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

Bill Shorten’s many town hall meetings stood him in good stead in the Sky “people’s forum” in Brisbane on Friday night.

His engagement with the audience was more direct than Scott Morrison’s, and he packed multiple references to his promises into his answers.

Shorten was forceful, especially on the topic of Labor’s plan to cancel cash refunds from franking credits, a policy that is troublesome for the opposition. He insisted on getting enough opportunity to explain his arguments and would not be shut down by moderator David Speers until he had made his points comprehensively.

When it comes to offerings for the future, Morrison has much less in his kit bag than Shorten, so his emphasis was on defending the government’s record.

Read more: Up close and personal: Morrison and Shorten get punchy in the second leaders’ debate. Our experts respond.

As in Monday night’s Perth debate, Morrison was on top of his facts and figures. Shorten, for his part, seemed better prepared than in their first encounter, when he was caught short a couple of times.

Like Shorten, Morrison was assertive, in his case physically as well as verbally. This produced the “line” of the night, when in response to Morrison moving close in Shorten declared him “a classic space invader”.

Those who claimed it was a “Latham moment” – a reference to Mark Latham’s famous fierce shaking of John Howard’s hand in the 2004 campaign – have over-vivid imaginations. Shorten’s quip played to the crowd – and he got a laugh.

The audience of 109 undecided voters broke almost evenly between the two leaders: 43% favoured Shorten, 41% Morrison, while 16% remained undecided after the hour’s encounter. Shorten’s “win” in the room was by a much smaller margin than he scored with the Perth studio audience.

As often happens with this “forum” format, the questions were an eclectic mix, ranging from education and climate change to the plight of local post offices. On the latter, Shorten mused that ways could be found to give these small businesses the ability to compete with the banks in regional areas, though he conceded he didn’t have a policy to do so.

One questioner suggested people should be able to determine how their tax was spent. Another was concerned about religious freedom, specifically that of Christians to speak in public forums about their beliefs on matters such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

When the subject of youth mental health came up, Shorten asked people to put up their hands if they’d known a family affected by suicide. Morrison was among the many who did so.

There were moments of agreement on topics such as mental health and sexual assault.

But inevitably much of the discussion and many of the clashes focused on money and tax. The conflicting arguments have been well rehearsed throughout the campaign.

Read more: Leaders try to dodge them. Voters aren’t watching. So, are debates still relevant?

Morrison dwelt on his theme of the need to manage money to pay for priorities. “If you can’t control your taxes you can’t control your spending.” Shorten’s pitch was familiar too. “The economy is not working in the interests of working and middle class people” .

Shorten said that his government would give “across the board” tax cuts when the budget could afford it. (This is how he covers that glitch on the campaign trail when he held out the prospect to one worker that Labor would give a tax cut to high income earners – although its policy is to reject the Coalition’s high-end tax relief.)

He flagged that Sunday’s Labor launch will promise a further crackdown on multi-nationals’ tax avoidance.

Labor will release its costings on Thursday or Friday of next week, he said, with bigger surpluses than in the budget. Labor planned “to have a budget surplus each year we are in government”.

Plans for a third debate remain fluid.

– ref. View from The Hill: Bill Shorten at ease in town hall-type forum – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-bill-shorten-at-ease-in-town-hall-type-forum-116555

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Manwaring, Senior Lecturer, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University

The best line of the second leaders’ debate between Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten wasn’t about policy, it was about … personal space.

Some in Queensland may have skipped the debate to watch the Friday night rugby, but they would have missed a pretty spirited clash between the Labor and Coalition leaders over everything from franking credits to religious freedom to even the closure of post offices across Australia.

Free to pace the stage and talk directly to voters in the “people’s forum” debate format in Brisbane, both Morrison and Shorten looked far more comfortable – and were certainly more confrontational – than in Monday’s more staid, conventional first debate in Perth.

Here’s what our academic experts thought.

Rob Manwaring, Senior Lecturer, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University

When they are finally published, the no-doubt low viewing figures might well confirm that it is only a minority of committed political nerds whose idea of a great Friday night is to watch the leaders’ debate (albeit behind a TV paywall)!

Yet, once the debate got going, this was a strangely engrossing contest, covering a range of issues including religious freedom, post office closures, climate change, mental health, and inevitably, the economy.

What helped set up this oddly watchable debate was the first question on how the major parties will tackle high rates of sexual assault. It seemed to re-set the “mood”. There was a good degree of bipartisanship here, although a fault line did emerge over Labor’s commitment to introduce paid domestic violence leave.

This was a strong segment, perhaps reinforcing the best of what these debates can offer where political leaders are seeking to engage directly with the public concerns.

There were similarly compassionate discussions on other issues, especially about mental health and young people, as well as a question about support for veterans. Bill Shorten, on a number of occasions sought to engage people directly, perhaps most effectively asking the audience to indicate, with raised hands, if suicide and mental illness had impacted on their friends and family. Almost all hands went up.

On a lighter note, the debate itself had some decent jokes – for example, Scott Morrison amusingly allowing more time for Shorten to talk, as he “had more taxes to explain”. Later, as a questioner muddled their names, Shorten laughed off the claim that they looked the same.

An interesting flash point was during an increasingly heated exchange on income tax cuts for high-income earners when a fired-up Morrison moved to “stand over” and lecture Shorten. Shorten called out the PM as a “classic space invader”, and it had echoes of Mark Latham’s infamous encounter with John Howard in 2004, with the roles reversed.

Morrison tended to be better with numbers, Shorten stronger on key social policies and climate change. It was messy in places, but it was also considered, and there were clear policy and value differences at play. It was strangely watchable – much like Australian democracy.

Read more: Leaders try to dodge them. Voters aren’t watching. So, are debates still relevant?

Alexandra Wake, Program Manager, Journalism, RMIT University

Even Sky News’ Peta Credlin effectively gave the second leaders’ debate to Bill Shorten, albeit through gritted teeth.

The Sky News panel agreed it was close, but by tackling issues like franking credits and negative gearing front on, Shorten came across as confident in Labor’s policy positions.

Both leaders did well, effortlessly using the campaign playbook to attempt to win over the 109 audience members chosen to attend by Galaxy Research. Shorten out-polled Scott Morrison as winner of the debate among audience members, but it was very close, just 43% to 41%. The rest were undecided.

There was a broad range of questions, most dedicated to familiar issues. But three questions were related to mental health in some way, and that appears to be the sleeper issue in this campaign.

A surprising question about the value of post offices in communities saw Shorten hint that an incoming government might use the country’s postal service as a possible competitor to the big banks.

Morrison, meanwhile, stuck to the Liberals’ core campaign message of better budget management and spending. He didn’t fluff his lines, but it’s not clear that his stock-standard responses will resonate with voters.

Shorten worked the room harder, and engaged the audience well by asking everyone who had been affected by suicide or mental illness to raise their hands. That’s an adept political tactic.

There were some light-hearted moments between the pair, but Shorten’s quip that Morrison was a “space invader”, as the taller PM came a little too close, might grab the headlines.

It’s easy to suggest the Twitterverse of political junkies hash-tagging #auspol with their sausage icon were also the real winners.

Scheduling the second leaders’ debate on Sky News in Brisbane at the same time as an NRL game – and in front of a Galaxy-selected audience – might have seemed like a stroke of PR lunacy.

But those Canberra-based commentators who scoffed at the terrible time and station for a debate clearly overlooked the fact Sky News is broadcast on WIN’s free-to-air network for regional Australia.

Morrison and Shorten were clearly tuned into 2018 Digital News Report Australia, which found that TV remains the main source of news for 36% of Australian news consumers – and it’s more popular in regional areas than metropolitan ones.

Read more: Morrison and Shorten take aim at one another in leaders’ debate: experts respond

Mark Rolfe, Honorary Associate in Social Sciences, UNSW

For those who like sporting metaphors, this rumble in the jungle – well, a debate in Brisbane – showed that neither party leader is Muhammad Ali or George Foreman.

However, the “people’s forum” format made for a more free-flowing discussion that partially mitigated the leaders’ desire to control it and deliver prepared moves. Sure, they often returned to pet themes and slogans where they could. As such, we were presented with warnings of the danger of change and the failure to change, and both fought for the last word.

But both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten were determined to emphasise civility and bipartisanship where they could. They wanted to appease the anti-politics sentiment and disillusion that abounds in Australia now, but also present differences in a palatable way to voters. Just like on Monday, Shorten got the better on these points with his queries to questioners and attempts to connect with their backgrounds.

They also had to demonstrate their spontaneity and knowledge when answering audience questions on important issues not usually highlighted in debates, such as domestic violence, sexual assault, mental health and veterans. In the process, the need to be flexible showed the personalities of both men, an important measure when there is still so much public suspicion of politicians.

With that, Shorten was more humorous, as demonstrated by his quip about Morrison being “a classic space invader” when he got too close.

And Shorten was prepared to directly demonstrate respectful disagreement with interrogators rather than avoid their questions, such as on the issue of freedom of religious expression. In this way, he aimed to present himself as not the usual politician but a man of substance.

Both leaders supplied substance with data and details of policies on issues such as profit-shifting, transfer pricing and taxing. Yet, both men were defensive on the vulnerabilities we’d expect: Morrison on climate and the Ruddock report on religious freedom; Shorten on franking credits and taxing multinationals.

Fortunately, they could avoid discussing the Labor and Liberals candidates who had walked the plank this week over imbecilic social media posts. But that is typical of a campaign so far absent the culture war battles of the past, although they still rumble below decks amongst some media.

– ref. Up close and personal: Morrison and Shorten get punchy in the second leaders’ debate. Our experts respond. – http://theconversation.com/up-close-and-personal-morrison-and-shorten-get-punchy-in-the-second-leaders-debate-our-experts-respond-116521

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Leigh Sullivan joins Michelle Grattan to talk about the week in politics. They discuss the first leaders debate on Monday held in Western Australia, the loss of candidates from multiple parties over offensive social media posts, questions around the cost of Labor’s climate change policy and the big number of votes cast in the first week of pre-polling.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on candidate troubles – and pre-polling – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-candidate-troubles-and-pre-polling-116530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Scott, Lecturer, School of Creative Industries, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle

The Newcastle Herald has won eight Walkley awards for journalistic excellence over the past seven years. This includes a Gold Walkley for the groundbreaking reportage that led to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse. It has told stories of national and international importance.

But this local newspaper, serving the NSW regional city of Newcastle and the surrounding Hunter region, is not profitable enough for Nine Entertainment Co, which acquired it in the takeover of Fairfax Media last year.

Read more: Media Files: What does the Nine Fairfax merger mean for diversity and quality journalism?

Nine has offloaded it and the rest of Fairfax’s Australian Community Media (ACM) division, comprising about 160 regional news titles, 130 community-based news websites and 650 editorial staff.

But this is the best news the staff of the Newcastle Herald have had for a long time. There’s a cautious optimism among both staff and readers that the newspaper (which began as the Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News in 1858) could undergo – like the city itself – revitalisation.

Cautious optimism

The new owner is a consortium of former Fairfax real estate supremo Antony Catalano and the Thorney Investment Group, a company that “concentrates on producing absolute returns for shareholders over the medium to long term”.

Catalano has said he plans to “grow the business, not shrink it to greatness”. He has assured Herald staff that he is about “hiring, not firing”. That’s comforting following cutbacks and two brutal rounds of redundancies in the past seven years.

Yet these inspiring assurances may prove hard to keep.

Newspapers – and journalism more generally – still face structural headwinds. Neither platform prophets nor philanthropists have found a dead-cert solution to the dried-up rivers of gold once richly fed by classified and display advertising streams.

Read more: How the decision to paywall NZ’s largest newspaper will affect other media

The ACM division is still profitable, but its revenue in the first half of the 2019 financial year was down 8% on the previous year (A$194.1 million, against A$212.1 million), with advertising revenue down 13% (to A$121.2 million).

So optimism about the benevolence of the Herald’s new owner must be cautious indeed.

Benefiting the community

But optimistic we must be. Research provides empirical evidence to support just how important a local newspaper is to a local community.

According to a US study published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018, local government becomes more wasteful without a local newspaper.

The researchers compared local government costs in counties where a newspaper had closed with demographically comparable counties still with a newspaper. It’s evidence media scrutiny is essential to governments being kept accountable.

Local media coverage is also associated with better informed voters and higher voter turnouts, the study’s authors suggest.

Good local journalism sees, knows and cares about the local community. It reflects that community’s history, present and where its future might lie.

Setting the agenda

This is certainly the case with the Newcastle Herald.

Newcastle is the nation’s second-biggest non-capital city, with a population of about 325,000; the population of the Greater Hunter Region is about 625,000. The Newcastle Herald is the only newspaper serving the region six days a week.

As such the newspaper plays a significant role in setting the news agenda for other local media.

Journalists and production staff at remaining commercial news outlets in Newcastle all operate – in the words of one senior newsroom contact – on the smell of an oily rag. Repeated savage cuts and increased networking have played their part in reducing commercial radio bulletins to rip-and-reads of the day’s Herald. Even the ABC has decreased the number of local radio bulletins it provides.

The Newcastle Herald clearly influences the city’s only local commercial television news bulletin (from NBN Television, owned by Nine Entertainment).

Local, original stories

The Herald has maintained its relevance largely because of the local, original stories it has pursued. It has done this despite its own newsroom being slashed, with a third of the journalists it had seven years ago.

Its much admired reporting on child sexual abuse (the Catholic diocese of Newcastle-Maitland diocese was a hotspot of crimes and cover-ups) is just one example.

Read more: Review: Spotlight’s revealing story of child abuse in my home town – and maybe yours

The paper has also led the way with coverage of the medical traumas of local women that propelled a Senate inquiry into pelvic mesh devices in 2017.

It also exposed the story of Cabbage Tree Road, a cluster of 50 cancer cases near a drain carrying toxic chemicals from the Williamtown RAAF base. The Herald’s reporting came from journalists knocking on the door of every home on the road. (The NSW Health Department has dismissed there being a link.)

Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. No other local commercial outlet in the area has the resources to do public-interest and accountability journalism. They all rely on the Newcastle Herald to set the agenda.

For the good of the Newcastle and dozens of other local regional and rural communities, we can only hope the Herald’s new owner can do better than its last.

– ref. What a local newspaper means to a regional city like Newcastle – http://theconversation.com/what-a-local-newspaper-means-to-a-regional-city-like-newcastle-116276

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tara Murphy, Professor and ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney

The hunt for gravitational waves is back on with the announcement overnight of the detection of signals from what’s thought to be the merger of two neutron stars, the incredibly dense remains of a collapsed star.

The signals were actually picked up on Thursday April 25 – ANZAC Day here in Australia – from a binary merger named S190425z), only the second ever neutron star merger to be observed.

The twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) – in Washington and Louisiana in the United States -— along with Virgo, located at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Italy, only resumed their operations on April 1 after a year and a half of upgrades. The latest result shows hunt is back with a bang.

Read more: Signals from a spectacular neutron star merger that made gravitational waves are slowly fading away

This is the third observing run (named O3) and soon after the merger signal was detected, astronomers around the world started searching for a host galaxy, but this time there was an extra challenge.

Where is the signal coming from?

When LIGO detects gravitational waves – the ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein – we can work out some information quite accurately, such as the mass of merging neutron stars.

The images (below) of all the signals detected in the first and second observing runs of the detectors (named O1 and O2) show how each signal is unique. These differences allow us to work out the masses and distances to the objects.

But one thing that is harder to work out is where the signal is coming from?

We do this by triangulating the signal received at the three detectors (the two LIGO detectors in the US and the Virgo detector in Italy).

For the first detection of merging binary neutron stars, GW170817, we got lucky. We were able to narrow down the signal to a region of 28 square degrees on the sky (about 140 times the area of the full Moon).

But S190425z was only detected in a single LIGO detector and Virgo, and hence the localisation region was 10,000 square degrees. That’s about a quarter of the entire sky.

The neutron star merger is also estimated to have happened about 500 million light-years away from Earth.

Needle in a haystack

Astronomers around the world, including Australian teams, have been using telescopes from the outback of Western Australia to The Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, to search for possible counterparts: galaxies that could be hosting the neutron star merger.

To do this we had to work out which of the 45,000 possible galaxies in the region would be the most likely hosts.

No confirmed matches have been found, so far, but on the way, we’ve found lots of other interesting events such as new supernovae – the explosions that occur when massive stars die.

This effort is an integral part of the Australian gravitational-wave hunting team at OzGrav. OzGrav supports more than 100 scientists and engineers who are making critical contributions to improving LIGO instrumentation, data analysis software, and interpretation of the results.

How far can LIGO see now?

The recent upgrades of LIGO and Virgo mean astronomers can now detect gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers further than ever before, up to 500 million light years away.

Any signals we detect from these distant mergers would have left their host galaxy around the time the first fish evolved on Earth (two hundred million years before dinosaurs came along).

Every second counts when astronomers are trying to use gravitational wave triggers to capture the last moments as neutron stars collide.

The team at the University of Western Australia node of OzGrav has developed a real-time search program (called “SPIIR”) to trigger gravitational waves from the LIGO-Virgo data within ten seconds.

The team has already identified four gravitational-wave candidates, and in the future it may even be possible to eventually alert astronomers before the emission of any light from a merger.

Beating the noise

An important part of the LIGO O3 upgrade was the installation of instruments called “quantum squeezers”, designed by OzGrav scientists at the Australian National University.

One of the most significant engineering challenges in building LIGO is reducing noise that can drown out the miniscule gravitational-wave signals. This noise comes from many different sources, such as seismic noise from earthquakes, ocean waves and even vehicle traffic.

Another source of noise is quantum noise, due to the discrete nature of light. The squeezers dampen this quantum noise by changing the quantum properties of the light used by LIGO to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime.

Another event detected

With the third observing run now well underway, we’re already seeing the results of these improvements to LIGO instrumentation and software.

Read more: How we found a white dwarf – a stellar corpse – by accident

In addition to the technical improvements there’s another marked contrast with previous observing runs: all detections are being released to the astronomy community, and the wider public, straight away.

In the midst of the excitement about S190425z there was another gravitational-wave alert a day later – a candidate signal with properties that suggest it could be a merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

This was picked up by all three detectors but as yet we also have no host identified for this, so we are not yet sure of the nature of this event. But it’s another hint of the exciting results yet to come.

– ref. We’ve detected new gravitational waves, we just don’t know where they come from (yet) – http://theconversation.com/weve-detected-new-gravitational-waves-we-just-dont-know-where-they-come-from-yet-116267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gwenda Tavan, Associate Professor, Politics and International Relations, La Trobe University

With taxes and health care emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.

The 2001 Australian federal election was a remarkable contest. Widely expected to see the Howard coalition government lose office after two lacklustre terms, the Tampa refugee crisis and the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States allowed the government to turn its political fortunes around.

Winning a presumed unwinnable election on the back of a strong national security agenda gave Howard’s team renewed impetus and assured its place in history. It fundamentally reshaped Australia’s political culture.

Read more: Leaders try to dodge them. Voters aren’t watching. So, are debates still relevant?

The Howard government had rocky start to 2001. It had won the 1998 GST election, but failed to gain a majority of the popular vote. Resentment over the GST remained strong. Ultraconservative voters were turning to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and Newspoll surveys showed the Coalition’s approval ratings trailing Labor’s (39 to 45).

Conservative governments fell in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and voter support for the coalition parties collapsed in the Queensland state election. The loss of the once safe seat of Ryan, and the leaking of a report by the Liberal Party president stating that the Coalition was mean, tricky and out of touch, added fuel to the fire. Most political analysts agreed that the government was doomed.

The Tampa crisis

Howard tried to stem the flow, and victory in a byelection in the Victorian seat of Aston in July suggested some progress. But, the real circuit-breaker came in August, with the Tampa crisis. Those dramatic events saw the arrival of a Norwegian tanker in Australian waters – and the refusal of the Howard government to accept the passengers seeking asylum – give birth to the infamous “Pacific Solution”.

What followed was a highly politicised and militarised response to the “problem” of unauthorised maritime arrivals. This included the excising of islands from Australia’s migration zone in order to prevent asylum-seekers making visa applications, the legalisation of offshore processing, the removal of boats from Australian territorial waters by the navy, and the co-opting of Pacific nations like Nauru and Papua New Guinea into offshore detention management programs.

Some commentators have interpreted Howard’s Tampa battle as pure political opportunism. But, this ignores the evidence that his government was already primed for a fight on border control. After low levels of boat arrivals for most of the 1990s, they rose to 3,721 in 1999, declined slightly in 2000 then rose significantly again in 2001 to 5,516.

Read more: Fixing the gap between Labor’s greenhouse gas goals and their policies

Concern for the irregular boat arrivals began to build. This was made visible by increasingly strident public discourse and tough border control measures, like the Border Protection Legislation Amendment Act 1999 and Migration Legislation Amendment Act 1999. The treatment of asylum-seekers caught in indefinite mainland detention was a source of constant media attention and political embarrassment for the government.

Tampa was Howard’s line in the sand. It profoundly challenged his commitment as leader to the protection of national security and sovereignty. It confirmed his affinity with the mood and aspirations of the Australian people – a bond powerfully articulated in his declaration that:

We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

As a seasoned politician, Howard also recognised Tampa’s electoral potential. From the beginning, his government was willing to politicise the issue. Labor’s evident ambiguity towards the Border Protection bills – agreeing, then refusing to support the Coalition’s legislation, and finally buckling under political pressure – was seen as “wishy-washy”. Claims were made in parliament that Labor was prepared to put the interests of people smugglers and “illegal immigrants” ahead of Australians.

September 11

Within weeks of Tampa, catastrophic terrorist attacks took place in the United States. Howard, in Washington DC at the time, was deeply affected and invoked the 50-year-old ANZUS treaty in support of its ally.

By October, when the election was called, the public mood had changed. Polls showed the Coalition’s approval ratings now at 50%, compared to Labor’s 35%. Howard’s personal rating was at a five-year high of 61%.

Incumbents enjoy advantages in campaigns. Nevertheless, the Howard government’s political mastery was evident in its ability to reframe the election as a referendum on national security. It created a link between the twin “threats” of terrorism and asylum-seekers in the public’s mind, and asserted its superior national security credentials.

The ALP campaigned well on some issues, but failed to provide a convincing counter-narrative to Howard’s agenda. Howard repeatedly pointed to Opposition Leader Kim Beazley’s ambivalence over the Pacific Solution as proof that he lacked the “ticker” to be prime minister.

Evidence that the government manipulated the facts surrounding the scandalous “children overboard” affair did not curb the popular view that dangerous times demanded strong leadership. In the end, the government was re-elected on November 10 with a swing of almost 2%, though barely any seats changed hands.

National security still on the agenda

The 2001 election changed Australia. It sealed Howard’s reputation as a strong leader, and gave him six more years in office. Success legitimated his hawkish outlook, and set the policy agenda for almost two decades. Australian troops, already committed to the conflict in Afghanistan as part of the US-led War on Terror, became ensnared in the illegal Iraq war.

Stringent anti-terrorism laws enhanced executive power, undermined civil liberties and alienated Muslim-Australians. Refugees, terrorism and national security remained major issues for both parties, but Labor struggled to establish its own agenda. Legislation to prevent irregular boat arrivals hardened into one of the harshest asylum-seeker regimes in the world, polarising public opinion.

Have the dynamics of that political contest dissipated?

In the current campaign, healthcare, climate change and economics have dominated, but the lure of “national security” for electoral advantage is still difficult to resist.

Read more: State of the states: more preference deals as pre-polling begins

Many of the policy and political priorities established in 2001 remain intact. Both major parties are committed to offshore processing, mandatory detention and push-backs as deterrent mechanisms for asylum seekers. The fact that 915 refugees and asylum-seekers are still languishing on Nauru and Manus Island, confirm that politics, not pragmatism or human rights, still shapes Australian asylum-seeker policy.

The fight against terrorism continues. Extreme right-wing political movements are growing, emboldened by the the politics of hate unleashed in 2001. It is almost 20 years since Tampa and 9/11, but those events continue to cast their shadow over the Australian political landscape.

– ref. Issues that swung elections: Tampa and the national security election of 2001 – http://theconversation.com/issues-that-swung-elections-tampa-and-the-national-security-election-of-2001-115143

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christa Lam-Cassettari, Interim Leader MARCS Institute BabyLab, Western Sydney University

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

How do babies learn to talk? – Ella, age 9, Melbourne.

What a great question, Ella!

Babies are born ready to learn and although they don’t “talk” in the first weeks of life, they know how to communicate what they are feeling. They do this by crying. And it is something they do a lot before they produce words.

Babies begin to learn the rules of language as soon as the little bones inside their ears and connections to their brain have grown. They can hear the rhythm and melody of their mother’s voice for three months before they are born and this changes the way their brain develops.

The experience that babies get from eavesdropping on their mother’s conversations in utero helps their brain tune into the language that they will learn to speak once they are born.

Read more: Curious Kids: Can chimpanzees turn into people?

Infant-directed speech

Have you ever heard someone talking to a baby with a funny voice that sounds almost like they are singing? People often use a higher pitch, speak slower and repeat what they say when they talk to babies.

Research from baby labs all over the world shows that adults help babies work out the sounds of language by using this special style of speech. Researchers call it infant-directed speech.

Scientists have developed different methods to test what babies like to listen to. We know that in the first year of life, babies turn their heads towards a speaker using infant-directed speech. Or they may suck on a dummy that will play recordings of someone who is using infant-directed speech instead of the flatter style of speech adults use to talk to each other.

This shows that babies prefer infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech.

Using a sing song voice helps babies tell the difference between words like “mummy” or “daddy” because:

1) the higher pitch draws the baby’s attention to speech

2) speech sounds like “ma” and “da” are exaggerated, simplified or repeated. That gives babies a better chance at hearing the difference between them.

3) the affectionate tone of voice encourages infants to play with caregivers who draw attention to different words by speaking more loudly or slowing down their speech.

Learning a language

When babies listen to lots of speech, the connections in their brains are more sensitive to speech that is spoken in the environment around them.

So a baby who hears lots of Cantonese or Mandarin, for example, will learn that the difference in the tone of the speaker’s voice is important and can change the meaning of a word.

A baby learning English, on the other hand, will learn that the tone of a speaker’s voice does not necessarily have the same effect on meaning.

Did you know?

Parents who respond to their baby’s happy babbling sounds by imitating them or talking about the sounds they were making might be onto a good idea. Researchers found that this was linked to the baby making more complex sounds and developing language skills sooner.

Infants can understand many words before they can say them. By nine months of age, babies can usually understand words like “bye-bye” and wave when somebody says it.

As infants get older, they babble more and their babble begins to sounds more like words than non-speech sounds.

By the time babies reach their first birthday, most infants have started to produce their first words. At one year of age, babies can usually understand as many as 50 words, and can say one or two words like “mama” or “dada”.

The story of how babies learn to talk is a fascinating one, Ella. It is amazing to think that you and I, and even your own parents were once little babies learning how to use language to communicate.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do birds sing?

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

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: how do babies learn to talk? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-babies-learn-to-talk-111613

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW

In a continuation of a recent trend, there are no politicians in this year’s Archibald Prize. The last time a portrait of a politician was awarded the prize was in 1992, when Bryan Westwood’s portrayal of Paul Keating’s Zegna suit, as worn by the then Prime Minister, was given the gong.

The closest we get to actual political figures is with studies of journalists and political commentators, including a strange little portrait of Leigh Sales, and Jordan Richardson’s portrait of Annabel Crabb, looking like a particularly severe Greek goddess.

Keith Burt’s portrait of journalist Benjamin Law manages to imply a Puckish charm, while Angus McDonald has painted lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The importance of the Archibald goes beyond its status as an instant snapshot of Australian social history. Forty years ago, after the newly appointed Director Edmund Capon and New South Wales premier Neville Wran combined to reform the governance of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this annual prize fest is the only time the Gallery’s Trustees can express their own taste in art.

In the past it was possible to work out the most likely winner from where the work was displayed, but this is no longer the case. The Trustees have selected the 51 Archibald and 29 Wynne finalists and will deliver their final judgement on May 10 – but they did not hang the exhibition. The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes are hung at the direction of the curator, Anne Ryan.

This year Ryan has privileged the Sulman Prize entries, “for subject painting, genre painting or mural project” – in other words, something with figures in it. These are often the most interesting works in the exhibition but, as the prize money is less, they have in the past been shunted into the final room.

This year visitors enter the exhibition to the sight of a very interesting Ken Done, Dive 3, which hangs adjacent to Noel McKenna’s whimsical Apartment. The viewer is also confronted by Abdul Abdullah’s Everything ever all at once.

The return of the Archibald

The reconfiguring of the exhibition means that the Archibald has returned to the central exhibiting gallery. All the portraits in this room are of artists and those who enable art – this is perhaps not surprising as portraits of artists are the majority of the chosen entries.

However there is a special poignancy in John Beard’s Edmund (+ Bill), a precisely pixelated portrait of the late Edmund Capon with a Bill Henson photograph. This hangs opposite David Griggs’ frenetic Tracing the antiquity of Jewish alchemy with Alexie Glass-Kantor. Here, the Mona Lisa-like tranquility of the woman best described as the powerhouse of contemporary curatorship, is overladen with the chaotic elements that turn angst into exhibitions. It is a face-off of two generations of cultural leadership.

Vincent Namatjira’s appropriately named Art is our weapon – portrait of Tony Albert is surprisingly quiet in comparison with his previous entry. Albert is a master of cloaking intense political engagement with an unassuming persona, and Namatjira captures that well.

I really admire Blak Douglas’s White shells, black heart, a large portrait face of Eora artist Esme Timbery. There are real shells embedded into the background behind that study of a wise old woman.

Blak Douglas is also hung in the Wynne Prize – in collaboration with the late Elaine Russell, Ashes, damper and kangaroo stew for dinner. Douglas was given permission to complete the work after her death, which means the resulting work is an interesting cross-generation, cross-cultural synthesis.

This year’s Wynne has some truly eccentric entries, including Glen Clarke’s Australian warhead with rising tide of human rights abuses, a sculpture consisting of origami shirts made of bank notes.

There is also Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s exquisite Pink Lightning, a bark painting that evokes the lightning over the sea. Its intense magenta tone comes from discarded printer cartridges, a creative form of recycling. It hangs in the same room as Jun Chen’s painterly Magnolia Trees. Both beautiful evocations of place, painted in completely different styles.

Most visitors to the exhibitions will, however, concentrate their gaze on the Archibald entries. They will compare media images of artistic director of Queensland Ballet Li Cunxin, playwright Nakkiah Lui, and actors Madeleine Madden and Sarah Peirse, among others, with the artist’s interpretations.

One of these, Tessa MacKay’s portrait of David Wenham, has already been awarded the Packing Room Prize, an award that reflects the taste of Brett Cuthbertson, the man in charge of those who handle the art (and artists).

Every artist whose work has been hung is already a winner. They are the small minority of 107, selected from a field of 2176 entries. The public exposure they receive from having their work on view both at the gallery – and the subsequent national tour – inevitably leads to invitations to exhibit and commissions from private collectors.

As well as being invited to the official announcement and opening party, there are a number of discreet social events organised by the gallery. Here they have the opportunity to get to know each other, and potential future patrons. This extra level of support encourages a community of artists, something to be valued in an otherwise competitive contest.

The winners of the Archibald, Wynne, Sulman Prizes 2019 will be announced on May 10. Finalists will be exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from May 11 to September 8.

– ref. Puckish charm and no politicians: the 2019 Archibald Prize – http://theconversation.com/puckish-charm-and-no-politicians-the-2019-archibald-prize-116346

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Angela Pattison, Research scientist at Plant Breeding Institute, University of Sydney, University of Sydney

Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

The species Solanum centrale, also known as kutjera in several Aboriginal languages, or the desert raisin in English, stands out in Australia’s wild bush tomato family in more ways than one.

A typical desert raisin plant in the wild looks fairly unimpressive from the surface, and certainly a lot less striking than the photos which pop up in an internet search.

In fact, if you don’t know what you are looking for, you may miss them. They are fairly scrawny with greeny-grey hairy leaves and grow no taller than to the bottom of your shin.

You might only spot a shoot every few metres between other shrubs. Each shoot only has a handful of leaves, and it typically carries three to 10 sultana-sized fruit. Like sultanas, they’re unappealingly brown and shrivelled. And you’ll only see them if they have escaped hungry desert fauna.

But its humble appearance belies its significance to both people and the environment.

The fruit from this plant has been a staple in desert communities for thousands of years. It resembles a raisin but tastes like a piquant or smoky sun-dried tomato, and because it dries on the plant it has a long storage life relative to other fruit.

Read more: Can we be Australian without eating indigenous food?

Its cultural significance and ability to grow in sandy arid areas where almost no other domesticated plants survive makes this species a prime target for an enterprise based in remote Aboriginal communities, producing a unique fruit with plenty of health benefits to consumers.

What makes the desert raisin unique?

Iceberg-like growth

Like an iceberg which is much bigger under the surface than appears from above, the desert raisin plant is much bigger under the surface of the ground than it appears. A single plant in the wild can span dozens of metres through hardy underground connections. The largest confirmed single plant was about one quarter of a hectare – but who knows how big these plants can really grow?

It expands in multiple directions from the seed plant over successive rains via roots which grow roughly parallel to the surface, producing new shoots as it expands.

Root sprouting allows a plant to grow a new shoot many metres away from the previous shoot while avoiding a vulnerable seedling stage. This feature is common among many unrelated desert plant families.

For example, a single Populus euphratica tree in the hyper-arid Taklamakan Desert of China was found to produce clonal shoots over an area of 121ha.

Unabated resilience

Desert raisins are known to grow vigorously following a disturbance, either natural or man-made. It is quite common, for instance, when driving through Australia’s arid interior to find piles of sand beside freshly graded roads covered in bush tomato shoots after rain.

Read more: The black wattle is a boon for Australians (and a pest everywhere else)

This is because a grader, a tool that smooths the surface of a road, cuts dormant roots and throws them, mixed with sand, onto the side of the road. The roots are ready to re-sprout as soon as they get wet.

And its not only chopping roots that appears to stimulate growth – targeted fires, fruit collection by Indigenous groups and grazing by desert marsupials have all been known to increase the vigour of patches of wild bush tomatoes over the long term.

The traditional custodians of this country knew how to manage this species for sustainable production, and people from Aboriginal nations which span the large range of edible bush tomato species have passed this knowledge down for centuries.

Cultivation

Do the unique root properties of the desert raisin remind you of a weed?

Well, yes.

Other root sprouters in the Solanum family from temperate areas are vigourous weeds in cropping regions around the world.

Colonies are very difficult to eradicate as the viability of roots is not affected by cultivation and most herbicides. In fact, cultivation stimulates sprouting from root fragments.

So how does this influence the way this species can be used as a food crop?

Read more: Warrigal greens are tasty, salty, and covered in tiny balloon-like hairs

There are currently several cultivated stands in regional and remote Australia, and the benefits of growing the species are becoming clearer, particularly for Aboriginal communities.

With water and nutrition in their natural habitats, bush tomatoes can become incredibly productive. When cultivated, the plants are large and thick, sometimes as high as the knee, with dozens of flowers per plant. But over the seasons they respond less to water and fertiliser.

It is at this point that perhaps a disturbance can be used to stimulate production from underground lateral roots – although if they pop up in the space between beds, it can create havoc for other operations!

It is no wonder that a plant, which normally hides its massive size so it can persist in harsh conditions, becomes a showy, vigorous plant when given the same kind of treatment as horticultural plants.

Read more: Why Aboriginal people need autonomy over their food supply

One final note. Much of the knowledge on how bush tomato and other food plants native to this country work is held by the traditional custodians of the species, the Aboriginal people.

We must all learn from Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people, listen, and work together so the amazing fruits of this land return to their place in human diets and landscapes, including the mighty desert raisin.

Sign up to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian.

– ref. The tasty, weed-like desert raisin plant is as big as a carpark – http://theconversation.com/the-tasty-weed-like-desert-raisin-plant-is-as-big-as-a-carpark-115121

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shirleene Robinson, Associate Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Fellow, Macquarie University

With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.

Johannes (Joh) Bjelke-Petersen’s reign as Queensland’s premier began in 1968 and came to a dramatic and inglorious end 19 years later with the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption. He is still Queensland’s longest-serving premier, but he leaves a complicated legacy. For many, he is remembered most for his rigid control of over all areas of government and his anti-democratic stance on public protests.

Bjelke-Petersen governed the state as leader of the Country Party (which later became the National Party) until his downfall in 1987.

In May that year, the ABC television programme Four Corners aired the first public allegations of organised crime and police corruption in Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen would hang on to office for only a few more months before being forced to step down.

The Fitzgerald Inquiry, launched in the aftermath of the Four Corners programme, continued for another two years, uncovering a deep and systematic web of corruption that implicated many at the highest levels of Queensland government and the Queensland Police Force.

Read more: The man who would be commissioner: Bjelke-Petersen’s crooked pick

For Bjelke-Petersen, not only was his career as a state premier over, but so, too, were his national ambitions. In early 1987, Bjelke-Petersen had launched an ill-fated “Joh for PM” campaign in a brazen attempt to challenge then-Liberal Party leader John Howard as head of the Coalition, then run against Prime Minister Bob Hawke in that year’s federal election.

His bid for power split the federal Coalition. Capitalising on the internal dissent of the Opposition, Hawke easily won the 1987 election, holding onto the prime-ministership for another four years.

An ill-fated run for federal office

Hawke’s win in the 1987 election had been far from inevitable. The Coalition had actually been ahead in the polls for much of Hawke’s 1984-1987 term. However, internal divisions, typified by the rivalry between Howard and Andrew Peacock over the Liberal leadership, put pressure on the party. Tensions were further stoked when Bjelke-Petersen announced his intention to enter the federal arena.

In January 1987, when Bjelke-Petersen announced that he intended to run for parliament, he assumed that his success in Queensland could be duplicated at the federal level. Fresh from a win in the state election the previous year, he and his backers did not acknowledge the distinctive set of circumstances in Queensland that had given rise to his long time in office.

His bid for PM did make a brief splash in the national media, drawing further attention to the deep ideological rifts within the federal Coalition. Howard, leader of the Liberals, and Ian Sinclair, leader of the Nationals, struggled to contain the division caused by Bjelke-Petersen’s ambitions. The discord reached a breaking point at the end of February 1987, when the Queensland National Party decided to withdraw its 12 federal MPs from the Coalition in support of Bjelke-Petersen’s efforts. The Coalition formally split soon after.

Hawke seized on the Coalition’s infighting and quickly called an election on May 27. Bjelke-Petersen was not even in the country at the time, having gone to the United States. Outplayed and dealing with increased coverage of corruption and dissent in Queensland, Bjelke-Petersen swiftly abandoned his plan to run for prime minister.

Read more: The larrikin as leader: how Bob Hawke came to be one of the best (and luckiest) prime ministers

By the end of the year, Howard’s Coalition was fatally divided. Labor was returned to government and increased its majority in the House with 86 seats to 43 for the Liberals and 19 for the National Party.

The win allowed Hawke to take his place in history as the party’s longest-serving prime minister.

A tarnished legacy in Queensland

The failings of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland extended far beyond the arrogance that saw him attempt an ill-conceived move into federal politics.

Under his leadership, Queensland was not democratic. His government exploited the state’s electoral gerrymander, which over-represented rural electorates at the expense of urban ones. The state’s unicameral parliament meant the checks and balances a second house would have provided were absent.

Bjelke-Petersen also relied on a police force rife with corruption to prop up his government. Dissenters faced brutalisation at the hands of police when they took to the streets. A repressive set of laws that banned protests meant taking to the streets could result in time in prison. For too long, the media were silent about the corruption taking place in the state.

Read more: Jacks and Jokers: Bjelke-Petersen and Queensland’s ‘police state’

Journalist Evan Whitton called Bjelke-Petersen “the hillbilly dictator” in reference to his carefully cultivated parochial style of leadership. Yet, Bjelke-Petersen was guided by a shrewd political awareness. He styled himself as a defender of a unique Queensland sensibility and scorned the more progressive southern states. He was not opposed to using fear and prejudice for electoral gain.

His treatment of LGBTIQ issues provides one strong example. During the 1980s, the Bjelke-Petersen government made efforts to prevent gay and lesbian teachers from being employed and gay students from forming support groups. When the AIDS epidemic reached Australia, his government demonised LGBTIQ individuals. As most other Australian states decriminalised sex acts between men, Bjelke-Petersen’s government attempted to introduce anti-gay licensing laws and criminalise lesbianism. In 1986, the Sturgess Inquiry into Sexual Offences Involving Children and Related Matters was used by the government to further ostracise gays and lesbians and turn the public against them.

The Bjelke-Petersen era provides a cautionary tale. It is difficult to imagine any other premier maintaining his or her position for this long again. His ill-fated bid for federal politics also reveals the impact that egomaniacal and divisive figures can have on political parties.

Bjelke-Petersen may not have been the only factor behind Hawke’s 1987 win, but his intervention certainly did Howard no favours – and deepened a rift in the Coalition that took years to mend.

– ref. Issues that swung elections: the dramatic and inglorious fall of Joh Bjelke-Petersen – http://theconversation.com/issues-that-swung-elections-the-dramatic-and-inglorious-fall-of-joh-bjelke-petersen-115141

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samuel Berhanu Woldemariam, PhD Candidate (Law), University of Newcastle

In the case of Julian Assange, focus has turned to the United States’ efforts to extradite him from Britain to the US to face a charge of conspiracy “to commit computer intrusion”.

The initial extradition hearing, which took place on Thursday, was a preliminary step in what will be a long, drawn-out process. Assange appeared before the court by video link and made it clear he opposes extradition. The next procedural hearing is set for May 30.

Assange had been arrested by London Metropolitan police on April 11, and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy. He had been granted asylum by the embassy seven years earlier, after fleeing arrest out of fear he would be extradited to the United States.

Earlier this week, Assange was convicted of breaking the conditions of his bail in 2012, and sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment.

Read more: Is the Assange indictment a threat to the First Amendment?

What happens next?

The actual extradition hearing will be some time off, following these preliminary hearings. After an initial decision by a judge, either side may have access to an appeal procedure through the courts.

Regardless of that outcome, the final step rests with Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Despite pressure from UK lawmakers, Javid cannot make a political decision on whether to extradite Assange – rather, his role is to approve a court order for extradition unless there are statutory provisions that prohibit it.

His decision to extradite Assange might also be subject to High Court appeal.

What is extradition?

Extradition is a legal process that states use to facilitate the transfer of a person from one jurisdiction to another in order for that person to be prosecuted for a crime. Many extradition arrangements between states rely on bi- and multilateral extradition and mutual assistance treaties.

The US and UK signed an extradition treaty in 2003. Under this treaty, both countries agreed to extradite people sought for trial or punishment for extraditable offences. An offence is extraditable where the conduct is punishable under the laws of both countries

by deprivation of liberty for a period of one year or more.

The offence for which Assange is wanted in the US is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment. It is grounded in an allegation that Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to hack US Department of Defence files, and publish classified information on Wikileaks.

Assange maintains his innocence, and his defenders argue that his extradition would set a dangerous precedent for journalism and the publication of truthful information – particularly as it may affect the US.

It is important to note the parallel, but now lapsed extradition claim from Sweden, which had earlier sought Assange for a preliminary investigation and possible prosecution for rape charges. Assange had claimed an extradition to Sweden to face those charges would result in another extradition from there to the US. Having lost his protection under Ecuador, Assange now faces exactly that prospect.

Read more: Julian Assange Q+A: WikiLeaks founder arrested in London

Constraints on extradition

Extradition is a heavily regulated and multi-stage process. Rules and procedures within and beyond the 2003 Extradition Treaty potentially protect Assange from extradition to the US, or at least constrain its conditions.

Political offences

The 2003 extradition treaty between the UK and the US explicitly provides:

Extradition shall not be granted if the offence for which extradition is requested is a political offense.

It is common for countries to retain a power to refuse extradition where it is sought in relation to political offences. Such an exemption can protect whistleblowers and others who legitimately challenge the exercise of governmental power.

Pure political offences are those that directly target the government, such as treason, sedition or espionage. Relative political offences are ordinary offences that are “committed for political motives or in a political context”.

The UK does not have a statutory or generally accepted judicial definition of a relative political offence. However, the Anglo-American system uses the “incidence-test” according to which

the act must be incidental to and forming a part of political disturbances.

The “requested state” may also refuse extradition if it determines that the request was politically motivated.

Assange’s lawyers are expected to make this a chief argument against extradition. Such an argument could not succeed on the basis that conspiracy to commit computer intrusion is a pure political offence under UK legislation, because it is not.

However, the UK courts or authorities may regard the charge Assange faces as a relative political offence. Alternatively, they may be convinced by Assange’s argument that his work with WikiLeaks is purely journalistic and the US charge politically motivated.

Read more: Explainer: what charges does Julian Assange face, and what’s likely to happen next?

The ‘Rule of Speciality’

The “Rule of Speciality” under the extradition treaty offers Assange protection against new charges. According to this rule, an extradited person may only be charged for the offence for which the extradition is granted, or for crimes committed thereafter. However, the requested state may waive the rule of speciality in which case Assange may end up facing more charges than originally specified.

This rule is important for both Assange and the UK authorities. The UK is entirely opposed to the imposition of the death penalty in any circumstances. The UK would be bound to refuse to extradite Assange to the US were he to face charges that carried a possible death penalty.

There will be pressure on the UK authorities to respect the rule of speciality, in which case Assange would face a maximum of five years imprisonment should he be extradited to the US.

Time and appeal procedures

Final decisions on extradition requests take considerable time. For example, the extradition of Abu Hamza from the UK to the US took eight years. Progress of the extradition request is likely to be slow through the UK courts and bureaucracy. It will be further delayed by any appeal procedures Assange seeks to utilise, whether through the UK courts or the European human rights system.

It is impossible to say, for now, what awaits Assange. At the very least, following the completion of his current prison sentence, there will be renewed uncertainty about his liberty. Controversy, of course, will persist over whether Assange deserves protection against political prosecution, if he may actually have nefarious links to Russia, or indeed whether the most just course would be for the Swedish charges to be revived first.

– ref. Julian Assange has refused to surrender himself for extradition to the US. What now? – http://theconversation.com/julian-assange-has-refused-to-surrender-himself-for-extradition-to-the-us-what-now-116173

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Associate Professor at La Trobe University. Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

This federal election is a tale of two campaigns. The first is the old-style, business-as-usual campaign: party leaders criss-crossing the country attending set events to garner as many headlines and votes as they can.

The other is a campaign dynamic where the old rules no longer apply. With more ways for candidates to connect with voters, mainstream media are less influential than they were in the last century. Changing electoral dynamics have also shaped this campaign, such as the sharp rise in the number of early voters, the growing appeal of minor parties and the widespread use of social media for paid and free political messaging.

It is in this re-imagined political environment that controversial businessman Clive Palmer can spend at least A$55 million on political marketing to rebrand himself as a preference deal kingmaker, despite a poor attendance record in parliament after his 2013 victory.

Debate dodging and tussles over timing

Even the great election debate tradition is caught between these old and new campaign dynamics. In one sense, nothing has changed since the first Australian televised debate between Bob Hawke and Andrew Peacock in 1984. Party officials continue to argue over the number of debates, where they will be held and under what circumstances.

These heated negotiations occur because, unlike the United States, Australia does not have an independent debate committee – Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) – to determine the rules and conduct of these verbal contests well before polling day. The Australian approach is more ad hoc, a tussle between parties and the media to work out the logistics.

In this campaign, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten have agreed to three debates: Monday night’s first debate in Perth, a second tonight in Brisbane and a third next Wednesday at the National Press Club.

It took some time for them to get to three. Shorten initially turned down offers by ABC and Nine for a third primetime debate, then proposed a third debate during lunch time (not prime time), prompting Morrison to accuse him of trying to dodge scrutiny:

A prime time debate would provide as many Australians as possible, including those who work during the day, the best opportunity to scrutinise the choice on offer at this election

Ordinarily, incumbents are more reserved about committing to a debate, not wanting to give their opponents a platform where they are considered as an equal contender. Remember when Hawke declined to debate then-Opposition leader John Howard in 1987?

During the 2016 campaign, Shorten was so keen to debate Malcolm Turnbull that he signed up for four debates: a traditional prime-time debate on ABC; a “people’s forum” hosted by Sky News; an experimental, live-streamed debate on Facebook Live in partnership with News Corp; and a second “people’s forum” in Brisbane, where he debated himself after Turnbull turned down an invitation to attend.

Now, Shorten is the one reluctant to agree to debates. This is because Labor is leading in the polls and Shorten is the one with a much larger following on social media (important for getting political messages out). Shorten has also been in the Opposition leader’s job for six years, while Morrison came to the prime ministership just eight months ago. Behind in the polls, and with a smaller social media footprint, the Coalition feels more like the underdog in this contest.

Yet, when voters are asked to nominate their preferred prime minister in polling, Morrison consistently tops Shorten. This is why Morrison pushed so hard for a third debate on prime time television. Here, he likely has the advantage, while Shorten arguably has the most to lose.

Read more: Morrison and Shorten take aim at one another in leaders’ debate: experts respond

Audiences are largely tuning out

This may account for why Labor agreed to Monday’s debate on the Seven network’s lesser-viewed channel, 7Two. The debate managed just over 600,000 viewers from the five main capital cities including an encore edition, though this was still well behind Lego Masters on Nine, which topped the night’s ratings with 1,053,000 viewers.

The second debate will likely draw far fewer viewers, given it’s on a Friday night when television viewership is generally down, and it will be on the Sky network behind a paywall. In 2016, the “people’s forum” broadcast by Sky News, also on a Friday night, for example, drew just 54,000 viewers.

Political debates in the US and Britain are far more popular. In fact, the first televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US presidential campaign drew a record 84 million viewers.

Read more: Trump and Clinton face off in first US presidential debate: experts respond

Australians, by contrast, do not flock to watch election debates. The Australian Election Studies (AES), which has tracked televised election debate since 1990, shows a steady decline in audience interest. Just 21% of Australians reported watching a debate in 2016, down from 71% in 1993.

This is likely because Australian debates are generally staid affairs with little genuine debate. They are also sometimes held at inconvenient times when few people are likely to be interested, such as Friday nights.

Even when people do tune in, they don’t stay for long. For example, the prime time ABC debate between Turnbull and Shorten in 2016 attracted a respectable audience of 875,000. But not for long. It lost 150,000 viewers with the first three minutes. At one point, the audience plummeted to 570,000.

This suggests that the format and content of the debates are failing to keep audiences engaged, despite some recent, American-style experimentation with “town hall” settings. Voters can tell when leaders are using questions to simply repeat their campaign messages.

Compare this with overseas debate formats that provide more lively interaction. In the 2012 US presidential debate, for example, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama roamed the stage in a forum full of potential voters who asked them questions, with a moderator on the sidelines just to keep order.

Britain, which only held its first televised debate in 2010, has taken to including minor parties in its debates, with seven speakers on the stage to offer a broader range of viewpoints.

Why debates still matter

There are good, democratic reasons to insist on political debates, if the format genuinely involves voters, parties and the media in a “trialogue”.

From the parties’ perspective, they are cheaper than political advertising and can help sway undecided voters. The long-tail effect of social media and the news media means that voters who don’t watch the debates can still read and hear what happened after the event.

From the voters’ perspective, debates still play an educational role by illuminating important issues and revealing differences in parties’ positions. And from the media’s point of view, debates allow reporters to set the agenda and scrutinise issues on behalf of the public, particularly those the leaders have inadequately addressed.

So, will the leaders’ debate gain a new lease of life in this electoral contest or will it be more of the same? Anything is possible in this tale of two campaigns.

– ref. Leaders try to dodge them. Voters aren’t watching. So, are debates still relevant? – http://theconversation.com/leaders-try-to-dodge-them-voters-arent-watching-so-are-debates-still-relevant-115456

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Diesendorf, Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW

As the federal election approaches, Labor has two principal climate and energy targets: a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the 2005 level by 2030, and for half of Australia’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030 (up from its current share of 19%).

The renewable electricity target is easily achievable with inexpensive extensions to Labor’s existing policies, but that policy would still leave Labor far short of its emissions target.

Read more: Labor’s climate policy: a decent menu, but missing the main course

Because electricity contributes only 34% of Australia’s total emissions, more substantial policies are needed to reduce emissions from both electricity and the rest of the energy sector to achieve Labor’s greenhouse target.

How much greenhouse gas are we talking about?

In 2015 the government chose 2005 as the baseline for its Paris target, presumably because it was one of our highest-emission years since 1990 (2015 emissions were much lower).

In the year ending September 2005, Australia’s emissions were equivalent to 605 million tonnes (MT) of carbon dioxide. From 2007, emissions dropped sharply due to a reduction in land clearing and then again between mid-2012 and mid-2014 due to Labor’s carbon price.

In the year ending September 2018, the latest year for which we have firm numbers, Australia’s emissions total was 536MT of CO₂ equivalent. Since 2015 our annual total has risen slightly, due to increases in non-electricity emissions outweighing reductions in electricity emissions.

Labor’s emissions target is a 45% reduction from 605MT, which is equivalent to a goal of 333MT. Therefore its policies have to cut 203MT from our 2018 annual emissions by 2030.

How much emissions does 50% renewable electricity cut?

As shown in the pie chart below, electricity currently contributes 34% of Australia’s annual emissions, or 182MT.

Let’s assume Labor’s proposed energy policies stop the growth in non-electricity emissions, and that annual electricity emissions don’t increase.

Then, taking into account that renewable energy is already 19% of total electricity generation, Labor’s 50% target would cut electricity emissions by 56MT.

Successfully cutting 56MT from the annual emissions total 203MT gives us a gap of 147MT.

Closing the gap

Let’s look at some feasible options for Labor to reduce this emissions gap. These are not all independent and so cannot simply be tallied up, but they do nevertheless offer some concrete targets.

The two most substantial options are increasing the renewable electricity target to 100%, and improving overall energy efficiency by 20%.

Further goals could include electrifying one-quarter of vehicles by 2030 and charging them only with renewable energy; electrifying half of non-electrical heat; halving non-energy industrial emissions; and halving fugitive emissions.

So how attainable are these objectives?

100% renewable electricity

Electricity is the easiest and cheapest energy supply option to transition to renewables. A 100% renewable energy target, together with no increase in non-electricity emissions (and without electrification of transport and heating), would cut 2018 annual emissions by 182MT, from 536MT to 354MT, and reduce the gap to 21MT.

Key federal policies needed for 100% renewable energy are:

• reverse auctions with contract-for-difference for solar and wind farms in the states that don’t have these auctions (NSW and WA),
• funding of key transmission links both interstate and intrastate,
• substantial additional funding to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) specifically for storage, and
• reform of the National Electricity Market objective, structure and rules.

Labor’s policy specifies A$10 billion for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, A$5 billion for upgrading the electricity grid, and A$200 million for household batteries – all big steps forward – but doesn’t mention reverse auctions which can have zero net cost to government.

Energy efficiency

The second biggest potential reduction is in energy efficiency. Improving overall energy efficiency by 20% would save 88MT of CO₂.

To achieve this, we would need to see a suite of policies along the following lines, none of which have been mentioned explicitly by Labor:

The other targets

Electrifying one-quarter of land transport and charging vehicles with renewable electricity is more substantial than Labor’s current transport target, namely that half of new vehicles should be electric by 2030.

Under Labor’s policy, the vast majority of vehicles would still have internal combustion engines and most of the remainder would be charged from a grid that’s 50% fossil-fuelled. A realistic emissions reduction from Labor’s modest transport target would be about 8MT.

However, if battery costs fall substantially over the next decade, the market could make the majority of new vehicles electric by 2030.

With a transition to nearly 100% renewable electricity by 2030, electric cars would be charged either from a “green” grid or rooftop solar. If a quarter of all cars are electric, this could contribute up to 17MT of emissions cuts.

Electrifying half of non-electrical heat, which currently comprises 19% of annual emissions, would contribute about 40MT of emissions reductions, assuming 100% renewable electricity; this would be challenging but possibly achievable with policies to shift gas heating to electrical.

Halving non-energy industrial emissions, which currently comprise 6.5% of our annual emissions, would save around 17MT. This goal needs regulation to implement research and development; one good starting point is to phase out traditional Portland cement and replace it with geopolymer cement.

Labor’s proposed baseline and credit scheme, Safeguard 2.0, would in theory reduce non-electrical heat and non-electrical industrial emissions, but in practice the enormous political power of big businesses with annual emissions greater than 25,000 tonnes would probably at best halt, instead of reducing, growth in industrial emissions.

Fugitive emissions (accidental methane leaks) from gas pipelines and some oil and gas fields would also shrink with success in electrifying heat, but would still continue from the Gorgon gas field and disused open-cut coal-mines. Halving these fugitive emissions would also save another 28MT.

Read more: Fugitive emissions: what is the real footprint of coal seam gas?

Carbon budgets

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to keep global warming below 2℃ the world has a total CO₂ budget of 1,000 billion tonnes, or gigatonnes (GT), measured from 2011. To keep the world below 1.5℃, that budget shrinks to 400GT.

Australia contributes 1.5% of global emissions, and annually our emissions have been hovering around 0.55GT. That gives us 23 years of emissions at the current level to hit the 2℃ target. If we aim for the more ambitious 1.5℃ – which most experts agree is necessary to avoid climate disaster – that shrinks to just 5 more years at our current emission levels.

Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of both coal and liquefied natural gas. From a global perspective, we need an urgent strategy to phase out these exports (and thus increase their international prices) and replace them with exports of hydrogen or ammonia produced from renewable energy.

– ref. Fixing the gap between Labor’s greenhouse gas goals and their policies – http://theconversation.com/fixing-the-gap-between-labors-greenhouse-gas-goals-and-their-policies-115550

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, University of Canberra

Our “state of the states” series takes stock of the key issues, seats and policies affecting the vote in each of Australia’s states.

We’ll check in with our expert political analysts around the country every week of the campaign for updates on how it is playing out.

New South Wales

Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra

The Liberals proclaim their party is a “broad church”, embracing a spectrum of views. But like most churches, there is always the potential for schism. These schisms were played out in the 45th parliament, culminating in the removal of a prime minister. They also caused policy paralysis on matters such as climate change mitigation, immigration, water management and broad based taxation reform.

Simmering tension between moderates and conservatives are evident in a number of urban seats, where centre-right independents are challenging conservatives. It’s also evident in several regional seats, where the challenge to Coalition seats is coming from nonaligned, but generally right-leaning independents.

In the NSW seat of Farrer, former Coalition minister Sussan Ley is being challenged by Albury Mayor, Kevin Mack. At this stage, Mack is being priced by the bookies for a win, overcoming a 20% buffer enjoyed by Ley. Given that the federal electorate takes in two state seats that fell to the Shooters Fishers and Farmers at the recent state election, Farrer can now be described as marginal.

As with many other rural seats, especially in the irrigation areas, there is palpable anger with the Coalition’s handling of water management. Barnaby Joyce, the former Minister for Agriculture and Water, further alienated locals with his explosive interview with the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas last week. In this environment, the stocks of rural independents have risen.

Read more: Facebook videos, targeted texts and Clive Palmer memes: how digital advertising is shaping this election campaign

In the Northern NSW seat of Page, sitting Nationals MP Kevin Hogan has suggested that he might sit on the crossbench if Labor forms government (as he did in 2018 in protest against the dumping of Malcolm Turnbull). Early internal polling suggests that Hogan is slightly ahead of Labor’s Patrick Deegan. Hogan may well find himself sitting with other regional independents, perhaps even holding the balance of power.

In Gilmore, on the south coast, Ann Sudmalis decided not to recontest the seat, resigning amid complaints of “bullying, betrayal and backstabbing” by local colleagues. The Liberals nominated Grant Schultz, but this nomination was overturned after the prime minister using a “captain’s call” to nominate former ALP President Warren Mundine. Schultz has since resigned from the party and is standing as an independent.

To add to this complexity, former Nationals member Katrina Hodgkinson has also nominated, and has enlisted as her campaign coordinator for Gilmore former Liberal member Joanna Gash. Labor and the Nationals are likely to be advantaged by Schultz’s decision not to preference any party, and this may be sufficient for Labor’s Fiona Phillips to secure the 0.7% of votes needed to win the seat.

Victoria

Nick Economou, Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University

Nothing in the campaign so far suggests that Victoria will not be really difficult for the government, with Liberal seats such as Chisholm, La Trobe and Michael Sukkar’s seat of Deakin under threat. The Liberal cause has been further undermined by the disendorsement of candidates in unwinnable seats who had been exposed as having made bigoted utterances. Labor triumphalism over this has been tempered by one of its candidates being accused of having made light of sexual violence against women.

Matters of substance to arise in Victoria over the last few weeks (during which time pre-polling commenced) relate to preference deals for both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In the seat of Flinders, held by health minister Greg Hunt with a 7.0% margin, high profile independent candidate Julia Banks – formerly the Liberal member for Chisholm – announced that her how-to-vote card would be advising supporters to direct their preferences to Labor ahead of the Liberal candidate. While Hunt is on a fairly significant margin, reports have suggested that the local Liberal campaign has become very concerned about this development.

Senate how-to-vote cards have also appeared in time for the pre-polling period. Of significance here is the Labor party decision to advise its supporters to give preferences to the Derryn Hinch Justice Party ticket. Not only does this boost Derryn Hinch’s chances of being reelected, the Labor how-to-vote card is a potential blow to the Greens’ Janet Rice if the Green ticket’s primary vote was to fall well short of the quota. The Greens will doubtlessly benefit from a flow of Animal Justice Party preferences, but in a half-Senate election, the combined vote may not achieve the 14.4% required for Rice’s re-election.

The Liberal-National ticket, meanwhile, directs preferences to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. One wonders if this might not be the basis on which Palmer’s party secures a seat in Victoria, particularly if, as seems very likely, the Liberal-National primary vote falls below three quota (43.2%).

Read more: Now for the $55 million question: what does Clive Palmer actually want?

Queensland

Maxine Newlands, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at James Cook University

Herbert was always to going to be a tight race for the minor parties. The biggest battle should have been between One Nation and United Australia Party. In the 2016 election, One Nation gained in Palmer’s absence. This time around, One Nation could struggle to gain a foothold thanks to the Liberals’ legitimisation of Clive Palmer’s Canberra bid via preference deals. One Nation’s own implosion, and the fact that its Herbert candidate comes from outside the electorate compound its problems.

While minor parties traditionally rely on protest votes, this year pre-polling could scupper any last minute announcements. Smaller parties tend to spend big in the last few weeks of a campaign, but that might be in vain if large numbers of people have already voted.

Pre-polling is going to play an important role in this election. Pre-poll votes within the first 24 hours are almost double the number at the same stage in 2016. The Queensland electorates of McPherson, Lilley and Herbert recorded the highest numbers of pre-pollers in the first 24 hours.

Herbert’s Hyde Park booth was the third highest in Queensland to pre-poll in the first 24 hours. At 1,414, it is more than double the previous election. By Wednesday, Hyde Park had 3,175 votes lodged – the highest in Queensland.

Both Herbert and Dickson were in the top ten electorates for pre-polling in 2016. Dickson pre-polled at 1,343 in the first 24 hours. This week’s housing market announcement could affect those pre-polling in Dickson, with house prices and negative gearing a key election issue.

GetUp! has ramped up the pressure in Dickson this week with its “Ditch Dutton” campaign, which involves door knocking, calling voters, media stunts, testimony of disenfranchised Dickson voters, and plastering the electorate with Ditch Dutton signs.

Western Australia

Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics at Murdoch University

The leaders’ debate may have returned Western Australia to the political spotlight, but less attention was being paid to what important players in WA’s 2017 state election were saying about a Liberal preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

In 2017, a desperate Liberal Party did a preference deal with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to try to save the election. The results were not what the Liberals had hoped for. It might have helped them to hold Geraldton, but the general damage to the party was considerable.

Both important players in WA’s 2017 state election worried about the Chinese government’s reaction to a preference deal with Palmer’s UAP. Former Premier, Colin Barnett, and current Premier, Mark McGowan, called attention to Palmer’s ongoing spat with Chinese officials and warned that any deal with Palmer would upset Australia’s most important trading partner. Palmer responded by accusing WA Labor of sucking up to the Chinese.

More importantly, at least when it comes to the current election result, Barnett warned of a backlash from more progressive Liberal voters, for whom a deal to swap preferences with a populist party is offensive. Barnett should know. That’s what happened to him when party officials made the deal with One Nation. It didn’t help that soon after the deal, Hanson said that voters hated Barnett, and One Nation candidates said they weren’t going to preference the Liberals. But the general effect of some Liberal voters rejecting the deal and the party was real.

This brings us to the blue-riband seat of Curtin, which the Liberals hold by a 20% margin. While it’s an ultra-safe seat, like Wentworth, it contains the kind of progressive Liberal voters who helped to elect independent Kerryn Phelps.

Curtin’s gotten a little curious, though. The former Member for Curtin and Liberal star Julie Bishop’s first choice to replace her lost in the preselection process. This was yet another moment of rejection by a party that Bishop had served with great distinction for two decades. It also meant that a conservative was preselected to a seat where there are likely to be plenty of progressive Liberal voters.

Then former Fremantle MP and Minister for International Development in the Rudd government, Melissa Parkes, nominated for the seat and soon resigned as Labor candidate after comments she made that were critical of Israel returned to haunt her.

Finally, and even more bizarrely, the independent candidate who might have done a Phelps and snatched a blue-riband seat from the Liberals passed “results” from what turned out to be a fake opinion poll to the West Australian, which led the paper to publish a headline story about the Liberals losing the seat. So, we even had fake news!

South Australia

Rob Manwaring, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University

The election campaign is steadily cranking up in South Australia, and we just are beginning to see some frays and cracks at the local level of campaigning. The past week has been dotted with a number of incidents – none of which in and of themselves may prove decisive – but certainly add to the colour of the campaign.

Rather unfortunately, Shaun Osborn, the Liberal candidate for Adelaide, sent out a letter with his first name misspelled on the header. This gaffe followed an apology to a local café owner, after Osborn had invited local members to an event where he had not sought prior permission.

A more serious incident took place in the much more tense battle for the seat of Mayo, held by Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie. One of Sharkie’s volunteers was charged by the police with stalking high-profile Liberal candidate Georgina Downer. The volunteer in question now faces the magistrates court in mid-May, and Sharkie has ordered that the man takes no further part in her campaigning in a seat she holds by just 2.9%.

Finally, racist graffiti was scrawled over a campaign poster for the Greens Senate candidate, and Ngarrindjeri elder Major “Moogy” Sumner. While these events have added some drama, it has distracted from a focus on local issues.

South Australia’s key, distinctive, policy contributions to the overall campaign are likely to remain water policy and energy policy.

The water issue was given fresh impetus when Labor Senator Penny Wong took a swipe at the Liberals’ preference deal with Clive Palmer’s UAP. Senator Wong argued strongly that the UAP water policy was to scrap the current Murray Darling Basin plan. Energy is a key issue, and has remained prominently associated with South Australia since the 2016 blackout. Bill Shorten is trying to pivot this into his campaign agenda, with his announcement to create a new “renewable energy zone” in the Spencer Gulf.

Read more: How the major parties’ Indigenous health election commitments stack up

Tasmania

Lachlan Johnson, PhD Candidate in Politics and International Relations and Research Assistant at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania

This week has seen Tasmania emerge as an important battleground with polls narrowing across the country. Reporting from the past week that the Coalition is confident of Gavin Pearce’s chances in Braddon has been bolstered by new uComms polling now giving the Liberal candidate a slim lead in the rural North-Western electorate.

While Braddon was always expected to be close, perhaps the bigger news from recent polling is a Coalition resurgence in Bass, which covers Launceston and the state’s North-East. That poll, also by uComms, gave the coalition a two-party preferred lead of 54-46%.

This suggests the disproportionately large amount of time spent by Scott Morrison and Michael McCormack in northern Tasmania, relative to some other marginal areas, may be paying dividends.

Bill Shorten also visited Tasmania on Saturday, unveiling new funding commitments in Hobart and Launceston. The opposition leader promised A$120 million in federal tourism funding, plus A$25 million towards a Tasmanian AFL team should it win office on May 18. Of that tourism funding, A$50 million would support the development of a new hotel and theatre at MONA. Interestingly, neither MONA nor AFL funding have been well received in the state’s two crucial northern electorates.

Unsurprisingly, the MONA announcement has generated significant interest and controversy. Also, given that Labor is in little danger of losing Lyons, and even less danger of winning Clark – held by independent Andrew Wilkie – the strategy behind the MONA proposal is puzzling. Millionaire proprietor David Walsh has suggested that the funding wouldn’t change even his vote, adding that Wilkie remains a safe bet. Now that Liberal Lyons candidate Jessica Whelan has resigned (following discovery of anti-Muslim social media posts in her name) these south-eastern electorates are unlikely to need much further intervention from Labor, who will instead redouble their efforts in Bass and Braddon.

It may therefore be the case that this tourism funding boost to the state’s major population areas is an attempt to garner upper house votes in what will surely be a very tight contest for a third Senate quota between the two major parties. Despite the government currently having four more Senators than the ALP nationally, a 2016 below-the-line voting campaign for Lisa Singh means that Tasmania is the only state in which Labor has more senators up for reelection than the Coalition this time around.

With both Bass and Braddon now in play, and a Senate challenge from the Coalition, Greens, and high-profile independents, this week has seen Labor looking increasingly vulnerable in Tasmania.

– ref. State of the states: more preference deals as pre-polling begins – http://theconversation.com/state-of-the-states-more-preference-deals-as-pre-polling-begins-116364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annette Greenhow, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Bond University

On May 1 the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) issued a highly anticipated ruling involving athlete Caster Semenya and Athletics South Africa as claimants, and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

The ruling upheld the IAAF’s eligibility regulation that restricted female athletes, including Semenya, with “differences of sex development” – broadly taken to mean high levels of testosterone – from entering certain international athletic events.

It means Semenya will have to take medication to lower her testosterone levels if she wishes to continue competing internationally in running events.

This decision is within the sports law decision-making framework. But what about Semenya’s human rights? Recent publications from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) criticise the “discriminatory regulations” relating to lowering testosterone in female athletes.

Read more: Caster Semenya: how much testosterone is too much for a female athlete?

Semenya’s case shows the challenges in balancing a range of interests in maintaining fair competition. On the one hand, the IAAF’s claim of a “legitimate, necessary and proportionate” method to ensure a level playing field in competitive sport. On the other, the rights of those with hyperandrogenism (a condition where the body produces relatively high levels of testosterone) in competing against females with so-called “normal” testosterone levels.

Who is Caster Semenya?

As an athlete competing in IAAF events, 28-year-old Semenya is well known for her athletic prowess in her chosen sport.

The public scrutiny Semenya endured in 2009 when subject to gender testing increased public attention on her physical attributes.

After being cleared to run again, Semenya’s domination continued to raise controversy about perceived unfairness of being included in female classified events. Others described her physical advantage akin to an adult competing against a child in the same competition.

Read more: Testosterone: why defining a ‘normal’ level is hard to do

The IAAF sets the rules

The IAAF is the legitimate rule-maker in the world of athletics. Athletes agree to be bound by the IAAF rules if they want to compete.

In April 2018 the “Eligibility Regulations for Female Classification (Athletes with Differences of Sex Development)” – known as the DSD regulations – were set out.

These established the criteria for women to compete in the female classification of the 400m, 800m and 1500m races and apply to athletes who are female (or have intersex characteristics) with naturally occurring testosterone levels of above 5 nanomole/L (a measure of concentration) and who experience a “material androgenising effect” (that is, the testosterone has a biological effect).

Affected female athletes are required to reduce natural testosterone levels to within the normal female range (i.e. to a level below 5 nanomole/L) by using medication, and maintain that reduced level for at least six months to remain eligible to compete.

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

The role of CAS

The CAS determines sports-related disputes and bases its rulings on the evidence presented to it and the submissions presented by the parties. The authority of the CAS operates via a series of interlocking arrangements that cascade down through the global governance of sport, and are binding on athletes.

In June 2018, Semenya and Athletics South Africa filed arbitration proceedings challenging the validity of the DSD Regulations as “discriminatory, unnecessary, unreliable and disproportionate”. They claimed that the DSD regulations would cause “grave unjustified and irreparable harm” and questioned the scientific soundness, a concern raised by others.

The IAAF disagreed and claimed the DSD regulations were necessary to pursue “the legitimate aim of safeguarding fair competition and protecting the ability of female athletes to compete on a level playing field”. It claimed the DSD regulations were based on the “best available science” and did not discriminate.

On May 1 the CAS Panel upheld the validity of the DSD regulations and considered the DSD Regulations as a “necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”

Semenya and Athletics South Africa have thirty days to appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal. The IAAF issued a media release advising the DSD Regulations effective on 8 May 2019, and calling on affected athletes to consult their medical teams and initiate suppressive treatment.

It’s also about human rights

So what are the wider implications of the Semenya case?

In March 2019, the IAAF was criticised by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) over concerns that their “discriminatory regulations […] to medically reduce blood testosterone levels contravene international human rights […] including the right to equality and non-discrimination…and full respect for the dignity, bodily integrity and bodily autonomy of the person”.

With specific reference to the IAAF’s DSD Regulations, the UNHRC called upon states to “ensure that sporting associations […] refrain from developing and enforcing policies […] that force, coerce or otherwise pressure […] athletes into undergoing unnecessary, humiliating and harmful medical procedures”.

The UNHRC also requested the UN High Commissioner to prepare a report on the intersection of gender discrimination in sports and human rights to present to the Human Rights Council at its forty-fourth session (likely to be held June 2020).

Sport is a special domain, but it is not that special to be immune from the law and human rights. Indeed, Sport Australia promotes inclusive sport based on the principle that “every Australian […] should be able to participate in sport […] in a welcoming and inclusive way”.

So the questions remain whether states will take heed of the UNHRC call to action, and how to reconcile this with the IAAF’s stand on gender characteristics falling outside the “normal” range.

– ref. It’s not clear where human rights fit in the legal ruling on athlete Caster Semenya – http://theconversation.com/its-not-clear-where-human-rights-fit-in-the-legal-ruling-on-athlete-caster-semenya-116417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Stephens, Professor of Law, University of Adelaide

The anti-satellite missile test carried out by India last month was a display of military capability.

It told the world that India – like China, the United States and Russia before it – was now capable of high precision targeting objects in space.

It also highlighted a growing realisation that we lack the appropriate rules and regulations to deal with weapons in space in 2019 and beyond.

Read more: India destroys its own satellite with a test missile, still says space is for peace

But what exactly are we missing in terms of regulatory capacity? What does existing space law cover right now, and how can we best update this to reflect current and future activities?

We’re working on a solution to ensure everyone around the world is on the same page. The Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations is a document that aims to spell out the manner in which international law controls and regulates military operations in outer space. It’s an initiative led by universities in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdm, and will be released in 2021.

Here’s what you need to know so far.

The existing treaties

We’ve had a global space agreement in place for more than 50 years. But the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) provide little practical guidance in assessing the lawfulness of potentially destructive space activities.

The OST does not ban the use of conventional weapons in space. Nor does it provide any concrete rules that states must abide by in testing conventional weapons (other than general obligations such as taking “due regard” of the interests of other states).

Following its recent missile test, India argued its obligation was met by destroying an asset – one of its own satellites – in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) test. India said the debris resulting from the test was rendered harmless to other items in space by both decay (break up in space) and falling back to earth.

But modelling conducted by other states and organisations concludes the opposite. Namely, that the debris from this specific test does represent a genuine threat, including to the International Space Station and commercial space operations.

We’ve got a problem when varied states see the same issue so differently.

Read more: Ten essential reads to catch up on Australian Space Agency news

Exploration over military action

The international legal regime relating to outer space is contained in five principal treaties that were negotiated in the late 1960s and 1970s. They provide an excellent snapshot of what states recognised as humanity’s capabilities and aspirations at the time.

Emphasis was given to scientific exploration of space, along with general references to the desirability of international cooperation in space activity.

Limited attention was given to military activity, other than broad prohibitions such as:

• no placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around the Earth
• no military bases or military manoeuvres on the Moon and other celestial bodies
• no testing of weapons on the Moon and other celestial bodies.

The focus on banning weapons of mass destruction in space was driven largely by tests such as the US Starfish Prime Test of 1962, a high-altitude nuclear detonation. This altered the radiation of the Van Allen belts that girdle the Earth. It was also said to have caused the failure of the US Telstar 1 communications satellite and feared to pose a radiation hazard to future Apollo missions.

But these treaties do not reflect military capabilities in space that have developed in recent years, including those in India, China, the United States and Russia.

Read more: It’s not clear where Trump’s ‘Space Force’ fits within international agreement on peaceful use of space

No law-free zone in space

While there is very little direct regulation of military space operations contained within the existing space treaty regime, that does not mean that such activity exists in a law free zone.

The OST states that general international law applies to space activities, including military space activities.

Today, military forces rely heavily on space-based assets for numerous critical security and war fighting functions. These include communications, intelligence collection, surveillance and reconnaissance, weapons verification and also for targeting in a time of armed conflict.

These space-based assets usually perform key civilian functions as well, such as GPS services. This all helps in transport, banking, medicine, agriculture and even the internet itself.

This means understanding what the legal limits relevant to these space assets is critical to civilian and military use alike. Increasing tensions on Earth have also created the belief in an impending “space war”.

Read more: I’ve Always Wondered: could someone take ownership of a planet or a moon?

The Woomera Manual

The Woomera Manual aims to set out a complete framework of legal controls relevant to military space operations.

Its development includes input from numerous space, military and general international law experts from universities and organisations around the world, such as the Secure World Foundation and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It also involves a number of international military officers, acting strictly in their personal capacity, along with representation from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The project is divided in three conceptual phases, looking at:

1. military space activities in peacetime under existing international law
2. the application of specialised principles of international law in a time of rising tension, and
3. the manner in which the Law of Armed Conflict (also known as International Humanitarian Law) would apply to the conduct of armed conflict to, from or in outer space.

We hope to get the manual completed by 2021.

Read more: We’re drafting a legal guide to war in space. Hopefully we’ll never need to use it

How it works

Through the Woomera Manual we aim to capture the law as it is right now – and not what is should or ought to be.

We examine what states have said and done in relation to military space operations under the law (and what the reaction of other states have been). The views of academics and others whose contributions can only ever be regarded as having a secondary priority are not included.

The final draft version of the Woomera Manual will be subject to a process of state engagement.

Read more: India destroys its own satellite with a test missile, still says space is for peace

In reaction to the recent India ASAT test, the US Strategic Command Commander, General John Hyten, advocated for the establishment of a framework that could fill gaps in the lawful conduct of military space operations.

The Woomera Manual seeks to fulfil that challenge by playing a constructive role in articulating that framework. It’s something we need now, more than ever.

– ref. A guide to ensure everyone plays by the same military rules in space: the Woomera Manual – http://theconversation.com/a-guide-to-ensure-everyone-plays-by-the-same-military-rules-in-space-the-woomera-manual-115146

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Robie, Professor of Pacific Journalism, Director of the Pacific Media Centre, Auckland University of Technology

When Pacific countries reflect on the state of their media today, marking World Press Freedom Day, they know the reality is much worse than the ticks they got from a global media freedom watchdog last month.

Five of the seven Oceania nations scoped in the Asia-Pacific region scored with apparently significant improvements in the 2019 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom index. Papua New Guinea rose by 15 points to 38th in the global table of 180 countries.

But media freedom advocates know the rankings can be deceptive.

Read more: Press freedom under attack: why Filipino journalist Maria Ressa’s arrest should matter to all of us

Threats of media regulation

New Zealand rose one place to seventh (to remain in the top 10) and Australia dropped two places to 21st, just one spot above Samoa, which was unchanged but described as “losing its status as a regional press freedom model”. Fiji (52), Timor-Leste (84) and Tonga (45) all “improved”.

West Papua is the worst situation in the Pacific, but this Melanesian territory is hidden within the Indonesian statistics.

The RSF index has a robust methodology, and the algorithms reflect that global media freedom has been declining, with growing hostility towards journalists since the last index survey. The situation in the Pacific has also been deteriorating.

While there might not be assassinations, murders, gagging, torture and “disappearances” of journalists in Pacific island states, threats, censorship and a climate of self-censorship are commonplace.

Take Papua New Guinea as an example again. Last week, amid what appeared to be the unravelling of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s coalition government, described by many critics as a de facto “dictatorship”, an opposition leader made an extraordinary threat against the country’s two foreign-owned newspapers.

Vanimo-Green MP Belden Namah, leader of the PNG Party which is one of two major groups in the opposition, put the Australian-owned Post-Courier and Malaysian-owned National newspapers “on notice” that an incoming new government would “deal” to the media.

Angered by the two dailies for not running his news conference stories, he threatened to regulate the print media should a new government be installed after the vote of no-confidence due on May 7.

Pressure on journalists

Last November, one of Papua New Guinea’s leading journalists, EMTV’s award-winning Lae bureau chief Scott Waide, was suspended by his company. It had been under pressure from the O’Neill government to have him sacked.

Why? Because he exposed the “inside story” of a diplomatic Chinese tantrum and a scandal over the purchase of luxury Maserati cars during the Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) hosted by Port Moresby.

Columnist Vincent Moses wrote on Pacific Media Watch:

Peter O’Neill is acting like another Chinese dictator in Papua New Guinea by exerting control over both state-owned and private media to not report truths and facts that expose his government and their corrupt acts to PNG and the world.

The strong condemnation that followed forced EMTV to reverse its decision and the network reinstated Waide.

Chiefs demand expulsion of journalist

In the North Pacific, a Pacific Island Times magazine editorial last week blasted traditional chiefs on Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia for demanding the expulsion of a probing US reporter.

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Mar-Vic Cagurangan, strongly defended her Yap correspondent, Joyce McClure, who has been living on the island for the past three years. She said declaring the correspondent a persona non grata would set a “dangerous precedent”.

Joyce McClure’s reporting provided transparency, which was “vital to every democratic society”, Cagurangan wrote.

Cagurangan has had to defend her team’s journalism before. Last September, she wrote an editorial stressing the tough times Pacific publishers and editors of small publications face dealing with threats from advertisers in tiny markets.

Given the small market, where there is a thin line between business and government, operating a media outlet is much more challenging locally.

Media intimidated in Fiji

In Fiji, the independent New Zealand website Newsroom last month investigated a major environmental development disaster inflicted by the Chinese company Freesoul Real Estate on the remote tourism island of Malolo. The website exposed how Fijian news media had been effectively gagged by 13 years of draconian media legislation and a climate of fear since the 2006 military coup.

Although democracy has returned and two post-coup elections have been held in 2014 and last year, journalists are often intimidated into silence.

Opposition leader Sitiveni Rabuka, the man who staged Fiji’s first two coups in 1987, said the “rot and culture of fear” in the civil service and the “intimidated and cowed media” were now so ingrained in the country that it had taken foreign journalists to break the story.

Read more: NZ journalists arrested in Fiji have been released but a new era of press freedom is yet to arrive

The RSF media watchdog warned in its 2019 report about totalitarian propaganda, censorship, intimidation, physical violence and cyber-harassment in the Asia-Pacific region. The pressures meant it now took a “lot of courage … to work independently as a journalist” in the region where democracies were struggling to resist various forms of disinformation.

The watchdog singled out China and Vietnam, which both dropped one place to 177th and 178th respectively on the global list of 180 countries, as the worst culprits.

About 30 journalists and media workers are detained in Vietnam, with nearly twice as many being detained in China. The latter country is of major concern to the Pacific in view of its growing economic, aid, trade and strategic influence in the region.

The report says:

China’s anti-democratic model, based on Orwellian high-tech information surveillance and manipulation, is all the more alarming because Beijing is now promoting its adoption internationally.

Read more: New Zealand’s Pacific reset: strategic anxieties about rising China

China has embarked on “soft power” strategies of seducing key journalists in the Pacific region with junkets to Beijing where they can be introduced to Chinese media manipulation.

The RSF index sees the growing raft of cyberlaws in the Pacific as an example of this Chinese-inspired media manipulation.

In spite of the pressures, Pacific journalists and publishers like Mar-Vic Cagurangan vow to fight on.

We will continue telling the story and exploring the truth. We are not your enemy. We are your neighbours committed to upholding the principles of democracy.

– ref. Pacific countries score well in media freedom index, but reality is far worse – http://theconversation.com/pacific-countries-score-well-in-media-freedom-index-but-reality-is-far-worse-116373

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Lynn Lau, Endocrinologist, Western Sydney University

This article is the first part in a series, Where culture meets health.

The holy month of Ramadan, which sees Muslims all over the world fast during daylight hours, begins this weekend. Does having type 2 diabetes exclude a person from fasting? Not necessarily. The decision belongs to the person, but getting some advice from health professionals can help.

Diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia. About 6% of Australian adults report they have diabetes, although this is likely an underestimate of the true prevalence.

Type 2 diabetes, which constitutes the majority of diabetes cases, occurs when the body becomes resistant to the actions of insulin, or loses the capacity to produce sufficient insulin from the pancreas. Insulin keeps the body’s blood glucose levels within a healthy range.

People with type 2 diabetes can manage the condition by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including doing exercise and keeping a healthy diet. In more serious cases, people with type 2 diabetes may need to take medications such as metformin, sulfonylureas, or other glucose-lowering tablets, or self-administer insulin injections.

Type 2 diabetes affects some ethnicities more than others. It’s more common in people of Middle Eastern, north African and south/south-east Asian backgrounds. Many Muslim Australians are from these ethnic backgrounds.

Using 2016 census data, and conservatively estimating an adult diabetes prevalence of 10% among people of Muslim background (the exact prevalence is unknown), as many as 40,000 Muslims may be living with diabetes in Australia. And this number is likely to be increasing.

Read more: How Australians Die: cause #5 – diabetes

We’re about to begin the month of Ramadan

Dietary practices such as fasting, feasting, and consumption of special foods are an essential component of many religious and cultural celebrations.

For Muslims, fasting during the month of Ramadan is obligatory for all healthy adults, who must refrain from eating, drinking and taking oral medications between dawn and sunset.

During Ramadan, most people have two meals per day, at sunset and before sunrise. This can be risky for people with type 2 diabetes – particularly those who use insulin or certain oral diabetes medications – for a couple of reasons.

First, fasting during the day can increase the risk of low blood glucose levels in people who usually take insulin or other blood glucose-lowering medications.

And conversely, the evening meal to break the fast, called “Iftar,” often involves eating large amounts of calorie-rich foods in a relatively short space of time. This can put people with diabetes at risk of high blood glucose levels overnight.

Omission or changes in the timing of medications may also contribute to instability of blood glucose levels.

Low blood glucose levels can cause symptoms of sweating, shakiness and confusion. If severe, they can lead to seizures, coma, or even death. High blood glucose levels make people feel tired and generally unwell and can lead to dehydration and poor concentration. Extremely high levels are a medical emergency.

There are guidelines

According to Islamic teachings, the elderly, pregnant, or those with illnesses requiring regular medication – like diabetes – can be exempted from fasting on medical grounds. They do not need to seek special permission from a religious leader.

Certain groups of people with type 2 diabetes who do not use insulin or particular oral medications can safely fast during Ramadan under the guidance of their health-care professional.

But as diet, lifestyle and medication use are key factors in maintaining stable blood glucose levels and minimising diabetes complications, many people with type 2 diabetes can also be considered medically exempt from fasting.

Read more: Know your disease: education is key to living well with diabetes

Practical guidelines established by the International Diabetes Federation-Diabetes and Ramadan (IDF-DAR) International Alliance assist health professionals to assess patients’ level of risk.

Low risk patients can safely enjoy fasting, while those at moderate to high risk are advised against fasting.

These guidelines have been endorsed by religious authorities in Australia and overseas and are a valuable reference for health professionals and their Muslim patients.

But it’s not quite that simple

The month of Ramadan is a special time for Muslim people, where fasting and feasting are integral to religious life, social interaction and communal celebration.

Because fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam, there is a strong desire to participate, even among those who could be exempt for medical reasons.

Those who cannot fast for medical reasons may feel alienated by their diabetes and develop negative attitudes towards it, possibly resulting in impaired self-management of their condition.

Some people with diabetes may be reluctant to raise the topic themselves, fearing a lack of understanding from non-Muslim health providers. They may conceal their intentions to fast to avoid any perceived conflict with the health professional.

Understanding the spiritual significance of this month to Muslims as well as the practical aspects can put health practitioners in a much stronger position to gain patient trust and facilitate communication.

Read more: Health Check: will intermittent fasting diets help you lose weight?

Culturally sensitive discussion allows people with diabetes to make informed choices

The month of Ramadan is determined according to the Islamic lunar year and varies annually in the western calendar. Professionals caring for people who observe Ramadan should be aware of its timing and start the conversation in advance.

Muslims with diabetes wanting to observe Ramadan should be counselled on the risks of fasting. Drawing on the guidelines, health providers can reassure their patients that those who do not fast for medical reasons also receive spiritual rewards and should not feel guilty.

Health-care professionals may suggest donations of food or money to the poor could be considered as an alternative, if it’s within the person’s means.

Discussion about Ramadan must occur in a culturally sensitive and non-judgemental way, appreciating a person’s right to evaluate the risks and benefits of fasting – both spiritual and physical – for themselves, and determine from an individual perspective whether fasting is the right decision.

Doctors might also advise their patient to discuss any concerns with their local religious leader.

For those who choose to fast despite their exemption, discussions about glucose monitoring, nutrition, exercise and potential medication changes can ensure they fast as safely as possible.

The diabetes health care team (which can include GPs, endocrinologists, diabetes educators, dietitians and diabetes nurse practitioners) can also develop an individualised Ramadan-specific management plan.

Read more: Friday essay: how Western attitudes towards Islam have changed

Understanding people’s different cultural backgrounds, lifestyles and religious practices plays an important role in their health care. A lack of understanding might lead to poorer health outcomes and disengagement with health services, while research shows culturally appropriate diabetes education and prevention programs improve outcomes for people from different backgrounds.

Health-care professionals should educate themselves about their cultural setting and local patient population to maintain effective therapeutic relationships and achieve the best patient-focused outcomes.

– ref. Between health and faith: managing type 2 diabetes during Ramadan – http://theconversation.com/between-health-and-faith-managing-type-2-diabetes-during-ramadan-115469

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Walker, Adjunct Research Associate, Monash University

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a highly stigmatised and misunderstood condition. Australians with BPD face considerable barriers to accessing high-quality and affordable care, according to new research published today.

For every 100 patients we treat in inpatient psychiatric wards, 43 will have BPD. People with this condition are vulnerable, impulsive, and highly susceptible to criticism – yet they continue to face stigma and discrimination when seeking care.

We have come a long way since the days of viewing mental illness as a sign of weakness, but we are lagging behind in our attitude towards BPD. At least part of this stems from the way we frame the condition, and from the name itself.

Rather than as a personality disorder, BPD is better thought of as a complex response to trauma. It’s time we changed its name.

How common is BPD?

BPD is strikingly common, affecting between 1% and 4% of Australians. It is characterised by emotional dysregulation, an unstable sense of self, difficulty forming relationships, and repeated self-harming behaviours.

Most people who suffer from BPD have a history of major trauma, often sustained in childhood. This includes sexual and physical abuse, extreme neglect, and separation from parents and loved ones.

This link with trauma – particularly physical and sexual abuse – has been studied extensively and has been shown to be near-ubiquitous in patients with BPD.

People with BPD who have a history of serious abuse have poorer outcomes than the few who don’t, and are more likely to self-harm and attempt suicide. Around 75% of BPD patients attempt suicide at some point in their life. One in ten eventually take their own life.

Read more: Borderline personality disorder is a hurtful label for real suffering – time we changed it

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) does not mention trauma as a diagnostic factor in BPD, despite the inextricable link between BPD and trauma. This adds to viewing BPD as what its name suggests it is – a personality disorder.

Instead, BPD is better thought of as a trauma-spectrum disorder – similar to chronic or complex PTSD.

The similarities between complex PTSD and BPD are numerous. Patients with both conditions have difficulty regulating their emotions; they experience persistent feelings of emptiness, shame, and guilt; and they have a significantly elevated risk of suicide.

Why the label is such a problem

Labelling people with BPD as having a personality disorder can exacerbate their poor self-esteem. “Personality disorder” translates in many people’s minds as a personality flaw, and this can lead to or exacerbate an ingrained sense of worthlessness and self-loathing.

This means people with BPD may view themselves more negatively, but can also lead other people – including those closest to them – to do the same.

Read more: Mood and personality disorders are often misconceived: here’s what you need to know

Clinicians, too, often harbour negative attitudes towards people with BPD, viewing them as manipulative or unwilling to help themselves. Because they can be hard to deal with and may not engage with initial treatment, doctors, nurses and other staff members often react with frustration or contempt.

These attitudes are much less frequently seen from clinicians working with people suffering from complex PTSD or other trauma-spectrum disorders.

What could a name change do?

Explicitly linking BPD to trauma could alleviate some of the stigma and associated harm that goes with the diagnosis, leading to better treatment engagement, and better outcomes.

When people with BPD sense that people are distancing themselves or treating them with disdain, they may respond by self-harming or refusing treatment. Clinicians may in turn react by further distancing themselves or becoming frustrated, which perpetuates these same negative behaviours.

Eventually, this may lead to what US psychiatric researcher Ron Aviram and colleagues call a “self-fulfilling prophecy and a cycle of stigmatisation to which both patient and therapist contribute”.

Read more: Biology is partly to blame for high rates of mental illness in women – the rest is social

Thinking about BPD in terms of its underlying cause would help us treat its cause rather than its symptoms and would reinforce the importance of preventing child abuse and neglect in the first place.

If we started thinking about it as a trauma-spectrum condition, patients might start being viewed as victims of past injustice, rather than perpetrators of their own misfortune.

BPD is a difficult condition to treat, and the last thing we need to do is to make it harder for patients and their families.

– ref. We need to treat borderline personality disorder for what it really is – a response to trauma – http://theconversation.com/we-need-to-treat-borderline-personality-disorder-for-what-it-really-is-a-response-to-trauma-115549

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Daley, Lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, RMIT University

I Need to Know is an ongoing series for teens in search of reliable, confidential advice about life’s tricky questions. If you’re a teen, send us your questions about sex, drugs, health and relationships and we’ll ask an expert to answer it for you.

As someone who has never touched drugs before, how hard is it really to say no to illicit substances?

Anonymous, 17, Newington

Key points

• The easiest way to say “no” is by explaining why you don’t want to take drugs (while at the same time not sounding judgemental)
• alcohol is the most commonly used drug
• most young people don’t use illicit drugs.

Hi and thanks for the question. Can young people really “just say no” to illicit drugs? There are a few things to consider, so let’s talk them through.

1. Are all teenagers trying drugs?

It might feel as though your friends are going to go through a phase of experimenting with illicit drugs. But in fact, most young people don’t take illicit drugs.

Alcohol is by far the most commonly used drug, though rates of alcohol use are generally decreasing. A national survey of secondary students found 46% of 12-17 year olds had tried alcohol in the past year, but only 25% had in the past month. Similarly, another survey found young people were trying alcohol for the first time later (about age 16) and more were abstaining than ever before (82%).

Cannabis is often the first illicit drug young people are exposed to (about 7% of 12-17 year-olds have tried it). Later on, generally in your early 20s, you’ll start to encounter people trying harder drugs such as ecstasy and amphetamines (see in the graph above how this number dramatically increases between the two age groups). Even then, the majority of people don’t regularly use these drugs.

Read more: Three Charts on who uses illicit drugs in Australia

2. Will people actually offer me drugs?

There is a widespread assumption that drugs are frequently offered to people your age. This isn’t always the case. Drug use is an illegal activity, so people who have them and who sell them tend to be a little cautious who they talk to about it. You might not ever be offered them directly.

But if most of your peer group are experimenting with substances, you almost certainly will be offered them. So…

3. How to say ‘no’ without it being a big deal

Although most young people don’t use drugs, some studies point out they’re open to other people doing so. This is referred to as the “normalisation” of illicit substance use: in simple terms, it’s being OK with your friends drinking alcohol or doing drugs even if you choose not to.

If you don’t want to drink or take drugs, you’ll find yourself in a position where you have to explain why. It might be useful to say something like:

It’s not my thing, but I don’t care if you’re into it.

Or if you feel like you need to give a reason, perhaps,

I always react badly when I drink alcohol/smoke joints, so I just don’t like it.

I have a game tomorrow and don’t want to feel bad.

I have bad come downs, so the high’s just not worth it for me.

I have a family thing tomorrow and don’t want to be hungover / coming down.

Hot tip: try not to make the other people feel like you you are judging them, but don’t feel like you need to justify why you don’t want to use drugs either.

4. Can you be the only one in the group who doesn’t use them?

When you do something you don’t want to do, you won’t feel good about it or about yourself. So you might have your friends, but you might not be happy – that’s not a great trade-off!

Make a point of being around people and friends who make you feel good. You might not enjoy hanging out with people when they’re affected by drugs, so don’t! Spend time with people who don’t pressure you to do things, and perhaps skip the parties, meet-ups and hangouts where you think there’s a good chance you won’t have fun.

If your friends are using drugs a lot and it’s impacting their lives in other ways, you might want to help them get some help – here are some tips on how to do that.

Read more: I Need to Know: ‘My friend is using ice and smoking pot. What do I do?’

If you’re the only person in your group not using drugs, you might want to find some other like-minded friends – perhaps through school, a part-time job or sport.

If you’re a teenager and have a question you’d like answered by an expert, you can:

• email us at intk@theconversation.edu.au
• submit your question anonymously through Incogneato, or
• DM us on Instagram.

Please tell us your name (you can use a fake name if you don’t want to be identified), age and which city you live in. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

– ref. How hard is it to say ‘no’ to drugs? – http://theconversation.com/how-hard-is-it-to-say-no-to-drugs-111536

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Levinson, Professor of Transport, University of Sydney

Train riders have to get to stations somehow. This is often referred to as the “first mile” or “last mile” problem. There are many technical solutions to help travellers get from home to the station and back, ranging from cars to electronic scooters, but most people use a much older technology, their feet, to get from A to B. What is seldom considered is access to the train platform itself.

Stations are not points but places. They occupy a large area. A person walking at average speed takes about two minutes to walk from one end of a full-length eight-car train to the other.

Read more: $500m for station car parks? Other transport solutions could do much more for the money

Often platforms have a single access point on one side of the station, which makes it more difficult for people on the other side of the station to get to the platform. Passengers may need to almost circumnavigate the station to get to the platform. At an average walking speed, the extra distance they must backtrack adds up to six minutes per trip each way, our research has found.

Imagine being so unlucky to have an extra 12 minutes of travel time every day if you take the train. You might be tempted to drive instead.

The table below shows the extra travel time in minutes depending on platform locations and access points for a traveller’s origin and destination. The average time for such a one-sided configuration of train stations is 3.25 minutes each way.

While this example is hypothetical, it is drawn from experience in Sydney, where 44 of 178 train stations have only a single side entrance.

So what impact will a second entrance have?

We examined those stations and access to their platforms: how many people lived within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the station platform, considering actual entrance location, and how many jobs were within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the platform. Using existing ridership data from Opal cards, we estimated a model that related the passenger entry and exit flows at each station to that station’s accessibility.

We sketched a second entrance at those 44 stations and measured accessibility again. It’s now higher, as having two entrances instead of one means more people can reach the platform in the same time. We then estimated the increase in ridership from the model due to the improved accessibility, assuming no change in population or employment.

Over all 44 stations, total morning peak period entries increased by 5%. But some stations benefit a lot, and others not at all, so prioritisation of investments matters.

Read more: Which lines are priorities for Sydney Metro conversion? Hint: it’s not Bankstown

It will be no surprise to locals that Erskineville station comes out on top with a nearly 35% increase. While many of the new apartment-dwelling residents west of the station make the extra hike every day, even more would catch the train if there were a convenient entrance.

Other top 10 stations include: Bankstown, Newtown, Villawood, Redfern, Burwood, Sydneham, Caringbah, Meadowbank and Penshurst. Planning is already under way to improve Redfern station.

While this result considers existing development, adding a second entrance can make new transit-oriented development that much more valuable. This is because it will likely increase activity on the previously less accessible side of the station, as the example of Erskineville shows below.

Read more: Make housing affordable and cut road congestion all at once? Here’s a way

Other considerations include accessibility for people who cannot use staircases, as many of the stations are older and will require lifts. The prospects of park-and-ride lots, the costs of construction, the presence of nearby stations, and site feasibility also play into final decisions.

Our formal findings and detailed methods are written up in this report: Catchment if you can: The effect of station entrance and exit locations on accessibility.

– ref. How to increase train use by up to 35% with one simple trick – http://theconversation.com/how-to-increase-train-use-by-up-to-35-with-one-simple-trick-115222

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute

Stagnant wages are a huge issue in this election campaign.

So it is odd that both major parties are hanging onto a policy that will take more out of workers’ pockets.

Lifting compulsory superannuation contributions from 9.5% to 12% in five annual steps between and 2021 and 2025, as Labor insists on and the Coalition says it supports, will take up to an extra 0.5% out of wages each year for five years.

If wage growth would otherwise be 2.3% per year, as it is now, instead wages growth for five years would be closer to 1.8%. After the five years, wages would be up to 2.5% lower than otherwise.

And it would cost the budget, which is one of the reasons neither side is anxious to do it until 2021. Super contributions are taxed more lightly than wages.

In return, workers will get more super, which won’t help them much.

More super means lower wages

Australia’s superannuation system requires employers to make compulsory contributions on behalf of their workers.

Right now that contribution is set at 9.5% of wages and is scheduled to increase incrementally to 12% by July 2025. Federal Labor recently recommitted to increasing compulsory super to 12% of wages. It’s also Coalition policy.

Although the government requires employers to pay super on top of salary, it doesn’t usually come out of their pockets.

The overwhelming evidence is that higher super contributions are paid for by lower wages.

The Henry Tax Review and others have found this is exactly what happens.

The Parliamentary Budget Office came to the same conclusion in April this year: if compulsory super contributions go up, wages will be lower than they would be otherwise.

And the cut to wages from raising compulsory super from 9.5% to 12% will be big. Really big. Our calculations show that by the time it is fully implemented in 2025-26, a 12% Super Guarantee will strip up to an extra A$20 billion from workers’ wages each year, or close to 1% of Australia’s gross domestic product.

Most workers don’t need more super

Nor are higher super contributions actually needed.

Grattan Institute’s latest retirement income projections show that most Australians are already on track for adequate retirement incomes.

Most workers today can expect a retirement income of at least 87% of their pre-retirement income if compulsory super contributions are left at 9.5%.

That’s well above the 70% benchmark endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and more than enough to maintain pre-retirement living standards.

Modelling commissioned by the super industry that suggests otherwise is based on flawed assumptions.

Even workers in their 40s and 50s today – many of whom didn’t benefit from the present high rate of compulsory super contributions for their entire working lives – can expect a retirement income of more than 70% of their pre-retirement incomes.

Right now, at the present rate of super contributions, many low-income Australians are on track to get a pay rise when they retire, through a combination of the age pension and their compulsory superannuation savings. A full-time worker on the minimum wage can expect a retirement income almost 20% higher than their present after-tax wage.

Forcing low-income workers to save even more for retirement while reducing their incomes while working will leave them worse off overall.

And more super won’t help much in retirement

Superannuation lobby groups are pushing the major parties to lift compulsory super contributions to 12% as soon as possible.

They point to the higher super balances workers will have at retirement if compulsory super contributions are increased.

But it’s a misleading story. More super at retirement is only useful if it actually translates to higher incomes in retirement. And for most low and middle income earners, it won’t do it much.

For most Australian workers, lower age pension payments would largely offset the increase in their retirement income from super savings, leading to little or no change.

There’s more. The age pension is indexed to wages. Boosting super contributions would suppress wages growth, making the age pension climb more slowly, hurting both retirees in future and retirees today.

Australians receiving the age pension today should be the most fervent opponents of a lift in compulsory super contributions.

And for many Australian workers, sacrificing a greater share of their wages in exchange for little or no increase in their retirement incomes will leave them with lower lifetime incomes than they would otherwise have.

Instead increasing compulsory super would primarily boost the retirement incomes of the top 20% of Australians who gain access to extra super tax breaks, while costing those of us working up to $20 billion per year in lost wage rises, and the budget more than $2 billion per year in lost tax.

Read more: Why we should worry less about retirement – and leave super at 9.5%

And it would be a long time before the tax revenue lost through super tax concessions saved the budget enough money on pensions to pay its way. Our projections put the break-even point at 2060 — by which time there will be 80 years of budget costs to pay back before the whole exercise has saved the government money.

The benefits of increasing compulsory super to 12% are tiny. The costs, at a time of unusually low wage growth, would be keenly felt, and at a time of unusually low economic growth, could have broader consequences.

Both Labor and the Coalition should think again.

The Productivity Commission has begged for an independent inquiry into whether 12% is needed, before the increases start.

At the very least, both sides should commit to postponing or varying the planned increases if there is a fair chance that they will lead to further wage stagnation. That’s how it is today, and may well be in four years time.

Read more: Frydenberg should call a no-holds-barred inquiry into superannuation, now, because Labor won’t

– ref. $20 billion per year. That’s how much higher superannuation could take from wages – http://theconversation.com/20-billion-per-year-thats-how-much-higher-superannuation-could-take-from-wages-116353

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

There’s an election on. Half a million of us have already voted. There’s just two weeks to go.

With that comes more intense scrutiny of different policies (which is good) and disingenuous claims by those with vested interests (which is not so good).

And perhaps the most contentious policy Labor is taking to the election is its proposal to eliminate dividend imputation cheques for people with excess franking credits.

Peter Martin has provided an excellent explanation of what franking credits are and how dividend imputation works which I won’t recapitulate.

What’s relevant here is that Labor wants to undo a Howard government innovation that sends cheques to people fortunate enough to receive income from shares and not pay tax. It exists nowhere else in the world.

Read more: Words that matter. What’s a franking credit? What’s dividend imputation? And what’s ‘retiree tax’?

Naturally retirees who don’t pay tax and have become used to “franking credit” cheques” along with dividend payments are unhappy.

Take this example, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday.

Alan and Bev are in their eighties, own their own home, and have A$800,000 in shares. Those shares pay them dividends of $32,000 a year. Along with those dividend cheques they get a $13,000 cheque from the government, which takes their annual income to $45,000.

Alan and Bev don’t want to spend what they’ve got

The thought of having to exist on only $32,000, leaves them “wondering how they can reduce their already tight budget”.

Alan and Bev might have realised that could draw down on their $800,000 a little each year.

If, for example, they took out $15,000 a year and earned 4% (their current rate) on what was left they would

• have more post-tax income than they do now, and

• still have about $400,000 saved in 20 years time, by which time they would be over 100 years old and, statistically speaking, rare.

I understand that they mightn’t want to do that, and I can understand that their adult children mightn’t want them to do it either, because if the parents don’t use the money they have saved, the children will be in line to inherit it.

Why should we subsidise their desire not to?

The position of the “independent financial expert” who wrote the article is a little odd. She doesn’t seem to want it to happen either.

The Future of Financial Advice Act requires her to put the best interests of her clients ahead of her own.

Perhaps she did, and advised them to run down some of their savings. Perhaps they told her that in their view it was in their best interests not to, and to leave them all to their children.

Read more: The newest election faultline isn’t left versus right, it’s young versus old — and it’s hardening

However, I as a taxpayer don’t like paying them a subsidy that allows them to do that when they could (should) be using their own money to pay for things they can well afford.

The payment of dividend cheques to people who pay insufficient tax costs $6 billion a year – soon to be $8 billion.

I don’t think we should be taxing inheritances through a death duty or an estate tax. Not at all. But right now we have what amounts to as an estate subsidy, one for which it is hard to see the economic rationale.

Labor wants to wind back an unusual subsidy

Dividend imputation is an important principle and a was a good policy when Paul Keating introduced it as treasurer in 1987.

It prevents the double taxation of company profits – where the company pays, say, 30% tax on profits and then an individual pays another as much as another 49% on the dividends. That kind of double taxation was unprincipled, deterred capital formation and investment and harmed employment and economic growth.

Dividend imputation paid to the shareholder the company tax paid in return for the shareholder paying tax.

In 2001, the Howard government extended it to shareholders who didn’t pay tax, in their cases turning “no double taxation” of company profits into “no taxation” of company profits.

Then in 2007 he changed the tax rules so that many more retirees didn’t pay tax.

Read more: Who are the wealthy retirees targeted in Labor’s plans?

Labor’s policy reverses the first (international unique) extension, in part because it has become extraordinarily expensive.

It’s understandable that retirees such as Alan and Bev feel that they are losing something. They are. But the main thing they are losing is a government subsidy that would enable them to hand all of their savings on to their children without dipping into them to look after themselves.

That’s the “gift” the opposition leader Bill Shorten says he wants to wind back.

– ref. Vital Signs: policies come and policies go, but surely we shouldn’t be subsidising inheritances – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-policies-come-and-policies-go-but-surely-we-shouldnt-be-subsidising-inheritances-116415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Davis, Associate Professor, Media and Communications, University of Melbourne

This is an edited extract of an essay in The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review.

Every era is defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely “disruption”. The book that seeded the mythology, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, is only a little more than 20 years old, yet its “technological disruption” thesis has become an article of faith for business and government, trafficked like narcotics from TEDx to trading floor to ministerial report.

Established companies often fail, so the thesis argues, not because they make bad decisions but because they make good ones. They stick with “sustaining technologies” because they are too successful to risk otherwise. Meanwhile, minnows with little to lose bring new technologies to market that initially may not be as good as seemingly entrenched “sustaining technologies”, but are cheaper and more accessible: think mainframe computers versus PCs, high-res CDs versus low-res MP3s, SLR cameras versus phone cameras, encyclopaedia versus Wikipedia. This is how Apple became a music company, Amazon became the world’s biggest bookstore and Facebook became your news feed.

But as with most mythologies there’s something a little too convenient about “disruption”. Christensen’s thesis emerged just as Silicon Valley venture capitalists – whose reverence for Christensen has helped make him a perennial keynote – were looking for new justifications for cutthroat business models and a rationale to gloss up their claims to “innovation”.

Behind their glitzy mission statements, many tech companies are little more than middlemen with a point-and-click front end: “intermediaries” in tech speak, “aggregators” of other people’s content that deliver product based on someone’s else’s property and/or labour to consumers, and then deliver those same consumers to advertisers.

The “technological disruption” mythology has provided cover for downsizing, lay-offs, the theft of intellectual property, the casualisation of labour and normalisation of precarity, the exploitation of free labour by users of digital platforms (as in when, say, Facebook users create content for free), the normalisation of totalitarian levels of surveillance, and what is no doubt the greatest misappropriation of personal information in human history.

As the historian Jill Lepore showed in a devastating takedown in The New Yorker in 2013, Christensen’s thesis is based on dodgy premises. Yet the “disruption” myth prospers. It sits all too comfortably alongside other myths of neoliberal times. As Christensen acknowledges, his theory reprises Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” thesis, published in 1942 and since corralled by free-market ideologues to justify the wholesale destruction of jobs, industries and ways of life in the name of economic “efficiency”.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting technological disruption doesn’t happen. What I am questioning is the magical transformative powers attributed to the process. The disruption myth ties our notions of progress to the concept of destruction. It does so under the technologically determinist assumption that such progress is inevitable and good, and skips past the possibility that as well as being liberating, technology can have devastating social impacts.

What happens, then, when the thing being “disrupted” is the fabric of democratic culture itself?

Proto-fascism

In mid 2018, I was walking through an Australian airport when I spotted several mini billboards for Facebook’s “Here Together” campaign. “Fake news is not our friend” said one. “Data misuse is not our friend” said another. The campaign was launched in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which more than 50 million people had their Facebook data improperly shared with the right-wing polling company. This happened amid ongoing scandals about fake news and fake accounts on the platform.

At the time I had just spent four weeks trawling the Facebook pages of eight Australian far-right groups to gather data for a research project. I’ll spare you the full details, but suffice to say that Australia’s Islamic population isn’t popular with the far right. Nor are refugees, feminists or environmentalists.

As I read posts from the pages, two trends stood out. The first was their pointed incivility. Not only were they uncivil, they revelled in their incivility. Their attacks on perceived opponents were not merely intended to rebut or disagree, but to undermine their credibility and delegitimise their humanity using any possible means. Incivility was being used in lieu of debate as a weapon to shut people down.

Much of the material that I analysed met the formal criteria for hate speech. It was clearly intended to incite animosity and hatred against target groups, to intentionally inflict emotional distress, and to threaten or incite violence. It defamed entire groups and used slurs and insults in an attempt to marginalise and silence their perceived opponents.

Many posts advocated strong-arm tactics without due process to target minority groups. In these angry calls for the demolition of longstanding human rights conventions and the subversion of law to suit the interests of the dominant (white, male) group, a form of proto-fascism could be heard.

Inspired by the US alt-right

The second trend is that Australian far-right Facebook pages increasingly model themselves on the US alt-right. Whereas old-school, far-right groups stick to white nationalism, the sites I looked at mixed race, gender, sexuality and a smattering of science issues. This mirrors the way in which the US alt-right has built links between white supremacists and so-called “men’s rights” groups as well as a growing emphasis on climate science among the far right in the US and Europe. Figures associated with the alt-right such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Steve Bannon and Gavin McInnes are revered on the Facebook pages I surveyed.

News of their proposed Australian tours is greeted with glee and multiple repostings. Also common are alt-right memes such as “cultural Marxist”, “social justice warrior”, talk of “white decline” and the idea that the “white race” is being subject to a form of “genocide”, crowded out by minorities and multiculturalism, a myth long nurtured by US white supremacist Bob Whitaker. There was considerable support for absolute “freedom of speech”, an alt-right meme that functions as cover for open racism and the public spread of hatred. These memes were often intermingled with imagery featuring alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, Donald Trump, on occasion imaginatively mashed with images of Pauline Hanson or Sonia Kruger (celebrated for publicly questioning Islam).

The popularity of the sites was also notable. Between them they had over 400,000 followers. A much greater number of people are likely to have viewed the sites but not signed up. Most postings had been liked and/or shared hundreds of times, some thousands.

These sites are part of a global trend towards the networked industrialisation of hatred. Cambridge Analytica wanted those millions of Facebook profiles so they could target users with divisive messages to influence the 2016 Brexit vote and US election. According to Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix, “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed”.

A leading entrepreneur of industrialised hatred is Steve Bannon, a former Cambridge Analytica board member, former Trump campaign adviser and then White House strategist, and before that editor of the right-wing Breitbart News. Bannon has lately become a globetrotting activist for white nationalism, offering advice to far-right figures such as Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, and parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Italy’s the League and Five Star Movement, as part of a project to build support for his idea of a far-right populist “supergroup” to win seats in the European Parliament.

Fox News has positioned itself at the forefront of developing the hate business model, via the work of commentators such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter. In Australia, Sky News “after dark” does similar work. The fostering of division has long been ingrained and normalised in tabloid news business models, as seen in a column by Andrew Bolt in August 2018 that singled out Jews, Chinese, Cambodians and Indians as part of a “tidal wave of immigrants that sweeps away what’s left of our national identity”.

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are also complicit. Conflict creates clicks. A few weeks after the Facebook “Here Together” campaign was over I checked the sites mentioned above again. All survived intact.

Decline of the public sphere

The hate business model uses incivility as a weapon to forestall public discussion about bigotry and to attack opponents. It is not enough to sow division; it must be done with unapologetic aggression and an open contempt for ideological enemies. The aim, ultimately, is to move norms of acceptable public discussion far to the right.

When Lauren Southern touched down in Australia in July 2018, she disembarked wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the alt-right meme “it’s okay to be white”, a statement first promoted by white supremacists on 4chan to “trigger” progressives and to underpin the idea that whites are somehow under threat. The following month Australian parliamentarian Fraser Anning unapologetically gave his race-baiting first speech to parliament. Two months later Pauline Hanson tabled a motion that asked the Senate to acknowledge “anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation” and that “it’s okay to be white”, which was supported by the Coalition government.

It took less than a year for a meme concocted to sow racialised division to find its way from an internet bulletin board to a parliamentary vote in a major Western democracy.

The electoral harvest of the new incivility can be seen in the Brexit vote and the rise of UKIP, the 2017 electoral success of AfD in Germany, the impact of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in the 2017 French presidential elections, and the 2018 formation of a populist government in Italy comprised of ministers from the League and Five Star Movement.

It can be seen, too, Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and presidency, and the persistent use of Indigenous peoples, Muslims and asylum seekers as political scapegoats in Australia. It can also be seen in the return of “strongman” politics: Duterte in the Philippines, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Trump in the US. All fomented social division to gain power, and have since waged war on “elites” and attacked and diminished democratic institutions.

This industrialisation of hate exploits two revolutions. The first is the centrality of economic and human mobility to modern life and the anxieties it has created at a time of uncertainty, precarity and hardship for many. Growing public resentment at the failures of economic globalisation has created an audience ripe for harvest by the reactionary machinery of the culture wars. The second is the relative openness of the internet. Just as Bill Gates famously commented in the early optimistic days of the internet that it offered a “frictionless” environment for commerce, so it was no less available as a “frictionless” environment for the circulation of hate.

The white supremacist site Stormfront was one of the earliest online communities, even if, amid the hype for the economic and democratic possibilities of online communities, no one paid much attention at the time. As traditional intermediaries and the “managerial class” that presided over old-time democratic culture – editors, publishers, journalists, academics, civic leaders – were bypassed, and as the traditional journalism business model was weakened by the loss of print advertising revenues and the growing domination of click-based online models, so new space was created for figures such as Bannon, quick to understand the new media dynamics and leverage them to build audiences for publications such as Breitbart News with a business model based on division.

This hate-based business model enacts a sobering version of Christensen’s theories. Democracy is being “disrupted”. Low-quality, easily trafficked disinformation produced cheaply by “new entrants” is crowding out higher-quality information produced by established incumbents (journalists, civic leaders, academics), who accumulated power through older technologies and institutions (print media, broadcast television, the university).

The old expensive-to-maintain public sphere, supported by comprehensive education systems, robust journalism and informed critique, is giving way to a cheap-to-run, “near good” public sphere corralled in privatised platforms. But there is no magic attached to this process, only the malodorous waft of divisiveness, hatred and encroaching authoritarianism.

What to defend?

Right now, the story of the new incivility is only partway told. The reactionary right has not yet achieved its aims, and in Australia is currently on the defensive. But the struggle over the future of democracy is global and the forces of reaction are playing a long game. Power is gradually being ceded away from liberal democratic norms towards populism and proto-fascism. Should this trend continue then the prospects for freedom, social justice and the environmental viability of the planet are bleak. Those on the left who for a long time have derided liberalism and been deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment culture that produced it, are thus forced to make a difficult decision: what to defend?

In the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison cell: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Morbid symptoms of our moment of interregnum are everywhere now.

Refugees of failed modernity roam the seas in leaky boats, hunt for gaps in fences on European borders, form caravans to walk the “route of death” through Mexico in the hope of getting to the US, rot in the asylum centres of Manus and Christmas Island, take indentured jobs sweeping floors in the penthouses of Singapore or walk girders on the construction sites of Abu Dhabi, searching for the wealth, freedom and security that Enlightenment did not give them.

They are met, when they get to those borders, with the forces of a new counter-Enlightenment: concrete walls and razor wire, white nationalism, militarised policing, curtailed human rights. Other refugees are within: casualties of deindustrialisation, casualisation and the winding back of welfare, who make up a new precariat.

Young people have felt the effects of this most brutally. Too often denied meaningful careers and kicked off the wealth-accumulation ladder, many hear the siren call of 4chan or are drawn to figures such as anti-“social justice warrior” celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson, with his paeans against feminism and bestselling tips on how young men can recover their masculinity; or to reactionary activists like Southern, whose racist pitch to disaffected youth is summed up by the title of her book: Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation .

Intellectual refugees are everywhere also. A displaced managerial elite searches for relevance: journalists with their Twitter accounts, academics with their online opinion pieces, public intellectuals declaiming at festivals and in the “serious” media. As the refugees of modernity spread out from its decaying outposts, so the logic of interregnum becomes almost irresistible.

The trouble with this logic is that people tend to fixate on what is ending rather than grapple with sparking new beginnings. Displaced progressive intellectuals, in particular, like conservatives, routinely complain that the world is about to end, but unlike conservatives are frozen into inaction rather than galvanised into action. For those who believe in democracy there is pressing work to do. Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, civility, universalism, cosmopolitanism and the social contract must necessarily inform any rebirth.

But new conditions of possibility mean that to succeed they can’t be simply a redux of enlightenments past. There are as yet no emancipatory leaders for the age of disintermediated knowledge. For want of messiahs, it is incumbent on those who possess educational, cultural and intellectual resources to understand their new roles as toolmakers of ideas, talking across rather than down, embedded at every social and cultural level, who can bring a variety of skills to civic culture and start telling new, productive stories about how democracy works in an age of dystopic disruption.

Imagining such a democracy will no doubt require a rethink of the oppositions that structure our world. It is essential, now, to think commonality without universality, citizenship beyond public versus private, growth and profits without inequality and externalities, nationalism without chauvinist particularism, and to think cosmopolitanism and particularism, and collectivity and individuality, in tandem. That is, to refashion Enlightenment oppositions for new times.

First, though, a more practical reckoning is no doubt required.

The underlying issue with democracy is that national and global social contracts have failed to deliver. The democratic connections between work, freedom, citizenship, rights and fairness have been lost, jettisoned in the name of liberalising markets and making labour more flexible with a promised pay-off that for many never came. Privilege has replaced citizenship as the arbiter of human destiny.

There can be no revitalised democracy without skewing economics away from the rich, emptying their apologists from parliamentary hallways and offices, scrapping the divisive politics of scapegoating, acting on planetary health and remembering what mutuality and social generosity look like. Without the dynamics of inclusion and trust that derive from a healthy social contract, why would anyone bother with civility?

– ref. Friday essay: networked hatred – new technology and the rise of the right – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-networked-hatred-new-technology-and-the-rise-of-the-right-115837

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martijn Boersma, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

There’s a good chance the device on which you are reading this contains cobalt. It’s an essential metal for batteries in phones and laptops. There’s also a chance the cobalt was mined by slaves.

Almost two-thirds of the cobalt mined around the world comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The central African country has a notorious recent history of human rights abuses, including slave labour.

Right now it is all but impossible to know if cobalt from the country is slave-free. It’s the same around the world for many other commodities, from tuna to coffee.

Some businesses see a solution in blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to verify global supply chains.

It is the latest promise for a technology that is touted as a solution for unregulated prison economies, climate change and counterfeiting. Maybe it will prove part of the solution. But we can’t put all our hopes on any technology solving a complex social problem.

Modern slavery in supply chains

Figuring out if goods are sourced and produced ethically gets increasingly difficult as supply chains become more complex.

In the case of cobalt, the supply chain can consist of countless middlemen who buy and mix cobalt from countless different mines. This means it is almost impossible for a cobalt buyer such as a battery maker to trace where the metal comes from.

The DRC’s cobalt industry encompasses a wide range of working conditions. Some miners are paid relatively well and work in safe conditions.

But around a fifth of the cobalt is dug up by about 110,000 to 150,000 workers in small “artisanal” mines. Those who work in this unregulated sector often earn a pittance and work in unsafe conditions.

Working in such mines includes descending into small hand-dug holes that defy even basic safety precautions. Poor construction and ventilation have led to injuries and deaths.

As sales of electric cars swells demand for cobalt, these conditions are worsening.

It is difficult to know exactly what proportion of the DRC’s cobalt industry uses slave labour. But a 2013 investigation by the Washington-based organisation Free the Slaves, found 866 of the 931 individuals interviewed in three mining communities were slaves.

The report identified seven types of slavery, including forced labour and debt bondage.

Almost one in four slaves was under 18 years of age. A 2014 report by UNICEF estimated 40,000 children were working in mines in DRC’s south, most of them digging cobalt.

Blockchain’s promise

It is not just cobalt. The same is true of everything from copper to cocoa. It is hard to know how products are made or where they are sourced from.

So how can we ensure supply chains are not tainted by modern slavery?

This is where companies are experimenting with blockchain technology. To understand their interest, let’s recap the basics of this technology.

Think of blockchain as an online public ledger. Once a transaction occurs, a permanent and unchangeable record of that transaction is created and has to be validated by others in the blockchain. These records are called “blocks” and are chained together chronologically.

Blockchain technology can therefore be used to create a verified and tamper-proof record of supply chains from source to end user.

The World Wildlife Fund is working with technology partners and a tuna fishing company to use blockchain technology to track tuna from “bait to plate”. A consumer will be able to find out when and where the tuna was caught by scanning a code on the packaging.

Read more: Almost every brand of tuna on supermarket shelves shows why modern slavery laws are needed

BHP wants to use it to verify copper supplies. Blockchain is also being used to track cotton, fashion, coffee and organically farmed products.

Ford and IBM are part of the consortium looking to use the technology to monitor cobalt supplies. It would mean the ability to track the metal from mine to battery. Ethically mined cobalt can be recorded in the blockchain and followed as it moves around the supply chain.

Challenges remain

While blockchain is promising, we need to address several challenges if it is going to work.

A crucial element in any blockchain is the “consensus protocol”. This determines who gets to validate a transaction, whether it be all participants, a majority, a select few or a random selection. In a blockchain dedicated to ethical sourcing it is crucial that workers can attest to their working conditions. There is no guarantee this will happen, especially for marginalised or oppressed workers.

Second, it is important to know what standard for ethical sourcing a blockchain upholds. There are several blockchain platforms, so different, potentially less robust, standards could easily develop. This is an issue for other areas of ethical certification, where competing schemes for goods such as coffee exist.

Third, we should always question the link between a “block” and its material reality. Finding a way to insert goods made using slave labour into the blockchain would be highly lucrative. Since the integrity of blockchain data depends on humans, it is vulnerable to inaccuracies or fraud.

Fourth, blockchain may create a “digital divide”. Larger suppliers with technical experience will have less trouble using this technology, while smaller suppliers may be left out. We need to guard against blockchain becoming a barrier to small suppliers entering the market.

No technological fix

As a transparency tool blockchain can – in theory – give insights into where goods came from. But no technology on its own can solve a complex social problem.

Ultimately, as with any other technology, the saying “garbage in, garbage out” applies. If humans want to undermine accountability systems, they will find ways of doing so.

Just recording transactions is not enough. As part of a comprehensive agenda to tackle the myriad factors underlying modern slavery, though, it may prove a useful tool.

– ref. Blockchain can help break the chains of modern slavery, but it is not a complete solution – http://theconversation.com/blockchain-can-help-break-the-chains-of-modern-slavery-but-it-is-not-a-complete-solution-115358

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Turney, Professor of Earth Science and Climate Change, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW

On Wednesday night a bipartisan UK Parliament passed an extraordinary measure: a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency.

The UK is the first national government to declare such an emergency. The decision marks a renewed sense of urgency in tackling climate change, following a visit to Parliament by teenage activist Greta Thunberg , the broadcast of David Attenborough’s documentary Climate Change: The Facts and 11 days of protest by environmental group Extinction Rebellion that paralysed parts of London.

Read more: Extinction Rebellion: disruption and arrests can bring social change

There are now some 49 million people living under national, city and local declarations of a climate emergency around the world.

What is a climate emergency?

While there is no precise definition of what constitutes action to meet such an emergency, the move has been likened to putting the country on a “war footing”, with climate and the environment at the very centre of all government policy, rather than being on the fringe of political decisions.

The UK are legally committed to a 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 (relative to their 1990 levels) and was recently recognised as one of just 18 developed economies that have driven down carbon dioxide emissions over the last decade.

Some city and local councils have set out their climate emergency policies to become carbon zero by 2030 built around renewable energy supplies, more energy-efficient housing and a host of other measures. Yesterday’s decision in Parliament implies further national reductions and investment in this space.

Read more: The terror of climate change is transforming young people’s identity

Counting down to 2030

The year 2030 is an important target. In spite of what climate contrarians might voice very loudly, five of our planet’s warmest years on record have occurred since 2010, whilst 2018 experienced all manner of climate extremes that broke numerous global records.

It’s sobering to realise that, because the oceans are a major sink of heat, the estimated 40-year delay in the release of this energy back into the atmosphere means the conditions of the last decade are in part a consequence of our pollution from the 1970s.

With the planet to experience further warming from the heat held by the oceans, there is increasing international focus on meeting the United Nation’s Paris Agreement which was signed by 197 countries in 2016. This ground-breaking agreement has the ambitious global aim of preventing global temperatures from reaching 2˚C above pre-industrial levels (the late nineteenth century) by 2100, and ideally should be no more than 1.5˚C.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has suggested that meeting this target means annual global carbon emissions must effectively halve between now and 2030, and then fall to zero by 2050. This is a target the UK opposition party Labour are now calling for.

More recent studies suggest even more ambitious cuts may be required.

The cost of inaction

Research in Australia has investigated the cost to the global economy if the Paris Agreement is not met and the world hits 4˚C warmer.

The values are eye-watering: an estimated US$23 trillion a year over the long-term. This has been likened to the world experiencing four to six global financial crises on the scale of 2008 every year.

In Australia, the cost would be on the order of A$159 billion a year, with most of the losses caused by drought-driven collapses in agricultural productivity and sea level rise. The expense to each Australian household has been put at the order of A$14,000.

The declaration of climate emergency by the UK comes at a crucial time in Australia, just two weeks out from a federal election. While the major parties have made public statements of support for the Paris Agreement, it remains unclear whether current and former leaders are fully aware of their obligations.

Read more: Climate change forced these Fijian communities to move – and with 80 more at risk, here’s what they learned

At a time when politicians discuss the need to “live within our means” when it comes to national finances, this does not appear to translate to the environment when we’re considering future generations.

Instead we seem to be caught in a debate surrounding the costs of action rather than inaction. The next generation of Australian voters certainly don’t seem confident about political commitments to their future as they hold their third national school strike tomorrow.

The welcome announcement from the UK is a major step in the right direction and potentially a watershed moment for a more sustainable global future. Is it too much to hope Australia could follow next?

– ref. UK becomes first country to declare a ‘climate emergency’ – http://theconversation.com/uk-becomes-first-country-to-declare-a-climate-emergency-116428

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Feldman, PhD Researcher in Science Communication, Australian National University

Today young Australians will hit the streets for the second Climate Strike of 2019.

Youths are often brushed off as being politically disengaged, but the Australian Electoral Commission has reported record high numbers of youth enrolment, and climate change will be at the forefront of their minds when many take to the polls for the first time.

Read more: School climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action

But unlike older generations, who develop and stick to lifelong party allegiances, we’re seeing dramatic shifts in the way young people vote, choosing sides based on issues and specific policies instead.

Slowly, we’re beginning see governments respond to climate change protests. Yesterday the UK Parliament declared a climate emergency, one of the demands from the Extinction Rebellion group who marched for ten days across London.

But there’s still much more to do. And the youth Climate Strike movement shows us loud and clear that young people not only care about climate change, but that it needs to be brought to the table to cement their vote.

Changing of the guard on party politics

The classification of “political engagement” around the world has traditionally had a strong citizenry focus: campaigning for a political party, joining unions, writing letters to MPs, and many other activities that would seem positively archaic to youth today.

Generation Z doesn’t need a town hall meeting or front bar at the Union Pub to get up to date information on their communities. Online communities mean they can find their tribe and pinpoint the political issues they care about, like climate change.

Read more: Students striking for climate action are showing the exact skills employers look for

As a result, they’re more likely to focus their political attention on specific causes. For those voting for the first time on May 18, being politically active can mean product boycotts or endorsements, signing petitions and, as with Climate Strike, protest movements.

While protests are an ancient tradition, Climate Strike is being led entirely by school students. Greta Thunberg, now aged 16, began the School Strike for Climate movement after attracting press to a then solitary protest at Swedish parliament in 2018.

By March 15, 2019, the movement had grown to over 1.4 million students in more than 300 cities worldwide.

This movement forces adults to acknowledge climate change is not only impacting the futures of an unknown, unborn generation, but also of those protesting here and now.

Climate change, then, is not only an important issue for under 24-year-olds, but also a deeply personal one. Discussion of climate change often elicits intense emotions like fear and anxiety for their futures.

In a speech earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland, Thunberg said:

adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Read more: Greta Thunberg at Davos: why Gen Z has real power to influence business on climate change

But despite their concern and focus on climate change as a political issue, very few young people have felt they could influence anything on a large scale. With Climate Strike, this may be changing.

Today’s issues, tomorrow’s voters

Young Australians have felt helpless and frustrated when it comes to curtailing climate change for several decades. This has flow-on effects that see youth hesitant to take action, especially considering no one likes to get involved in political issues they don’t feel like they can affect.

What’s more, Millennials and Generation Z are often labelled “lazy” or “entitled” free loaders in public discourse. This leads to a further retreat from political issues, and young people living up to the low expectation already set for them. It’s a cruel cycle.

But in 2017, young people were presented with a perfect opportunity to effect change in on a single issue: the same-sex marriage postal survey.

During this time, 100,000 Australians registered to vote for the first time, with 65% under the age of 24. These newly enrolled voters will also be stepping up to their first federal election in 2019, and they’re now feeling empowered to bring climate change to the table.

Read more: Marriage survey: two-thirds of new voters are aged 18-24

High profile protest movements such as Climate Strike don’t just help to make changes in the political arena. Participants are left feeling confident about the change they can make to a cause.

The result: we have a young generation more engaged with climate change policy than ever before.

After 150,000 young Australians attended Climate Strike in March 2019, one can’t help but to sit up and take notice of this vocal group of people.

As with any demographic, there will be those who continue to vote impulsively, without much consideration for their choice. But there will also be a considerable portion that vote on the issues that matter to them.

All told, climate change needs to be addressed in a real and meaningful way to win over these new voters. Those who can’t vote this election will soon be charging at the next.

– ref. Young people won’t accept inaction on climate change, and they’ll be voting in droves – http://theconversation.com/young-people-wont-accept-inaction-on-climate-change-and-theyll-be-voting-in-droves-116361

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Wanna, Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration, Australian National University

As head of the United Australia Party, Clive Palmer is no classic right-winger nor crotchety conservative. He is no angel either. He is often wrongly lumped in with Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and maybe even with the more recent retreads like Fraser Anning and Cory Bernardi.

But he is not like them. He is a big-spending, eccentric, brusque businessman espousing a strange mixture of populist musings. He is also eager to end the strangulation the major parties exert over policy options. On some issues he is more progressive than Labor (asylum seekers); on others he is more adventurous than the Coalition (taxation) – he is a protectionist nationalist without the xenophobic baggage.

So, just what is Palmer up to in this election campaign? After a fairly desultory campaign in 2013 when he won a single lower house seat and initially three senators, he sat out the 2016 federal election. Now, he’s back in full force, spending upwards of A$55 million before the election comes to an end. He’s standing candidates in every electorate and running a team in every senate constituency. Polling is showing him “influential” in many swing seats with support running into the mid-teens in some electorates.

Read more: View from The Hill: Can $55 million get Clive Palmer back into parliamentary game?

Why is he spending so much of his own money on what looks like a pyrrhic campaign, even if he is elected to the Senate for Queensland?

Many people say Palmer has no policies, he stands for nothing except himself, and is just fanning a protest vote.

It’s true that Palmer tends to campaign with hackneyed slogans: “Make Australia Great”, “Aussies aren’t going to cop it any more” and “Let’s get something done for a change”, being the main three. He also authorises crass advertising – his prominent billboards and full-page poster-style advertisements feature himself, curtained in canary yellow, with the implicit message that the Liberals and Labor “don’t fight for you”. He is partial to hyperbole, and in the media often lives in a world of denial.

At the 2013 federal election, Palmer’s United Party released a slender raft of policy proposals. He opposed the carbon tax and supported tax reductions, but he also proposed a more compassionate policy towards asylum seekers, a conscience vote on same-sex marriage, free university places for residents, tax relief for mortgagees, regional wealth retention, and smaller government. Many of his 2013 policies reappear in recycled form in 2019.

He claims as his achievements to have stopped many of the “zombie” measures Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey tried to impose in the 2014 budget. These include: stopping GP co-payments of $7 per visit, opposing cuts to universities, preventing more social security cuts, opposing an increase in the eligible age for the age pension to 70 years, supporting climate change and renewable energy proposals, and supporting a ban on lobbyists and the removal of boat-arrival children from offshore detention. He also claimed credit for supporting the abolition of the carbon tax and the mining tax, and for bringing down Campbell Newman’s LNP government in Queensland.

This election, the UAP is proposing to increase pensions by 20% immediately (or $4,000 a year for each pensioner). It is advocating an extra $80 billion spending on health and a further $20 billion for education over the next parliament. Palmer continues to support mining development (with more onshore processing of commodities) and a zonal taxation system, with wealth generated in regions remaining in regions. He wants immediate investment in very fast trains.

The UAP is also fiercely criticising other mainstream party policies. For instance, Palmer opposes the “sell-off” of agricultural land to foreign buyers, targeting in particular Chinese government-owned companies for their aggressive purchasing strategies. His position is not xenophobic: he detests Chinese Communist Party business practices because of first-hand experience, but he is not against people of Chinese descent coming here or doing well.

He opposes the ALP’s tax policy, regarding it as insufficient and mostly deferred until after 2024. He wants all income tax rates reduced by 15% now, and for companies and small businesses to pay their tax bill at the end of the financial year once their earnings are finalised (thus abolishing the pernicious provisional tax paid quarterly in advance).

He also wants mortgagees to be able to get a tax offset for the first $10,000 of repayments to help first-home buyers. Furthermore, the UAP is campaigning for the abolition of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and ending the public profligacy of water buy-backs. Palmer claims that spending on the national broadband network has “wasted” $55 billion “and it still doesn’t work”.

Palmer’s revival in his electoral stocks has occurred despite him being embroiled in many controversies and untrustworthy business practices. These include the debacle over the Coolum Resort, which closed under his management, costing 600 jobs and leaving over 300 investors without their assets.

He was widely blamed for the collapse of his nickel refinery in Townsville (which he took on to “save”) and for not paying workers their redundancy entitlements. He has also been linked to a stalled Titanic II project, killed off a Gold Coast A-League soccer team, complains of Rupert Murdoch’s influence over the Australian media, and been charged by ASIC with violating the Corporation Act. He has also transferred some of his business interests to the tax haven of Singapore.

Read more: How much influence will independents and minor parties have this election? Please explain

Many commentators who highlight Palmer’s record believe the preference deal with the Liberals and LNP could perhaps damage the Coalition vote. But although Labor will whinge to the closing of the polls on May 18, I expect the cross-preferencing arrangement to benefit both the LNP and the UAP.

Palmer may not win any lower house seats, but his preferences might determine who does in up to 20 seats. If his electoral support continues to grow, he may well secure two or three senate positions, almost back to where he was in 2013.

But he is coming under widespread attack as an illegitimate player by many commentators and media outlets as well as his political opponents. Most of the major papers and TV news outlets regularly slam his antics (Google “Clive Palmer’s Criticism”).

The key perhaps to understanding Palmer’s gravity-defying electoral support is that he is a “positive populist” rather than a largely negative populist along the lines of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who has based her own protectionist stance much more explicitly on race and xenophobia. Indeed, Palmer eschews the racist policies and dog-whistling his rival right-of-centre competitors have delivered, including One Nation and Fraser Anning’s Conservatives.

Palmer carefully tailors his positive populist messages to appreciative audiences: his line that “something must be done” has resonated.

Certainly, some of Palmer’s electoral support at the ballot box will be simply a protest vote (and he will be aware of that). But perhaps some greater proportion will be voting for more genuine diversity from what the cartelised major parties are offering. Australia seems ripe for a more serious positive populism offered by Palmer and his UAP. The ultimate question will be whether the wheels will again fall of the wagon.

And what after the election? Palmer’s boast that he will form government is fanciful. He has long been anti-Labor and in this election is not directing preferences their way, so he may be well and truly ostracised by Labor if it wins office.

Alternatively, if the Coalition scrapes back in it will be partly obligated to his preferences and will have to accommodate whoever the UAP manages to get into parliament.

The last time Palmer held this power his influence quickly waned as his “team” mostly abandoned him. We will soon see if he has learnt from bitter experience.

This article is adapted from an earlier piece published in The Machinery of Government.

– ref. Now for the $55 million question: what does Clive Palmer actually want? – http://theconversation.com/now-for-the-55-million-question-what-does-clive-palmer-actually-want-116350

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deb Lee-Talbot, PhD candidate, History, Deakin University

When visitors first enter the exhibition Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits at Bendigo Art Gallery, they are greeted with soaring sounds of coronation anthems. These genteel songs entice patrons into an exhibition that is ultimately conservative in both content and style.

The exhibition opens with portraits of Henry VIII, whose long-term legacy is difficult to deny. Printed on the first main wall is the memorable, yet reductive, children’s rhyme “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. Viewers are quickly drawn into the Crown and court’s power, and the brutality and risk that was associated with being married to Henry VIII.

Best viewed by standing between the portraits of his wives Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon is the first of many two-sided timelines, linking significant moments in the United Kingdom’s history to world events. This suggests that the British monarchy should be understood as a politically powerful force.

It soon becomes clear that this is an exhibition seeking to represent the Empire as a “Great Power”. The two and a half metre “Ditchley Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) illustrates a towering, divine force.

In this highly symbolic work, Elizabeth stands on a world map, her feet firmly planted on Oxfordshire. We see that she was the great hope of her people at the time – a stormy sky is swept away into oblivion by the sunshine that only this Queen can bring.

A romantic narrative

The sections on the Stuarts (1603 to 1714),and the Georgian period (1714-1837) are dominated by similar formal portraits, but the curators are obviously wary of contemporary viewer fatigue. The chamber music fades and extravagant portraits disappear as patrons enter the 18th century era of “Empire and Exploration”. It is here that we see this is truly an exhibition adhering to an romanticised narrative of monarchy.

An introductory note explains that The Crown supported three expeditions led by Captain James Cook during the 1760’s and 1770’s “in search of an undiscovered continent in the Pacific Ocean”. It is a great disappointment to see this choice of wording, which erases the significant political issues of Australia’s colonisation.

Had the exhibition acknowledged contemporary historical discussions in Australia, delivering on the curator’s promise to illuminate “key figures and important historical moments”, there might have been a more inclusive and engaging narrative.

Instead, we move on to a new era of portraiture and monarchy. The advent of photography during Queen Victoria’s (1819-1901) reign provided a new style of intimacy, and a substantial series illustrates her life as both a woman and the British Queen that “reigned but never ruled”.

Critical examination of these images disrupts the romantic representation of this family. Most striking is a carbon print produced by John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1863) illustrating the Queen with her daughter, Queen Alexandra, on the latter’s wedding day. Here, Queen Alexandra stands over the seated and heavily cloaked Queen Victoria.

Rejecting the demands of the photographer’s lens, her audience, and her daughter, Victoria instead gazes at a marble bust of her late husband. The idealised representation of a unified family is somewhat disrupted as we are offered the stark black and white image of a mother literally turning her back on her child on her wedding day, no less.

Reaching the age of the Windsor family, beginning with George V in 1917 and continuing today, patrons are invited to walk under a glorious chandelier to peruse photographs, film clips, paintings and display cases containing riding gloves and dresses.

These items are enchanting, but there is no sense of the glorious political or military power as displayed in the rooms of the Tudors, Stuarts and Georgians.

Rather, we see the continuing evolution of the monarchy’s “soft power”: images from popular women’s magazines adorn the walls, illustrating a monarchy with significant popular culture influence, but little else.

The complexity of this position is superbly indicated in portraits concerning Queen Elizabeth II. A 1971 print by Patrick Lichfield shows a delighted regent relaxed, clapping, after a formal dinner. This rests in sharp juxtaposition with Chris Levine’s (2007) holographic portrait, “Lightness of Being”, of a crowned Elizabeth II. In this image, artist Levine states, there is “an aura about it, a power”.

Perhaps this moment captured a monarch working hard to continue a long tradition of conveying, through art, a sense of remote authority to an adoring public.

In Tudors to Windsors, through various forms of portraiture, visitors see the monarchy’s transition from a male dominated, politically powerful institution to the celebrity status of more recent female reigns. An unexpected highlight of the exhibition is the history concerning artistic technologies relative to portraiture.

Yet patrons should be aware this is an exhibition that does not apply a critical gaze to the British monarchy. Consequently, idolised images reign.

Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits is at Bendigo Art Gallery until July 14.

– ref. The exhibition Tudors to Windsors is an uncritical glorification of empire – http://theconversation.com/the-exhibition-tudors-to-windsors-is-an-uncritical-glorification-of-empire-115908

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Woodley, PhD candidate, School of History, Australian National University

With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.

One of the forthcoming federal election’s many questions is how rural Australians will vote. On issues such as climate change, coal seam gas extraction, water management and basic decency in politics, voters in regional Australia are disillusioned. The old certainties of rural politics seem to be breaking down, and there is a heightened sense that the long-established structures amplifying country voices are no longer working.

More than a century ago, rural Australia was in a similar state of flux over how farmers should engage with state and federal politics. The 1913 federal election was a pivotal moment in the contest of ideas about what sort of polity and society rural Australians wanted. The alliances that emerged from the election led to the formation of the Country Party, the precursor to today’s National Party.

The 1913 election was called by the Labor prime minister, Andrew Fisher, a former coal miner and avid trade unionist. Fisher first served as PM in 1908-09, leading a minority government. When he attained a comfortable majority in both houses of the parliament at the 1910 election, he initiated an ambitious reform program that included liberalising disability and old age pensions, introducing maternity allowances and workers’ compensation, and enacting a progressive land tax on the unimproved value of the largest rural properties.

It was a considerable record on which to seek another term of government, but also contained elements that would galvanise resistance in rural Australia.

Developments in rural Australia

At the time, the New South Wales Farmers and Settlers Association (FSA) was emerging as a powerful and effective voice, claiming to represent farmers, both large and small. By 1914, it would boast 430 branches across the state.

The FSA executive opposed any form of land tax, even on the largest landholders, on suspicion that a Labor government would one day impose it on all farmers. However, farmers still struggling to acquire a “living area” were sympathetic to the Labor Party’s agenda, as many were once shearers or rural labourers.

When a resolution was proposed at the FSA conference in 1907 that would bar members of the Labor Party from joining the organisation, a Jerilderie delegate objected that such a motion would “cause disastrous splits in families the members of which included supporters of both organisations”. During that same period, senior members of the FSA executive resigned rather than renounce Labor sympathies.

Read more: Issues that swung elections: the ‘credit squeeze’ that nearly swept Menzies from power in 1961

By 1913, another issue had intensified the FSA executive’s antagonism towards Labor: the increasingly active Rural Workers Union (RWU).

The conservative government of George Reid, which held power in Australia from August 1904 to July 1905, had excluded large numbers of rural labourers from the federal Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904, arguing that the seasonal and unstructured nature of agricultural work made formal schedules of pay and conditions impractical.

The Labor Party contested this view, and in 1910, Fisher’s government amended the act to include rural workers. The RWU then sought registration with the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration as a first step towards achieving an industrial award mandating minimum wages and conditions of employment.

Then, in early 1913, the RWU began negotiating with the powerful Australian Workers Union, which represented shearers and shearing shed hands, with the aim of amalgamating into one big rural union.

This provoked significant disquiet in FSA branches. The FSA executive, led by the articulate and politically astute farmer Robert Patten, redoubled its efforts to energise and expand its membership among small-scale farmers and their families, encouraging them to align themselves firmly on the side of capital.

The 1913 election

In the midst of these developments, Fisher called an election for the middle of 1913. He was opposed by Joseph Cook who, like Fisher, was a British migrant with a coal mining background.

Cook entered the new federal parliament in 1901, and by 1909, had become deputy leader in Alfred Deakin’s Commonwealth Liberal Party – a new, anti-Labor coalition, or “fusion,” of members formerly associated with Free Trade and Protectonist alliances. (It was also a predecessor of the modern Liberal Party.) Cook then became leader of the opposition when Deakin resigned in January 1913.

Read more: Cultivating a nation: why the mythos of the Australian farmer is problematic

Fisher presented six referendum questions to the electorate to coincide with the 1913 election. Each was designed to extend Commonwealth powers in light of the High Court’s unsympathetic rulings on aspects of his reform agenda. All six proposals were rejected by a slim margin – a sign the electorate was perhaps wary of the pace and breadth of Fisher’s reform agenda.

In the election itself, the country vote would prove to be crucial.

Like the referendums, the House of Representatives election was tight. The main parties were separated by only 9,000 of the 1.85 million total votes cast.

Labor entered the election holding nine more seats than the opposition, picking up seats in the big cities and Victorian regional centres of Bendigo and Ballarat. But in rural areas, the Liberal Party prevailed, picking up four Labor seats alone in Victoria.

In New South Wales, the FSA endorsed supporters of its platform running as opposition candidates in seven seats. Four of them deposed sitting Labor Party members, including Patten, who defeated the pro-Labor independent William Lyne in Hume. It was the last seat declared, and Cook won government with a majority of one.

But Cook’s victory was short-lived. By the time he had selected a speaker, his majority had disappeared, and Australians would be back at the polls by mid-1914, just as war broke out in Europe.

The election would have a longer-lasting legacy with the organisation of rural voters into a sizeable – and powerful – voting bloc with a dedicated, conservative presence in federal politics. The Country Party emerged as an independent and distinctly rural voice during the war and held the federal balance of power by 1922.

Australia’s population was already drifting to the cities when the Country Party formed, but that has not prevented the rural vote from continuing to exert a strong, often disproportionate, influence on Australian politics.

As in 1913, the 2019 election could prove to be a decisive moment in shifting rural political alliances, with broader consequences.

– ref. Issues that swung elections: rural voters get a voice and topple a government in 1913 – http://theconversation.com/issues-that-swung-elections-rural-voters-get-a-voice-and-topple-a-government-in-1913-115154

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Morey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University

At the May 18 federal election, voters in every electorate of Australia’s House of Representatives will have a choice of multiple candidates. Preferential voting means that we rank candidates in the order that we prefer them.

So, how does preferential voting work?

Voters must number every box on the ballot paper. You can number them in any order, but you must number each of them. So if there are eight candidates, you must number one to eight inclusive.

Read more: How much influence will independents and minor parties have this election? Please explain

You don’t have to follow how-to-vote cards

Supporters of political parties hand out “how-to-vote” cards that advise voters how to fill out their preferences, but you certainly don’t have to follow them. You can still vote “1” for that party’s candidate, but change the order of your later preferences.

For example, suppose you want to vote for the candidate of the Liberal Party, and it recommends that you vote “1” Liberal and “2” for the candidate of the United Australia Party (UAP), led by Clive Palmer. If you don’t like the UAP, you can still vote Liberal “1”, and mark your other preferences in any order you choose.

As long as each candidate receives a different preference, your vote is formal (valid). And as long as you vote “1” for the Liberal party candidate, your vote is still a full vote for the Liberals.

What a valid vote looks like

Let’s take an imaginary electorate that has the following candidates.

Below are a number of possible ballots:

• in column A we show a ballot for the Liberal Party candidate that next preferences the National Party, then the United Australia (Clive Palmer’s party), and then the Christian Democrats. Note that all eight boxes must be marked

• in Column B we show a ballot for the ALP candidate

• in Column C a ballot for the Greens candidate that next preferences the Animal Justice candidate, and then the Liberal candidate.

All those ballots are formal, because they mark all the numbers on the ballot paper in sequence.

If a ballot paper repeats a number or does not number each of the boxes, then it is informal and cannot be counted. So all voters are advised to be careful, and number each of the boxes on the ballot.

Read more: More grey tsunami than youthquake: despite record youth enrolments, Australia’s voter base is ageing

Key mistakes to avoid

Here are some examples of informal ballot papers that cannot be counted.

• in Column D, the numeral “5” is repeated, so the ballot is informal

• in Column E, two boxes are unmarked, so that ballot is also informal

• in Column F, there is gap in what should be a sequence of consecutive numerals, so that ballot is also informal.

Why do we have preferential voting?

The basis for preferential voting is that the winning candidate must receive at least 50%, plus one vote, to be elected. In other words, the winning candidate is supported by at least half the voters.

The candidate who has the highest number of votes at the first stage of the count (first preferences) does not necessarily win. It can happen that a candidate with fewer first preferences, nevertheless goes on to win. The most notable case was at the 1972 election in the federal division of McMillan, in rural Victoria:

Although the Labor candidate had received the highest number of first preference votes, he did not reach 50% and was not elected.

Because of that, the candidate with the smallest number of votes, Buchanan, was excluded from the count, and the second preference of each of his ballot papers was transferred, with the same effect as first preferences, to the candidate marked “2”.

This left four candidates in the count. If, at this point in the count, the cumulative total of one of the candidates continuing in the count had exceeded 50% of all ballots, that candidate would be declared elected.

That did not happen, so the continuing candidate with the fewest votes, Houlihan, was excluded. That led to the transfer of Houlihan’s ballots to the candidates marked as the next available preference.

Read more: A matter of (mis)trust: why this election is posing problems for the media

When both Buchanan and Houlihan had been excluded and their ballots transferred, the third count was as follows:

Because Barrie Armitage was now the lowest-polling candidate, he was excluded from the count, and his ballots were transferred to the two continuing candidates, according to the next available preference on each ballot. The final result was:

Note that the winning candidate is not necessarily the same as the candidate that received the most first preference votes. The preferential system ensures that the candidate elected is the one preferred by the majority in each electorate.

In the case of McMillan in 1972, Henry Hewson was the candidate preferred by the majority. The full details of this count can be found on the excellent Psephos website

In Australia, thanks to preferential voting, our House of Representatives members are each elected by an absolute majority of the voters in the electorate they represent.

– ref. Explainer: how does preferential voting work in the House of Representatives? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-preferential-voting-work-in-the-house-of-representatives-116348

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Morey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University

Editor’s note: This is an updated version on an article that was published in 2016 when the new Senate voting rules were first introduced.

The voting system for the Australian Senate combines both preferential voting and proportional representation counting.

This system produces an upper house comprised of eight electorates (six states and two territories), each represented by multiple senators. As a group, these senators much more fairly represent the diversity of opinions in their electorates than the system in the lower house, where each of 151 electorates is represented by only a single member.

The election for the Senate on May 18 will be the world’s largest-ever election using this system, known technically as “proportional representation using the single transferable vote”. We will elect six senators in each of the states, and two senators in each territory.

Read more: How the major parties’ Indigenous health election commitments stack up

The key features of Senate voting

• you have one vote

• you can express preferences for candidates in the order you prefer them, writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on

• if the candidate for whom you vote “1” is elected with more first preference votes than the quota needed for election, the surplus votes received are transferred to the next chosen candidate at a value that ensures as much as possible of your voting power of one vote counts towards electing a senator

• a quota is the number of votes a candidate requires to be elected. In each of the states, in this half Senate election, the quota is 1/7 of all the formal votes plus 1

• if the candidate for whom you vote “1” fails to be elected, the full value of your vote passes to the candidate to whom you gave your “2”. And if that candidate fails to be elected, to your “3” and so on

• the number of candidates elected for each party is, as closely as possible, directly proportional to the support that party’s candidates receive after preferences

• a big majority of voters will be represented by either a senator they voted “1” for, or a senator they gave an early preference to.

Read more: A matter of (mis)trust: why this election is posing problems for the media

So, what do Australians need to know when they go to vote to choose their senators in this year’s federal election?

The ballot paper requires you to choose from one of two ways of marking it. Voting above-the-line means that you let your vote support parties’ candidates in the order on the ballot paper, whereas voting below-the-line means that you decide the order in which you support candidates.

The order is important because the chance of a candidate being elected decreases the later his or her name appears in that order of priority.

Voting above-the-line

The instructions on the ballot papers will tell you that a valid above-the-line ballot will show at least six party boxes, numbered 1 to 6, for at least six party groupings. However, your vote will have potentially more effect if you number more boxes.

In the example below, if you put a “1” in the Liberal box, the first Liberal to gain from your vote will be Malcolm Turnbull, then secondly Alexander Downer, then Tony Abbott, and so on. If you are a Liberal voter that wants to put Tony Abbott first, you can do this, but you have to vote below-the-line (read on for how to do that).

The example we show here is a formal (valid) vote that places the major parties last. This voter supported first the “Climate Sceptics”, but then ranked other minor parties and then the larger parties in the order: Liberal, Labor, Green.

It could happen that when this voter’s preferences are finally transferred, all the candidates for the first six parties chosen had been elected or excluded. Their vote is then used to help decide the final contest, between Labor and the Greens – in this case favouring Labor. But if the voter had not numbered all the boxes, their vote would have become exhausted: in other words, not further counted towards the election of a candidate.

An above-the-line “vote savings provision” means that even if you mark only one box, your ballot will still be counted. But (for example) if you had marked “1” in the square for Climate Sceptics – and only that square – and the Climate Sceptics candidates had failed to get enough votes to remain in the count, your ballot would have become exhausted, meaning your vote did not count towards electing a senator.

That is why it is best to number as many squares as possible.

Voting below-the-line

Below-the-line voters rank individual candidates in the order such voters prefer. You will be instructed to number at least 12 boxes below-the-line.

Suppose you are a Liberal voter, but you don’t like the order of the Liberal candidates on the ballot paper. You may number the boxes of the six Liberal candidates in any order – provided the numbers are sequential and each numeral is different.

If you then want to preference the Shooters and Fishers candidates (numbering 7 to 12), then Palmer United candidates (numbering 13 to 18), but dislike the remaining parties, you may leave their candidates’ squares blank. Your ballot is still formal and will be counted – as in the mock voting paper below.

Suppose you want to support particular candidates from different parties – and want to rank Penny Wong, Sarah Hanson-Young and Jacqui Lambie ahead of all the other candidates. You may certainly do that – again provided your ballot includes 1 to 12 and those preferences are sequential.

You might want to rank everyone except the main parties first. Let’s say that you also prefer the Hemp Party and Socialist Alternative first, but then want to vote for the Shooters and Fishers. If you then think Labor is the least bad of the main parties, the best way to use your ballot is to preference all of the small parties’ candidates and then Labor’s. That way, even if all the smaller parties’ candidates are excluded from the count, your next choice gains the value of your vote.

Note that you can rank the candidates of a particular party in any order. In the example below, the voter prefers Donald Trump to the other Shooters and Fishers candidates.

The more genuine preferences you express, the more likely a candidate you favour will be elected rather than one you disfavour.

The rules allow a vote to be counted provided that the first six consecutive numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. If you omit or repeat a number, the ballot will still be counted. So a ballot that has the preferences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 would be formal – but only preferences one to nine would count.

Your vote is most effective when you express as many preferences as you can or want to – either below or above the line.

– ref. Explainer: how does preferential voting work in the Senate? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-preferential-voting-work-in-the-senate-116347