobles might be lining their pockets, for many subjects suspected there was corruption in the kingdom. The people remembered how the king’s government had preyed on the poorest of his subjects with something called Robodebt, and they wondered why the politicians mouthed platitudes about “star chambers” when anyone raised having a corruption commission.

In a crisis, a king may find he is dependent on his allies to keep order and defeat his enemies in the rural shires and distant towns. And so, when The Great Pestilence arrived, people were surprised at how much power could be exercised by the dukes and duchesses – even the minor ones – in their own lands.

At times, when the matter of border, school and business closures arose, it seemed the king had no power at all. It was the dukes and duchesses who held sway over the everyday lives of the king’s subjects. And these dukes and duchesses achieved great fame and popularity for keeping their people safe.

Read more: View from The Hill: Daniel Andrews frustrates Scott Morrison with a slow-pace lockdown exit

When disaster struck in the great Great City of the South, and The Great Pestilence spread from the four-star inns to the common people, there was much condemnation of the grand duke in command of that city. After a brief time in which many of the rhythms of normal life had begun to return to the kingdom, and even the Sharkies were playing football again, schools, shops, inns and taverns again had to shut. The grand duke imposed a strict curfew on his people. An opposition faction, some scribes, and a few fanatics tried to foment revolt against the grand duke. They painted pictures of happy lands across the seas, such as Sweden, which did not have lockdowns and curfews. But the grand duke continued to rule, and the Great City of the South overcame the pestilence.

As the year ended, glad tidings reached the kingdom from across the seas of powerful potions, as well as the overthrow of the Orange Friend of the Plague in the Grand Empire of the West. The people now realised that their kingdom, in spite of its ordeals, had endured The Great Pestilence better than most. Scholars in the universities discovered that for the first time in many years, the people trusted their governments again.

And the king was pleased. For his eye had already alighted on when he might call an election, to allow his subjects to express their love in the only way that truly mattered to him.

Read more: An obedient nation of larrikins: why Victorians are not revolting

– ref. The king, the fires and the fever: a fairytale finish to 2020 – https://theconversation.com/the-king-the-fires-and-the-fever-a-fairytale-finish-to-2020-149971

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Roman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Oceans and Atmosphere, CSIRO

How do we save whales and other marine animals from plastic in the ocean? Our new review shows reducing plastic pollution can prevent the deaths of beloved marine species. Over 700 marine species, including half of the world’s cetaceans (such as whales and dolphins), all of its sea turtles and a third of its seabirds, are known to ingest plastic.

When animals eat plastic, it can block their digestive system, causing a long, slow death from starvation. Sharp pieces of plastic can also pierce the gut wall, causing infection and sometimes death. As little as one piece of ingested plastic can kill an animal.

About eight million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean each year, so solving the problem may seem overwhelming. How do we reduce harm to whales and other marine animals from that much plastic?

Like a hospital overwhelmed with patients, we triage. By identifying the items that are deadly to the most vulnerable species, we can apply solutions that target these most deadly items.

Some plastics are deadlier than others

In 2016, experts identified four main items they considered to be most deadly to wildlife: fishing debris, plastic bags, balloons and plastic utensils.

We tested these expert predictions by assessing data from 76 published research papers incorporating 1,328 marine animals (132 cetaceans, 20 seals and sea lions, 515 sea turtles and 658 seabirds) from 80 species.

We examined which items caused the greatest number of deaths in each group, and also the “lethality” of each item (how many deaths per interaction). We found the experts got it right for three of four items.

Flexible plastics, such as plastic sheets, bags and packaging, can cause gut blockage and were responsible for the greatest number of deaths over all animal groups. These film plastics caused the most deaths in cetaceans and sea turtles. Fishing debris, such as nets, lines and tackle, caused fatalities in larger animals, particularly seals and sea lions.

Turtles and whales that eat debris can have difficulty swimming, which may increase the risk of being struck by ships or boats. In contrast, seals and sea lions don’t eat much plastic, but can die from eating fishing debris.

Balloons, ropes and rubber, meanwhile, were deadly for smaller fauna. And hard plastics caused the most deaths among seabirds. Rubber, fishing debris, metal and latex (including balloons) were the most lethal for birds, with the highest chance of causing death per recorded ingestion.

Read more: We estimate up to 14 million tonnes of microplastics lie on the seafloor. It’s worse than we thought

What’s the solution?

The most cost-efficient way to reduce marine megafauna deaths from plastic ingestion is to target the most lethal items and prioritise their reduction in the environment.

Targeting big plastic items is also smart, as they can break down into smaller pieces. Small debris fragments such as microplastics and fibres are a lower management priority, as they cause significantly fewer deaths to megafauna and are more difficult to manage.

Flexible film-like plastics, including plastic bags and packaging, rank among the ten most common items in marine debris surveys globally. Plastic bag bans and fees for bags have already been shown to reduce bags littered into the environment. Improving local disposal and engineering solutions to enable recycling and improve the life span of plastics may also help reduce littering.

Lost fishing gear is particularly lethal. Fisheries have high gear loss rates: 5.7% of all nets and 29% of all lines are lost annually in commercial fisheries. The introduction of minimum standards of loss-resistant or higher quality gear can reduce loss.

Read more: How to get abandoned, lost and discarded ‘ghost’ fishing gear out of the ocean

Other steps can help, too, including

• incentivising gear repairs and port disposal of damaged nets

• penalising or prohibiting high-risk fishing activities where snags or gear loss are likely

• and enforcing penalties associated with dumping.

Outreach and education to recreational fishers to highlight the harmful effects of fishing gear could also have benefit.

Balloons, latex and rubber are rare in the marine environment, but are disproportionately lethal, particularly to sea turtles and seabirds. Preventing intentional balloon releases and accidental release during events and celebrations would require legislation and a shift in public will.

The combination of policy change with behaviour change campaigns are known to be the most effective at reducing coastal litter across Australia.

Reducing film-like plastics, fishing debris and latex/balloons entering the environment would likely have the best outcome in directly reducing mortality of marine megafauna.

Read more: Newly hatched Florida sea turtles are consuming dangerous quantities of floating plastic

– ref. These are the plastic items that most kill whales, dolphins, turtles and seabirds – https://theconversation.com/these-are-the-plastic-items-that-most-kill-whales-dolphins-turtles-and-seabirds-151200

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilana Finefter-Rosenbluh, Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Monash University

Results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 testing round were released last week. They showed Australia had improved in Year 8 maths and science, and Year 4 science, from the previous testing cycles.

The TIMSS is a standardised, international assessment administered to check how effective countries are in teaching maths and science. Another international standardised test is the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA examines how well students in secondary schools across 36 OECD countries, and 43 other countries or economies, can apply reading, maths, science and other skills to real-life situations.

Read more: Australia lifts to be among top ten countries in maths and science

Standardised tests have been in place in a number of educational systems for nearly two centuries. They are rooted in reformers’ desire to regulate schooling and hold educators accountable, in the hopes of improving teaching and learning. But how did such exams gain momentum and why are they so controversial?

What are standardised tests?

Standardised tests are exams administered and scored in a standard, or consistent, manner. They are scored using particular scales of standards in knowledge and skills.

Such tests can be given to large groups of students in the same area, state or nation, using the same grading system to enable a reliable comparison of student outcomes. The tests can be composed of various types of questions, including multiple-choice and essay queries.

In Australia, for instance, 740 schools and just over 14,200 students participated in PISA 2018. The results were compared to those of students in other countries, but also between students inside Australia.

Another well known exam is Australia’s national standardised test, the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), intended for all Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students across the country.

Similar testing programs to the NAPLAN can be found in other nations, including the UK, Israel, Germany, Mexico and Canada.

So how did it all begin and what makes countries take this approach?

A history of one-size-fits-all student testing

The 17th and 18th centuries saw English and American ministers preaching annual sermons to raise money to educate the poor. This appealed to the generosity of elites, while promoting policies that enforce tax support for charity schools.

The public expected to literally see the fruits of mass education during the industrial revolution; creating a reality in which fundraising and the display of students went hand-in-hand.

As William Reese describes in his prominent book Testing Wars in the Public Schools, “exhibitions” or “examinations” of learning became part and parcel of the US educational system. Such displays were used as a tool for citizens to judge teacher effectiveness and student accomplishment.

Read more: PISA doesn’t define education quality, and knee-jerk policy proposals won’t fix whatever is broken

Once the days of exhibition were announced, educators’, students’ and even parents’ preparations began. It highlighted their eagerness to impress the public with the childrens’ knowledge.

Often reported by the press to lift community pride and morale, such exhibitions brought a milieu of people, including politicians and members of the school committee, who distributed prizes for meritorious achievement.

Students were focused on the task-at-hand, memorising topics and orally reciting ideas to impress the crowd. Impressions did not only rest on their public performance, but teachers’ ability to successfully discipline them “on stage”.

The rise of standardised testing in the US

By the early 1840s, US reformers Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, among other reformers, became frustrated by the “theatricality” of education and aggravated by the cruelty of corporal punishment and school exclusivity.

Mann and Howe had witnessed English reformers practising advanced statistics and debating the merits of competitive testing, which soon led to civil service reform and the appointment of inspectors to examine schools.

The two reformers grappled with fundamental questions such as “What makes one school better than others?” and “How can one identify changes in teacher practice and student learning over time?”.

They decided it was time to establish a more formal, consistent and critical testing program than a simple exhibition. They were in favour of written (rather than oral) exams in schools.

Materialising in various Boston grammar schools in 1845, the reformers surprised students with a one hour test attached to a blank answer sheet. A reality of competitive, written, standardised exams that offer quantifiable configurations of teaching and learning had emerged.

Holding sensitive school data in their hands helped the reformers to control issues of teaching, teacher promotion and leave, as well as acceptance and graduation in secondary schools (and later on higher education settings).

A new power battle became the centre of a long-lasting debate about the politics and the meaning of assessment.

What about Australia?

Standardised tests are not new to Australia. Research shows that since the 1800s, and although not consistently, some Australian students have taken part in some form of standardised tests to determine their knowledge, regardless of age.

Large numbers of students, for example, participated in half-yearly exams in the 1820s, administered by Principal Lawrence Halloran at his Sydney school. Similar to the US, external inspectors were also involved for some time in monitoring student achievement on various sets of tasks in schools.

But the standardised testing similar to what we’ve seen in the US was introduced to Australia in 2008 by way of the NAPLAN. This was accompanied by the MySchool website, which lists results for Australia’s students.

Then Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard introduced NAPLAN to give accountability and transparency to families and policymakers on student performance.

The message was very much familiar: let the crowd judge while we, the reformers, steer the schooling ship.

The tests drummed up similar controversy and criticism as in the US. It was mostly around them being a political and negative control mechanism, and their distorted critique (of what goes on in schools), waste (with regard to classroom time spent teaching to the test) and misclassification (reflection of the students’ socioeconomic circumstances rather than learning).

Read more: A year without NAPLAN has given us a chance to re-evaluate how we gauge school quality

These came alongside confidence the tests can help diagnose learning gaps and keep parents, researchers and policymakers informed of students’ performance.

But NAPLAN’s cancellation during the 2020 COVID pandemic, as well the hiatus of standardised tests in other countries like the US, has made interested parties question whether it may be the beginning of the end of the obsession with the testing method.

Where to now?

Some successful education nations like Finland — which rank highly in international standardised tests like PISA — avoid external, national standardised tests.

Finland has been a poster child for school improvement since finding its way to the top of the international rankings after emerging from the Soviet Union’s shadow. The country has magnificently shifted from a centralised education system, that celebrating external testing, to a more localised one in which highly trained educators provide more narrative feedback to students.

As the Finnish policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg explains, Finland has made a conscious decision to avoid investing in standardisation of curriculum enforced by frequent external tests.

Instead, it focused on teacher education and providing time for teacher collaboration on issues of instruction. Student-free daily meals, health care, transportation, learning materials and counselling are also part of the package.

With the ongoing conversation about quality, possible assessment alternatives and new ways of schooling, only time will tell whether standardised testing programs continue shaping Australian and international education practices.

– ref. From power battles to education theatre: the history of standardised testing – https://theconversation.com/from-power-battles-to-education-theatre-the-history-of-standardised-testing-151216