Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Walker, Visiting Fellow, Australian National University

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

Evidence from around the world shows that public investment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) can advance nations towards a strong economy, a healthy population and a sustainable environment.

To achieve this, however, countries need ambitious, internationally competitive levels of investment in research and development, stable leadership for the sector within government, and a long-term, whole-of-government strategy for science.

Although Labor has announced clear targets for public investment in research and development, very few of the critical details of a vision for STEM have been outlined by any party in 2019 policy statements.

Read more: Infographic: Budget 2019 at a glance

Election 2019

The current government has not told us much about their short- and long-term plans for Australia’s STEM sector. This is important to note given the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA), launched in 2015, is due to wrap up this year.

To date the Coalition’s campaigning has focused on:

We’re yet to see concrete figures from the Coalition for public investment in research and development.

Labor has committed to increase investment in research and development to 3% of GDP by 2030, and to establish a review of research priorities (disclosure: Emma, an author on this analysis, will be a panel member for this review). Labor hasn’t yet named any specific figures or areas of focus for the review.

Neither the Coalition nor Labor has outlined how it plans to fund its STEM ambitions if it forms government following the May 18 election.

Declining investment in STEM

Australian government investment in scientific research and the people and facilities that make it possible has had a few major setbacks in the past decade. This occurred in part due to the global financial crisis, and in part due to a push to shift greater responsibility for research and development support to the private sector.

Government expenditure on research and development (GOVERD) has declined since 2006/2007. ABS (screenshot April 10 2019)

At present, investment in research from both government and the private sector is dropping, with the latest figures indicating only 1.8% of GDP – well behind similar nations in the OECD.

The most recent relevant announcement around critical funding for research infrastructure in 2018 was welcome, but otherwise overall investment remains a critical gap.

The 2019 budget and budget response were, in effect, election pitches – and both clearly signalled that science and technology are not front of mind for our major parties.

The Coalition promised generous provisions for medical research, but cut support for university research and sought to reassign the A$3.9 billion education investment fund.

Labor’s Budget reply highlighted the need for STEM skills for our future workforce, focused heavily on VET. It said little about the future of research and development.

We can and should aim higher. To set Australia up for a strong future, we believe a minimum investment in research and development of 3% of gross domestic product is required by 2030. This investment would underpin ambitious and internationally competitive research and development.

Stable leadership

Science and technology has lacked strong, stable leadership within government for many years.

Symbolically, we’ve had ten federal ministers with titular responsibility for science since 2007 – five under the Coalition and five under Labor.

We have also had prolonged stints without a named science minister in the federal cabinet, the two most recent being under Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 and Tony Abbott in 2013.

Read more: No science minister, and it’s unclear where science fits in Australia

Over the past 30 years, we have struggled to achieve unified, bipartisan support for science and technology in the halls of parliament. In key areas – such as research infrastructure, application of the research and development tax incentive, and industry growth centres – Labor and the Coalition have often worked at cross purposes.

The most positive step in recent years was the launch of the National Science Statement under Prime Minister Turnbull in 2017. This signalled intentions to take a holistic government approach to the sector and provide meaningful direction for the years ahead. This promise is yet to be realised.

This is particularly concerning, given the National Innovation and Science Agenda – the current framework for supporting scientific research and development in Australia – will expire in 2019. This framework will not take shape without a champion for science at the decision-making table, someone who can articulate the value of STEM for Australia’s prosperity.

The clever country?

A quick look at Australia’s recent history in STEM strategy is revealing for its variability.

Following years of cuts to research in the 1980s, and after public protests by scientists on the streets of Canberra, Bob Hawke included in his 1990 election campaign the words:

[…] no longer content to be just the lucky country, Australia must become the clever country.

Under the next Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, investment in research and development began to climb. Even though his government’s main focus was the arts and the economy, and there was little narrative left for STEM, actual support for science remained relatively strong.

Read more: Infographic: how much does Australia spend on science and research?

With Keating’s demise and the election of John Howard’s Coalition government, support for basic science was consolidated with the establishment of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) in 2004. Howard’s government invested in research at the pace of inflation, and sought to strike a balance between curiosity-driven and applied research.

During the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, government investment grew in both STEM education and facilities, facilitating both curiosity-driven and applied research and development.

The introduction of the Education Investment Fund and the Super Science Initiative brought A$5.2 billion in public investment for university research programs, research institutes, and infrastructure-building projects including the Square Kilometre Array.

Labor-led public discourse was predominantly focused on primary and secondary education, covering issues such as quality of STEM education, the shortage of maths and science teachers and falling enrolments in STEM subjects.

It was during this time Labor also introduced the demand-driven system of funding university education. This system removed caps on funding for bachelor degrees, and resulted in a positive gain for STEM courses.

Abbott and Turnbull

The critical balance of supporting both curiosity-driven and applied research began to tip towards application when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister and amped up Australia’s medical research capability with the ambitious medical research future fund (MRFF) in 2014.

Focused on the translation and commercialisation of medical research, this fund increased the weighting on the applied end of the research spectrum; a shift that was reinforced by the “ideas boom” of his successor, Malcolm Turnbull.

The ideas boom lynchpin was the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA), launched in 2015.

However, we also saw substantial job losses for climate scientists at the CSIRO and a trend of failing to support public research agencies at the same pace as inflation. Since then, public investment in curiosity-driven research has continued to decline.

In 2015 then Minister for Education Christopher Pyne threatened to cut off funding for the critical research facilities in NCRIS. This was avoided when the research sector presented a very public, very vocal united front, through the National Research and Innovation Alliance led by Science & Technology Australia and the Australian Academy of Science.

Read more: Pyne backflips on research infrastructure funding cut

Most recently, we have seen a freeze to education’s demand-driven system, significant cuts to research support funding, and attempts to seize A$3.9 billion from the now defunct education investment fund to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme – which did not succeed – and a subsequent redirection into a proposed emergency response fund (announced in the latest Federal Budget).

The current Coalition government’s focus on commercial research and development has been steady, with the introduction of engagement and impact assessment for funded research and a requirement for publicly funded research to meet a national interest test. However, concerns around the declining level of business investment and how the research and development tax incentive functions are yet to be addressed.

This inconsistency and lack of unity over many years has led to reactivity from our sector, rather than strategic long-term planning.

This may not change in the near future, regardless of who wins the 2019 federal election. But we certainly hope it does.

– ref. STEM is worth investing in, but Australia’s major parties offer scant details on policy and funding – http://theconversation.com/stem-is-worth-investing-in-but-australias-major-parties-offer-scant-details-on-policy-and-funding-113739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney

As Australia prepares to farewell the beloved racehorse Winx in her final race this weekend, it’s interesting to look at the factors that contributed to her incredible success.

This magnificent mare’s extraordinary career reflects her impeccable genetics, rearing, training, strategic rest periods, and race riding. Optimal heart, lung and muscle function also play a part.

But what about something we refer to as her “economy of locomotion” during high-speed galloping? This is the energy cost of travelling a particular distance.

Read more: Vets can do more to reduce the suffering of flat-faced dog breeds

This can be compromised during a race, both by behavioural factors such as “pulling” due to overexcitement, and by any bias in the horse towards one side over the other, known as structural asymmetry.

David Evans on Winx.

We don’t know whether Winx has perfect structural symmetry. But her trainer and regular riders would have a strong sense of the mare’s balance during track work and races.

A matter of left and right

Bilateral symmetry in animals refers to the balance of structures, such that they are mirror images along the body’s midline.

Asymmetry is a disruption of the left-right balance that may be associated with factors such as abnormal anatomy, chronic lameness, or laterality (a preference to use one side of the body rather than the other).

In horses, there is now evidence from laterality studies of differences in and between populations due to age, training, handling, breeding, sex, arousal and anatomical proportions, such a ratio of head length to leg length.

Racecourses vary from state to state

Horse racing in Australia is rarely done only in a straight line. In New South Wales and Queensland, for example, horses race in a clockwise direction, whereas in Victoria they race anticlockwise.

Winx has raced and won mostly in NSW but has also won four Cox Plates (Victoria), so clearly she can cope with both track directions.

For many others, race direction can matter and may risk injury to a horse.

On bends, it is common for horses to use the left leading leg when galloping in an anticlockwise direction, and vice versa. But, because of asymmetry, many horses have a preferred leading leg. So, depending on the state, the bends favour some horses more than others.

Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

The direction of racing predicts which limbs are vulnerable to injury.

Irrespective of course direction, one study found 72% of musculoskeletal injuries occur to the leading leg. Major sites on a racetrack of injury were:

• on the straights (30.77% of injuries involved the leading leg)

• coming out of a turn (55.31% of injuries were to the leading leg)

• passing a turn (62.5% of injuries corresponded with the leading leg)

This implies that more strain is put on the leading leg during turns.

Therefore, horses racing on their weaker side, in a direction counter to their preferred leading leg, may be at increased risk of injury.

Asymmetry is normal in horses

Sizeable anatomical asymmetries can affect a horse’s race performance and, beyond a certain point, can lead to lameness.

Thoroughbreds have been shown to have longer right than left third metacarpal bones (the long bone in the front leg between the knee) and pastern (the joint immediately above the hoof). This could theoretically lead to advantages when racing on anticlockwise courses, and disadvantages on clockwise courses.

From the moment a foal first rises to her feet, she will tend to use one side of the body more than the other. Any innate bias can become consolidated as the foal grows.

Horses at pasture spend up to 16 hours per day grazing, an activity that forces them to stand with one foreleg ahead of the other, many lock in a preference for advancing the left or right foreleg. Paul McGreevy

When she goes into exercise training, the asymmetry persists, and may show in the horse’s behaviour.

Checking a horse’s movement

Side biases in the movement behaviour in the horse include the ease with which they flex their necks to the left or the right and, perhaps most importantly, their preferred leading leg in the canter and gallop.

Last year we published a study on more than 2,000 thoroughbred racehorses that established, for each horse, the lead-leg preference of the initial stride into gallop from the starting stalls.

Almost half (48.74%) of the horses started races in a direction counter to the optimal gallop leading leg and so would have to change leading leg to optimise their performance and safety on bends.

This increases the risk of errors on landing and therefore injuries. Injuries to horses also bring the risk of injury or even death for jockeys. Perhaps, when we have the right data, we will be able to confirm that Winx makes very few of these changes.

Let the tech detect the movement

Much recent research in horse biomechanics has used on-board accelerometry technology that can measure their movement while exercising freely in their natural environments at speeds near those in competition.

Studies have focused on gait characteristics – the way a horse moves – in normal and obviously lame horses and in other clinical conditions. It’s shown to be useful for accurate and sensitive detection of gait abnormality.

One study using accelerometry on 222 riding horses perceived as “healthy” by their owners found that 73% showed movement abnormalities during straight-line trotting.

Read more: Why horse-racing in Australia needs a social licence to operate

Further studies using this technology should improve the welfare of performance horses and their riders if it can identify any gait abnormalities due to laterality, lameness, and other clinical problems.

Gait analysis will also reveal the attributes of horses that can safely and optimally race in both clockwise and anticlockwise directions, as Winx has shown.

So here’s hoping Winx can go out with another victory in her final race, at a sold-out event at Randwick (it’s a clockwise track and she’s had plenty of wins there).

Jockey Hugh Bowman riding Winx wins race 7, the Longines Queen Elizabeth Stakes, at Randwick in April 2018. AAP Image/Daniel Munoz

– ref. The success of Winx shows the value of symmetry in race horses – http://theconversation.com/the-success-of-winx-shows-the-value-of-symmetry-in-race-horses-115148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Chappell, Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute; Professor of Law, UNSW

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

Women’s rights and gender equity

Louise Chappell, Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute and Scientia Professor, Law Faculty, UNSW

For most of the Coalition’s time in office, gender justice concerns have received scant attention across the board. Former Women’s Minister Michaelia Cash, in fact, is probably better remembered for her sexist slurs on Bill Shorten’s female staff than any major policy announcement.

Since stepping into the minister role in 2017, Kelly O’Dwyer has clearly worked to improve the government’s profile and performance and attempted to develop a coherent policy agenda.

On her watch, the government met its goal of reaching gender parity on government boards and announced a A$109 million women’s economic security package focused on workforce participation, economic independence, and expanding women’s earning potential. While this was welcome, some commentators criticised the relatively small funding package, especially given the scale of the problems it set out to address.

Read more: The Liberals have a serious women problem – and it’s time they took action to change it

Politically, the Coalition’s emphasis on support for domestic violence survivors in the package was a sign it was still playing catch-up after it threatened to strip A$35 million in funding from frontline legal domestic violence services in the 2014 budget. Earlier this year, the Morrison government also committed to spending A$328 million to implement the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children, a program commenced under the Rudd and Gillard ALP governments.

Other women’s issues have been more problematic for the Coalition. For instance, the ParentsNext program has been been the subject of a Senate inquiry over allegations of discrimination on the basis of sex, race and family type. Critics also point to the lack of concrete action on women’s homelessness. Reforms to the childcare system implemented in 2018, meanwhile, are proving a bureaucratic nightmare for families with insecure, unpredictable or contract-based jobs.

The Coalition government has also notably failed when it comes to increasing the number of women in its ranks.

Across both houses of parliament, women comprise just 22.9% of Liberal Party members and only 9.5% of National Party representatives. Women have also held a small proportion of senior Cabinet positions since 2013 (10% under Tony Abbott, 21% under Malcolm Turnbull, and currently 30% under Scott Morrison). In addition, both Coalition partners continue to resist the introduction of gender quotas for parliament.

What about Labor?

These numbers should improve if Labor wins the May election. With women currently making up 46% of Labor’s numbers in parliament, the ALP is close to reaching its goal of gender parity. A strong swing to Labor may well help it reach its goal of 50-50 female representation – or more.

The ALP has already announced a detailed women’s policy platform, claiming it will put gender at the centre of decision-making. This includes the reintroduction of “gender policy machinery” to government, meaning Labor pledges to conduct a gender impact assessment on all policy decisions and cabinet submissions, and release an annual gender budget statement.

Read more: Australia can do more to attract and keep women in parliament – here are some ideas

Tanya Plibersek, the deputy leader and shadow women’s minister, has also made several key announcements, including new measures to tackle the gender superannuation gap and increase childcare funding. Most controversially, the ALP has outlined a plan to deliver a National Sexual and Reproductive Health Strategy, which will include decriminalising abortion and providing access to termination services.

While history shows that ALP governments tend to have a stronger record than Coalition governments in advancing women’s rights, it would be wrong to be complacent. Past Labor governments have proved inconsistent on women’s issues, for example, cutting single parent pensions and keeping women asylum seekers in detention.

This means Australian women must continue to put pressure on both sides of politics to fully realise their rights.

Indigenous rights

Lindon Coombes, Industry Professor (Indigenous Policy), University of Technology Sydney

The Coalition has had a clear focus on employment and business development as the key platforms for improving Indigenous outcomes over both terms of its government, but its top-down approach and failure to genuinely work with Indigenous peoples and organisations has led to few successes.

One of the key components of the government’s policies – and one of the most controversial – has been the Community Development Program (CDP), instituted in 2015. Although the program was championed by the Coalition as a key way of improving rural employment in Indigenous communities, it immediately came under fire and became the subject of a Senate inquiry in 2017.

According to testimony at the inquiry, the success rate in getting Indigenous people into full-time or part-time work has only been about 10%. The program has also been overly punitive, with more than 350,000 fines issued to some 33,000 participants for lateness or missed appointments.

Read more: Why the government was wrong to reject an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’

Another contentious Coalition-led initiative has been the so-called “cashless welfare card”, which has been trialled in various locations across the country. The government claims the card will reduce domestic violence and crime, and improve the welfare of children and families. But an evaluation of a similar program in the Northern Territory could not find “any substantive evidence of the program having significant changes relative to its key policy objectives”.

Equally controversial has been the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), one of Tony Abbott’s key policy initiatives. In 2016 a Senate inquiry found that less than half of successful applications had gone to Indigenous organisations the year before. Last November, it was also revealed that A$500,000 of IAS money had been given to non-Indigenous industry groups to counter Aboriginal land claims.

Perhaps most disappointing to Indigenous peoples, however, has been the lack of support in the Coalition government for the Uluru Statement’s call for an Indigenous voice to Parliament. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissed the statement as an unworkable attempt to create a “third chamber” of parliament. His successor, Scott Morrison, echoed this view after coming to power.

What about Labor?

While both parties are committed to Constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, the ALP has promised to hold a referendum on enshrining an Indigenous voice to parliament in the Constitution. Labor has also pledged to establish a Makarrata Commission to supervise a truth-telling and agreement-making process formed between governments and Indigenous peoples.

It appears unlikely the Coalition will support either measure as part of its platform.

Read more: With a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, Australia must fix its record on Indigenous rights

The ALP has also guaranteed it would comply with the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) and affirmed its support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Coalition, meanwhile, has long expressed its desire to amend or abolish the RDA and has been largely silent on the UN declaration.

The ALP has also committed to support the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples as the peak national representative body for Indigenous peoples after it had its funding slashed by the Coalition.

Both parties have aligned behind the Closing the Gap targets, but the ALP has added three extra targets: to increase Indigenous participation in higher education, improve access to services for Indigenous peoples with disabilities, and reduce incarceration and victimisation rates in Indigenous communities.

– ref. No matter who is elected, more work remains on women’s rights and Indigenous issues – http://theconversation.com/no-matter-who-is-elected-more-work-remains-on-womens-rights-and-indigenous-issues-114610

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Musker, Senior Research Fellow, South Australian Health & Medical Research Institute

Depression is a common mental disorder affecting over 300 million people across the world. It’s estimated that one in ten people in Australia (10.4%) suffer from depression.

Alongside other therapies, medication is often used to treat patients with depression. About 8% of Australians are taking antidepressants for depression, anxiety and related conditions (but in this article we’re focusing on depression).

Antidepressants are powerful drugs that affect the way the neurotransmitters in our brains work, usually with the outcome of increasing the overall amount of a chemical called serotonin. Low levels of serotonin cause low mood, so increasing the availability of this transmitter improves mood.

Read more: Are antidepressants over-prescribed in Australia?

To be in a position where you feel ready to come off antidepressants is a good thing. But it’s not necessarily an easy thing – particularly if you’ve been taking antidepressants for a long time.

There is a possibility of withdrawal symptoms, and even the chance of relapsing back into a depression. These risks can’t be removed, but they can be managed.

The illness trajectory

Depression can last for a minimum of two weeks, but will more commonly last for months or years. For some, it will be present for the duration of their lives.

Typically, those who suffer from a major depressive disorder will be taking antidepressants for many years.

Antidepressants can sometimes cause side effects such as weight gain, fatigue, sexual dysfunction and insomnia. It’s understandable that people will want to stop taking these drugs as soon as possible, or after they have felt well for a considerable time.

But this process carries risks, so it’s important to establish a plan with your doctor before proceeding.

Read more: Pregnant women taking antidepressants shouldn’t panic about birth defect claims

Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome

Your body has become used to having the drugs in its system, so withdrawal can cause side effects.

A condition called antidepressant discontinuation syndrome affects about 20% of people withdrawing from antidepressants.

This syndrome can cause flu-like symptoms (headache, body aches and sweating), difficulty sleeping, irritability, feeling sick (nausea or even vomiting), disturbance in balance, confusion, anxiety and agitation.

Some people will take antidepressants for many years of their life. From shutterstock.com

These symptoms may only last for a week, but could have more serious consequences if not monitored properly, such as falling back into depression. It’s important to have a withdrawal plan with your GP or prescribing doctor, so that these symptoms can be measured and medications adjusted accordingly.

Some antidepressants such as Paroxetine and Venlafaxine (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are more likely to cause withdrawal, so extra care should be taken with these medicines. Other drugs like Fluoxetine can be withdrawn over a shorter period, or even act as a buffer while withdrawing from other antidepressants.

Read more: What causes depression? What we know, don’t know and suspect

Steps to take if you’re coming off antidepressants

Coming off antidepressants too quickly may increase the risk that a person will fall into a depression again and need to revert to taking medication, creating a cycle of depression.

The American Psychiatric Association and the UK National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health suggest antidepressants are taken for up to several weeks after the depression symptoms have ceased, particularly if you have been on them for many years. The key aim here is to prevent a relapse into depression.

It takes between four to eight weeks for an antidepressant to start working effectively, and it will take just as long for your body to get used to not being on them.

A general guide is to withdraw from antidepressants over around four weeks, but longer if you are on a group of drugs called monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

This process involves a gradual reduction of the amount of the drug you’re taking over time, according to the plan you and your doctor have agreed upon. Keeping track of how this is affecting your mood is helpful.

Talking therapies can be useful when going through the process of coming off antidepressants. From shutterstock.com

A systematic review found several interventions helpful when thinking about stopping antidepressants. The most effective was a form of psychological treatment called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

CBT is a talking therapy that is generally provided in hour-long sessions over a period of about 16 weeks during and after the withdrawal phase.

CBT can be combined with an activity called mindfulness, a type of relaxation that helps you focus on your thoughts.

What if you do experience withdrawal?

If you find yourself suffering from the symptoms of withdrawal, returning to a lower dose of medication and slowing down the discontinuation over a longer period may be a sensible way to go.

You can also focus on some key activities known to have a positive effect upon depression. These might include forming good sleep habits, increasing the amount of exercise you do, engaging in your favourite hobbies or social activities, or adopting a healthy low carbohydrate diet.

Read more: Health Check: what makes it so hard to quit drugs?

The Black Dog Institute recommend you monitor your mood in a mood chart, which will give you a clear picture of how you’re tracking. This enables you to see the danger points when your mood falls below par, and consider when you may need to seek help.

There are many free interactive resources online which may be helpful, alongside professional medical care, as you navigate coming off antidepressants. You can also focus on positive mental health strategies that build your well-being and resilience.

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

– ref. If you’re coming off antidepressants, withdrawals and setbacks may be part of the process – http://theconversation.com/if-youre-coming-off-antidepressants-withdrawals-and-setbacks-may-be-part-of-the-process-114179

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Brazil, Associate Professor and Reader in Engineering, University of Melbourne

Following opposition leader Bill Shorten’s policy announcement that 50% of new cars will be electric by 2030, questions have been raised about the ability of the electricity grid to cope with the increased demand associated with a substantial increase in the use of electric vehicles.

Read more: Labor’s plan for transport emissions is long on ambition but short on details

These concerns are not completely unfounded. Modelling and research at the University of Melbourne, conducted as part of a project led by Professor Iven Mareels, has shown that in Victoria even fairly modest rates of electric vehicle uptake could have a major impact on the electricity distribution grid.

However, these problems would be caused by uncoordinated charging, with battery recharging occurring as soon as the driver returns home and plugs in the car. With some simple coordination – perhaps using smart meters – Australia’s grid can easily support far more electric vehicles for decades to come.

The problems

It’s helpful to first understand the challenges to the grid posed by a high number of electric vehicles. The focus here is on the low voltage electricity distribution network, by which we mean the part of the grid “downstream” from local transformers that directly supply electricity to homes and businesses.

This includes most of the grid infrastructure that we see around us every day, such as residential power lines and pole-mounted transformers. Electric vehicle charging can affect this infrastructure in a number of different ways.

Power demand

An electric car with a typical daily commute of 40km requires roughly 6–8 kilowatt hours of energy to recharge, which is equivalent to the daily needs of a small household. In other words, if you purchase an electric vehicle, the impact on the local electricity network is about the same as adding a small house to the neighbourhood.

And in an unregulated environment most electric vehicle owners are likely to plug in and begin charging when they arrive home, around 6 to 7 pm, which is the time residential electricity networks experience peak demand. This can lead to network failures, or component overload where assets such as distribution transformers and the utility lines run beyond their nominal current ratings and capacity limits, substantially shortening their lifetimes.

Voltage drop

Voltage can be thought of as the “electrical pressure” in the network. Each utility line in the distribution network has an associated impedance, meaning that the voltage at each house in the network decreases the further it is from the distribution transformer. As more current is drawn through the lines due to the charging of electric vehicles, this decrease in voltage is exacerbated. If the voltage in some houses falls below regulated limits, household appliances may fail or suffer.

Phase unbalance and power quality

Electricity distribution networks in Australia are generally three-phase, meaning there are three lines carrying the current, each a third of a cycle out of phase with the others. Most houses connect to only one of these phases. If a disproportionate number of households with electric vehicles all happen to be connected to the same phase, then that phase can get out of balance with the others, leading to a significant loss of efficiency in the network. Mass electric vehicle charging could also affect the overall quality of the power in the network, for example by distorting the shape of the 50Hz waveform that carries the current.

Modelling and simulations, based on real Australian data, have shown these negative impacts on the grid can occur at fairly low rates of electric vehicle ownership. For example, in a study based on an area in Melbourne it was shown that an electric vehicle penetration of only 10% can lead to network failures in an unregulated environment.

Getting smart

The good news is that all of these problems can be prevented by implementing a smart charging framework: shifting electric vehicle demand away from peak times.

Electric vehicles are among the most flexible loads in the grid. Unlike showering, cooking and heating our homes, we can shift the demand to other times, such as overnight, when there is more capacity in the network. The trade-off, of course, is that it takes longer until the vehicle is fully charged.

However, most owners are unlikely to notice this, as long as the car is charged and ready to go by the time they need to leave for work. Furthermore a standard commute will generally mean there is enough spare battery capacity to allow the car to be taken out for an emergency late-night run, even if it is not yet fully charged.

Shifting electric vehicle load. If vehicle charging is not controlled, there is a significant increase in peak demand. If the vehicle charging load is shifted to times when there is more capacity, there is no increase in peak load.

Setting up such a charging system would not be particularly difficult or expensive. One suggested scenario is each for residence with an electric vehicle to acquire a home charging terminal that the car plugs into, which receives instructions from the utility operator via the household smart meter. This allows the operator to control vehicle charging across the network based on the current network conditions and demand.

If the charging of electric vehicles can be controlled in this manner, then our existing networks will be able to sustain high uptake rates, without any additional investment into grid infrastructure.

Read more: Shorten’s climate policy would hit more big polluters harder and set electric car target

Detailed simulations have shown that the same network that started to fail at a 10% uptake with uncontrolled charging is able to sustain more than an 80% uptake when vehicle charging is shifted, using simple optimisation algorithms. Through this sort of demand management, most of our existing networks should be able to handle electric vehicles for decades to come.

– ref. Australia’s electricity grid can easily support electric cars – if we get smart – http://theconversation.com/australias-electricity-grid-can-easily-support-electric-cars-if-we-get-smart-115294

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorraine Hammond, Associate Professor, Edith Cowan University

Explicit instruction is a term that summarises a type of teaching in which lessons are designed and delivered to novices to help them develop readily-available background knowledge on a particular topic.

Explicit instruction emerged out of research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers sat at the back of classrooms and looked for relationships between particular behaviours of effective teachers and their students’ academic performance.

This research found teachers with the best results spent more time reviewing previously learned concepts, checking whether students had understood concepts and correcting misconceptions during the lesson. Explicit teaching practices involve showing students what to do and how to do it.

Like baking a cake, explicit instruction is a step-by-step process where deviating from the recipe or omitting ingredients can have an underwhelming result.

Explicit instruction came out of 1960s research, when researchers observed effective teachers from the back of their classroom. from shutterstock.com

This is contrasted to a type of learning where, before students are shown the essential information, they are asked to practise a task, and then discover and construct some or all of the essential information themselves. This is sometimes known as inquiry-based learning.

It can be useful for someone who wants to conduct an experiment to learn about evaporation and condensation, provided they already understand the nature of solids, liquids and gases and how to safely use a Bunsen burner.

We remember what we think about

Explicit instruction is also known as “fully guided” practice. Teachers who follow an explicit approach explain, demonstrate and model everything: from blending sounds together to decode words, to writing a complex sentence with figurative language, to kicking a football.

While some students achieve success quickly, others need far more opportunities for practice. Explicit instruction teachers provide daily reviews of previously learned knowledge and skills so they become automatic. Then they can be applied to more complex tasks such as reading, writing a short story or playing a game of AFL.

Explicit instruction is underscored by a learning theory known as the information processing model. It is based on the assumption we only remember what we think about, and keep thinking about. If you can still remember your childhood telephone number, it’s probably because of the number of times you have used and retrieved that information.

Read more: Comic explainer: how memory works

It’s well known there is a limit to how much new information the human brain can process and how much can be stored in our long-term memory. These understandings form something known as cognitive load theory, which adds further value to the effectiveness of explicit instruction.

Information procession theory suggests we only remember what we keep thinking about. from shutterstock.com

Put simply, knowing precursor maths skills – such as times-tables and the difference between the numerator and denominator – reduces the strain on the limited space you have in your brain. So it might free up some brain space to learn about more complex maths, such as simplifying fractions.

Particular models fall under the umbrella term of explicit instruction in Australia and include: explicit instruction, explicit direct instruction, Direct Instruction and I do, we do, you do. These models are based on similar instructional principles and refer to specific lesson design and delivery components.

Read more: Direct Instruction and the teaching of reading

Direct Instruction, for instance, consists of a suite of commercially available teaching resources developed from the work of US educator Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s. It is a highly scripted model, which is both a reason some teachers perceive the approach as inflexible, and the reason it is effective. When followed with fidelity, direct instruction has been shown to work. The model has proven quite effective when applied in remote aboriginal communities.

Explicit instruction, however, is not scripted. This means there is often variability between the way teachers use it and of the component parts of this approach. This also makes definitive statements on its efficacy problematic.

So, what’s the controversy?

Since the late 1970s, more child-centred approaches have been the prevailing orthodoxy in teacher education and curriculum design in Australia. These approaches include discovery learning and inquiry. They are based on a theory of learning called constructivism, that sees learning as an active process.

Teachers following a constructivist approach provide learning opportunities that enable students to come to their own unique understandings of what is being taught. Constructivism is popular and prevalent because it personalises learning, emphasises the active construction of knowledge and privileges hands-on learning to solve real-world problems.

Critics of explicit instruction typically argue it is a deficit model that sees students sitting passively in rows all day engaging in rote learning. This is a misunderstanding of explicit instruction, which – when done properly – is engaging and rarely done for extended periods of time.

Explicit instruction requires students to face the teacher. from shutterstock.com

It’s true the model requires students to face the teacher. This is because the process involves the teacher asking a lot of questions. She or he may also ask children to write on mini-whiteboards to show their understanding during the lesson.

Arguments that explicit instruction doesn’t allow teachers to cater for range of student abilities are also ill-founded. Explicit instruction allows teachers to teach the same concept to students but differentiate at the point of individual practice.

Read more: Learning languages early is key to making Australia more multilingual

For example, after teaching the algorithm for subtraction, students will have the same time to solve problems of increasing difficulty. But not all students will follow the same process. While some students will only solve (29-13), others might solve (189-101) and (1692-1331).

As adults learning to abseil or skydive, we prefer it when information is broken down into manageable chunks, the instructor checks for understanding and we are given opportunities to practise the skills we’ll need before we step over the edge. There is a place for explicit instruction in Australian classrooms, particularly when background knowledge is low and the task is difficult.

– ref. Explainer: what is explicit instruction and how does it help children learn? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-explicit-instruction-and-how-does-it-help-children-learn-115144

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

Australia’s retirement incomes system has been built on the assumption that most retirees would own their home outright. But new Grattan Institute modelling shows the share of over 65s who own their home will fall from 76% today to 57% by 2056 – and it’s likely that less than half of low-income retirees will own their homes in future, down from more than 70% today.

Home ownership provides retirees with big benefits: they have somewhere to live without paying rent, and they are insulated from rising housing costs. Retirees who have paid off their mortgage spend much less of their income on housing (on average 5%) than working homeowners or retired renters (25% to 30%). These benefits – which economists call imputed rents – are worth more than A$23,000 a year to the average household aged 65 or over, roughly as much again as the maximum pension.

You’ll be OK if you own

Our 2018 report Money in Retirement showed that while Australia’s retirement income system is working well for the vast majority of retirees, it’s at risk of failing those who rent. They are more than twice as likely as homeowners to suffer financial stress, as indicated by things such as skipping meals, or failing to pay bills.

This is not surprising – renters typically have lower incomes. But the rising deposit hurdle and greater mortgage burden risks means rates of home ownership are falling fast among the presently young and the poor.

The share of 25 to 34 year olds who own their home has fallen from more than 60% in 1981 to 45% in 2016. For 35 to 44 year olds it has fallen from 75% to about 62%.

And home ownership now depends on income much more than in the past: among 25-34 year olds, home ownership among the poorest 20% has fallen from 63% to 23%.

But fewer will

Home ownership is likely to fall further in coming years. Using Grattan Institute modelling, we find that on current trends, the share of over 65s who own their home will fall from 76% today to 74% in 2026, to 70% by 2036, 64% by 2046, and 57% by 2056.

And while we don’t project home ownership rates for different income groups due to data limitations (we have the necessary Census data on home ownership rates by age and income only for 1981 and 2016), it is more than likely that less than half of low income retirees will own their homes in future, down from more than 70% today.

Today’s younger Australians will become tomorrow’s retirees.

Worsening housing affordability means renting will become more widespread among retirees. As a result, more retirees will be at risk of poverty and financial stress, particularly if rent assistance does not keep pace with future increases in rents paid by low-income renters.

And rent assistance won’t much help

The maximum rent assistance payment is indexed in line with the consumer price index, but rents have been growing faster than the consumer price index for a long time. Between June 2003 and June 2017, the consumer price index climbed by 41%, while average rents climbed by 64%.

That’s why our Money in Retirement report recommended boosting Commonwealth Rent Assistance by 40%, at a cost of $300 million a year in today’s dollars. That would restore it to the buying power it had 15 years ago. It should be indexed in future to changes in the rents typically paid by the people who get it, so its value is maintained, as recommended by the Henry Tax Review.

There’s another important implication. Retirement incomes are likely to become more unequal in future. Money in Retirement found that in general future retirees will have adequate retirement incomes. Most workers today can expect a retirement income of at least 89% of their pre-retirement income, well above the 70% benchmark used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and more than enough to maintain pre-retirement living standards.

But a retirees who rent will have much less for living on.

There will be ‘haves’ and more ‘have nots’

Among home-owners, an increasing proportion will be still paying off their mortgages when they retire – the proportion of 55 to 64 year olds who own their home outright fell from 72% in 1995-96 to 42% in 2015-16. Some will (quite rationally) use some or all of their super to pay off their mortgage.

And rising housing costs will in time force retirees to draw down on more of the value of their home to fund their retirement.

Currently, few retirees downsize or borrow against the equity of their home while continuing to live in it. But that will have to change.

Read more: Renters Beware: how the pension and super could leave you behind

House prices have outstripped growth in incomes. Median prices have increased from around four times median incomes in the early 1990s to more than seven times median incomes today (and more than eight times in Sydney).

Government policy should continue to encourage these retirees to draw down on the increasingly valuable equity of their homes to help fund their retirement. They are not the ones who will need government help. The government’s recent expansion of the Pension Loans Scheme that allows all retirees to borrow against the value of their homes is a step in that direction.

Retirement is going to change in the years ahead. Most retirees will be far from poor, many of them better able to support themselves than ever before. But an increasing number will not. They are the ones who will need our help.

Read more: Productivity Commission finds super a bad deal. And yes, it comes out of wages

– ref. Retiree home ownership is about to plummet. Soon little more than half will own where they live – http://theconversation.com/retiree-home-ownership-is-about-to-plummet-soon-little-more-than-half-will-own-where-they-live-115255

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

We’ve known about smoking’s health risks for half a century — at least since the landmark 1964 report by US Surgeon General Luther Terry.

But it turns out it is not just smokers addicted to nicotine. So is the Australian government.

This year’s budget predicts revenue from the tobacco tax at a staggering A$17.4 billion. That’s a lot of money compared to the expected surplus of A$7.1 billion. It’s more than the A$12.3 billion from diesel fuel, A$6.4 billion from petrol tax, and the roughly A$6 billion from alcoholic beverages.

Part of the reason governments tax things is the same reason Slick Willie Sutton said he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” But the better reason to tax tobacco, pokies and the like is these activities have costs to society.

Internalising externalities

People who smoke impose costs – or externalities – on the rest of us. Second-hand smoke is both unpleasant and harmful. The health effects of smoking like heart and lung disease, and cancer, are borne by the taxpayer thanks to our universal health-care system. Smoking sets a bad example for kids, and so on.

When a behaviour is enjoyable but harms society, most economists think it better to tax it instead of banning it. This is why we favour congestion taxes and “sugar” taxes, rather than banning private cars in city centres or outlawing soft drinks.

Read more: Smoking costs society dear – so why isn’t Big Tobacco paying its way?

So-called “Pigouvian taxes” – named after British economist Arthur Pigou, who first proposed the idea – are intended to make those responsible for negative externalities pay for them. Ideally the tax will even motivate to change their behaviour.

When tobacco is taxed, smokers are forced to balance their personal enjoyment with the harm they’re creating for others. Public health experts point to tobacco taxes as one of the reasons we’ve seen a huge drop in the number of smokers.

Addicted to revenue

But what happens when a government becomes reliant on a Pigouvian tax because it gets so much revenue from it?

Federal treasurer Josh Fydenberg’s boast of being “back in the black” has a rather dark irony to it. The 2019-20 forecast budget surplus was made possible by the blackening lungs of Australia’s 2.5 million smokers.

This puts the government in a difficult position.

The whole idea of a Pigouvian tax is to reduce the amount of an activity — in this case smoking. But the government needs these 2.5 million smokers puffing away to fund basic services.

As was wryly noted on the BBC comedy Yes Prime Minister, smokers are “national benefactors”. With an average annual tobacco tax contribution of nearly A$7,000 per Australian smoker, it’s not hard to see why.

A clip from the Yes Prime Minister episode ‘The Smoke Screen’.

This kind of revenue addiction is not unique to tobacco or the federal government. The New South Wales government gets 8.4% of its total revenue from gambling taxes. Poker machines alone account for 5.3% of NSW government revenue. Victoria is not much better, with 4.6% of government revenue coming from pokies.

No wonder, then, that actions taken by the NSW government in the name of curbing the harms of poker machines have been criticised as ineffective. Why would we expect the government to cut off its cash cow?

Designing a better tax

It is worth comparing the A$17.4 billion in revenue that goes straight into federal government coffers from tobacco tax with the potential use of a Pigouvian tax to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

My colleague Rosalind Dixon and I have proposed the Australian Carbon Dividend Plan (ACDP) – which would impose a tax of A$50 on every tonne of carbon emitted. This would raise A$21 billion a year at current emissions levels. That money would be returned to voting-age citizens, leaving the average household A$585 a year better off, and low-income households more than A$1,300 a year ahead.

Read more: Fresh thinking: the carbon tax that would leave households better off

At first glance these two Pigouvian taxes look similar. But the tobacco tax does relatively little to deter smoking because nicotine is addictive.

The carbon dividend imposes a similar tax burden, but would be a meaningful step in addressing climate change. Importantly, it would return all the tax proceeds to households rather than propping up the budget.

Cutting the Gordian knot

By giving the proceeds directly to citizens, the Gordian knot that binds a government to the revenue from harmful behaviour is cut.

This preserves the magic of a Pigouvian tax, without the government being conflicted.

The same thing could be done with tobacco tax – to ensure the government doesn’t have nicotine on its hands.

I don’t mind that Pigouvian taxes might generate a lot of revenue that can be put to good use. But when the government gets so much revenue from one or two such taxes, it creates a conflict of interest.

That conflict can mean the government doesn’t pursue public health campaigns around smoking as vigorously as it should, or goes soft on regulating poker machines.

– ref. Vital Signs: why governments get addicted to smoking, gambling and other vices – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-why-governments-get-addicted-to-smoking-gambling-and-other-vices-115254

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Romain Fathi, Lecturer, History, Flinders University

When the first world war came to an end on the Western Front in November 1918, it was time for Australian soldiers to return home. As in Gallipoli, they left behind their fellow Australians who had died. But the Australian public felt less anxiety about the war graves on the Western Front than those in Gallipoli. France was a mostly Christian country, and an Allied nation. Surely, the French would deeply care about the Anzacs?

Soon after the war, the Australian government tried to impose the view that Australians had saved the city of Amiens. Canadians, British, French and others were claiming the same, as the Third Battle of Picardy had been an Allied operation.

Australian commemorative plaque, Cathedral of Amiens. author

Realising that the good people of Amiens would certainly never believe that the Australians had done it all, Australian authorities turned their interest to much smaller villages to have their glorious – and often historically inaccurate – narrative displayed, and therefore ensure the commemoration of the Anzacs.

This worked well enough for them. Back in 1919, some French people were genuinely keen to contribute to the Australian state-sponsored glorification of the Anzacs in the Somme area. They were mostly motivated by the prospect of Australian pounds.

A few mayors clearly indicated that, for money, they would honour the Australian war dead, and chose to celebrate the Australian narrative of the war.

The French Mayor of Steenwerk, for instance, could not have been more explicit when he reached out to the Australian Governor-General in 1920, writing:

In return [for Australian financial assistance] we make this offer […] The old men of the Hospital will take care of [the remains of your gallant soldiers] and will consider it an honour to tend the graves and ornament them with flowers. On the front of the new edifice, we shall put the inscription: ‘In Memory of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers gloriously buried under our soil during the war of 1914–1918.’ Thus [your people] will have the satisfaction of thinking and knowing from the antipodes, [that] the memorial to their dead, associated to a charitable idea, will be perpetuated from generation to generation.

He wasn’t the only one. The Mayor of Villers-Bretonneux, Dr Jules Vendeville, was even more cunning in securing Australian financial assistance. He had a plaque made celebrating Australian heroes so that the Australian government would finally commit to building the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. The money started pouring in.

Instilling Anzac

Better yet, when the Victoria Villers-Bretonneux Fund based in Melbourne approached Dr Vendeville in 1922 to discuss how the money raised by Victorians could be used to help Villers-Bretonneux’s reconstruction and commemorate the sacrifice of Australian war dead, the mayor proposed public baths .. and an abattoir! You can imagine how this went down.

As a result, Australians, through Victoria’s then director of Education Frank Tate, raised the idea of a commemorative school, but the Mayor of Villers-Bretonneux did not want this.

Instead, the French mayor simply crafted a deceptive financial system, which would lead Australians to believe that all of their money went to rebuild what is today Victoria School at Villers-Bretonneux, while actually using parts of the funds for different purposes.

In the interwar period, the school kids of Villers-Bretonneux were entrusted with keeping the memory of the Anzacs alive. Tate was the one who had the “Do not Forget Australia” signs put in each classroom of this small primary school in rural France. It was, essentially, propaganda.

The Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux, France. The memorial commemorates nearly 11,000 Australians with no known grave. Author provided

And so it was that in the 1920s, on the Western Front, the memory of Australian soldiers was in fact promoted and paid for by Australian authorities, rather than the French. The French had other priorities – and who could blame them?

Australians and the British had it comparatively easy during the war. France lost nearly 1.4 million soldiers (and 7.2% of its population overall), and a fifth of its territory was utterly and completely destroyed. That level of devastation, to this day, is barely comprehensible for those who have not visited the Red Zone around Verdun.

Still, the remembrance of Australian soldiers was not always financially motivated. Some locals remembered the diggers fondly, as they also remembered soldiers of the 30 or so Allied nations who had come to fight in France.

In fact, had it not been for a handful of French people who founded in 1955 the Welcome Committee, which then became the French-Australian Association of Villers-Bretonneux, the French memory of Australian soldiers in the Somme would have all but disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s. As a thank you, some of the members of this association were bestowed with the Order of Australia, once the Anzac legend became a commodity in high demand for Australian politicians in the 1990s.

Putting tiny towns on the map

As time progressed, other villages in Northern France saw how Villers-Bretonneux was benefitting from tourism and the visits of Australian politicians. They too wished to reap the rewards of this memory boom. The towns of Bullecourt and Vignacourt both renamed one of their streets Rue des Australiens in the late 1980s. Soon after, Australian-funded memorials were built and visitors came.

But what’s in it for these French villages? While observing Anzac Day ceremonies at Bullecourt in 2011, an official from the Australian Embassy in Paris told me it “puts them on the map”. The French had known this for a while. The local newspaper La Voix du Nord reported in the early 1990s: “Paradoxically, Bullecourt (a small village south of Arras) is better known in Sidney [sic] or in any other town in Australia, than in France.”

In its article, the newspaper felt obliged to locate Bullecourt in relation to nearby Arras because even French readers would not necessarily know of its existence. For most French, these Australian “battlefields” were entirely unknown and of too small a scale to be remembered.

Anzac Day ceremony, Bullecourt, 2011. Author provided

Since the 2000s, with cheaper airfares and what historians have coined the “return of Anzac”, more and more Australians have visited the former Western Front in France and Belgium. This interest was fostered by former prime minister John Howard, who preferred the Western Front’s association with victory to the defeat at Gallipoli.

Tens of millions of Australian dollars were spent developing new commemorative sites for Australians to visit, at times helped along by some French euros to boost local tourism.

Australians funded and created more commemorative sites in France between 1998 and 2018 than between 1918 and 1938. Anzac is indeed a big industry.

Anglo commemorative tourism has boomed on the former Western Front in the last 20 years. Author provided.

Before the Australian government took over the organisation of Anzac Day commemorations at Villers-Bretonneux and turned them into a big TV show, they were a small affair where French locals and visiting Australians would gather after the service for a luncheon. In 2001, however, the Australian Embassy stopped funding lunch, as too many locals were coming for the free food without attending the ceremony.

Australia a minor player

Beyond these small villages, most French people are unaware that Australians fought in the first world war. The second world war and its stories of resistance and collaboration have dominated France’s official memory landscape instead. Until the centenary of the WWI, fewer French people were interested in that conflict, compared to the huge network of associations and museums dedicated to WWII.

Furthermore, the French national curriculum in history does not discuss Australia’s engagement in the first world war. It mentions the involvement of the colonies but France had its own empire back then.

Additionally, the French didactic approach is more cultural than military, and the emphasis is put on Franco-German reconciliation. National school textbooks insist on the story of European integration. So the causes, the consequences, the mass violence, the horror and the uselessness of the war, as well as the idea of total war, are what is studied rather than which troops fought in what village.

And although proportionally the number of Australian volunteers was relatively high with regard to the total Australian population, they represented less than 0.6% of the total number of soldiers involved in the first world war.

Put simply, unless a French person has done more reading than usual about this war, extensively visited the former front, or happens to live in one of the few villages where Australian troops were involved, then they are very unlikely to be aware of the engagement of Australian soldiers in it.

Commemorative diplomacy

While the vast majority of French are unaware of the Anzacs, their government has recently rediscovered this shared page of history. Throughout the negotiations for the huge $50 billion sale of French submarines to Australia, French authorities lavishly praised the Anzacs.

The French State started sending senior representatives to Villers-Bretonneux for Anzac Day instead of local officials, the Champs-Elysées was bedecked with French and Australian flags for subsequent state visits, and Australia (with New Zealand) was chosen as guest of honour for the 2016 Bastille Day parade. No effort was spared to seal the deal.

In 2015, the French government welcomed the idea of the Sir John Monash Centre, which has since been built on the grounds of the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery in northern France. No French historians were involved in the project, though. The centre tells the Australian version of the war, tinged with nationalism, and showcases a very self-centred and biased narrative of the conflict.

Again, the French don’t mind too much: not only was this $100m project funded by the Australian taxpayer, it will generate more tourism to a now essentially rural region, devastated by the economic crisis of the 1980s, which does not attract tourists as Paris, Provence or Brittany do.

Front exterior of the John Monash Centre. Author provided.

Since the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux was unveiled in 1938 – and only then because King George VI was performing that ceremony – no French Prime Minister had set a foot at the memorial until 25 April 2018 when the Monash Centre was unveiled.

There, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe paid tribute to Australian soldiers. But don’t be fooled, homage paid to the glorious Australian heroes is paid elsewhere to the Canadians, the Irish, the Indians, the Americans, the South Africans etc etc. Commemorative diplomacy cares little about history, but does much to facilitate the countries’ political and commercial agendas of the day.

What about the Moroccan division?

So why do we care about the French remembering the Anzacs? Why does the press, every year, feature articles about the French commemorating Australian service? Is this a remnant of a lingering colonial insecurity, whereby we can only exist as a nation if others acknowledge that we are one?

This craving to be bigger than Ben Hur when it comes to first world war extraterritorial commemorations is also a convenient vehicle with which to locate Australianness outside of Australia, and therefore shift the national narrative away from the story of dispossession.

Perhaps we shouldn’t care too much whether the French or anyone else remember the Anzacs. National self-worth can’t come from overseas. As Malcolm Fraser put it:

The constant need to be aggressive about one’s national identity, to vociferously reaffirm it, usually indicates a sense of inferiority towards other nations. Being able to regard oneself as an Australian, being able to contribute to Australia, does not depend on outward symbols.

French, British, Canadian, Australian war graves alongside those of the soldiers of the Moroccan Division, testifying to the allied nature of the Second Villers-Bretonneux operation. Crucifix Corner Cemetery. Author

Instead of desperately wishing others to remember us, perhaps Australians should change their perspective. At the new Monash Centre, Australians don’t remember or discuss the French Army’s Moroccan Division, which relieved the AIF’s 52nd Battalion during Second Villers-Bretonneux in late April 1918.

This was a joint operation, so why make it Australian? We can’t expect others to remember us if we don’t remember them.

– ref. Friday essay: do ‘the French’ care about Anzac? – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-do-the-french-care-about-anzac-110880

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

The Wall Street Journal carried the announcement of Australia’s May 18 poll with the rather cruel headline “Australia to Pick Its Next Leader—With an Election”.

It was a sharp reminder (if anyone needed one) of how appalling federal politics has been – and what it looks like to outsiders, as well as to the local voters who will soon register their judgement.

This election is Bill Shorten’s to lose, if you take the long trend of opinion polls, and what the public predict when asked who’ll win.

But the campaign over the coming weeks can be crucial, and Scott Morrison is a ferocious and desperate fighter.

Read more: Morrison visits Governor-General for a May 18 election

Bill Shorten starts in a strong position. The Coalition has been a shambles through much of the parliamentary term. The Liberals executed a prime minister; a Nationals leader executed himself. The government has few significant achievements except same-sex marriage, to which it was dragged.

Labor has a coherent narrative and an extensive suite of well-developed policies.

But those policies – including on negative gearing, franking credits, and climate change – are Labor’s weakness too. They leave it wide open to the scaremongering that will be relentless (and often dishonest, if the electric car debate is a guide).

Government and opposition begin this contest with nearly equal numbers. After the redistribution, the Coalition has a notional 73 House of Representative seats and Labor 72, with six crossbenchers; 76 seats are required for majority government in the new 151-member house.

The closeness of the numbers means the Coalition (in minority government when the term ended) must win seats to survive.

It has hopes in a scattered handful of Labor seats – including Herbert in Queensland and Lindsay in NSW.

The Liberals may win back Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat of Wentworth – which independent Kerryn Phelps took in the byelection – if former Liberal voters have got over their fury at the coup and look to a potential future high-flyer in Liberal candidate Dave Sharma.

Another possible Coalition gain could be Indi, where independent Cathy McGowan’s bid to pass her mantle to an independent successor may be too ambitious.

But against the government’s few prospects, its outlook in Victoria is bleak and it has many marginals in Queensland. Several Liberal seats are at risk in Western Australia. The Nationals seat of Cowper could go to a recycled independent, former MP Rob Oakeshott.

If the Coalition pulled this election out of the fire, its victory would surely be narrow, even a hung parliament, not a prospect many voters would relish.

Morrison is framing the battle as centrally about economic management, recalling Labor’s deficits, casting forward to ALP tax hikes.

He has drawn on John Howard 2004 “trust” pitch, asking “who do you trust to deliver that strong economy which your essential services rely on?”

But how will Morrison rate compared with Shorten on the empathy meter? His reply, when asked On Thursday about Labor’s “fairness” theme, that “under a Liberal Nationals government, we will always be backing in those Australians who are looking to make a contribution not take one” was jarring (and reminiscent of Joe Hockey’s lifters and leaners).

Morrison will persistently exploit Shorten’s unpopularity. “If you vote for me, you’ll get me. You vote for Bill Shorten and you’ll get Bill Shorten”. Labor sources claim people’s reservations about Shorten are already factored into the vote. Shorten says: “It’s not about me and it’s not about him” – which of course it is.

Shorten is tapping into a rich vein of grievances, over flat wages and the high cost of living. His mantras are fairness, a united team, and the contrast between looking to the future “versus being stuck in the past”. He has made Labor’s pitch on health, its traditional strength, very personal for people with his big-ticket promise to slash costs for cancer sufferers.

Compared with 2016 this will be a short campaign, 38 days to 56 days. And it will be rougher, as the Coalition runs heavily negative and reaches for every weapon. Unlike Turnbull in 2016, Morrison will not be wearing gloves.

On the other side, Labor will benefit from the freneticism of GetUp, which has many government MPs in its sights and a target of making a million phone calls. And the unions have money and manpower.

Turnbull campaigned badly, and the government was lucky to survive last election. The former prime minister’s hyped language – “innovation”, “agile”, “ideas boom”, “age of excitement” – was attuned to the future but a turn off in many parts of the country.

Morrison has to be wary of falling into the opposite trap – sounding old-fashioned, out of sync with public opinion and the rush of technology.

The scepticism of sections of the Coalition about renewables has damaged the government. The misrepresentation and demonisation of Labor’s target of having electric cars form 50% of new car sales by 2030 is likely to be counterproductive. “Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend […] where you’ve got Australians who love being out there in their four wheel drives,” Morrison said last Sunday. After the airing of past quotes from ministers praising electric cars (and maybe some focus groups) the attacks shifted gear slightly.

Australians love renewables and believe electric cars are the way of the future – that it’s just a matter of when they become cheap enough. The Coalition will get nowhere by appearing to stand in the way of progress.

Both sides are struggling with the imperatives of geography in this election. Adani epitomises the dilemma.

This week the Morrison government signed off on another stage of the proposed coal mine – a good message to central and north Queensland, a bad one to Victorian Liberal seats where climate change resonates. Likewise, Labor has its own problem dancing along the Adani tightrope. The controversial project will stalk the campaign.

Read more: Morrison government approves next step towards Adani coal mine

In announcing the May 18 date on Thursday, Morrison spoke in his prime ministerial courtyard. A few hours later Shorten made his opening statement from the home “of an everyday Australian family” in the Melbourne suburb of Mitcham.

Courtyard versus backyard – the competing images at the election’s kickoff. A beginning that will be long forgotten when the campaign reaches its exhausted end after five weeks of trench warfare.

Bill Shorten at his first press conference of the campaign in the backyard of a family home in Melbourne. Daniel Pocket/AAP

– ref. Grattan on Friday: In this campaign, Morrison won’t be wearing gloves like Turnbull did in 2016 – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-in-this-campaign-morrison-wont-be-wearing-gloves-like-turnbull-did-in-2016-115333

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen O’Connell, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney

The decision in Geoffrey Rush v Nationwide News, handed down today in Australia’s federal court, is the first – and so far, only – legal determination of a case associated with the #MeToo movement in Australia.

The defamation case was decided in favour of the actor Geoffrey Rush, who had sued News Corp’s Nationwide News, the publisher of the Daily Telegraph, over allegations the newspaper published regarding Rush’s inappropriate behaviour with an unnamed fellow actor, later identified as Eryn Jean Norvill, who gave evidence in the case.

In finding for Rush, Justice Michael Wigney decided that the defence of truth argued by Nationwide News had not been proven. Because Wigney said Rush had suffered significant distress – and to vindicate his reputation – he set non-economic damages at A$850,000. This is more than double the cap in cases not involving aggravated damages, with further economic loss still to be determined.

The Rush decision comes as the Australian #MeToo Movement seems to have gone quiet. The high-profile cases that arose in the year following #MeToo, which included allegations against television presenter Don Burke, actor Craig McLachlan and politicians Barnaby Joyce, Luke Foley and Jeremy Buckingham, have mostly faded from public view.

Read more: Craig McLachlan, defamation and getting the balance right when sexual harassment goes to court

None of these cases have been heard under sexual harassment laws, and none of the women has claimed or received any remedy. Rather, what most of these cases have in common is that the men involved have sued or threatened to sue for defamation.

While reckless and sensationalist media stories certainly cause harm, the Rush decision and other defamation cases may lead someone who has experienced sexual harassment to think that the reputational interests of the accused are better protected by law than those alleging harassment.

Australia has particularly strong defamation laws, which the Rush trial has brought into sharp relief. Actress Yael Stone, who publicly raised further concerns about Rush, said that Australia’s defamation laws made her “terrified” to speak up.

Will the decision in favour of Rush have a further chilling effect on future harassment claims, especially in the absence of any successful, high-profile sexual harassment cases?

Sexual harassment: layers of silence

We have, on paper, strong laws in Australia to respond to individual incidents of sexual harassment in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth). But laws are useless if they are not enforced, and only a tiny proportion of sexual harassment incidents are ever reported (just 17%), let alone taken to court.

Of those few reports, most are kept quiet and out of the public view. If an incident is reported in a workplace, for instance, only a few insiders may ever know about it because of non-disclosure agreements.

Read more: We need to do more about sexual harassment in the workplace

If a harassed person makes a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission, he or she must go through a compulsory, confidential conciliation stage. If this is unsuccessful and the complainant proceeds to court, there are very strong incentives to settle the case privately (namely the cost and difficulty of pursuing a case).

While these layers of confidentiality and privacy may suit the harassed as well as the alleged harasser, the flip side is that it makes sexual harassment, an enormous social problem, barely known to the public. Only the tiniest number of cases make it to court and into public scrutiny.

And if women speak up publicly through social or conventional media, defamation laws come into play.

What impact will the Rush decision have on sexual harassment reporting?

An unfortunate side effect of the decision is that it is likely to have an additional silencing effect on sexual harassment discussions and reporting. Such a widely reported defamation case can only further entrench public perceptions of the risks of speaking up.

There are further concerns. There is the potential for the public to mistakenly see this as a sexual harassment case between Rush and Norvill, rather than a defamation case between Rush and Nationwide News.

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

Since the court found that the defence of “truth” was not proven, this may lead to a misconception that Norvill’s statements about inappropriate behaviour were a lie. This will only be reinforced by Wigney’s statements questioning Norvill’s credibility, saying she was a witness “prone to exaggeration and embellishment”.

The judge said Eryn-Jean Norvill had nothing to gain from making accusations against Rush, but was not an ‘entirely credible witness’. Peter Rae/AAP

But having insufficient evidence to prove the truth of a statement in law is not the same thing as it being a lie. That misconception has the potential to exacerbate stereotypes about women making up claims of assault and harassment.

The Rush decision is a legal success for the actor, but it may have unintended side effects for the #MeToo movement and the effectiveness of sexual harassment laws.

People bringing sexual harassment cases to court generally receive very low damages payouts. Compared to the million-dollar awards for a celebrity defamation case, the median damages payment in a sexual harassment case is below A$30,000. The severe under-reporting and under-valuing of sexual harassment allegations, and the silencing of public discussion of the problem, may be further impacted by this decision, as well.

We need the #MeToo movement to continue if we are to tackle the continuing problem of sexual harassment and gendered abuse. In delivering his summary judgement, Wigney’s comment to the courtroom is surely the truest statement of all:

… it would have been better for all concerned if the issues that arose … were dealt with in a different place to the harsh, adversarial world of a defamation proceeding.

– ref. Geoffrey Rush’s victory in his defamation case could have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement – http://theconversation.com/geoffrey-rushs-victory-in-his-defamation-case-could-have-a-chilling-effect-on-the-metoo-movement-115127

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gail Broadbent, PhD candidate Faculty of Science UNSW, UNSW

With electric cars back in the headlines, it’s time to remember why we should bother making the transition away from oil.

In our recent research looking at attitudes towards electric vehicle uptake, we pointed to some of the factors making the case for change. We need to remind ourselves that burning oil, a finite resource, to energise motor vehicles will not only cost the environment, but also the economy.

A critical factor is carbon emissions. The transport sector is the fastest growing contributor of greenhouse gases.

The transport sector contributes some 18% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas pollution and Australia is ranked second worst in an international scorecard for transport energy efficiency.

Read more: Costly, toxic and slow to charge? Busting electric car myths

But even if you don’t believe this is an urgent issue, there are plenty of economic reasons to change our gas-guzzling habits.

A matter of money

In just one year (2017-18), Australia’s imports of refined petroleum cost A$21.7 billion.

Crude petroleum cost us a further A$11.7 billion – that’s more than A$33 billion going to overseas companies who may pay limited tax to Australia.

The argument that electric vehicle motorists, who do pay GST on their electricity, may not pay any fuel tax is really a distraction asking taxpayers to look somewhere else instead of the big companies.

What’s more, the A$18 billion fuel tax goes to general revenue and isn’t pledged to road building.

Unsteady fuel reserves

Policies minimising Australia’s reliance on oil imports could bring significant benefits to businesses and families, and even to public sector agencies with fleet operations.

Around 90% of the oil Australia consumes is imported and road transport is almost entirely dependent on it. The bulk of our automotive gasoline comes from Singapore and South Korea, and in the event of geopolitical imbalance, the supply of our fuel could potentially be jeopardised.

And our fuel stockpiles are very low. Australia has only about 21 days’ supply in stock, rather than the recommended 90 days.

Read more: Australia’s fuel stockpile is perilously low, and it may be too late for a refill

Health risks

Potential geopolitical imbalances affecting the national supply are important, but the health costs associated with fossil fuels are in the scale of billions of dollars in Australia.

This includes premature death, hospital and medical costs, and loss of productivity that arise from toxic air pollution from internal combustion engine vehicles.

It has also been found pollution from burning fossil fuels can cause respiratory illnesses like asthma and neurodevelopmental disorders in children It’s a high price to pay to continue burning fossil fuels.

And noise pollution from traffic can cause health problems, for instance, by elevating blood pressure, or creating cognitive development problems for children, who have noise-related sleep disturbance.

Conventional cars are inefficient

Electric vehicles convert about 60% of their energy to propulsion. Conventional cars, on the other hand, are very inefficient.

For every litre of fuel burned, only about 17 to 21% of the energy is converted to forward motion, the rest is lost as heat and noise. The waste heat collectively warms up urban areas, causing more use of air conditioning in buildings in summer.

And buildings located near heavily trafficked roads may be exposed to high air and noise pollution, so windows may not generally be used for ventilation. This also places demand on air conditioning and electricity.

An electric charging station in Canberra. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Renewable energy is cheaper and faster

An important point in the ongoing debate about electric vehicles is that they’re only as clean as the electricity they use. A widespread adoption of electric vehicles means the electricity supply will need to be increased.

And Australia’s current energy supply is notoriously one of the dirtiest in the world.

But the demand for new electricity to supply future electric vehicle uptake will be met by installing renewables because they’re cheaper and faster than installing new coal fired power stations.

Read more: How electric cars can help save the grid

The bottom line on this ongoing debate is really about changing our mindset about transport – let’s not get stuck in the past, let’s join the modern world and charge ahead.

– ref. Don’t trust the environmental hype about electric vehicles? The economic benefits might convince you – http://theconversation.com/dont-trust-the-environmental-hype-about-electric-vehicles-the-economic-benefits-might-convince-you-115225

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Peter, Climate Scientist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

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.

Is water blue or is it just reflecting off the sky? – The students of Ms Brown’s class, Neerim South Public School, Victoria.

This is a wonderful question as it involves many of the puzzles that motivated research into the physics of light in the early 20th century.

The short answer is that the sea is blue because of the way water absorbs light, the way particles in the water scatter light, and also because some of the blue light from the sky is reflected.

But to explain what I mean by that, I have to tell you a bit about light and physics.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why is the sky blue and where does it start?

How light works

First, we need to know some fun facts about the nature of light.

The light we see, which we call white light, is made up of incredibly tiny particles called photons. A photon is even smaller than an atom. You can’t see them, but they’re there.

These particles are very strange because when we measure them, sometimes they move like a tiny ball and sometime like a wave – weird, right?

White light is made from photons that have many different wavelengths, some shorter and some longer, and together make up all the colours of the rainbow. The photons with the shortest wavelength we can see look blue, while those with the longest wavelength look red.

White light is made from photons that have many different wavelengths. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

So let’s think about sunlight. The photons stream from the sun and interact with all matter on Earth. Depending on what the light touches, some of the photons will get absorbed or soaked up. And some will bounce back. When they bounce back, we call this “scattering”.

The photons that get scattered are what gives things their colour. For instance leaves are green, because the green photons bounce back towards our eyes and that is what colour our eyes perceive. Other coloured photons are absorbed by the leaves.

What colour is a glass of water?

Now that we know a bit more about light, we can begin to answer your question.

Experiments have shown that pure water (water with nothing else dissolved in it) absorbs more of the red light than the blue light.

But how much of the red light will get absorbed? Well, that depends on how much water the light has to pass through.

A small bottle or glass of pure water is clear, because it can only absorb a little bit of red light. from www.shutterstock.com

You might be wondering why the water in a glass looks clear. It is because the glass of water is too small to absorb more red light waves. To see the effect with your eye, you would have to look through a glass of water as big as a swimming pool. That amount of water could absorb quite a lot of red light, so the water would look quite blue.

Now imagine a glass that held an entire ocean’s worth of water. It would be enormous! With that much water, you could absorb a LOT of red light. So it would look very blue.

But when it comes to how light interacts with the ocean, there’s more to the story.

Read more: Curious Kids: how is water made?

For starters, sea water is not pure. Sea water has lots of things dissolved in it, like salt and small pieces of dead sea creatures. These particles in the water reflect some of the light from before it has time to develop the full blue colour. The light coming back out from the sea is usually more greenish-blue in colour.

You asked about the sky. We know the sky is blue and the sea does reflect some of this light. So, yes, it does play a role.

It’s true the sky does play a role in how our eyes perceive the colour of the sea. But it’s not the only factor. renê ardanuy on/off/flickr, CC BY

To sum it all up: the sea is blue because of the way water absorbs light, the way particles in the water scatter light, and also because some of the blue light from the sky is reflected.

Finally, we need to think about the time of day and the position of the Sun in the sky. When the Sun is shining bright, the sea appears bluer than it does late at night, when the sea looks very dark and almost black.

Like many questions in science, the answer is not as easy as a simple yes or no. There are often lots of correct, but incomplete, answers to many questions. To me, that’s what makes science so interesting.

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

– ref. Curious Kids: is water blue or is it just reflecting off the sky? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-is-water-blue-or-is-it-just-reflecting-off-the-sky-113199

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Austin, Professor UNSW Canberra Cyber, UNSW

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

The government’s chief cyber security coordinator, Alastair McGibbon, told an audience of specialists in November 2018 that the prospect of a catastrophic cyber incident is:

the greatest existential threat we face as a society today.

Using a nautical metaphor, he said such an event was not far off on the horizon, but could be on the next wave. He cited what one technology expert called the most devastating cyber attack in history, the NotPetya attack in 2017. NotPetya was a random attack on a single day that cost one Danish global company more than A$400 million dollars.

The latest dire warning from the government is appropriate, yet its policy responses have not quite matched the challenge – or their own commitments.

Read more: Should cyber officials be required to tell victims of cyber crimes they’ve been hacked?

Cyber security is everyone’s business

The government is 16 months into a departmental reorganisation in order to deliver better cyber security responses, especially through the new Home Affairs Department. That department has been very busy with everyday skirmishes in the escalating confrontations of cyberspace – from Huawei and 5G policy, to foreign cyber attacks on Australian members of parliament.

But Home Affairs is not the only department with a broad responsibility in cyber security policy. On the military side, the Defence Organisation has moved decisively and with discipline. In 2017, it announced the creation of a 1,000-strong joint cyber unit to be in place within a decade. It also announced increased funding to expand the number of people working in civilian defence roles on cyber operations.

Another department with potentially heavy responsibilities is the Department of Education, working with universities, the TAFE sector and schools. Unfortunately, it appears to be missing in action when it comes to cyber security.

Key plans have stalled

In April 2016, Prime Minister Turnbull released a National Cyber Security Strategy. It included commitments to grow the cyber workforce (especially for women), expand the cyber security industry and undertake annual reviews of the strategy itself.

But in key places the ambitious plans appear to have stalled or fallen short. As a result of the Turnbull overthrow, the post of Minister for Cyber Security – which was only created two years previously – disappeared. The 2018 annual review of the strategy was not released, if it took place at all. The annual threat report of the Australian Centre for Cyber Security (ACSC) did not appear in 2018 either.

In November 2018, AustCyber, an industry growth centre that is one good outcome of the 2016 strategy, published its second Sector Competitiveness Plan. Typical of government funded agencies, it reports much good news. Australia is indeed an international powerhouse of cyber security capability. What is unclear from the report is whether the government’s 2016 strategy has much to do with that.

Read more: Why international law is failing to keep pace with technology in preventing cyber attacks

Where we’re falling short

One indicator that we’re off-track is the fact the AustCyber report of 2018 has no data on the participation of women in the sector after 2016. Reports from the decade prior to 2016 showed a decline from 22% down to 19%, but the government does not appear to be tracking this important commitment after it was made.

In other bad news, the AustCyber report concludes that the education and workforce goals remain unfulfilled. It is hard to estimate how badly, since the initial strategy of April 2016 set no baselines or metrics. AustCyber now assesses that:

the skills shortage in Australia’s cyber security sector is more severe than initially estimated and is already producing real economic costs.

On the government’s commitment to increase the cyber workforce, AustCyber reports growth over the previous two years of 7% – roughly 3.5% per year. But it probably needs to be of the order of 10% per year for a full ten years if the gap identified by the report is to be met:

The latest assessment indicates Australia may need up to 17,600 additional cyber security workers by 2026 …

The government has provided $1.9 million over four years to promote university cyber security education in two Australian universities. That amount is so small it might not even be called a drop in the ocean. As AustCyber suggests, though in muted language, Australia does have huge resourcing holes in our cyber security education capability.

The most important gap in my view is the near total lack of university degree programs or professional education in advanced cyber operations, the near total lack of technical education facilities to support such programs, such as advanced cyber ranges, and a weakly developed national capability for complex cyber exercises.

What we should be doing

In 2018, I argued at a national conference sponsored by the government that Australia needs a national cyber war college, and a cyber civil reserve force, to drive our human capital development. I suggested at the time the college should be set up with a budget of A$100 million per year. Based on a recent international research workshop at UNSW Canberra, I have changed my estimate of cost and process.

Australia needs a cyber security education fund with an initial investment of around A$1 billion to support a new national cyber college. It should be networked around the entire country, and independent of control by any existing education institutions, but drawing on their expertise and that of the private sector.

It would serve as the battery of the nation for cyber security education of the future.

Read more: The public has a vital role to play in preventing future cyber attacks

Labor isn’t offering a better alternative

The Labor Party, through its cyber spokesperson Gai Brodtmann, has been critical of the government’s failure to fill the gaps. But she is retiring from the House of Representatives at the next election.

Labor has no well developed policies, and no budget commitments, that can address the gaps. There is even reason to believe the party doesn’t have a front bench that is engaged with the scope of the challenge. None of them seem to be as technologically oriented as Turnbull, the last cyber champion the Australian parliament may see for a while.

– ref. Australia is vulnerable to a catastrophic cyber attack, but the Coalition has a poor cyber security track record – http://theconversation.com/australia-is-vulnerable-to-a-catastrophic-cyber-attack-but-the-coalition-has-a-poor-cyber-security-track-record-113470

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francisco López-Muñoz, Profesor Titular de Farmacología y Director de la Escuela Internacional de Doctorado, Universidad Camilo José Cela

The Holocaust is one of the worst collective crimes in the history of humanity – and medical science was complicit in the horrors.

After World War II, evidence was given at the Nuremberg Trials of reprehensible research carried out on humans. This includes subjects being frozen, infected with tuberculosis, or having limbs amputated.

There was also specific research into pharmacology that is less well-known, as can be seen from the articles we have published over the past 15 years.

Read more: Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?

The prestige of German medicine

German pharmacology and chemistry enjoyed great international prestige from the second half of the 19th century.

This golden age ended with the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933 and was replaced with institutionalised criminal behaviour in public health and human research.

At the beginning of World War II, Nazi leadership saw medical and pharmaceutical research as a front-line tool to contribute to the war effort and reduce the impact of injury, disease and epidemics on troops.

Nazi leaders believed concentration camps were a source of “inferior beings” and “degenerates” who could (and should) be used as research subjects.

German pharmacology and medicine lost all dignity. As Louis Falstein pointed out:

the Nazis prostituted law, perverted education and corrupted the civil service, but they made killers out of physicians.

The rise of eugenics in central Europe at the beginning of the 20th century paved the way for the Nazi government to implement a disastrous policy of “racial hygiene”.

The Aktion T4 Programme

The Nazi ideology promoted the persecution of those who were considered “abnormal”, as part of the Aktion T4 program.

September 1, 1939 – the date of the start of World War II – marked the beginning of the mass extermination of patients with “deficiencies” or mental conditions, who were deemed to be “empty human shells”.

Aktion 4 patients getting on a bus, 1941. Wikimedia Commons

At first, the crimes were carried out via carbon monoxide poisoning.

In 1941, a second phase was launched: so-called “discrete euthanasia” via a lethal injection of drugs such as opiates and scopolamine (anti-neausea medication), or the use of low-doses of barbiturates to cause terminal pneumonia.

These techniques were combined with food rations and turning off the hospital heating during winter.

These euthanasia programmes led to what amounted to psychiatric genocide, with the murder of more than 250,000 patients. This is possibly the most heinous criminal act in the history of medicine.

Experimenting with healthy subjects

Medical experimentation became another tool of political power and social control, over both sick people from the T4 Program, as well as healthy people.

Those in good health were recruited in the concentration camps of ostracised ethnic or social groups such as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals.

A number of experiments were undertaken, including the study of:

• the effect of sulfonamides (antibiotics) on induced gas gangrene (Ravensbrück)
• the use of the toxic chemical formalin for female sterilisation (Auschwitz-Birkenau)
• the use of vaccines and other drugs to prevent or treat people intentionally infected with malaria (Dachau)
• the effects of methamphetamine in extreme exercise (Sachsenhausen)
• the anaesthetic properties of hexobarbital (a barbiturate derivative) and chloral hydrate (a sedative) in amputations (Buchenwald)
• the use of barbiturates and high doses of mescaline (a hallucinogenic drug) in “brainwashing” studies (Auschwitz and Dachau).

Block 10 of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where medical experiments with prisoners were carried out. Francisco López Muñoz

Faced with all this evidence, how it is possible that up to 45% of German doctors joined the Nazi party? No other profession reached these figures of political affiliation.

What were the reasons and circumstances that led to these perverse abuses?

The banality of evil in medicine

The answer is difficult. Many doctors argued that regulations were designed for the benefit of the nation and not the patient. They invoked such misleading concepts as “force majeure” or “sacred mission”.

Read more: Two steps forward, one step back: how World War II changed how we do human research

Some believed everything was justified by science, even the inhumane experiments carried out in the camps, while others considered themselves patriots and their actions were justified by the needs of wartime.

Some were followers of the perverse Nazi ethos and others, the more ambitious, became involved in these activities as a means of promoting their professional and academic careers.

Lastly, avoiding association with the Nazi apparatus may have been difficult in a health sector where fear had become a system of social pressure and control.

A monument by Richard Serra in Berlin honouring of the victims of the Aktion 4 programme. Wikimedia Commons

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, in his book Purity of Blood, defines this type of motivation very well:

… although all men are capable of good and evil, the worst are always those who, when they administer evil, do so on the authority of others or on the pretext of carrying out orders.

However, as has happened in many moments of history, sometimes tragedies bring positive posthumous effects.

After the trial of the Nazi doctors, the first international code of ethics for research with human beings was enacted, the Nuremberg Code, under the Hippocratic precept “primun non nocere”. This code has had immense influence on human rights and bioethics.

Read more: Two steps forward, one step back: how World War II changed how we do human research

– ref. When science is put in the service of evil – http://theconversation.com/when-science-is-put-in-the-service-of-evil-113138

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Sobyra, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

Wage growth has fallen short of the official forecasts for an extraordinary eight consecutive budgets.

Commonwealth budget papers, ABS wage price index

When asked what’s needed to actually get wage growth up in line with the repeated forecasts, prime minister Scott Morrison usually mentions productivity, and he is usually optimistic. He says the more that is produced per worker, the more can be paid per worker.

I believe that once you see that sustained productivity and that sustained profit, then that should flow through to wages.

It was the line pushed by Business Council chief executive Jennifer Westacott on budget night:

We have been calling for wage increases for ages. The question is how you get them. You get them through the economy doing more, you get them through productivity going up. I mean, the link between productivity and wage increases is not theoretical, it’s factual.

But not in the case of the finance industry.

And what has happened in that industry helps tell a larger story.

Although the finance industry has made enormous productivity gains in recent decades, and although workers could have been given a share of the gains, they hardly haveestsugg It s. that while productivity gains are a necessary condition for sustained real wage growth, they are not a sufficient condition.

What productivity is

Productivity is the amount of output produced per given unit of input, usually labour. The theory says that if firms can find ways to produce more with less, for example by investing in technology, software and research and development, then the gains from the extra that’s produced will be shared between the firm’s owners and its workers in the form of higher profits and higher wages. They’ll all win.

This path from productivity growth to wage growth is often presented as inevitable, and for much of the 20th Century, it seemed to be. It became an article of faith, crystallised nicely by Dr Stephen Kirchner just ahead of the budget: “Raising productivity growth is still the best way to improve average workers’ incomes.”

But history has a habit of shattering truisms.

The story of Australia’s finance industry over the last 40 years is a case study.

Finance: lots of take, little give

In the heat of the battle over the banking royal commission in 2017 the then treasurer Scott Morrison painted the finance sector as “key to jobs and growth”. It underpinned “everything that happens in our economy.”

He wasn’t wrong. Over the last four decades, finance has become the single biggest driver of economic activity in Australia, doubling its contribution to gross domestic product since 1975. Of the 19 major industries tracked by the Bureau of Statistics, “Financial and Insurance Services” contributes 8.8% to GDP, compared to 7.8% from Construction, 7.6% from Mining, and 7.0% from Healthcare and Social Assistance.

In conventional economic terms, it is an industry that has done everything right.

As it has grown in importance to the economy, it has consistently lifted its productivity. Its output per hour worked has more than doubled during a quarter century in which the economy as a whole has grown 50%.

Read more: The workplace challenge facing Australia (spoiler alert – it’s not technology)

The gains have been due to consistent investments in technology and research and development. As it has poured money into tech, it wound down its investments in buildings. This accords with what we can see. Banks have moved away from “bricks and mortar” services toward digital and virtual services.

So far, so good. This is precisely what the textbook says industries should be doing.

Yet there’s a problem: these big productivity improvements haven’t produced the outcomes the theory predicts. Wages haven’t been growing in line with productivity.

The vast majority of the productivity dividend in finance has been reaped in profits rather than wages. In other words, almost all the gains have gone to the owners and shareholders of the businesses, rather than their workers.

Another way of looking at it is through the eyes of the average employee in the industry. When we take into account the rising cost of living (inflation), the average finance worker has experienced no growth in wages since the turn of this century, almost two decades ago. The inflation-adjusted profits of businesses that employ them have boomed.

ABS Australian National Accounts

What gives?

Anwar Shaikh is one of the world’s leading economists and a professor at The New School in New York City. He’s what we call a “classical” economist. That means he’s more interested in describing the economy that exists than idealising it in neat theories that can be expressed in mathematical equations but bear little resemblance to what happens.

His latest book, which deserves a Nobel Prize, had something important to say about this apparent decoupling of productivity and wages – a pattern that has emerged across many OECD countries.

He argues that productivity provides the foundation for real wage increases, but that those increases are not automatic. His proposition is simple to the point of common sense: wages respond to productivity growth depending on the strength of workers bargaining power relative to that of their employers. Less bargaining power makes it less likely wages will grow in step with productivity.

Read more: Ultra low wage growth isn’t accidental. It is the intended outcome of government policies

The bottom line is that productivity growth alone will not deliver the goods for workers unless the right social, political and institutional conditions are in place to translate it into wage growth.

The conditions that delivered this linkage for much of the 20th Century were not natural or automatic; they were hard-won and they have been steadily eroded since the 1980s.

Bringing back old-school unionisation need not be the only answer. Some of today’s unions are combative and fiercely protective of old ways of working, not necessarily what’s needed for a competitive economy. Equally though, restoring the productivity-wages link is probably going to take a little more than the Reserve Bank Governor begging companies to pay their workers more.

One alternative comes from Singapore, consistently ranked among the most competitive nations in the world (currently second to the United States). Singapore has a long tradition of actively managing the link between wage increases and productivity growth (of course, it also has a reputation for actively managing other things, which mightn’t always be the best).

In effect, the Singapore model pegs wages to economic performance, especially productivity. The primary mechanism is a tripartite institution of government, industry and unions, known as the National Wages Council. Its job is to set non-mandatory wage guidelines. The system isn’t binding, but is built on consensus and flexibility. It’s been mightily effective.

It is naïve to suggest that we could import entire policies from Singapore, Sweden or anywhere else. Nevertheless there are lessons from these systems we could explore. Whoever forms government in five weeks time might need them.

– ref. What the finance industry can tell us about what’s holding back wages – http://theconversation.com/what-the-finance-industry-can-tell-us-about-whats-holding-back-wages-114915

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paula Gerber, Professor of Human Rights Law, Monash University

The sultan of Brunei has been on the throne for 52 years, making him the second-longest reigning monarch in the world, after Queen Elizabeth II.

Until recently the sultan appeared more interested in living a decadent life, rather than a pious one. In 2011, Vanity Fair dubbed Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and his brother, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, “constant companions in hedonism”. They spent lavishly on luxury cars, yachts and real estate, and according to the magazine:

…allegedly sent emissaries to comb the globe for the sexiest women they could find in order to create a harem the likes of which the world had never known.

Now, the sultan has introduced Sharia law in his country and taken aim at LGBT people, women and even children with some of the harshest penalties in the world for gay sex and adultery (death by stoning) and having an abortion (public flogging). In an apparent effort to eradicate transgender identity, dressing in attire associated with a different sex is also punishable with a fine and imprisonment up to three months. An adolescent who has reached puberty can be punished as an adult for these offences, while younger children can be whipped.

Read more: Explainer: what is ‘sharia law’? And does it fit with Western law?

Needless to say, these laws amount to serious breaches of international laws relating to human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights.

Diversion from economic woes

The big question is why the sultan would do this. One religious scholar observed:

This is obviously not coming from a place of religious devotion, since the sultan himself is in violation of every single rule of Sharia law you could possibly imagine.

One of the main reasons may be that plunging oil prices mean that, for the first time, the tiny, oil-rich nation of Brunei (population 430,000) is grappling with an economic crisis.

Other leaders faced with similar crises or corruption allegations have whipped up hatred against LGBT people in a similar way to distract the public’s attention. This tactic was used by Gambian President Yahya Jammeh in 2014, when he enacted a law that created a new offence of “aggravated homosexuality” that carried a life sentence.

The sultan may also be seeking to rehabilitate his reputation as a “party boy”, perhaps believing that introducing Sharia law could enable him to leave a religious legacy that will outweigh the decades of excesses that he and his family have indulged in.

Why boycotts don’t work

The international community has been swift in its condemnation of Brunei’s new laws. Many outraged celebrities and gay rights activists have organised boycotts and protests outside hotels owned by the sultan (including the Royal on the Park in Brisbane) and Royal Brunei Airlines.

But are such boycotts effective? The short answer is no. We should be wary of boycotts for several reasons, including:

1. they can cause the government to harden its position to show it will not give in to foreign pressure, making the repeal of such laws even harder to achieve;
2. the LGBT community can be subjected to a vicious backlash, blamed for bringing economic pressure and shame on the country; and
3. it can be seen as hypocritical since there are other countries that impose the death penalty for homosexual conduct (Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia) and are not subjected to similar international condemnation.

What can concerned global citizens do?

In Australia, for one, people can put pressure on the government to respond strongly to Brunei, a key regional defence and security partner. As I noted in 2013, when these laws were passed but not yet implemented, Australia has a strong trading relationship with Brunei, which may give it leverage to have some influence.

So far, however, the response from Australia has been muted. Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne said in a tweet that Australia has raised its “concerns” with Brunei over the new laws, but she has otherwise been silent on the issue. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not spoken out about the new laws.

International organisations can also put pressure on Brunei. For example, Brunei is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, and this body may be able to engage in constructive dialogue with the sultan. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which takes place in Rwanda next year, is a potential forum for such dialogue, not only with Brunei, but also with the other 35 Commonwealth countries that also still criminalise consensual same-sex sexual conduct.

If negotiations with Brunei are unsuccessful, the Commonwealth can also suspend a country’s membership – a step it has previously taken in response to grave breaches of human rights in Fiji, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

Read more: Should the west be held accountable for gay persecution?

It would be particularly helpful if the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) took a hard line against Brunei (a member state), but this is unlikely. Although ASEAN adopted a Human Rights Declaration in 2012, it did not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and contains numerous “weasel words” that significantly dilute its impact.

The ASEAN Civil Society Organisations has urged ASEAN member states to call on Brunei to immediately halt the implementation of Sharia law, saying:

By adopting conservative views of morality and excessive punishments, Brunei essentially legitimises violence.

But this is likely to fall on deaf ears.

The United Nations also has a role to play. Brunei’s human rights record will be reviewed by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) next month and this provides another opportunity for constructive dialogue. Although the HRC is often perceived as a toothless organisation, research has shown that if a state is criticised by one of its strategic partners, it is more likely to accept that criticism than if it comes from a state with fewer ties.

Could other countries follow suit?

There are concerns that Brunei’s actions will embolden its Muslim-majority neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, to follow suit.

Gay sex is not against the law in Indonesia, with the exception of Aceh province, which has instituted Sharia law. Although homophobia and transphobia have been on the rise and there was talk of criminalising gay sex ahead of this month’s elections, it still seems unlikely that Sharia law will be adopted throughout the country. The vast majority of Indonesians – 88% of the population – continue to consider themselves moderate Muslims.

Read more: Michael Kirby: the rainbow in Asia and the fight for gay rights in our region

Malaysia similarly has some states that apply Sharia law. Last September, two women were found guilty of attempting to have sex in the conservative northeastern state of Terengganu, and were sentenced to be caned six times each. Though Sharia law could potentially spread across the country, Malaysia is one of few countries in the region where democracy is getting better, not worse.

It is worth observing that Brunei has not used the death penalty since 1957. An optimist could conclude that the introduction of these new laws is mostly symbolic and designed to beef up the sultan’s Islamic credentials and garner favour with other Islamic countries to boost trade and tourism.

But that does not diminish the legitimate concern the world is expressing for the vulnerable minorities targeted by these laws.

– ref. Why boycotts against Brunei’s new anti-gay laws won’t be effective, but regional pressure might – http://theconversation.com/why-boycotts-against-bruneis-new-anti-gay-laws-wont-be-effective-but-regional-pressure-might-115067

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Urwin, Researcher, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Monash University

It has long been assumed that Indigenous Australia was isolated until Europeans arrived in 1788, except for trade with parts of present day Indonesia beginning at least 300 years ago. But our recent archaeological research hints of at least an extra 2,100 years of connections across the Coral Sea with Papua New Guinea.

Over the past decade, we have conducted research in the Gulf of Papua with local Indigenous communities.

During the excavations, the most common archaeological evidence found in the old village sites was fragments of pottery, which preserve well in tropical environments compared to artefacts made of wood or bone. As peoples of the Gulf of Papua have no known history of pottery making, and the materials are foreign, the discovered pottery sherds are evidence of trade.

This pottery began arriving in the Gulf of Papua some 2,700 years ago, according to carbon dating of charcoal found next to the sherds.

Read more: Explainer: what is radiocarbon dating and how does it work?

This means societies with complex seafaring technologies and widespread social connections operated at Australia’s doorstep over 2,500 years prior to colonisation. Entrepreneurial traders were traversing the entire south coast of PNG in sailing ships.

There is also archaeological evidence that suggests early connections between PNG and Australia’s Torres Strait Islands. Fine earthenware pottery dating to 2,600 years ago, similar in form to pottery arriving in the Gulf of Papua around that time, has been found on the island of Pulu. Rock art on the island of Dauan further to the north depicts a ship with a crab claw-shaped sail, closely resembling the ships used by Indigenous traders from PNG.

It is hard to imagine that Australia, the Torres Strait and PNG’s south coast were not connected.

The region termed the ‘Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere’ where archaeology is gradually uncovering evidence of ancient interconnections. Author provided

An unconventional trade

The trade itself was quite remarkable. When British colonists arrived in Port Moresby (now the capital of PNG) in 1873, some 130 kilometres from the start of the Gulf of Papua to the west, they wrote in astonishment of the industrial scale of pottery production for maritime trade by Indigenous Motu communities.

Each year, Motu women would spend months making thousands of earthenware pots. Meanwhile the men built large trading ships, called lakatoi, by lashing together several dugout hulls. The ships measured 15-20 metres long and had woven sails in the shape of crab claws.

In October and November, Motu men would load the pots into the ships and sail west towards the rainforest swamplands of the Gulf of Papua. The trade on which they embarked was known as hiri. The voyages were perilous, and lives were sometimes lost in the waves.

Rows of Motu pots ready for shipment to the Gulf of Papua. The pots are arranged on a beach situated in today’s Port Moresby region. Taken by Reverend William G Lawes in 1881-1891. Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA

When the men arrived – having sailed up to 400 kilometres along the coast – the Motu were in foreign lands. People living in the Gulf of Papua spoke different languages and had different cultural practices. But they were not treated like foreigners.

Sir Albert Maori Kiki, who became the Deputy Prime Minister of PNG, grew up in the Gulf of Papua in the 1930s. He described the arrival of the Motu in his memoirs:

The trade was not conducted like common barter […] the declarations of friendship that went with it were as important as the exchange of goods itself […] Motu people did not carry their pots to the market, but each went straight to the house of his trade relation, with whom his family had been trading for years and perhaps generations.

In exchange for their pots, the Motu were given rainforest hardwood logs from which to make new canoes, and tonnes of sago starch (a staple plant food for many people in Southeast Asia and across the island of New Guinea).

The Motu would stay in Gulf villages for months, waiting for the wind to change to carry them back home.

Quantity overtakes quality

Pottery has been traded into the Gulf of Papua for 2,700 years, but the trade grew larger in scale about 500 years ago. Archaeological sites of the past 500 years have much larger quantities of pottery than those before them. The pottery itself is highly standardised and either plain or sparsely decorated, in contrast with older sherds that often feature ornate designs.

In the past 500 years it seems that pottery makers valued quantity over quality: as greater quantities of pottery were traded into the Gulf of Papua, labour-intensive decorations gradually disappeared.

Fragments of a decorated earthenware bowl dating to within the past 500 years. Found in an excavation at Orokolo Bay (Gulf of Papua, PNG) in 2015. Photographs by Steve Morton (Monash University)

We think this is when the hiri trade between the Motu and rainforest villages of the Gulf of Papua began in earnest.

The coming decades promise further findings that will help unravel the forgotten shared history of PNG and Indigenous Australia across the Torres Strait. But it is becoming increasingly clear that Indigenous Australia was not isolated from the rest of the world.

– ref. Archaeology is unravelling new stories about Indigenous seagoing trade on Australia’s doorstep – http://theconversation.com/archaeology-is-unravelling-new-stories-about-indigenous-seagoing-trade-on-australias-doorstep-111528

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology

The vicious targeting of the Muslim community in the Christchurch terror attacks has already had swift consequences.

Gun law reform is underway, as is an investigation of laws relating to crimes motivated by bigotry. The government has also announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry into why the attack was not identified and prevented.

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

At the centre of these various waves is the trial of the alleged perpetrator, accused (to date) of 50 murders and 39 attempted murders. The identities of the attempted murder victims are suppressed at the moment.

Right to fair trial

The accused, who The Conversation has chosen not to name, remains in custody at New Zealand’s highest security prison in Auckland. He has a right to a fair trial based on a presumption of innocence. The trial will be before a High Court judge and a jury of 12, who have to make decisions based on the evidence presented and found admissible in law. Discussions of the merits of the charges in the media or by politicians are to be avoided because of the risk of polluting the court verdict.

During his first court appearance at the Christchurch District Court on the day after the attacks, the accused was named. New Zealand allows defendants to have their names suppressed in various circumstances, but this accused did not seek that protection. Whether or not to name the accused is now a choice of each journalist or media organisation.

Read more: Christchurch attacks provide a new ethics lesson for professional media

New Zealand also allows photography and recording in court, subject to judicial control. A video of the accused with his face blurred was released from the first hearing, but Justice Cameron Mander declined applications to film and record the second hearing at the High Court in Christchurch last week.

Murder charges carry life sentence

At the second, procedural hearing, the accused did not appear in person but via an audio-visual link from prison. Until then, it was thought he would represent himself, but he has now hired two lawyers.

The main order made by Justice Mander was a request for medical reports under the Criminal Procedure (Mentally Impaired Persons) Act 2003. Such reports are designed to investigate whether a defendant might have been insane at the time of the offending or whether he has a current mental disorder that prevents him following a trial. They are commonly ordered for serious charges.

The prosecution may consider additional charges. The most obvious would be breaches of the Arms Act 1983 or the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. Since murder charges carry a life sentence, the prosecution will no doubt weigh up whether additional charges add anything of value.

A terrorism charge, which also carries a life sentence, would require proof of motivation of the accused, which would allow evidence of ideology before the court. Murder and attempted murder charges focus on the narrower question of an intention to kill, and the only evidence allowed would be relevant to the identification of the accused as the perpetrator and his intention, not his motivation.

The only defence to a murder charge is self-defence from an ongoing attack by others.

Speedy trial unlikely

Before the next hearing, expected in June, the prosecution will be compiling evidence and disclosing that to the defence lawyers. This allows them to consider arguing about the admissibility or otherwise of evidence, which may affect when they can advise on the plea. In a complex case, several pre-trial issues are likely to arise and require a judicial ruling.

The length of the trial will depend on whether any charges are contested, how many facts are accepted by both the prosecution and defence, and the number of witnesses that have to be called to give evidence and be cross examined.

While a speedy trial is an accepted component of a fair trial, that is not a regular feature for trials of any complexity. Even if this case is given priority, if it involves trial (which it will unless there is a guilty plea to the charges brought), it is likely to be many months before it happens.

Trial open to public

Another question is where the trial should take place. So far, the courts in Christchurch have been involved, but cases have been transferred in the past because of difficulties of finding a local jury without a link to someone involved in the case.

The trial will be public. Judges have powers to require some evidence be heard without the public present, but media are allowed in those hearings unless there is a national security issue. Judges can also impose controls on the reporting of evidence, including to protect the interests of victims.

One of several verdicts may follow in any trial. An acquittal follows if there is inadequate evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If the medical evidence allows it, a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity may follow. Similarly, if there is evidence that shows a defendant is not fit to stand trial, the court then considers whether he committed the acts.

The fourth possible verdict, which is proper only if the evidence satisfies the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused committed the offence with the necessary intent, is a verdict of guilty. Such a verdict on a murder charge invariably leads to a sentence of life imprisonment. A judge can order that the sentence has to be served without the prospect of parole.

Prisoners from overseas, including from Australia, usually serve their sentence and are deported at the end of it. New Zealand does not have standing arrangements for prisoners to be transferred to their country of origin to serve their sentence (nor for New Zealanders to return to serve their overseas sentence). But governments can make other arrangements in special circumstances.

– ref. Explainer: trial of alleged perpetrator of Christchurch mosque shootings – http://theconversation.com/explainer-trial-of-alleged-perpetrator-of-christchurch-mosque-shootings-115041

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Parkinson, Academic Dean and Head of TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

After years of uncertainty about the future of the family law system, the next government now has a clear roadmap for how to amend the law, and improve the system of justice, for all those unfortunate enough to go through a relationship breakdown.

The Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC) report, published on April 10, is the result of 18 months of work, initially under the leadership of Professor Helen Rhoades. The President of the ALRC, the Honourable Justice Sarah Derrington, led the project in its later stages.

The final report makes recommendations that are considerably different from the proposals put forward in its discussion paper in October 2018. That paper presented an ambitious reform agenda focused upon the provision, at taxpayer expense, of many new services, such as “one-stop-shop” centres to help people access relevant programs.

Read more: In the Family Court, children say they want the process explained and their views heard. It’s time we listened

While many of these were worthy ideas, a taxpayer dollar can only be spent once, and the discussion paper did not adequately set out a rationale for the new spending initiatives, or prioritise between them. The final report nonetheless builds upon some of the sensible proposals for reform to the law the paper put forward, such as the simplification of the law concerning parenting after separation.

It also makes a radical new suggestion that the federal family courts be abolished. Instead, it recommends cases be heard by state and territory courts that can make orders under state child protection and family violence laws, as well as under the Family Law Act 1975.

Reducing cost and anguish

The best way to evaluate the ALRC’s recommendations is to ask how well they work to reduce the cost and anguish for people going through a family breakup. One of the ALRC’s guiding principles was that the law be:

…clear, coherent, and enforceable so as to enable families to resolve the issues arising after separation […] in a just, timely, and cost-effective manner…

Overall, it offers a coherent package of reforms. Proposals for simplification of the law are part of this.

Read more: Sperm donation is testing what it means to be a legal parent, all the way to the High Court

Parenting after separation

The law on parenting after separation has long been criticised as overly complex. The ALRC recommends reducing the number of matters that a judge must consider when deciding what is in the best interests of a child whose parents cannot agree about post-separation parenting.

The ALRC’s recommendations are likely to be criticised for abandoning the reforms introduced in 2006 that sought to encourage parents and judges to consider the option of shared care – or even an equal time arrangement.

The government would be wise to deal with these recommendations sensitively and in a manner that does not reignite the “gender wars”. The fact is that only a small proportion of parents are able to make a shared care arrangement work for the benefit of the children. They have to live close enough together, for a start.

Read more: Separated parents and the family law system: what does the evidence say?

The important principle, currently contained in the Family Law Act, is that the law should encourage the maximum involvement of both parents in children’s lives which is consistent with the children’s best interests. That principle needs to be retained in the Act. Sometimes, due to abuse, neglect, mental illness or other factors, it is not safe for children to have much involvement from one of the parents; but this is a minority of cases.

Children, vulnerable to long-term harm from their parents’ breakup, do best if they can keep a close relationship with both of their parents.

Dividing property after separation

Another important reform is to set out some basic rules and principles concerning the division of property after separation. Currently, so much depends on the discretion of the judge; and the principles on which that discretion is exercised are very unclear. This is especially the case when it comes to inheritances, and property owned before the marriage began.

The ALRC makes various proposals to simplify the law. It avoids some of the harder issues, such as pre-marital assets, but a reforming government could and should tackle them. These issues are dealt with very sensibly in other countries, which can provide models for Australia.

Access to justice

The Commission makes other reform proposals that may sound technical, such as how orders for costs should be made, or when arbitration could be used. Together, these proposals could do a lot to reduce the cost of access to justice, and to deter bad behaviour by some litigants and a minority of family lawyers.

The ALRC’s report offers a clear and coherent way forward for the government. It is worthy of the most careful consideration by all politicians concerned about improving the system.

– ref. New report charts future of the family law system – http://theconversation.com/new-report-charts-future-of-the-family-law-system-115238

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alister Graham, Professor of Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology

The first picture of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy shows how we have, in a sense, observed the invisible.

The ghostly image is a radio intensity map of the glowing plasma behind, and therefore silhouetting, the black hole’s “event horizon” — the spherical cloak of invisibility around a black hole from which not even light can escape.

The radio “photograph” was obtained by an international collaboration involving more than 200 scientists and engineers who linked some of the world’s most capable radio telescopes to effectively see the supermassive black hole in the galaxy known as M87.

Read more: First black hole photo confirms Einstein’s theory of relativity

So how on Earth did we get to this point?

From ‘dark stars’

It was the English astronomer John Michell who in 1783 first formulated the idea of “dark stars” so incredibly dense that their gravity would be impossible to run from — even if you happened to be a photon able to move at the speed of light.

Things have come a long way since that pioneering insight.

In January this year, astronomers published an image of the emission coming from the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, the region immediately surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Impressively, that image had detail on scales down to just nine times the size of the black hole’s event horizon.

Now, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has succeeded in resolving the event horizon around the supermassive black hole in M87, a relatively nearby galaxy from which light takes 55 million light years to reach us, due to its distance.

Astronomical figures

Astronomical objects come with astronomical figures, and this target is no exception.

M87’s black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our Sun, which itself is one-third of a million times the mass of the Earth. Its event horizon has a radius of roughly 20 billion kilometres, more than three times the distance Pluto is from our Sun.

It is, however, far away, and the incredible engineering feat required to see such a target is akin to trying to observe an object 1mm in size from a distance of 13,000km.

This Nobel Prize-worthy result is, of course, no accidental discovery, but a measurement built on generations of insight and breakthrough.

Predictions without observation

In the early 1900s, considerable progress occurred after Albert Einstein developed his theories of relativity. These enduring equations link space and time, and dictate the motion of matter which in turn dictates the gravitational fields and waves within spacetime.

Soon after, in 1916, astronomers Karl Schwarzschild and Johannes Droste independently realised that Einstein’s equations gave rise to solutions containing a “mathematical singularity”, an indivisible point of zero volume and infinite mass.

Studying the evolution of stars in the 1920s and 1930s, nuclear physicists reached the seemingly unavoidable conclusion that if massive enough, certain stars would end their lives in a catastrophic gravitational collapse resulting in a singularity and the creation of a “frozen star”.

This term reflected the bizarre relative nature of time in Einstein’s theory. At the event horizon, the infamous boundary of no return surrounding such a collapsed star, time will appear to freeze for an external observer.

While advances in the field of quantum mechanics replaced the notion of a singularity with an equally bewildering but finite quantum dot, the actual surface, and interior, of black holes remains an active area of research today.
While our galaxy may contain millions of John Michell’s stellar-mass black holes — of which we know the whereabouts of a dozen or so — their event horizons are too small to observe.

For example, if our Sun were to collapse down to a black hole, the radius of its event horizon would be just 3km. But the collision of stellar-mass black holes in other galaxies was famously detected using gravitational waves.

Looking for something supermassive

The EHT’s targets are therefore related to the supermassive black holes located at the centres of galaxies. The term black hole actually only came into use in the mid- to late 1960s when astronomers began to suspect that truly massive “dark stars” powered the highly active nuclei of certain galaxies.

Numerous theories abound for the formation of these particularly massive black holes. Despite the name, black holes are objects, rather than holes in the fabric of spacetime.

In 1972, Robert Sanders and Thomas Lowinger calculated that a dense mass equal to about one million solar masses resides at the centre of our galaxy.

By 1978, Wallace Sargent and colleagues had determined that a dense mass five billion times the mass of our Sun lies at the centre of the nearby galaxy M87.

But these masses, slightly revised since then, might have simply been a dense swarm of planets and dead stars.

In 1995, the existence of black holes was confirmed observationally by Makoto Miyoshi and colleagues. Using radio interferometry, they detected a mass at the centre of the galaxy M106, within a volume so small that it could only be, or soon would become, a black hole.

Read more: Sizes matters for black hole formation, but there’s something missing in the middle ground

Today, around 130 such supermassive black holes at the centres of nearby galaxies have had their masses directly measured from the orbital velocities and distances of stars and gas circling the black holes, but not yet on a death spiral into the central gravitational compactor.

Despite the increased sample, our Milky Way and M87 still have the largest event horizons as seen from Earth, which is why the international team pursued these two targets.

The shadowy silhouette of the black hole in M87 is indeed an astonishing scientific image. While black holes can apparently stop time, it should be acknowledged that the predictive power of science, when coupled with human imagination, ingenuity, and determination, is also a remarkable force of nature.

– ref. Observing the invisible: the long journey to the first image of a black hole – http://theconversation.com/observing-the-invisible-the-long-journey-to-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole-115064

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

The choice for voters at the 2019 federal election, called by Scott Morrison on Sunday for 18 May, will in an important respect be exactly the same as every other election held since 1910. Voters get to choose which of two sides next gets to run the country.

Beyond that basic similarity, Australian federal elections fall into two types: those in which the government is returned, and those in which the government is defeated.

The former is much more common. Governments have been returned at general elections 31 times since federation, compared with just a dozen changes of government (I’ve included the peculiar case of the dismissal in 1975 as a change of government, although it technically was not). When an opposition challenges a government at the polls, it’s battling the weight of history.

Read more: A Shorten government could shift the country on important issues and show a little spunk

Those elections that see a change in government are often thought of as the most significant. Paul Keating has been credited with saying that if you change the government, you change the country. But it’s also true that you can change the country by returning a government.

In 2016, electors changed the country when they refused to give Malcolm Turnbull the ringing endorsement he craved. Instead, they offered the slimmest of majorities, thereby delivering him more completely into the hands of his party’s right wing and the National Party. His prime ministership never recovered and he was toppled before the end of his term.

In 1987, Australian voters also changed the country by returning the Hawke government. In doing so, they postponed a Howard prime ministership by almost a decade, and ensured policies that were still contentious in 1987 – such as Medicare – would survive the opposition of the free-marketeers in the Liberal Party. The combination of economic rationalism and social protection that the Hawke government had pursued since 1983 would survive because electors decided they were unwilling to support a more bracing conservatism.

The return of Keating in 1993 had similar effects. The rejection of the Liberals’ Fightback! manifesto did not end the possibility of a goods and services tax. But it did ensure that when the Coalition returned to office in 1996, it was reconciled to universal health insurance and a social safety net, however reluctantly. When Howard sought to move beyond the informal compact with voters he established in 1996 by introducing radical industrial relations reform via WorkChoices, he was promptly despatched.

Another way of classifying elections might be to divide them between contests in which the parties seem to be offering distinct alternatives, and those in which they converge even as they rip each other apart in an attempt to manufacture difference.

This is a fuzzy distinction that often requires a closer knowledge of policy than most voters possess. It is also the case that Australia’s system of compulsory voting motivates parties to appeal to the centre instead of making more extreme pitches to mobilise their “base”, as we see in the United States.

That process of convergence is easy enough to observe at this election. Bernard Keane has recently pointed out that, in its economic policy, the Morrison government “has been more Labor than Liberal”, adding: “Take the name off the cover, and you’d be hard pressed to work out just which side of politics had produced it.”

Keane has a point, of course, but there are also policy differences: on taxation, on negative gearing, and on franking credits for retirees. The Labor Party is worrying over intergenerational inequality, and issues such as housing affordability and wages, in the ways the Coalition is not. And there are significant differences over energy and the environment.

The point here is that the times have changed since the heyday of neoliberalism under Hawke, Keating and Howard. Voters have made it clear they want governments to do something about inequality, and they are unable to accept that the operations of the market and the interests of the public amount to the same thing.

In this respect, the 2019 contest may well be thought of as Australia’s first post-GFC election. Of course, this is not literally so: we’ve had three. But in another sense, it seems to me to be true; the GFC has now caught up with us. That was not the case while the China boom continued, and while enough people believed the mining lobby when it told them any government proposing to kill the goose that laid the iron-ore egg was unfit for office.

Read more: The end of uncertainty? How the 2019 federal election might bring stability at last to Australian politics

A temporary rise in commodity prices has provided the basis of a spending free-for-all in which both government and opposition have joined, each aimed at buying an election victory. But no one seriously imagines that any temporary budget improvement represents a long-run trend in Australia’s economic circumstances. In line with global developments, for the foreseeable future we are likely to experience lower rates of economic growth than those to which we have been accustomed.

Australian voters are also now much more preoccupied with how the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s, whatever it has achieved in the past, now works against their interests. They are concerned about their flat wages and rising cost of living. They demand that governments make the wealthy contribute a fair share to meeting the tax burden. They are impatient with what they see as the greed and amorality of big business and big government. And they are less tolerant than a generation ago of rising inequality.

But above all, they really dislike politicians. This is not new – it was there even in colonial times – but it is potent and growing. The Australian National University’s Australian Election Study revealed that the 1996 and 2007 elections – each of which saw a change of government – coincided with a rise in political trust and satisfaction with democracy. The 2013 change-of-government election did not. At the 2016 election, trust fell to alarming proportions.

It may well be that this number – which Antony Green’s hardworking computer will not spit out on election night – is really the one to watch once the dust settles on the 2019 election.

– ref. As election 2019 kicks off, the only certainty is a cranky and mistrustful electorate – http://theconversation.com/as-election-2019-kicks-off-the-only-certainty-is-a-cranky-and-mistrustful-electorate-113659

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

Scott Morrison has called the election for May 18.

After returning from Melbourne to Canberra late Wednesday night, Morrison visited the Governor-General Peter Cosgrove at 7 am on Thursday.

Following the redistribution, the government goes into the election with a notional 73 seats; Labor has 72. The winner needs 76 for a majority in the new House of Representatives, which has 151 members, one more than formerly.

The election is also for half the Senate.

Labor starts the campaign as favourite, having had a long-term consistent lead in the polls.

The campaign itself – which will be interrupted by Easter and Anzac Day – will be absolutely vital for the Coalition’s chance of clinging onto power, given it is starting from behind.

This week’s Newspoll has Labor leading 52-48% on the two-party vote. The government got a small bounce in that poll after a well-received budget last week.

The key battleground states will be Victoria – where the removal of Malcolm Turnbull went down badly and the government has a number of seats at risk – and Queensland, with its many Coalition marginal seats. Western Australia will also be important.

The Coalition will rely heavily on scare campaigns against Labor policies on negative gearing, changes to franking credit arrangements, and climate change, as well as painting the ALP as a high-taxing party.

The extensive use of social media will be a feature of this campaign.

Late Wednesday Morrison posted a video featuring his family, “My vision for Australia”, defining the election as about Australia’s direction over the next decade.

“The real question is, is what country do you want to live in for the next 10 years,” he says in the video, referring to “the choices my girls will have”.

“See, the decisions you make in one term of government last for a decade or more. So it isn’t just about the next three years – it is about, what does the next decade look like?”.

“You change the government, you change the course of the country – and it takes a long time to get it back on track”.

The formal start of the campaign follows a post-budget week in which the government took advantage of incumbency with extensive publicly-funded advertising of its programs.

The government has also made a large number of last-minute appointments to a range of government boards and public institutions, the last of them on Wednesday night. Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen said on Wednesday Labor would examine these appointments and reserved the right to reject them.

Once the election is called the government goes into caretaker mode in which the convention is that major decisions are not taken nor appointments made.

May 18 was the last date for the Australian Electoral Commission to conveniently complete counting before the July 1 start of the new Senate’s term – although earlier there was speculation that the date might be pushed out by Morrison to May 25.

This election sees a number of high profile independents running in heartland Liberal seats.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is under intense pressure from Zali Steggall in his Sydney electorate of Warringah.

In the Victorian seat of Flinders, Julia Banks, the member for Chisholm who defected from the Liberals to join the crossbench last year, is challenging Health Minister Greg Hunt. Labor is given a strong chance in the seat.

– ref. Morrison visits Governor-General for a May 18 election – http://theconversation.com/morrison-visits-governor-general-for-a-may-18-election-115290

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Economou, Senior Lecturer, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University

We now know that the next federal election will take place on May 18. To guide you through the campaign, 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.

Victoria

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

For the first time in many contests, Victoria is shaping up as a crucial battleground in the 2019 federal election.

Normally there are few marginal seats in Victoria that involve a contest between Labor and the Liberal Party. In recent times, there’s been more interest in Labor’s battle with the Greens in the inner-city seat of Melbourne, and the election of the independent Cathy McGowan in the rural seat of Indi (McGowan will not be re-contesting this seat in 2019).

If the Victorian state election held in November 2018 is any guide, the historical pattern where few marginal seats change hands will be broken. Labor could be on the verge of a landslide in Victoria.

Even before a vote has been cast, the 2018 federal redistribution has already created a new Labor seat in Melbourne’s suburban north-west – to be called “Fraser” – and the previously Liberal seat of Dunkley is now notionally Labor.

If the anti-Liberal swing that occurred in the state election was replicated in the federal contest, other Liberal seats would also fall. In the 2016 federal election, Labor won a two party vote of 51.8%. In the 2018 state election, Labor’s statewide two party vote was 57.3% – a difference of 5.5 percentage points.

If we see a similar swing in the federal election, Labor would gain Chisholm, LaTrobe, Casey and McEwen, with Deakin and possibly Flinders also being won.

There was more bad news for the Coalition out of the 2018 state election. The state district of Mildura in Victoria’s rural far north-west, previously held by the National Party, was won by independent Ali Cupper. Mildura comprises about half of the federal seat of Mallee, whose sitting member, Andrew Broad, has since resigned over an internet sex scandal. This formerly safe National seat is now clearly vulnerable – particularly to a high profile local independent.

In the half-senate election, meanwhile, arguably the most significant contest will involve the Derryn Hinch Justice Party. In all likelihood, Labor will win two seats, the Greens will secure one seat, and the joint Liberal-National ticket ought to secure two seats. The final seat will be battled over by the Coalition and a host of minor parties, of which the Hinch party will be the most prominent. Indeed, Derryn Hinch himself is up for re-election and this may well be reason enough for the Hinch Justice Party to prevail.

New South Wales

Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra

Most political analysts argue that the forthcoming federal election will be won or lost in Queensland. While there may be more marginal seats in contention in that state, there are a number of ongoing issues which play out both nationally and in NSW which might influence the election result.

The first is the tension between conservative and moderate Liberals. This tension underpins the challenge by independent Liberal Zali Steggall to former PM Tony Abbott in the Sydney seat of Warringah. The contest also highlights election funding. Steggall is receiving support from Get Up!, which has targeted “hard right” Liberals Abbott and Dutton. Abbott holds his seat by 11%, but in 2016 this result was achieved against challenges from Labor and the Greens and not such a strong, local candidate from the right.

Independent Zali Steggall is challenging former prime minister Tony Abbott in the Sydney seat of Warringah. AAP/PETER RAE

A second issue relates to the poor performance of the Nationals in the recent NSW elections, when many traditional National voters switched their votes to independents or to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party. This suggests that the regional seat of Cowper might now become more marginal, especially since the Nationals’ Luke Hartsuyker is not recontesting. Independent Rob Oakeshott is trying for a second time to win, although he will need a swing of more than 4.6%.

Third, many voters have been angered by the overthrow of sitting prime ministers and in Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth showed this anger by preferring independent Liberal Kerryn Phelps over the endorsed Liberal candidate, Dave Sharma. Much interest now focuses on whether Phelps’ vote will evaporate as anger wanes. Sharma is a strong candidate but Phelps has made a significant contribution to parliament, especially in sponsoring the “medevac” legislation.

There are few marginal seats in NSW that might be exposed by a swing away from the government, but in Gilmore, retiring Liberal Ann Sudmalis won in 2016 by just 1,503 votes. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has intervened by making a “captain’s call” in nominating former Labor President Warren Mundine, so this seat is likely to be close. Other marginal seats in NSW include Robertson and Banks held by the government by less than 2%, and the Labor-held seat of Paterson.

Queensland

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

Queensland is a Liberal National stronghold. At the last federal election, the Coalition picked up 21 of 30 Queensland seats. The Australian Labor Party picked up eight seats, and Katter’s Australian Party was re-elected in the seat of Kennedy. Labor’s win over the Coalition in Herbert in North Queensland gave them their only Queensland seat outside of the state’s metropolitan area.

Queensland’s population is concentrated along the southeast corridor that stretches from Brisbane to Ipswich and Toowoomba, so funding allocations are a divisive issue in regional and rural Queensland. The concentration of much of the state’s infrastructure into one corner has seen the minor parties – Katter’s Australian Party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party – set up offices in Townsville CBD in recent years. The message is clear, vote for them and they will look after the North’s interest.

With Labor hanging onto Herbert by a mere 37 votes, the candidate with local interests will be key. The first woman to hold Herbert, incumbent Cathy O’Toole, is a born and bred Townsvillian. She will face the Coalition’s Philip Thompson – last year’s Queensland Young Australian of the year. While the two locals battle it out, the minor parties will be the ones to watch.

Labor Member for Herbert Cathy O’Toole speaking at an event with opposition leader Bill Shorten. AAP/MICHAEL CHAMBERS

Katter’s Australian Party, Palmer’s United Australia Party, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will be in a three-way battle for preference votes. One Nation benefited from Clive Palmer’s absence from the 2016 election, picking up a 13% swing in the northern suburb of Bluewater (in the seat of Herbert). This year the spoils will need to be split.

For the Greens, the Adani coalmine and Great Barrier Reef will be key issues. National and local support from Stop Adani and GetUp! Australia’s campaign will take a local concerns to the national level. GetUp! also have their sight on another seat: the minister for home affairs Peter Dutton’s electorate of Dickson.

Dutton has a stronger majority than Herbert’s Cathy O’Toole, but he too is a high profile scalp. Unlike O’Toole, Dutton has held the seat for nearly two decades. Over the past 18 years, the Coalition under Dutton has seen their majority dwindle with a margin of just 1.7% in 2016. With a 5.1% swing away from the Coalition in favour of Labor at the last election, Labor candidate Ali France will be a strong contender.

Whatever happens on polling day, Queenslanders will probably stay with form, and vote with the Coalition. Whether the Coalition will secure more than 21 seats will depend on its local focus on jobs, the environment and who can close the divide between the metropolitan south and the rest of Queensland.

Western Australia

Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics at Murdoch University

Until budget night, the GST issue in Western Australia looked as if it had gone away – finally. West Australian folk are as sick of it as everyone else.

Scott Morrison’s government committed to a GST top-up for Western Australia and introduced a floor into the system that will mean that Western Australians won’t be punished as much for not having poker machines outside casinos. Last night’s budget and a A$1 billion dollar shortfall for Western Australia means that the issue might come back.

The point about the ongoing resentment toward the GST split is that it was, and is, a manifestation of the perennial complaint of West Australians: that, apart from the income generated from resources, no one in Canberra cares about Western Australia.

While the GST short-fall affects all states, Labor will work hard to get WA voters to believe that the latest GST problem is another sign that the Liberals don’t care about us. That’s federal politicking in Western Australia.

And Canberra has really cared lately. Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, brought his shadow cabinet to Western Australia two weeks ago to reassure us that a Labor government would really care, and will spend billions on infrastructure and other projects in the state. Last week Scott Morrison came to announce that a Liberal-National government would spend another A$1.6 billion on roads and rail in addition the A$4.7 billion WA got for its GST top-up.

Western Australia Treasurer Ben Wyatt, like everyone else, sees the recent visits and promises and the budget as signs that the major parties are very interested in Western Australian seats. Well, some seats. For the Liberals it’s Cowan and Perth. For Labor it’s Hasluck, Pearce, Swan, Stirling and Canning.

Pearce is particularly interesting because it is Western Australia star Liberal, Christian Porter’s, seat. But there’s always the matter of Durack and O’Connor being held by the Liberals when they should be National Party seats. They’re huge regional seats that the Nationals hoped to win (Durack) or win back (O’Connor) in the last election but didn’t.

South Australia

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

South Australia is rarely a game-changer in Australian federal elections, but there are some key clashes taking place in the state. While the issue of who forms government might not be decided in the driest state in the country, a few electoral contests will tell us a good deal about the state of the parties, and the mood of the electorate.

The most marginal seat in SA is Boothby, with conservative Liberal Nicolle Flint sitting on a nominal lead of 2.8%. If the voters are keen to punish the Liberals, then Flint may not be able to capitalise on first term incumbency. Critically, GetUp! have targeted Flint, and will be hopeful after their success in Tasmania last time round.

There are other key seats, far less marginal than Boothby, that could also tell us something about the extent of voter dissatisfaction with the Morrison government. In the seat of Sturt, currently held by the ubiquitous, but now retiring Christopher Pyne, the Liberals only have a nominal margin of 5.8%. Pyne has not left the preselected James Stevens much time to gain name recognition in the constituency. Stevens is SA Premier Steven Marshall’s former chief of staff.

In other circumstances, the Liberals might hope to claw back the seat of Mayo – currently held by the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie. Sharkie was caught up in the citizenship crisis, and beat Georgina Downer in a byelection. Downer is back again, drawing on some significant support, and will hope that she can make better inroads than her byelection effort.

Economically, South Australians will be concerned that the state is treading water. Energy, climate breakdown, cost of living concerns, and also the dead fish of the Menindee are key issues preoccupying the SA electorate.

Given the Liberal leadership crisis, the voters may well be unforgiving.

Tasmania

Richard Eccleston, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania

Michael Lester, researcher and PhD student at the Institute for the Study of Social Change.

Tasmania has emerged as an electoral battleground in the early “faux” election campaign. There have been multiple visits by Coalition and Labor frontbenchers with a long list of project funding announcements and promises.

And the reason for that is clear. Labor holds four of the state’s five House of Representative seats, but only one is classified as “safe” following an electoral redistribution in 2017. The other seat – the Hobart-based seat of Clark (formerly Denison) – is held by popular independent Andrew Wilkie.

For each seat to change hands after the redistribution, Bass nominally would require a swing of 5.4%, Braddon just 1.7% (although there has since been a byelection in that seat), and Lyons, 3.8%. Franklin, currently held by Shadow Minister for Ageing and Mental Health Julie Collins, would require a swing of 10.7% and is considered a safe Labor seat, even in these volatile times.

An opinion poll on federal voting intentions conducted by local pollster EMRS last December put Labor on 40% statewide, up from 37.9% at the 2016 election. The Liberals were down from 35.4% to 33%, and the Greens were on 11%.

This Tasmanian poll, combined with the fact that the Coalition continue to trail Labor nationally, suggests that the Liberals have little chance of regaining any of the three seats (Bass, Braddon and Lyons) they lost to Labor back in 2016. The lack of major new announcements for Tasmania in the budget also suggests that government strategists are more focused on holding ground on the mainland than winning back lost territory in Tasmania.

But, as we will explain in our seat-by seat coverage over the course of the campaign, the Liberals have endorsed new candidates in these three key seats. All Tasmanian politics is local, so personalities matter. Whether these fresh faces are enough to cause an upset or two come May remains to be seen.

– ref. Federal election 2019: state of the states – http://theconversation.com/federal-election-2019-state-of-the-states-114982

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darren Curnoe, Associate Professor and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of New South Wales, UNSW

The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines, reported today in Nature, will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists.

Some will greet the publication with wild enthusiasm, believing it confirms their own views about our evolutionary past. Others will howl angrily, believing the declaration goes way too far with too little evidence.

Me, I sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of opinions. I’ve long promoted a pluralist view of human evolution and do see the hominin fossil record as strongly suggesting high species diversity.

Read more: Fresh clues to the life and times of the Denisovans, a little-known ancient group of humans

There is no reason to expect human evolution to have been any different to the evolution of other animals where, for example, among our close primate relatives, diversity was and often continues to be the rule.

At the same time, each and every new discovery has to stack up and must be judged on its merits, on the basis of the evidence presented. We can’t just accept the interpretation of a new discovery because it suits our strongly held views.

But we need also to keep a cool head, because the naming of any new species is still a scientific hypothesis, ripe for testing and far from set in stone, even if published in the esteemed pages of a journal like Nature.

The Philippine find

So, just what have they found? It’s dubbed Homo luzonensis, after the Philippines’ main island of Luzon, where it was recovered during excavations of Callao Cave in 2007, 2011 and 2015.

This new hominin is represented by a handful of heavily worn adult teeth from one or two individuals, one foot and two toe bones, two finger bones, and the fragment of the shaft of a juvenile thigh bone.

Proximal foot phalanx of a Homo luzonensis individual known as CCH4, showing the longitudinal curvature of the bone. Callao Cave Archaeology Project (Florent Détroit)

Its anatomy is argued to be a peculiar mix of features normally found in living humans, Homo erectus, the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) and Australopithecus.

The similarities to Australopithecus are especially intriguing when one ponders for a moment on just who the australopiths actually were. A famous example is “Lucy” who belonged to Australopithecus afarensis living in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Another is Australopithecus sediba, from a cave in South Africa and found just a decade ago.

These and the many other Australopithecus species (and there are at least six described) lived only in sub-Saharan Africa, between about 2 million and 5 million years ago.

Members of Australopithecus were among the earliest hominins who gave rise to the human genus Homo. This makes them one of our own evolutionary ancestors. Yet, despite their definite bipedalism, they also seem to have spent much of their time climbing in trees, perhaps feeding, sleeping and escaping predators.

They were typically around 30-50kg, stood 1-1.5 metres tall, and had brain sizes around one-third the size of our own. They may have produced and used crude stone tools, but the evidence remains unclear. In a sense, they would have looked a lot like chimpanzees but with smaller faces and front teeth and with upright bodies.

Is it a new species?

The statistical comparisons made in the newly published research, led by Florent Détroit of the Musée de l’Homme, highlight a rather odd assortment of features in Homo luzonensis.

But the all-important type (or holotype) specimen, referred to as fossil CCH6, comprises just a few teeth from the upper jaw, all of which are rather heavily worn down or broken.

Right upper teeth of the individual CCH6. Callao Cave Archaeology Project (Florent Détroit)

There’s not a lot of anatomy preserved here, and this leaves me feeling the case for this new species is a little flimsy.

How astonishing would it be that something resembling Australopithecus would have survived a long, long, way from the African Rift Valley as recently as 50,000 years ago?

Well, as it turns out, this is precisely the situation with the diminutive Homo floresiensis from Flores in eastern Indonesia, most recently dated between 60,000 and 100,000 years old.

Again, while the Hobbit might have prepared us philosophically for yet more radical discoveries, the case for Homo luzonensis needs to be judged solely on its merits.

I think I’d prefer to leave the fossil in what Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey used to call the “suspense account” until we have a lot more evidence.

Dating the fossil finds

The thing that bugs me the most about the new research is the seemingly poor understanding of the age of Homo luzonensis. There’s not much new evidence presented here about the dating of the site or the fossils themselves, and the work that has been done previously needs to be interpreted with a good deal of caution.

The method used to date the actual fossils (called Uranium-series or U/Th Dating) can be notoriously unreliable when dating bones and teeth, and frankly, some of my colleagues simply don’t accept that it’s up to the task.

Read more: Poor health in Aboriginal children after European colonisation revealed in their skeletal remains

This is because bones and teeth can lose old uranium or take up new uranium when buried in sediments, like those contained in a cave, and there’s no way of really knowing if this has happened in the past. The method assumes that uranium was taken up just once in the past and then decayed giving us a radioactive clock but this is probably not the case in reality.

It would be usual practice to check the dating of a site with different methods and using various materials (charcoal, sediment, bone, cave flowstone, and so on) and there’s no explanation provided why this hasn’t been done for Callao Cave and Homo luzonensis, or if it has, how the crosschecks compared?

I think the best we can say is that the fossils would seem to be older than 50,000 years, but just how much older is anyone’s guess. They could be 55,000 years old or 550,000 years old, and this would make a very real difference in terms of their importance and place in human evolution.

Still, if Détroit and his team are right about Homo luzonensis, the new discovery would add to a growing picture of extinct human diversity in Southeast Asia, which we simply couldn’t have imagined a decade or two ago.

– ref. How much evidence is enough to declare a new species of human from a Philippines cave site? – http://theconversation.com/how-much-evidence-is-enough-to-declare-a-new-species-of-human-from-a-philippines-cave-site-115139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Watson-Lynn, Head of Programs, Perth USAsia Centre, University of Western Australia

The world’s largest democratic election is set to take place in India. Voting will take place in seven phases from April 11 to May 19, and the result will be announced May 23.

An extraordinary 900 million people are eligible to vote, 130 million for the first time. Not only is it the “largest democratic exercise” in history, it is among world’s most expensive. In 2014, the Lok Sabha (lower house) elections cost the Election Commission of India half a billion US dollars.

Several key issues are emerging in this election that will prove decisive in voter decision-making behaviour. Unsurprisingly, economic development is front and centre. Despite having one of the world’s highest economic growth rates, growth slowed to 6.4% in the final quarter of 2018, down from a peak of 8.2% in mid-2018.

Unemployment rates are at their highest since the 1970s, as the economy struggles to create jobs for rural migrants moving to cities and a large youth cohort now entering the labour market. Unemployment and inflation, which directly affect household incomes, are widely seen as the biggest concerns for Indians in the lead up to the election.

Read more: India’s WhatsApp election: political parties risk undermining democracy with technology

The spread of “fake news” and misinformation is also an important electoral complication. WhatsApp in India is tackling the spread of misinformation through a verification centre called Checkpoint. Indian users of the Facebook owned social networking service, of which there is 200 million, can send pictures, messages, and videos to be fact-checked.

This comes as Facebook removed hundreds of pages that shared misleading content about India and Pakistan following a suicide bombing in Kashmir. How to deal with these increasing tensions between India and Pakistan are a key feature of the political campaign.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers a speech during a mass election campaign. PIYAL ADHIKARY/AAP

How India’s electoral system works

India has a Westminster system of government, a legacy of the British Raj. In the Lok Sabha (lower house) there are 543 seats up for grabs. An additional two seats for the Anglo-Indian community are nominated by the president. These 545 seats will form the 17th Lok Sabha. The Prime Minister is selected from the members of the largest party or coalition.

There is no direct election for the Rajya Sabha (upper house). Rather, the current 233 Rajya Sabha members are elected by the Legislative Assembly in each of the states and the two union territories, with an additional 12 members nominated by the president. The Rajya Sabha may have up to 250 members, but it doesn’t reach this quota at present.

Read more: Kashmir: India and Pakistan’s escalating conflict will benefit Narendra Modi ahead of elections

Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi

There are two distinct personalities leading the major parties in this election. Both have taken advantage of the Representation of the People Act 1951 during their career, which allows candidates to contest an election from two seats – what the Wall Street Journal calls the “political equivalent of spread betting”.

Current Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – a Hindu nationalist party. Modi won both of the seats he nominated for in the 2014 elections, Vadodara in his home state of Gujarat, and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. He chose the seat of Varanasi and will recontest this seat in 2019. It is unknown whether he will contest a second seat, but there is speculation he might in the south of the country.

Leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, leads the secular Indian National Congress (Congress). Gandhi has already declared that he will contest two seats in 2019, Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, as well as Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala.

Gandhi is latest generation of Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, which has played a decisive role in Indian politics since independence in 1947. In keeping with family tradition, Gandhi recently appointed his sister Priyanka Gandhi as the All India Congress Committee secretary responsible for Uttar Pradesh. The All India Congress Committee is responsible for the Congress’ decision making.

Rahul Gandhi speaks during a political rally that was held in March. SANJAY BAID/AAP

Uttar Pradesh is the primary battleground

It’s no coincidence that both Modi and Gandhi will contest seats in Uttar Pradesh. Commentators often describe Uttar Pradesh as “the battleground state” of Indian elections. With a population size of roughly 230 million people, Uttar Pradesh sends more members to the Lok Sabha than any other state; it holds 80 seats, followed by Maharashtra (48), West Bengal (42) and Bihar (40).

The BJP won the 2014 election with an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. The only time a party won by a larger majority was in 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress to win 78% of seats. But an absolute majority is more of an anomaly than the norm in recent Indian electoral history.

Read more: India: government continues to suppress citizens’ right to information ahead of election

This means that in 2019, both the major parties are courting and negotiating with minor parties. Reports on the status of party alliances have the BJP performing strongly with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), while Congress is struggling to build their opposition coalition.

It’s hard to predict whether Modi or Gandhi will emerge victorious in the election. Opinion polls are presently split. Modi and the BJP benefit from the advantages of incumbency, but recent deterioration in economic performance poses an opportunity for opposition parties.

Although it’s shaping up more like elections of the past, where the result will depend on negotiating party alliances, the 2019 Lok Sabha elections will still go down in history as the world’s biggest election.

– ref. India’s elections will be the largest in world history – http://theconversation.com/indias-elections-will-be-the-largest-in-world-history-114968

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Nielsen, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Monash Addiction Research Centre, Monash University

Drug-related deaths in Australia have almost doubled over the past ten years, in large part because of the increased use of opioids. In 2016, middle aged people using combinations of prescription drugs were the most likely to die a drug-related death.

Prescription monitoring aims to tackle this issue by allowing health professionals who are prescribing or dispensing high-risk medicines to see a patient’s prescription history.

This may help a doctor to make decisions about a patient’s care, or a pharmacist to decide if they should dispense certain medicines to a patient; with the aim of reducing harm.

Read more: Making more drugs available ‘over the counter’ would be a win for the public and the health care system

But as a new prescription monitoring program, SafeScript, is rolled out across Victoria, we need to tread cautiously for a couple of reasons.

First, our health professionals and systems will need to be properly equipped to deal with the volume of people who will be identified by this program as needing support.

And second, evidence from the United States tells us restricting access to prescription drugs may drive people towards using illicit drugs instead.

What is SafeScript?

Right now SafeScript is optional for doctors and pharmacists to sign up to, but it will become mandatory in April 2020.

The system automatically captures a range of high-risk medicines, such as strong pain medicines, and medicines for anxiety and sleep. These medicines are generally those commonly implicated in drug-related deaths.

Tasmanian health-care providers have had access to voluntary prescription monitoring since 2012. But SafeScript will be the first mandatory real-time prescription monitoring system in Australia.

Pharmacists can also use the SafeScript software. From shutterstock.com

When a health-care professional goes to prescribe or dispense a listed high-risk medicine, they will see a green, amber or red pop-up notification.

They will be alerted to risk factors such as a patient taking higher doses of medicines, risky combinations of medicines, or where a person may be seeing multiple prescribers for the same or similar medicines. In rare cases, they may be seeking more medicines than they need for themselves so they can supply them to others.

The software links the health-care providers to additional information including the patient’s prescription history. From there, it’s up to the health-care professional to use that information to inform their clinical decisions.

Read more: Fixing pain management could help us solve the opioid crisis

Anecdotal reports from health-care providers using the system suggest they are finding the information useful. After a six month trial starting in western Victoria, the system has already identified a few thousand “at risk” patients.

But the system is still in its very early stages, so we don’t yet have information about longer term, or patient specific outcomes, such as whether prescription drug-related harms are decreasing, or whether patients are receiving appropriate care when risks are identified.

What are the concerns?

Although the system identifies certain risky behaviours, it’s up to the health-care professional to assess whether the patient requires treatment for a substance use disorder, or if it is safe for a patient to continue to supply a high-risk medicine to them.

Typically, GPs and pharmacists are not confident talking about sensitive topics like substance use.

To address this, a number of voluntary training sessions are being run across the state to upskill health-care providers in having these difficult conversations.

A telephone hotline has also been established for GPs to seek clinical advice regarding patient care.

A doctor may choose to prescribe drug treatments, such as buprenorphine, for dependence to strong pain medicines. They may also decide to refer the patient to a pain service, or a drug treatment service.

But where there are likely to be a greater volume of patients referred to these services, there are also significant concerns around access.

When SafeScript identifies a patient who may be at risk, it’s up to the health professional to decide what to do. From shutterstock.com

In Australia, there is a need to double the capacity of alcohol and drug treatment services to meet current needs. This means if a referral is made, there may be delays in accessing care.

Referral to a pain service may be more appropriate for some patients, though waiting lists for these services can also delay access to care.

Further, in regional and rural areas where prescription drug problems are often higher, treatment access may be more limited.

Read more: How we can reduce dependency on opioid painkillers in rural and regional Australia

Could there be harms associated with prescription monitoring?

International experience and research with prescription monitoring has been inconclusive. A recent large review could not determine whether prescription monitoring programs decreased or increased fatal or non-fatal drug overdoses.

The review did however identify three studies in the United States that showed heroin overdoses increased after the implementation of prescription monitoring.

Read more: Not everyone who takes painkillers for fun is an addict; some have just found a different way to cope

We don’t know if we’ll see the same patterns in an Australian setting. But restrictions on access to prescription drugs may mean some people shift to using illicitly sourced drugs, and this could increase harms.

With the implementation of prescription monitoring, we need to increase capacity of both evidence-based treatment and harm reduction services. We know that drug treatment capacity does not meet current needs – and these needs are about to grow.

– ref. Prescription monitoring is here, but we need to tread carefully to avoid unintended harms – http://theconversation.com/prescription-monitoring-is-here-but-we-need-to-tread-carefully-to-avoid-unintended-harms-114969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pedro Fidelman, Senior research fellow, The University of Queensland

The Sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), the most comprehensive environmental assessment produced by the UN in five years, brought us both good and bad news.

The environment has continued to deteriorate since the first GEO-6 report in 1997, with potentially irreversible impacts if not effectively addressed. But pathways to significant change do exist, and a sustainable future is still possible.

Launched in March at the fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, the 700-page report involved nearly 200 global experts who collaborated over 18 months.

Read more: Climate action is the key to Australia achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

It covers, in detail, a range of topics, including air, biodiversity, oceans and coasts, land and freshwater, climate change, human health and energy.

And it assessed the state of the global environment, the effectiveness of policy responses, and possible pathways to achieve the environmental goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The good news

There is a fair bit of negative information in the GEO-6, which unfortunately reflects the overall state of environmental affairs globally. But it is not all doom and gloom, the GEO-6 has many positive, solution-oriented messages too.

The GEO-6 advises that pathways and approaches to systemic change exist, which must be scaled up quickly to steer the planet towards more sustainable futures.

Read more: Shorten’s climate policy would hit more big polluters harder and set electric car target

The considerable connections between environmental, social and economic policies can inform multiple goals. So policies addressing entire systems – such as food, energy and waste – are more likely to have beneficial impact.

For instance, reducing our use of fossil fuels leads to health benefits by decreasing outdoor air pollution responsible for premature deaths. And efforts to eliminate hunger (such as changes in agriculture production) can help address climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and chemical pollution.

With the window for action closing quickly, given the unprecedented rate of global environmental change, the GEO-6 is calling for more ambitious and innovative policy.

We need significant change leading us to decarbonisation, a circular economy, sustainable agriculture and food systems, and better adapting socio-economic systems to climate change.

The bad news

The GEO-6 warns the overall condition of the global environment continues to deteriorate, driven mainly by population growth, urbanisation, economic development, technological change and climate change.

Here’s what we’re dealing with:

• air pollution currently causes an estimated 6 to 7 million premature deaths annually
• we might be witnessing the sixth mass species extinction in the planet’s history
• 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean every year as a result of mismanagement of domestic waste in coastal areas
• warming ocean waters are leading to mass mortality of coral reefs across the world’s tropics
• 29% of all lands are degradation hotspots
• pathogen-polluted drinking water and inadequate sanitation cause approximately 1.4 million human deaths annually, with many millions more becoming ill.

UNEP graph on the relationship between planetary health and human health. Author provided (No reuse)

These and other issues reported in the GEO-6 will lead to ongoing and potentially irreversible impacts if they are not addressed effectively, and immediately.

Typically, environmental policy efforts are based on individual issues, like air pollution, or industry sectors. But this approach doesn’t address the complexity of contemporary environmental problems that require system-oriented efforts at large scales.

Under current policy scenarios, the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as other goals like the Paris Agreement, are unlikely to be achieved.

The GEO-6 calls for urgent, inclusive and sustained action by governments, business and society proportionate to the scale and pace of global environmental change.

What it means for Australia

In Australia, positive action is taking place at state and local levels of government, where support for more ambitious emissions targets is generally stronger than at the Australian government level.

And many sectors of society and business are shifting towards more sustainable practices. The booming uptake of rooftop solar and the development of large-scale renewable projects illustrates such a shift.

But when it comes to sustainable development policies at the national level, Australia lags behind most of the developed world, particularly in relation to energy and climate change policy.

Read more: Should Australia recognise the human right to a healthy environment?

We don’t yet have long-term certainty for support of the uptake of electric cars, the transition to renewables, the adoption of fuel efficiency standards, and limiting emissions from the manufacturing and resources industry.

Effective strategies to curb land clearing remains to be seen, and only recently Australia has incorporated principles of circular economy into the National Waste Policy.

These do not help Australia meet its agreed commitments under the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and associated Sustainable Development Goals.

With long-term environmental, socio-economic and political stability at stake, it is time for commitment, leadership and robust policies that can last beyond the three-year electoral cycle.

– ref. There’s a lot of bad news in the UN Global Environment Outlook, but a sustainable future is still possible – http://theconversation.com/theres-a-lot-of-bad-news-in-the-un-global-environment-outlook-but-a-sustainable-future-is-still-possible-115137

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Jackson, Education Policy Lead, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Early childhood education and care barely rated a mention in the lead-up to the 2016 federal election. But the mood has changed in Canberra.

In the lead-up to the May election, Labor has pledged $A1.75 billion to extend the current subsidy for four-year-olds to attend preschool to three-year-olds. This goes a bit further than the Coalition, which has pledged another year of funding for four-year-olds to attend preschool only.

There is mounting evidence that two years of quality preschool sets up a child for success throughout their education journey and life. A wealth of international research shows children who attend high-quality early childhood programs not only perform better in learning, but also in skills such as social competence, vocabulary and self-control. And these benefits are greatest for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This is backed by research into early brain development, which shows the importance of laying foundations for learning early in life, while children’s brains are most malleable. Economist James Heckman famously showed that investing in early learning and development has greater return on investment than addressing issues in later years.

Of course, investment in schools remains important to ensure early advantages don’t fade out over time, but a good start matters to maximise learning. Despite progress in early childhood reforms, Australia still doesn’t provide an adequate dose of quality early childhood education and care to all children. This election is a chance to focus policy attention back onto the benefits of early learning.

Read more: Research shows there are benefits from getting more three-year-olds into preschool

Why two years matters

Just over 90% of Australian children are participating in preschool in the year before school – when they are four years old. Now the challenge is to extend preschool participation to three-year-old children, so support for learning begins even earlier.

In Australia, a major 2017 review identified that funding two years of preschool would be the most effective early childhood reform the country could make.

Early childhood education is about more than just building blocks. Markus Spiske/Unsplash

In the United Kingdom, a large study that began in 1997 assessed more than 3,000 children at the age of three and followed them all the way up to 16. It found two or three years of quality preschool placed children nearly eight months ahead in their literacy at entry to school, compared to children with no preschool. At the age of 16, more months spent in preschool was associated with higher grades in English and maths.

But this isn’t just about reading and writing. Quality preschools run play-based learning programs in which children are encouraged to discover and explore. These play experiences provide opportunities for children to develop essential skills such as co-operation, concentration, problem-solving and self-control.

This sets up children for the more structured learning environments they will encounter in school.

Some Australian policymakers are acting on this evidence. Victoria, NSW and the ACT have committed to subsidising universal access to three-year-old preschool, coming into effect over the next decade. Interestingly, both Labor and Liberal governments have introduced these policies, indicating clear potential for cross-party support for two years of preschool.

Read more: Why Swedish early learning is so much better than Australia’s

Don’t forget the quality

For early childhood services to make a difference to children’s learning, they need to be high-quality. The key to this is interactions between educators and children – in which educators extend children’s thinking and language, and explore ideas together.

Interactions must also be warm and responsive. An Australian study that tracked 2,500 children found those who had attended early childhood services with strong emotional engagement did better at school than children who attended early childhood services where relationships were weaker.

Quality also includes programs that provide opportunities for children to explore in the natural environment, sensory play (like playdough or water), spaces for calm reflection, and activities that challenge children’s physical and cognitive development. Research shows experiencing such environments in early childhood services can deliver a range of cognitive, social and behaviour development benefits.

Quality early childhood programs should include opportunities for sensory play. from shutterstock.com

Australia’s National Quality Standard aims for early childhood services to achieve a consistent level of quality. But significant challenges remain in lifting standards throughout the sector. The Australian study of 2,500 children found the quality of support available for children’s learning remains especially low in low-income communities.

The major parties differ in their response to this challenge. The Coalition supported the National Quality Framework in principle, but is now pursuing savings in the costs of investment in early childhood sector reform. Labor has pledged to reinstate funding for the framework as part of its two years of preschool package.

Workforce challenges

Much of the quality of preschool depends on the ability of the almost 200,000 educators who work in Australian early childhood services to plan and deliver effective play-based learning programs and strong relationships with children and families.

Commitments to two years of preschool places have increased pressure on the supply of highly skilled early childhood educators. In response, both Victoria and NSW have committed to reducing tuition fees for students studying early childhood education. This is a great start, but a concerted national approach to workforce development is needed.

Professional development for existing educators is also among the major workforce development challenges across Australia.

Educators’ pay and conditions remain a significant issue in achieving a workforce of the scale and quality the early childhood policy agenda demands. Considerable work remains to break the link between educators’ pay and the costs of early childhood services that are passed on to families. This link currently means difficulties remunerating educators are greatest in Australia’s lowest-income communities – where skilled educators are needed the most.

Read more: Why Australia should invest in paying early childhood educators a liveable wage

One in five Australian children are not developmentally on track when they start school, with a widening gap between the most and least advantaged communities. Australia cannot afford to have that gap widen further.

Part of Australia’s commitment needs to be secure, ongoing funding for quality service provision, as we have for schools. We’re certainly not at that point yet, but as we head into a federal election campaign, we are much closer to bipartisan support for early learning than ever before.

– ref. Both major parties are finally talking about the importance of preschool – here’s why it matters – http://theconversation.com/both-major-parties-are-finally-talking-about-the-importance-of-preschool-heres-why-it-matters-114974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

Immigration policy will be a major issue in the 2019 federal election. We know this because immigration has featured significantly at every Australian election since the 2001 “children overboard” election.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson argued in their 2003 book, Dark Victory, that willingness to play the race card in relation to boat people was a decisive factor in John Howard’s election victory. For Tony Abbott, “Stop the boats” was a major campaign theme when the Coalition won back government in the 2013 election. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, rose to prominence as Abbott’s unyielding immigration minister who stopped the boats.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: the MV Tampa and the transformation of asylum-seeker policy

While the events of Christchurch may have cramped the opportunity for the Coalition to run hard on fear, promising to be tough on borders and tough on (Muslim) terrorism, the dog-whistle politics on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers will be there for those wanting to hear it.

For Labor these policy issues have been difficult. It was Kevin Rudd who as PM declared that those arriving by boat would never be settled in Australia, irrespective of the validity of their claims for protection under the UN Refugee Convention. Labor supported efforts to get children out of detention on Manus Island, but doesn’t want to give the conservatives too much space to convincingly advance a “Labor weak on border security” line.

Humanitarian intake is growing

The Coalition governments of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison have in fact increased Australia’s annual humanitarian intake significantly. The number has risen from just over 13,750 to more than 18,000 – though the government has not loudly broadcast this fact.

In addition, Abbott in 2015 announced a one-off intake of 12,000 Syrian conflict refugees. Most of them arrived in 2017, effectively doubling the annual refugee intake in that year.

Australia – and the refugees – coped well, demonstrating the nation’s capacity to significantly increase refugee intakes. Our research with newly arrived Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugee families suggests they are settling well in Australia, receiving a warm welcome from locals in the cities and regional centres. Employment and family reunification are their key worries.

Read more: Refugees are integrating just fine in regional Australia

Labor’s shadow immigration minister, Shayne Neumann, has flagged a new temporary sponsored visa for the parents of migrants. Unlike the current visa, it does not have a cap and it might assist refugees to get their parents to Australia.

Labor has announced it will increase the annual humanitarian intake of refugees to 27,000 by 2025. It will also abolish Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs). These visas provide boat arrivals who are found to be refugees the right to stay for only three years with work and study rights and access to Centrelink payments. As Labor argues, this places them “in a permanent state of limbo”.

The Coalition parties have not announced their policy intentions in relation to humanitarian intakes or the rights of asylum seekers, including those who arrived by boat.

At a time when Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton scans the horizon for new boat arrivals, record number of asylum seekers are arriving by plane under tourist visas. In 2013-14, there were 18,718 asylum applications, including 9,072 boat arrivals. This had increased to 27,931 asylum applications, with no boat arrivals, by 2017-18.

Department of Home Affairs

Each year the Australia government sets the permanent immigration targets. Until recently this was set at 190,00. In practice just 162,000 immigrants have been admitted over the past year or so.

A token cut and 2 new visas

In this context Prime Minister Morrison’s announcement that the permanent immigration target will be cut to 160,000 is really no change in immigration policy. There is nothing to see here if you dismiss the need to be loudly anti-immigration in the current populist political climate.

Read more: Government’s population plan is more about maximising ‘win-wins’ than cutting numbers

The announcement is linked to congestion-busting in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne. It is accompanied by the introduction of two new visa pathways – the Skilled Work Regional (Provisional) Visa and the Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional (Provisional) Visa – for skilled migrants to live and work in regional areas for five years.

These visas offer the carrot of permanent residency at the end of three years to attract new immigrants to regional Australia. In addition, the budget announced that scholarships to the tune of $94 million over four years would be available to domestic and international students who study there.

Read more: Settling migrants in regional areas will need more than a visa to succeed

Temporary migrants exploited

Most immigration policy debates centre on permanent immigration intakes, particularly of humanitarian immigrants and asylum seekers. Yet annual temporary migrant intakes – international students, working holidaymakers and temporary skilled workers – are three times greater than the permanent intake. Over 800,000 temporary migrants were in Australia in June 2018.

One key policy issue is the exploitation of temporary migrant workers. The Turnbull government abolished the 457 temporary skilled migration visa because of increasing reports of abuse and exploitation by employers.

One recent survey of 4,332 temporary migrant workers found “increasing evidence of widespread exploitation of temporary migrant workers, including wage theft”. Half of all temporary migrant workers may be underpaid. About one in three international students and backpackers earned $12 an hour or less – about half the minimum wage.

This issue goes not just to the ethics of maintaining a temporary migration program largely premised on migrant worker exploitation. It also resonates with Labor’s campaign for a living wage and the restoration of penalty rates for workers in response to the low rate of real wage growth in Australia, which constrains consumer demand.

Read more: Ultra low wage growth isn’t accidental. It is the intended outcome of government policies

The 2019-20 federal budget allocated extra funding to the Fair Work Ombudsman to bolster enforcement action against employers who exploit vulnerable workers and announced the National Labour Hire Registration Scheme to target rogue operators in the labour hire industry. However, the research suggests wage theft is widespread in the small business sector, a key target for tax relief in the budget. It is an area of immigration policy that requires considerably more resources and punch.

– ref. Dog whistles, regional visas and wage theft – immigration policy is again an election issue – http://theconversation.com/dog-whistles-regional-visas-and-wage-theft-immigration-policy-is-again-an-election-issue-113557

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Montague, Senior Lecturer/Program Director, masters program in human resources management, RMIT University

Over the next decade up to 40% of jobs could be replaced by automation. That’s according to a forecast from the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia.

Risk of job automation by country. In New Zealand, for instance, the median worker has 39% chance of their job being automated. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 202

Other estimates are less dire. A report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says only 14% of jobs across its member nations are “highly automatable”, though another 32% are likely to change significantly.

Despite this uncertainty about the exact number of human jobs that will disappear, it is certain the impacts of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) are potentially profound.

If the new jobs that emerge as a result are fewer and less rewarding than those lost, we face a period of social dislocation.

Yet there is little evidence of any strategic planning and forward thinking by Australia’s federal and state governments to minimise the potential downside. The recent federal budget, for example, was silent on this issue.

It is analogous to the lack of a strategic plan on climate change.

Read more: Your questions answered on artificial intelligence

Our concern about the policy vacuum is based on an extensive search on government websites, the media and budget speeches, which disturbingly yielded very little.

We think AI should be an election issue, because there is virtually no job that won’t be affected by AI-driven automation. Being ready for this technological and social revolution should be at the heart of any government’s economic and educational reform agenda.

Workers that never rest

The activities at which AI is expected to outperform humans by 2030 include translating languages, writing high-school essays and driving trucks. By mid-century it is expected AI could be capable of writing a bestselling books or performing surgery.

Researchers believe there is a 50% chance AI will outperform humans in all tasks in 45 years and that almost all current human jobs can be automated in 120 years.

Robotic farmhands in agriculture. www.shutterstock.com

The World Economic Forum may argue that AI and automation “is about empowering people, not the rise of the machines” but there are good reasons to think some people will lose out.

Read more: Careful how you treat today’s AI: it might take revenge in the future

Machines have many attractions to employers. They do not need rest, holidays or take sick leave. They will never complain about overtime or join a union.

A report published last month by management consultancy McKinsey Australia suggests, if proactive measures are not taken, the unemployment rate could increase by 2.5 percentage points, based on up to 46% of jobs being automated by 2030.

The industries likely to experience the greatest disruption are retail, administration and government, health and social assistance, construction, manufacturing, and accommodation and food services. Australia Statistics, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), ONED, BLS, Oxford Economics

Inequality will also increase, the report says. To what extent depends on “how much Australia steps up its efforts to retrain and redeploy its surplus service, administrative and manual workers”. Without large-scale retraining, Australia’s Gini coefficient (the standard measure of income inequality) could increase from 0.32 to 0.41.

Questions for policymakers

The stakes are high. Employment is so much more than just an income. A decent job provides purpose and dignity. It enables security, health and well-being. Joblessness hurts the individual, families and the wider community. If fewer people have work, and more people get paid less, the federal government will have to contend with falling income-tax revenue and rising welfare spending.

With intensifying global competition and rapid technological change, all governments need to be strategic. They need long-term policies to help business and workers gain the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to seize the opportunities and mitigate the threats.

Read more: Artificial intelligence can now emulate human behaviors – soon it will be dangerously good

There are three key questions for policy makers:

• To what extent will AI-driven automation increase unemployment and underemployment?

• How can governments and employers take advantage of AI and create the jobs of the future?

• How can government, employers and educators equip employees and graduates with the skills to have jobs alongside robots, instead of competing with them?

The growth in AI and machine learning need not pose a threat to jobs and our standard of living, but without a strategic and shared effort, we will repeat the mistakes of previous technological revolutions, which imposed a terrible price on some in the name of progress.

The authors of this article are working towards a book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Implications for Managers in the Asia Pacific, due to be published in September. It will include chapters from colleagues in Taiwan, China, India, Mauritius, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. For the Australian chapter we need more information from leaders and managers in industry about the impact of AI and the preparation and planning that is, or is not, occurring. We invite you to complete a short survey as part of this study. You can do so confidentially here.

– ref. Artificial intelligence may take your job, so political leaders need to start doing theirs – http://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-may-take-your-job-so-political-leaders-need-to-start-doing-theirs-103764

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tani Khara, PhD student in Sustainability, University of Technology Sydney

Protests from animal-rights activists around the country have drawn a swift national backlash. The Prime Minister has condemned the animal-rights protesters as “shameful”, “un-Australian” and, memorably, “green-collar criminals”.

It’s clear the protesters have touched a nerve, attracting derisive comments from both social media and mainstream outlets. While public inconvenience and disrupting understandably creates annoyance, this does not necessarily explain the strong reaction from Australians.

Read more: Animal rights activists in Melbourne: green-collar criminals or civil ‘disobedients’?

It is worth looking at other factors which may have also prompted negativity towards the protests, and why questions about our meat consumption can feel particularly uncomfortable.

The meat paradox

Its clear from the widespread reaction to abuse in the live export industry that many Australians value animal welfare. Millions of Australian households also include much-loved pets, and less-cruel farm products like free-range eggs are growing in popularity.

At the same time, Australians eat vast amounts of meat. It is also clear that, whatever one’s views towards farming, it is very hard to guarantee the meat on one’s plate was killed in a “humane” manner.

Read more: Three charts on: Australia’s declining taste for beef and growing appetite for chicken

The contradiction between enjoying meat but disliking the harm done to animals to produce it is called the “meat paradox”.

Widespread annoyance at the vegan protests goes beyond the traffic disruption. Ellen Smith/AAP

One way of reducing this dissonance is mentally disengaging from the origins of meat. If animals are not assigned a moral status, then slaughtering them no longer becomes a moral dilemma, and eating meat, therefore, is not morally problematic.

Another way we cope with simultaneously liking (or loving) some animals but eating others is to create categories. That is, cows, sheep and pigs are for eating but dogs, cats and horses are not. In this mental map, farm animals tend to be viewed as commodities rather than individual sentient beings.

We are also far more likely to feel empathy towards species we’re familiar with and can relate to. Pets have an advantage here, as they are often selectively bred for expressive affection towards people.

Read more: Why do vegans have such bad reputations?

Shock gets attention, not action

All of this together means strident campaigning for animal rights can provoke a strong and emotive backlash. Furthermore, it’s not at all certain this headline-grabbing approach improves animal welfare.

Shock tactics can effectively attract attention and (compared to less emotive messages) are more likely to be noticed, but they do not necessarily prompt action.

Although disturbing scenarios of animals undergoing cruelty and confinement might be eye-catching, these, alone, are not effective in changing attitudes or behaviours.

Communicating an achievable, positive alternative is important. David Crosling/AAP

People have a limit to how many issues we can worry about at once and as worry about one risk increases, concerns for the others may lessen. Exposure to messages about animal cruelty can also create feelings of pain and loneliness and may also, paradoxically, result in avoidance to take any further action.

Instead, it is important to create a compelling positive alternative. In this case, this might involve showing farm animals free from any confinement and abuse, thereby communicating a vision to aspire to.

This might explain the success of Animals Australia’s “Make it Possible” campaign which offered its audiences a vision of hope by depicting a farm animal who broke free from the shackles of captivity. Results from this campaign revealed a drop in demand for factory-farmed products and a rise in ethical product purchases.

Read more: Should veganism receive the same legal protection as a religion?

In addition, it is important to make behaviour change easier by making the alternatives more accessible – which, in this instance, may involve giving people information and access to consumption alternatives – as sustainable behaviour change is more likely to occur when it is perceived as relatively easy.

Read more: It’s complicated: Australia’s relationship with eating meat

This might also explain why reducetarianism or flexitarianism – reducing meat rather than cutting it out entirely – appears to be gaining traction. In my as-yet unpublished research on what Australians eat, one person told me:

when the Titanic sank, you don’t say ‘oh I don’t have room for everyone, throw everyone overboard, out of lifeboats!’ You do what you can.

I guess that’s the philosophy of reducetarianism, eating one bit of chicken a month is better than a person who eats it twice a day.

Read more: How restaurants are wooing ‘flexitarians’

Australians can be empathetic towards animals. There’s also a slow – but growing – understanding of how the livestock sector is influencing climate change.

But research shows our immediate needs and demands – to feed our family, to eat familiar food, even getting to work on time – often take precedence over larger and far less visible moral and environmental questions.

Understanding and empathising with the barriers, needs and habits of people who do and don’t eat meat may go some way in bridging the chasm towards a more sustainable future.

– ref. Here’s why well-intentioned vegan protesters are getting it wrong – http://theconversation.com/heres-why-well-intentioned-vegan-protesters-are-getting-it-wrong-115224

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

Regulation of the Australian building industry is broken, according to the Shergold-Weir report to the Building Ministers’ Forum (BMF).

[…] we have concluded that [the] nature and extent [of problems] are significant and concerning. The problems have led to diminishing public confidence that the building and construction industry can deliver compliant, safe buildings which will perform to the expected standards over the long term.

You can say that again.

Just one of the issues identified in the report, combustible cladding, could affect over 1,000 buildings across Australia. An unknown proportion of these are tall (four storey and above) residential strata buildings. Fears of rectification costs are starting to have severe impacts on the apartment market.

The cost of replacing combustible panels at the Lacrosse Apartments in Melbourne, which caught fire in 2014, will be at least A$5.7 million, plus A$6 million or so in consequential damages. The total cost of replacing combustible panels across Australia is unknown at this point, but is likely to run to billions of dollars.

Read more: Lacrosse fire ruling sends shudders through building industry consultants and governments

The Shergold-Weir report identifies a catalogue of other problems, including water leaks, structurally unsound roof construction and poorly constructed fire-resisting elements. Faults appear to be widespread.

A 2012 study by UNSW City Futures surveyed 1,020 strata owners across New South Wales and found 72% of respondents (85% in buildings built since 2000) knew of at least one significant defect in their complex. Fixing these problems will cost billions more.

Regulatory failures are not only “diminishing public confidence”, they have a direct impact on the hip pockets of many Australians who own a residential apartment. In short, building defects resulting from lax regulation are a multi-billion dollar disaster.

How could authorities let this happen?

A web of regulations and standards enacted by governments cover construction in Australia, but this regulation is centred on the National Construction Code (NCC). The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), a body controlled by the Building Ministers’ Forum, manages the NCC. The ABCB board comprises appointed representatives from the Commonwealth plus all the states and territories and a few industry groups.

It is such a complicated system that it is hard to identify any government, organisation or person that is directly responsible for its performance.

Read more: Australia has a new National Construction Code, but it’s still not good enough

The NCC is supposed to create “benefits to society that outweigh costs” but it appears the ABCB may have been more focused on the need to “consider the competitive effects of regulation” and “not be unnecessarily restrictive” (Introduction to NCC Volume 1).

The BMF’s February 8 communique, issued after the fire in the Neo200 building in Melbourne, is straight out of the Yes Minister playbook:

Ministers agreed in principle to a national ban on the unsafe use of combustible ACPs (aluminium composite panels) in new construction, subject to a cost/benefit analysis being undertaken on the proposed ban, including impacts on the supply chain, potential impacts on the building industry, any unintended consequences, and a proposed timeline for implementation. Ministers will further consider this at their next meeting [in May this year].

This suggests the ministers are more concerned about possible impacts on the panel suppliers and the building industry than the consumer. The earliest a ban can take effect is in May. In the meantime, anecdotal evidence suggests buildings are still being clad in combustible ACP.

Thanks to the journalist Michael Bleby, we know governments and the ABCB failed to act in 2010 when presented with evidence that combustible ACP was not only a danger, but was also being widely used on tall residential buildings.

Bleby quoted ABCB general manager Neil Savery as saying neither his organisation, nor any of the states, was aware that builders were using the product incorrectly.

We also know that panel manufacturers, including the Australian supplier of Alucobond, actively lobbied building ministers. At the July 2011 BMF meeting, the ACT representative effectively vetoed an ABCB proposal to issue an advisory note on the use of combustible ACP.

We are entitled to ask why the ABCB and its staff, or the downstream regulators and their staff, did not know about serious fire problems with ACP that the technical press identified as long ago as 2000. The answer will be of particular interest to residents of tall apartment buildings clad in these panels, all of whom are now living with an active threat to their safety.

Read more: Cladding fire risks have been known for years. Lives depend on acting now, with no more delays

Consumers are owed better protection

While both Labor and Coalition governments have worked to improve consumer protection for people buying consumer goods, their record on housing, particularly apartments, is awful. While a consumer can be reasonably sure of getting restitution if they buy a faulty fridge, no such certainty exists if they buy a faulty house or apartment.

At the moment, the NCC does not have any focus on providing protection for buyers of houses or apartments. There are few requirements for the durability of components and astonishingly weak requirements for waterproofing. Under the NCC and its attached Australian Standards, particularly AS 4654.1 and 2-2012, a waterproof membrane could last, in practice, five minutes or 50 years.

Given the magnitude of the economic loss, it would be appropriate for the BMF and ABCB board to publicly admit they have failed. Since their appointments in November 2017 and January 2013 respectively, neither ABCB chair John Fahey nor Savery as general manager has remedied the situation. The Shergold-Weir report has not been implemented and the combustible cladding issues remain unresolved. It would be reasonable for Fahey to step down and for Savery to consider his future.

The next federal government should consider what further action should be taken, particularly in relation to individuals on the BMF and within the ABCB involved in the 2010-2011 decision not to issue the proposed advisory note on the use of ACP. Since the ABCB does not publish minutes and none of its deliberations are in the public domain no one knows what actually happened or who did what.

The new board should consider moving residential apartment buildings (Class 2 buildings in the NCC classification) from Volume 1 of the NCC to Volume 2, which controls detached and semi-detached housing. Volume 2 should then have as its overriding objective the protection of consumers.

The downstream regulators should focus on requiring builders to deliver residential buildings with no serious faults and providing simple mechanisms for redress if they don’t.

Surely this is not too much to ask.

This article has been updated to correct a reference to NCC volumes 1 and 2 – the latter controls detached and semi-detached housing.

– ref. Housing with buyer protection and no serious faults – is that too much to ask of builders and regulators? – http://theconversation.com/housing-with-buyer-protection-and-no-serious-faults-is-that-too-much-to-ask-of-builders-and-regulators-113115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

What happens when an opposition party wins power? In theory, it adopts a more statesmanlike demeanour. If it doesn’t, it stays perennially narky, unwilling to accept others’ ideas, yet incapable of generating a positive way forward itself.

The alternate aggression and apathy of the Coalition in arts and culture since the 2013 election suggests it never abandoned its oppositional ways. Taking office just after Creative Australia, the national cultural policy Labor released too late to have much practical effect, the way was clear to reclaim the portfolio as one of bipartisan concern.

This had happened under Prime Minister John Howard, who responded to the game-changing influence of Paul Keating’s Creative Nation policy not by rejecting it, but by extruding its ambitions through traditional Menzies values.

Instead, the last six years has seen a combination of ministerial whim and purposeless economising. There has been an absence of strong policy initiatives, neglect of smaller arts organisations, and an undermining of trust in arm’s length agencies, notably the Australia Council for the Arts and the ABC.

ABC staff hold a meeting outside their offices in Sydney in 2018. There has been an undermining of trust in the ABC over the last six years. Joel Carrett/AAP

Read more: Australian governments have a long history of trying to manipulate the ABC – and it’s unlikely to stop now

The first Coalition arts minister, George Brandis, was an artistic conservative with a poor grasp of the sector’s industrial complexities. Mitch Fifield, the current minister, is an economic conservative with little time for its cultural complexities. The emergence of tech giants like Netflix and Amazon has changed the landscape of the arts, introducing a proliferation of new competitors for Australian creators – but the government has failed to keep up with these developments.

There has also been a resurgent populist politics with a nasty, xenophobic edge to it. As a mechanism for social inclusion, arts and culture appear to have passed the Coalition by entirely.

A space where nothing happens

All the government’s major cultural policy events have been regrettable ones: the spat over the 2014 Sydney Biennale, which saw Brandis threaten artists if they didn’t accept corporate sponsorship; the 2015 raid on the Australia Council’s budget to establish an ill-defined National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA); and a Senate Inquiry into the arts cuts with an unprecedented 1,719 submissions.

Then, with the accession of Fifield as minister, the rebranding of the NPEA as the Catalyst Fund, the dissolution of this body too, and the return to the Australia Council of most (but not all) of the money taken from it 18 months previously.

Since 2016 arts and culture has been a space where nothing happens, by design. The low rate of government investment in the sector has continued unabated. In 2011-12, total federal cultural expenditure was A$2.355 billion; in 2012-13 A$2.361 billion; in 2015-16 A$2.29 billion; and in 2016-17 it was A$2.384 billion.

Figures for 2014-15 are hard to find, because in 2014 the Australian Bureau of Statistics canned its Culture, Sport and Recreation accounts in response to funding cuts. The burden of collecting cultural data then fell on the Meeting of Cultural Ministers Statistical Advisory Group – which had its federal administrative support removed in 2012.

Against this, the Coalition can point to recent investment in cultural infrastructure through the Public Service Modernisation Fund, and a A$8.2 million tip-in for collecting institutions. The National Gallery of Australia has received A$63.8 million to ensure, in the words of one arts bureaucrat, “the new Director doesn’t have a leaky roof and can buy the next Blue Poles”. Given the Efficiency Dividends scalped from galleries and museums in the past, however, this counts as little more than one step forward after two steps back.

The 2019 Coalition budget extends the ad hocism, with A$30.9 million for an Australian Music Industry Package, and sprinkled support for select cultural bodies, including the Bundanon Trust, the property Arthur Boyd bequeathed to the nation (that just happens to be in the Liberals’ most marginal NSW seat).

There is no return of money to the Australia Council or the Regional Arts Fund. In the words of Artshub’s Richard Watts the budget “demonstrates the Morrison government’s lack of interest and understanding of the sector”.

Read more: Missing in action: a vision for the arts in the 2019 budget

Most serious of all has been the damage done to the reputation and operation of the Australia Council and the ABC. Intentionally or not, both were harmed under the Coalition. Given their crucial role as protectors of our national culture, the consequences go beyond the immediate storms in which they were embroiled.

Labor’s challenge

The main challenge facing an incoming Labor government is recognised in its pre-election manifesto A Fair Go for Australia: which parts of creative Australia remain applicable and which need upgrading? The arts and culture section juggles two sets of priorities. On the one hand, there is standard blah about “contribut[ing] to innovation and lift[ing] productivity”. On the other, there is new awareness of the urgent need to promote cultural diversity and connection in an age of democracy deficit.

These pronouncements are of the broader kind. Yet there are two specifics Labor might consider. First, ending efficiency dividends for arts and culture, which are not efficient and a dividend only if the public goods so targeted are not impaired.

Second, restoring federal support for the Statistical Advisory Group and the ABS’s Culture, Sport and Recreation accounts. I have been an outspoken critic of the datafication of cultural policy, but fit-for-purpose facts and figures are essential to meaningful evaluation.

Both resources are important for ensuring our next national cultural policy is truly cultural, national and bipartisan.

– ref. Arts and culture under the Coalition: a lurch between aggression and apathy – http://theconversation.com/arts-and-culture-under-the-coalition-a-lurch-between-aggression-and-apathy-114434

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anja Hilkemeijer, Lecturer in Law, University of Tasmania

This article is part of a series examining the Coalition government’s record on key issues while in power and what Labor is promising if it wins the 2019 federal election.

Religious freedom

Anja Hilkemeijer, Law Lecturer, University of Tasmania; and Amy Maguire, Associate Professor, University of Newcastle Law School

In December 2017, joyous scenes accompanied the long-awaited enactment of marriage equality in Australia. This joy was soon replaced by outrage, however, when the community learned of the extent to which religious schools may legally discriminate against students and staff on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

In response, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced last October that parliament would swiftly act to disallow religious schools to expel students on the basis of their sexuality.

Read more: Talk of same-sex marriage impinging on religious freedom is misconceived: here’s why

However, action on removing the special exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (SDA) for religious schools quickly stalled. Following a number of private members’ bills, a range of amendments and two Senate inquiries, it became clear the Coalition government wanted religious schools to retain some special exemptions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison wanted a Religious Discrimination Act passed before the general election, but momentum has slowed. Dan Himbrechts/AAP

In a Senate committee report in February, Coalition senators insisted the matter of religious school exemptions from the SDA be referred to the Australian Law Reform Commission.

To date, no referral has been made. And given the few parliament sitting days scheduled before the federal election, it appears this issue will fall to the next parliament to resolve.

The Coalition has also announced a number of initiatives to boost protections of religious freedom following the release of the long-awaited Ruddock Religious Freedom Review in December.

Read more: Why Australia needs a Religious Discrimination Act

Contrary to the panel’s recommendation, Morrison said the government would appoint a religious freedom commissioner to the Australian Human Rights Commission. He also said he wanted to pass a Religious Discrimination Act before the next federal election, but the government has not provided any details on what form such a statute might take.

While the Liberal Party’s election policies have yet to be released, it is safe to assume the Coalition would seek to implement all the proposals announced in response to the Ruddock report if re-elected.

What about Labor?

If Labor wins the May election, it will feel pressure to follow through on removing exemptions for religious schools in the SDA, as it has committed to doing.

Labor has also indicated it supports enacting a federal law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, but it needs to see the details of such a proposal before committing to it.

Freedom of speech

Katharine Gelber, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, The University of Queensland

Freedom of speech has become a prominent topic in public debate in recent years. One trigger was the 2017 marriage equality survey. During the campaign, the Australian Christian Lobby argued that marriage equality would “take away” people’s right to free speech and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott insisted that a “no” vote was essential, “if you’re worried about religious freedom and freedom of speech”.

A second trigger was the 2017 parliamentary inquiry into freedom of speech, which raised the question of whether the wording of the racial vilification provision in federal law (Section 18C) should be changed, and whether the procedures under which complaints are dealt with by the Australian Human Rights Commission should be altered. Subsequent attempts to change the text of Section 18C were unsuccessful.

Read more: Free speech: would removing Section 18C really give us the right to be bigots?

What has received far less media attention, though, are the multiple ways in which the Coalition has undermined free speech while in government. The Coalition appears to be a friend of free speech only when it suits them.

The list includes extensive laws that restrict free speech far more than is necessary for legitimate national security purposes.

These include counter-terrorism laws prohibiting the unauthorised disclosure of information that does not have a public interest exemption. Another new law ostensibly designed to prevent foreign interference in Australian affairs exposes journalists and charities to risk of prosecution.

In addition, the Coalition included secrecy provisions in the 2015 Border Force Act intended to prevent people who work in offshore detention centres from disclosing information. The legislation was so draconian, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants cancelled a planned visit to Australia in September 2015 on the grounds it would prevent him from doing his work. Eventually, in the face of a High Court challenge in 2017, the government removed the provisions.

What about Labor?

Labor’s position on free speech is less clearly stated. On the one hand, it has a record of support for national security laws that restrict free speech. However, Labor takes a different stance from the Coalition on anti-vilification laws, which it defends as narrow, valid restrictions that prevent racism, bigotry and discrimination.

Perhaps the biggest shift in public discourse around free speech has been the degree to which politicians from One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party and the United Australia Party, as well as some from the Coalition, have been emboldened to promote harmful stereotypes of migrants, asylum seekers, LBGTQI and other marginalised groups.

Indeed, in some quarters, political rhetoric has become so caustic that it has separated informed public debate from evidence and reasoning, and undermined core democratic institutions.

If Labor wins the election, its biggest challenge will be to provide the leadership to shift public discourse away from this and facilitate a political culture that embraces diversity and provides free speech to as many people as possible.

Social security and welfare

Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Social security and welfare remains the largest component of government spending. In the latest budget released by the Coalition government, spending is projected to increase from A$180 billion in 2019-20 to just over A$200 billion in 2022-23. This represents a slight fall, however, from 36.0% of total spending to 35.8%.

Compared to previous budgets, there are no major proposed cutbacks in assistance. The Coalition government has attempted to slash funding for social security and welfare in its past six budgets, with little success.

A campaigner for an anti-poverty group in Adelaide. Tracey Nearmy/AAP

There are some welcome initiatives set out in the budget, including a commitment of A$328 million over four years to the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children, and a commitment of A$527.9 million over five years to establish the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.

Read more: Future budgets are going to have to spend more on welfare, which is fine. It’s spending on us

But the budget also extended the government’s Cashless Debit Card trials, which have courted controversy. The Australian Council of Social Service has argued the card curtails people’s freedoms and hasn’t resulted in any positive effects. This followed an Australian National Audit Office report, which concluded that the card had major flaws and it was difficult to see where social harm had been reduced due to a “lack of robustness in data collection.”

The Coalition government has attempted to play up its social security and welfare successes in recent years, pointing to the fact that the proportion of the working-age population receiving income support is at its lowest level since the early 1980s.

But this appears to be the result of fewer people applying for benefits rather than people moving off benefits more rapidly, as has been claimed. It also reflects a somewhat stronger labour market in recent years and changes introduced to the Parenting Payment Single and Disability Support Pension programs under the Rudd/Gillard governments.

What about Labor?

Whoever wins the next election will face pressure to further increase welfare and social security spending as the National Disability Insurance Scheme ramps up and the Aged Care Royal Commission releases its findings. The recent report by the Parliamentary Budget Office projects that real spending on aged care will increase by around A$16 billion over the next decade as a result of Australia’s rapidly ageing population.

Newstart, the main payment for unemployed Australians, is also increasingly being seen as inadequate. It has slipped relative to pensions and wages each year because it is indexed to the slower-growing consumer price index.

Labor has promised that, if elected, it will use a “root and branch review” to look at lifting the rate of the Newstart unemployment benefit. However, it is not just Newstart that is inadequate, but support for single parents and families with children, which has been cut by both major parties over the last 15 years.

– ref. The Coalition’s record on social policy: big on promises, short on follow-through – http://theconversation.com/the-coalitions-record-on-social-policy-big-on-promises-short-on-follow-through-114611

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Thomas, Professor of Media and Communications; Director, Social Change Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University

The national broadband network (NBN) has been a major issue in federal election campaigns for close to a decade.

And the 2019 version of the NBN bears little resemblance to the futuristic, egalitarian earlier editions.

Despite years of controversy, cost over-runs, and delays, the coalition government says our $50 billion national network is finally nearing completion.

But Labor’s Shadow Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has set out some different priorities should her party achieve government in the coming election. One of these is a “digital inclusion drive”, aimed at improving access to the internet for older Australians and low-income households.

Read more: Three charts on: the NBN and Australia’s digital divide

In addition, Labor is making no immediate commitment to replacing copper connections with fibre.

Instead, if elected, it will fund service and reliability fixes for those on the copper NBN, and impose service guarantees for small businesses and consumers. It will examine what has happened to the economics of the network, looking at its cash flow, pricing, capital structure, and future options for network upgrades.

Labor’s policy will disappoint those hoping for a fast-tracked return to that party’s original (2009) vision of high-speed fibre for (almost) everyone. But its 2019 plan is an important acknowledgement that network infrastructure is only one part of the NBN story.

Affordability and digital inclusion

The Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) provides data on the affordability of internet services for Australians since 2014. It shows that recent, modest improvements seen by some households have been matched by declines in affordability for a number of Australia’s more digitally excluded groups.

The results for low-income households, single parents, people outside the labour force, Indigenous Australians, and people with a disability remain poor.

The good news for Australian consumers is that the pricing of mobile services has improved, reflecting competitive pressures and the reduced cost of delivery as a consequence of investment by network owners.

But when we look at fixed broadband services — the kinds of connections used by most households — recent price increases by NBN have led to a decline in the number of low-cost plans on the market. This change post-dates the most recent ADII report (2018), and the effects are beginning to work their way into the market.

Read more: Digital inclusion in Tasmania has improved in line with NBN rollout – will the other states follow?

Communications costs matter

Communications services have a knock-on effect in many other areas of life and work.

Access to high-speed broadband can reduce the costs of using other services considerably. This makes critical activities like banking, seeking government information, looking for work, or studying much easier.

But when we speak of the cost savings linked with online services, we need also to bear in mind the flip-side of those savings: the much higher costs borne by those, often less well-off, citizens who must access services offline.

If an individual on a low income lacks electronic access to banking or government information, the cost of commuting to do these things in person can be prohibitive — and especially so for Australians living in remote or regional areas.

For children at school and adults in education or training, a lack of access to the internet means many will fall behind their peers, as access to educational materials and online content becomes a core part of the modern education experience. This has implications for Australia’s ability to take advantage of the next wave of digital transformation.

Read more: Australia’s digital divide is not going away

Expensive for everyone

The costs of inequitable internet access are directly felt by many families, but the broader costs are borne by society.

And so digital exclusion now has the potential to be a drag on Australia’s economic growth and productive potential for decades to come.

For individuals, conducting activities offline may be time-consuming and expensive. But that’s also true for the government. It’s estimated that even taking half of government services online would save around A$20 billion.

Aside from the costs of lower productivity, economic growth and tax receipts, inequitable access means that the material savings from automated services may never be realised.

Affordable access to broadband also supports the cost effective delivery of core government and other services – such as health – to regional and remote locations.

Although addressing inequitable access will involve costs in the short term, effective policy measures to improve affordability are likely to generate considerable national benefits.

Read more: Infographic: Budget 2019 at a glance

How to improve affordability

At this stage Labor is not saying what it might do to improve internet affordability for low-income households.

The idea of writing down the NBN has been widely discussed. It does, however, have serious implications: it will be very costly to taxpayers.

It will also limit the ability of the NBN to invest in future network upgrades and threaten the economics of uniform national pricing, the NBN’s key promise of equity for regional and remote Australia.

That could mean a return to the pre-NBN communications landscape, with regional and remote Australia relying on increasingly obsolete communications infrastructure while metropolitan Australia moves ahead.

Read more: Shorten uses budget reply speech to reframe the economic debate

A direct increase in cash payments is likely to improve living standards materially for those in poverty, but more money for low income households doesn’t necessarily mean that broadband will be within their reach.

The creation of a concession at a retail level would make the telecommunications companies responsible for selling products at a cheaper rate, which in an era of reduced margins appears unlikely to occur.

Also, a series of retail concessions can lead to consumer confusion, as the scope of each scheme and the discounts on offer vary wildly. We’ve seen these problems in the energy sector.

Another option is to create a wholesale concession, a measure that has been promoted by consumer advocates. This would involve the government paying NBN to put a wholesale product into the market that retailers could purchase and retail to low income households.

A nationally uniform concessional service would allow retailers to compete in offering affordable services to low-income households, boost NBN take-up and consequently its revenue and financial viability.

Read more: Government advertising may be legal, but it’s corrupting our electoral process

Focus on inclusion

While the introduction of a concessional arrangement would involve government picking up a part of the tab for service delivery, it offers sizeable benefits.

By ensuring NBN access for low-income households, the government avoids forgoing a large proportion of the savings that should accrued from the digital transformation of government services (and the benefits to be gained from improving services).

It would also prevent a lower take-up of NBN services and revenues. Without such an arrangement, questions will continue to be raised about the financial viability of NBN, its repayment of outstanding debt to government and whether there needs to be a write-down.

The take up of broadband has historically seen improvements in average household income, productivity, and the creation of new kinds of work and services.

In order to maximise the benefits of the current wave of digital change, we’ll need a broader public debate, that goes beyond the relative merits of fibre and 5G.

Policy will need to address the challenge of affordability, invest in digital literacy, and ensure that all Australians can access the services that they need.

While there are many improvements that can and should be made to our national network infrastructure, a focus on the larger problem of digital inclusion is both welcome, and overdue.

– ref. Labor will prioritise an NBN ‘digital inclusion drive’ – here’s what it should focus on – http://theconversation.com/labor-will-prioritise-an-nbn-digital-inclusion-drive-heres-what-it-should-focus-on-115135