A documentary from the Smithsonian Institute, examining new DNA and physical anthropology evidence, suggests the famous cavalry officer Casimir Pulaski (1745-1779) might have been a woman, or intersex.
Pulaski is a hero of the struggles for Polish and American independence. He is credited with saving George Washington’s life in battle and with establishing the first American cavalry force. According to the documentary, DNA testing has confirmed a female-appearing skeleton is indeed Pulaski’s. This new evidence is the first hint that Pulaski – who seems to have lived as male from childhood – was anything other than a cisgendered man.
We may never know if Pulaski was intersex (that is, his body didn’t fit neatly into either male or female categories) and did not question his gender. Or if he was, in fact, born female but chose to live as a man.
In either case, Pulaski would be the most senior military officer we know of to have female anatomical characteristics before the late 20th century. But he certainly wouldn’t have been the only one on the battlefield.
The history of intersex men and women is one that requires more research. The lives of intersex people have often been made invisible throughout history. I hope that when more evidence comes to light Pulaski can be claimed as an inspirational intersex hero.
We know quite a bit, however, about women dressing as men and joining the military in the 18th and 19th centuries. There were famous women such as the British marine Hannah Snell (c.1723-1792) who, disguising herself as James Gray, signed up to fight in Scotland against the Jacobite invasion of 1745. Snell was later wounded trying to capture a French colony in India.
After revealing her gender, she was granted a pension by the king and made a living performing military exercises on stage. She also briefly kept a pub called “The Female Warrior”.
A portrait of Hannah Snell, circa 1750.Wikimedia Commons
In contrast to Snell’s self-promoting confidence, the Anglo-Irish military physician James Barry (c.1789-1865) kept the secret of his female birth all his life. Dressing as a man, Barry completed medical studies in Edinburgh and went on to have a long and distinguished career. Only after Barry’s death was his sex discovered.
“William Brown” was the name taken by a black woman from Edinburgh who served aboard HMS Queen Charlotte from 1804 until after 1816, through the end of the Napoleonic Wars. She exhibited “all the traits of a British tar (slang for a sailor) and takes her grog with her messmates”, according to a contemporary report.
The discovery of Brown’s sex by her crew doesn’t seem to have interrupted her career: she re-enlisted on the same ship after news broke that she was female.
Then there is the story of Jeanne Baré, who was not a soldier, but became the first woman known to have circumnavigated the globe (1766-69). She dressed in men’s clothes to work as an assistant to Philibert Comerçon (she may also have been Commerçon’s mistress), who was the botanist to French admiral and explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville.
Portrait of Jeanne Barret (1740-1807) by Cristoforo Dall’Acqua (1734-1787).Wikimedia Commons
Baré was found out when the ships made it to Tahiti. While she had passed as a man with the crew, her disguise didn’t fool the Tahitians, who pointed her out to Bougainville.
Why would women disguise themselves as men and join the army and navy? One major reason was that men were paid far better than women. For a working-class woman, despite the dangers of a military or naval career, the money might have looked too good to pass up.
There were prohibitions against women wearing men’s clothing in the period, but prosecutions were relatively rare. The army and the navy were desperate for recruits and tended not to inquire too closely. As Snell’s career shows, being brazen about one’s cross-dressing adventures might be a ticket to a comfortable life.
Young women might also be inspired by the many popular ballads narrating the military and naval careers of cross-dressing women. One, The Ballad of Jack Monroe, exists in several surviving versions:
She went into the tailor shop And dressed in men’s array, And went into a vessel To convey herself away.
For women as well as men, joining the army or navy might be a rare opportunity to see the world. For an adventurous spirit, living in disguise may have added to the excitement.
But for many of these cross-dressing adventurers, there must have been one further reason: they just felt more comfortable, more like themselves, fighting and living not only alongside men, but as men.
Educate to Liberate curators Pauline Smith and Ari Edgecombe … a window on the police and immigration crackdown on illegal “overstayers” in the 1970s. Image: Michael Andrew/PMW
Called Educate to Liberate, the exhibition showcases art projects, memorabilia and photographs of a time when the police were racial profiling and harassing Pacific Islanders in a government-approved campaign.
Curator Pauline Smith told Pacific Media Watch the exhibition raises awareness and invites people to come forward to share their stories.
“It gives people permission to talk about it. It’s still very painful and shameful for a lot of people,” she said.
The Dawn Raids were part of a police and immigration crackdown on illegal “overstayers” in the 1970s. Pacific Islanders were specifically targeted while overstayers of European origin were overlooked.
-Partners-
Police entered homes in the early hours, demanding to see passports and proof of residency. They often physically removed residents for deportation.
Smith said the raids created a lot of shame among Pacific people, many of whom are reluctant to talk about it due to social stigma.
However, some have opened up about their experiences.
South Island raids “We had this girl in Invercargill who had a story about how they were dawn raided and the uncle was escorted on to the plane by police, so they looked like criminals.”
Social services then came and put her brother and sister in state care.
“She said her brother never recovered properly.”
Educate to Liberate was exhibited in the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Niho o te Taniwha in Invercargill last year after the release of Smith’s award-winning children’s book, Dawn Raids.
Co-curator Ari Edgecombe of the Southland Museum said there were many sad stories of the Invercargill Dawn Raids, despite a common misconception they were not carried out in the South Island.
“That’s one of the reasons why we’re asking people to share their voice if they want to,” he said.
“We just figured that this might be the time for healing.”
Polynesian Panthers The exhibition’s Auckland opening in Fresh Gallery Ōtara last weekend featured talks from Tigilau Ness, Will ‘Ilolahia and Reverend Alec Toleafoa of the Polynesian Panthers, an activist group formed in the 1970s in response to the raids and police discrimination.
The Polynesian Panthers were formed to resist police discrimination. Image: Michael Andrew/PMW
Pacific people were being “systematically targeted” for random street checks in a police initiative called Operation Pot Black.
The Panthers distributed a legal pamphlet to Pacific communities allowing people to know their rights when being harassed by police. A copy of the pamphlet is on display at the exhibition.
They also carried out their own dawn raids on the houses of North Shore MP George Gair and the Minister of Immigration, Bill Birch, turning up at 3am with loudspeakers and spotlights and demanding to see their passports.
The police raids stopped shortly after.
Former chair of the Panthers Will ‘Ilolahia said he and other members of the group served prison sentences for their struggles with the police.
“Some of us were feeling so strong about it that we were prepared to go and do time.”
Institutional racism A “change consultant” now, ‘Ilolahia and other Panther members visit schools and talk to students about the need to stand up for what is right.
While he said that there have been improvements in the treatment of Pacific people, institutional racism still exists in New Zealand.
“Racism is still here, basically because the system is monocultural in it’s outlook.”
He said there was a need for all New Zealanders to start recognising themselves as migrants.
“Aotearoa is a country of migrants. We’re all migrants.”
“But we’ve got a pretty good place here. That’s why we fought for it.”
The Educate to Liberate exhibition opened at the Fresh Gallery Ōtara on April 6 and runs until May 25.
Michael Andrew is the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project contributing editor.
A replica of a 1970s living room in a Pacific family home. Image: Michael Andrew/PMW
The fallout from the extraordinary revelations about Peter Dutton’s contacts with Chinese Communist Party-aligned billionaire Huang Xiangmo is a potent brew, its ingredients the issue of foreign interference and the legacy of last year’s leadership challenge.
A tale full of spooky overtones, mates, ironies, and payback.
Monday’s Four Corners-Age-Sydney Morning Herald investigation reported that Dutton, immigration minister at the time, in 2015 approved a private citizenship ceremony for Huang’s family, who were due to travel overseas.
Dutton justifies the special treatment as being in response to a request from then-Labor senator Sam Dastyari.
That would be the same Dastyari who in December in 2017 announced he would resign from the Senate after revelations that he had promoted Chinese interests, including at a notorious news conference where he stood beside Huang.
(Dutton is generous in responding to personal representations – he, it will be remembered, was the minister who provided a quick rescue services for a couple of stranded au pairs.)
Four Corners reported that in 2016 – when Huang was anxious to get his own citizenship – lobbyist Santo Santoro, a former Howard government minister and close to Dutton, arranged a lunch between the businessman and the minister at Master Ken’s (upmarket) restaurant in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Dutton denies the lunch was about Huang’s citizenship bid. “He didn’t make representations to me in relation to these matters,” Dutton said on Tuesday, also stressing he’d received no donation (Huang over several years donated, to both sides of politics, between $2 million and $3 million.)
Huang didn’t get his citizenship and last year his permanent residency was cancelled. The officials charged with examining his background and activities judged him unsuitable to be one of us.
The Australian Financial Review reported that, in relation to the cancellation of his residency, ASIO had found he was “amenable to conducting acts of foreign interference”. Cancellation of a permanent resident’s visa is a decision taken by the immigration minister or a senior official within the Home Affairs department, which is responsible for immigration and citizenship matters. By this time, David Coleman had oversight of immigration.
Scott Morrison, desperate to smother what is on most criteria a damaging story coming almost on the eve of the election being called, insists on Tuesday there was nothing to see in Dutton’s conduct.
“I’ve spoken with Peter Dutton about this and there are no issues here that trouble me at all. I mean there’s no suggestion that Peter, in any way, shape or form, has a sought or been provided with any benefit here.
“The individual we’re talking about had his visa cancelled while he was out of the country, by Peter Dutton’s department. So if the object was foreign interference, well, the exact opposite is what has occurred.”
But the issue is not whether Dutton himself got a benefit.
The issues are that Huang’s family received favourable treatment via the minister’s office, and that Huang, in hiring Santoro, “bought” himself valuable access to a minister. That Huang came to grief later is not the point.
“The suggestion that somehow I’ve provided anything to this individual is just a nonsense,” Dutton says. He’d met with him “because he was a significant leader within the Chinese community”.
Duuton underestimates himself. He notes that Huang “was interested obviously in politics and other issues of the day”. Of course he was – and access to a minister over a relaxed and tasty Chinese meal yields information and insights.
Malcolm Turnbull had emerged early on Tuesday declaring Dutton had “a lot to explain” and setting up the challenge for Morrison. “Scott Morrison is the Prime Minister and you can’t wave this off and say it is all part of gossip and the bubble.
“This is the national security of Australia. Remember the furore that arose against Sam Dastyari ?
“All the same issues have arisen again and this has to be addressed at the highest level of security, priority, urgency by the Prime Minister,” Turnbull said.
“The buck stops with him. I know what it is like to be Prime Minister and, ultimately, you are responsible. So Scott Morrison has to deal with this Peter Dutton issue”.
Predictably, Turnbull didn’t influence Morrison but he did ensure a bad day became even worse for the government.
Turnbull is not an objective voice when it comes to Dutton, who instigated the events that ended in the political demise of the former PM.
But Turnbull’s credentials on combatting foreign interference are beyond question. His government introduced the legislation to counter what has become a very serious problem.
On Monday Duncan Lewis, head of ASIO, told a Senate estimates hearing “the threat from foreign interference and foreign espionage in Australia is running at […] an unprecedented level.”
No doubt if he knew then what he learned later, Dutton would not have given Huang the benefits of valuable face time.
But by 2016 politicians, and especially a minister, should have been alert to foreign interference.
In 2015 Lewis briefed the top officials of the main parties about the risks from foreign donations, and reportedly named donors ASIO believed were acting on the Chinese government’s behalf.
Did Dutton make any effort to check Huang out with ASIO before agreeing to lunch?
Most pertinently, the lunch highlights the insidious power of the lobbying industry in today’s Canberra.
Four Corners had Santoro on tape saying (speaking to an unidentified person, not Huang): “One of my best friends is Peter Dutton. He is the most honest politician that I have ever come across, but he tries to be helpful.[…] I can go to somebody in the minister’s office and say ‘can you have a close look at this’”.
According to Four Corners, Santoro charges at least $20,000 for access to Dutton’s office.
Dutton says: “There are lobbyists who are registered on both sides of parliament, people that operate as lobbyists. Their transactions and how they conduct their business is an issue for them”.
Actually, how they conduct themselves and how ministers respond are matters for the democratic system.
That you can write Santoro a cheque and expect to be fast-tracked to the minister’s office (whether that ends in a successful outcome or not) isn’t the way the system should desirably work.
We do have a federal register of lobbyists. But we don’t have enough information about their operations – until they find themselves in the spotlight.
Journalist Primrose Riordan tweeted on Tuesday that Santoro had “just updated his listing on the foreign influence register to include a heap of Chinese companies”.
At the very least, the Dutton affair suggests we need a lot more transparency about what in recent years has become a sunrise industry of politics, and a lucrative occupation for spent politicians.
Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir of a “monstrous” mother has won the 2019 Stella Prize. The Erratics tells the story of Vicki’s return home to a prairie house in the sparse wintry landscapes of Alberta, Canada, where she grew up. Once there, the narrator faces family relationships that are strained to the point of breaking.
Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s debut memoir explores family relationships on the edge.Stella Prize
When the book begins, its narrator has been absent from her family for 18 years. Her mother is clearly unwell, and Vicki believes she should be declared legally “incompetent” against her wishes.
Vicki is convinced that her mother is attempting to kill her father, by starving him to death, keeping him on a diet of spinach, bok choy and kale. Her father defers to his wife, often against all reason, and indeed safety.
This book shatters social expectations that a mother is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-caring, by setting them against the bleak reality of what one mother is. It explodes culturally sanctioned ideas about what a mother ought to be, feel and do. It does so with a rare – often dark, and deeply unsettling – honesty.
The writing style is taught, elegant and clinically restrained. The narrator is almost numb.
The judges said:
Set against the bitter cold of a Canadian winter, Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics mines the psychological damage wrought on a nuclear family by a monstrous personality. Despite the dark subject matter, this book has a smile at its core, and Laveau-Harvie shows constant wit when depicting some harrowing times.
There are many uneasy truths in this book. It’s occasionally difficult to feel empathy for the narrator, with her myriad blind spots, and the way her desires too often lead her to fashion the world according to her own needs – seen in her failure to understand the psychiatrist’s serious hesitation to commit her mother to a locked ward unless she is genuinely a threat to herself or to others. In her too easy belief that her father’s carer is a “gold-digger”. And in the many judgments that are delivered down the telephone line from half a world away, after she returns to Sydney.
“I would very much like to mean ‘we’, my sister and me,” she writes about the question of who will be caring for her aged parents. “But I’m leaving, my sanity always dependent on living somewhere remote […] My sister and her partner will shoulder almost all of what needs doing.”
There is grief, though, when news breaks that her mother’s medical team have decided she requires constant care in a mental health ward. Vicki writes:
I think of everything my mother will never see again, the view over the foothills to the Rockies from the windows of her house, the animals in the duck light, fawns gambolling unsteadily, coyotes pausing to give you the slightest of nods before loping across the lawns […]
And yet, it is difficult reading to the end: grief expressed from faraway Sydney feels disparaging of her caregiving sister’s nervously exhausted relief at, in the narrator’s words, the “wicked witch being dead”.
This is a remarkable book. It is also a deeply uncomfortable one. And that – I suspect – is precisely the point. Where the rest of us would rather deal in easy platitudes, this book is deeply honest.
Current smelting emissions from the Nyrstar smelter in the South Australian city of Port Pirie continue to pose a clear risk of harm to local children, our research has found.
Port Pirie has been a world-leading centre for lead and zinc smelting and processing since 1889, exposing the adjoining community to dangerous lead contamination for more than a century.
A new study led by Macquarie University examined blood lead and emergency department presentation data collected by South Australia Health. It also examined lead in air and sulfur dioxide data collected by the South Australian Environment Protection Authority to quantify health outcomes due to smelter emissions in Port Pirie.
In 2017, almost half of Port Pirie’s children under five years old had unacceptably high blood lead levels. Heightened blood lead levels in children can result in developmental problems and behavioural disorders.
Meanwhile, Port Pirie residents visited emergency departments for respiratory conditions at more than twice the rate of residents elsewhere in South Australia. Children under ten make up 11% of the Port Pirie population, yet they represent 30% of emergency department respiratory cases.
Emergency department presentations for respiratory illness might include asthma, bronchitis, and upper respiratory tract infections.
Based on our results, which are in turn based on government data, we would argue that protection of public health and the environment must be made a higher priority than the present focus on economic opportunities.
Half of children in Port Pirie exceed the maximum acceptable blood lead levels, according to Australian standards.David Mariuz/AAP
Lead in blood, even at low levels, has a range of adverse health impacts, including reducing IQ, lowering academic achievement, and socio-behavioural problems.
In 2018, the percentage of Port Pirie children under five exceeding the Australian intervention blood level of 5 µg/dL rose to 50.5%, compared with 47.4% in 2017. Mean blood lead concentrations rose in all children to 4.8 µg/dL.
Blood lead levels in children aged two, who are considered the most sensitive indicator of lead exposure trends in the city, rose to an average of 5.8 µg/dL in 2018.
A recent University of Adelaide study looked at children from Port Pirie and the New South Wales town of Broken Hill. It calculated that 13.5 IQ points were lost when a child’s blood lead level increased from 1 to 10 µg/dL.
Therefore, the estimate of loss for Port Pirie children with an average blood lead level is around 6 to 8 IQ points. To put this in perspective, the average IQ is around 100.
Multiple studies of the long-term effects of lead exposure show its adverse effects do not improve with age. In one New Zealand study, children who had high lead exposures reported lower cognitive function and socioeconomic status at age 38 than those who didn’t.
Elevated concentrations of air lead results in the deposition of lead-rich dust, which Port Pirie children are seemingly unable to avoid.
The smelter company, Nyrstar, monitors lead levels in the air daily. In 2017, the average lead in air measured across all four of Port Pirie’s EPA monitors was more than double the Australian standard, at 1.13 µg/m³.
Our study shows Port Pirie’s lead in air concentrations need to be 80% less than the current Australian standard of 0.5 µg/m³, at no more than 0.11 µg/m³.
Children under five would be better protected at this level, as it would help their blood levels remain below the maximum acceptable Australian blood lead level. However, to protect two-year-old children, lead in air concentrations need to be even lower at 0.082 µg/m³.
Therefore, application of the current Australian lead in air standard of 0.5 µg/m³ at Port Pirie fails to adequately protect children from adverse exposures.
Sulfur dioxide and respiratory health
Sulfur dioxide is a well-known health risk for respiratory diseases. Surprisingly, our study is the first to examine its impact on respiratory health in Port Pirie despite it being a known problem in the city for decades.
Our research found elevated levels of sulfur dioxide in Port Pirie, and increased rates of emergency department respiratory presentations.
Port Pirie residents visited an emergency department with respiratory symptoms at a higher rate than the rest of South Australia, with children being disproportionately affected.
Port Pirie residents rates of Emergency Department presentations for respiratory symptoms are more than double those for the rest of South Australia.
Remarkably, there is currently no legal requirement in Nyrstar’s environmental licence for it to meet a particular air standard for sulfur dioxide in Port Pirie.
Even our national standards may be too generous as the sulfur dioxide levels recommended by the World Health Organisation are even lower than those set by the Australian standards.
As a minimum, to better protect the residents of Port Pirie, the Australian standards for sulfur dioxide must be enforced.
A matter of politics
No other city in Australia experiences air quality like Port Pirie. The city’s population has the worst combined outcomes for sulfur dioxide exposure and blood lead in Australia.
Established public health programs in Port Pirie have aimed to reduce blood lead in Port Pirie’s children. Playgrounds are washed and residents advised to wash their hands, surfaces and food. But previous research has found that playground washing results in only short-lived exposure reduction and effective treatment requires elimination of smelter emissions.
Of the political and government agency decision-makers, we ask: why did you not intervene sooner to prevent vulnerable members of the population from being be exposed to toxic substances that are known to cause serious short- and long-term health problems? Would you be comfortable with bringing up your family in such an environment, where damaging but preventable toxic exposures are inescapable?
In a statement to The Conversation, Nyrstar noted it was undergoing the most significant transformation of the Port Pirie smelter in its history, and was committed to reducing emissions as a result:
That is the focus of the company and its entire workforce and Nyrstar has been working closely with the community through the decommissioning process. When complete it will be among the world’s most advanced facilities of its kind; full ramp up and stable low emissions should be achieved by the end of 2019. – Nyrstar
The most recent air quality, particularly sulfur dioxide levels, suggests there have been improvements, but there’s a still a long way to go. Importantly, these improvements do not help those already exposed.
This Nyrstar investment, supported by the SA government, includes a smelter refit with modern, clean technology and is expected to yield measurable benefits in health outcomes.
However, in the refit “transition” period since 2014, lead in air quality has got markedly worse, not better.
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 Turnbull/Morrison government has a mixed record, at best, on health.
The 2019 budget cash splash includes more promises on health but these will not come into effect until after the election. So they are just promises, not actions that have changed the health system.
The claim appeared to gain traction with voters, so we should expect to see a re-run of this tactic in this election. This started with Bill Shorten highlighting the issue in his budget reply speech, promising to “put back every single dollar that the Liberals have cut from public schools and public hospitals”.
The Coalition now funds only 45% of hospital funding growth, down from 50%.hxdbzxy/Shutterstock
Despite bribes and threats, the federal government has failed to negotiate hospital funding agreements with Victoria and Queensland, together covering 46% of the population. As a result, those states are at risk of being left in a funding limbo when the current arrangements expire on June 30, 2020.
Increased transparency is all well and good, but it puts the burden of reducing out-of-pocket costs on consumers, who generally do not have enough information to make informed choices. The complication rates of different specialists, and other measures of quality, are not yet routinely available to patients, or even GPs.
This area should be marked as a policy fail.
Promises about diagnostic testing before the 2016 election were of two kinds: more reviews and more machines that go ping, the latter dropped into marginal electorates as part of the cargo cult which appears endemic during election campaigns.
Left unaddressed is the need to reform the pathology market to recognise that pathology provision (such as blood and tissue tests) is a big business and needs to be treated as such, by procuring via tenders rather than fee-for-service.
A third key area of specialist provision, mental health, is a mess. Before the 2016 election, the Coalition promised to “strengthen mental health services”.
Although the details are still to be fleshed out, this will probably allow general practitioners to introduce remote consultations – such as advice by email for those who want it – and have practice staff reach out to people with chronic illness to track how they are going to reduce future problems.
This is a good move, and reflects recommendations from a review of general practice items as part of the broader Medicare Benefits Schedule Review.
Other important recommendations from the general practice review seem to be languishing, and there is no sense that overdue primary care reforms are being tackled in a serious and systematic way.
Overall, however, the government has been moving in the right direction in this area, albeit slowly and with false starts. A solid pass.
4. Pharmaceutical benefits
Before the 2016 election, federal health minister Greg Hunt signed agreements promising to talk to and work with all components of the pharmaceutical supply chain.
This has been a success story. New drugs are now listed in line with recommendations from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, ending the delays and political interference of yesteryear.
Pharmaceutical prices have come down, so the prices paid by Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for drugs are now closer to international best practice. But anti-competitive restrictions on pharmacy location remain, to the benefit of pharmacy owners.
Overall, no harm has been done, but unfortunately most of the fundamental problems of the private markets have not been confronted. Borderline achievement.
The criteria for distributing money from these funds is opaque; it is difficult to discern any strategic vision informing the way the largesse is being spread.
Health minister Greg Hunt makes frequent health funding announcements.AAP/Penny Stephens
All were worthy, and most were designed to placate vocal sectoral interests. Most have been implemented, but few will change the fundamentals of the health system or improve integration of the system’s many disparate elements.
Scattered like programmatic confetti, each of these funding dollops will yield a minor benefit, but together they will lead to more funding silos, less policy integration, and more confusion about the roles of the Commonwealth government and the states.
What’s more, they will give more heart to vested interests, and undermine rational national health policy.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten has made Medicare a focus of his pre-election campaigning.Ellen Smith/AAP
Labor has also set out a longer-term vision for reform of the health system, including a proposal for an ongoing “reform commission”.
The centrepiece and most expensive was a massive “cancer plan” commitment to address out-of-pocket costs for people with cancer. This includes expanded Medicare rebates for MRI scans for cancer patients, a new rebate for bulk-billed visits to oncologists, and a guarantee that all new drugs recommended for listing on the PBS will be listed.
The federal government has just promised to increase spending on public hospitals from A$21.7 billion in 2018 to A$26.2 billion by 2023. Expect more hospital promises in coming weeks. There is a long history of parties at both state and federal level pledging new hospitals during election campaigns.
Building new hospitals may at first seem sensible, especially as the population grows. But it will not cure the health system’s most pressing ailment. Instead, our research shows it’s more effective to focus health policy on people and prevention.
A problem of demand
It is true that hospitals in Australia aren’t keeping up with demand. Though supply of beds has increased, the population is growing while also ageing. This is increasing demand for all health-care services, including hospital beds.
The following graph shows the change in the number of beds per 1,000 people in all states and territories since 2006. Only in the Australian Capital Territory has the ratio improved.
State and federal governments thus feel a lot of pressure to spend more on hospitals. In 2016-2017 it was $69 billion Australia-wide – $2 billion more than the previous year. The following graph shows expenditure on public hospitals by state over the past two decades.
Queensland shows the greatest growth over the past two decades. In Western Australia, where we did our research, the proportion of government health budgets spent on public hospitals rose from 26% to 31%.
Preventive measures
We looked at why the hospital care is growing faster than the overall health sector, and what can be done about this.
Our conclusion: there needs to be more focus on the “unsexy” parts of the health-care system that treat people before they get sick enough to need a hospital. Prevention is cheaper and more effective than cure.
For example, it is estimated that A$9 million invested in anti-smoking campaigns between 1997 and 2007 saved A$740 million on smoking-related illnesses like lung cancer.
Yet our breakdown of health spending in Western Australia shows just 1.7% is spent on preventive measures – called “public health spending”. Australia-wide the average percentage is even less, according to research from La Trobe University and the Australian Preventative Partnership Centre.
Early medical attention is another way to reduce the need for hospitals. In analysing data from around Western Australia between 2009 and 2016, we generally found that increasing visits to general practitioners reduced the incidence of avoidable deaths (deaths that could have been avoided with better treatment or prevention).
People-centred approach
Limited prevention and early detection comes back to the way we fund health care. Australia’s health system is funded using a “hospital-centred” rather than “people-centred” approach.
This means hospitals are funded by the number of patients cared for and the type of procedures done. Hospital and GPs are funded separately. There is no incentive to cooperate and keep people out of hospitals.
A people-centred approach, on the other hand, would give funds based on patients’ health outcomes, rather than their particular treatments. GPs would be paid to manage patients, with the goal of keeping them out of hospital.
This system would particularly help people living in remote and rural regions, including Indigenous Australians, who are disadvantaged by the relative lack of resources being spent on local and preventive health.
The best example of such a people-centred system is New Zealand’s Canterbury model – named after the Canterbury region on New Zealand’s South Island (which includes Christchurch).
Instead of separate budgets for GPs and hospitals, Canterbury created a “one system, one budget” approach. This led to new programs that weren’t possible under the old system. An example is Healthpathways, which brought together GPs and specialists to decide on treatement programs for individual patients.
In working to make hospitals the last resort, more time and resources have gone to GPs. There are now more 24-hour clinics, for example, making it easier to get treated by a local doctor when needed.
A study of the Canterbury system showed that between 2007 and 2014 the number of people being hospitalised declined from 6.59 to 5.83 per 1,000. While an 11% decline may not seem huge, it represents a significant financial saving, given the high cost of hospitalisation.
Canterbury shows what can be achieved by rethinking how health care funding works. Australia has the opportunity to reimagine its health care system in a similar way.
New hospitals get a lot of attention. Politicians can point to them as concrete evidence they’re doing something to help. But emphasising hospitals as the most important part of the health system comes at a cost, and will only get more so as the population ages.
It’s time to discuss alternatives. Putting more resources into prevention and people is the right medicine for our future health needs.
For time immemorial, many wildlife species have survived by undertaking heroic long-distance migrations. But many of these great migrations are collapsing right before our eyes.
Perhaps the biggest peril to migrations is so common that we often fail to notice them: fences. Australia has the longest fences on Earth. The 5,600-kilometre “Dingo Fence” separates southeastern Australia from the rest of the country, whereas the “Rabbit-Proof Fence” stretches for almost 3,300 kilometres across Western Australia.
Emus attempting to cross the Rabbit-Proof Fence in Western Australia.Western Australia Department of Agriculture & Food
Both of these enormous fences were intended to repel rabbits and other “vermin” such emus, kangaroos and dingoes that were considered threats to crops or livestock. Built over a century ago, their environmental impacts were poorly understood or disregarded at the time.
Since construction these fences have caused recurring ecosystem catastrophes, such as mass die-offs of emus and other species trying to find food and water in a land notorious for the unpredictability of its rainfall, vegetation growth and fruit production.
Fatal fences
The same thing is happening across much of the planet. While a nemesis for larger wildlife, nobody knows how many fences exist today or where they’re located. A study that mapped all the fences in southern Alberta, Canada, found there were 16 times more fences than paved roads.
Scientists are waking up to the peril of fences, realising that from an environmental perspective they’re grossly understudied — “largely overlooked and essentially invisible,” according to a recent global review.
A zebra noses a fence in Kenya.Duncan Kimuyu
In Africa, home to some of the most spectacular wildlife migrations, scientists found that of 14 large-mammal species known to migrate en masse, five migrations were already extinct. Proliferating fences, along with habitat loss and wildlife poaching, has sent ecosystems such as the Greater Mara in Kenya crashing into ecological turmoil.
And a 2009 audit of Earth’s greatest terrestrial-mammal movements showed that of 24 large species that once migrated in their hundreds to thousands, six migrations have vanished entirely.
Many remaining migrations are mere shards of their former glory. For instance, Indochina once had mass migrations of elephants and other large mammals, big cats, monkeys and birds — often called the “Serengeti of Southeast Asia”.
Elephants and Banteng graze in Kuri Buri National Park in Thailand, vestiges of a once-massive fauna that migrated annually across Indochina.Pattarapong/iStock
The thundering herds of American bison – some numbering up to 4 million animals – which once dominated the plains of North America have all but vanished today.
How to save mass migration
There are two main ways to destroy mass migrations: killing the animals outright by hunting and over-harvesting, or stopping the animals from accessing food or water, typically by fencing them out or clearing and fragmenting their habitat.
As the human footprint rapidly expands, scary things for wildlife are happening all over. Research that one of us (Bill Laurance) led revealed that 33 African “development corridors” would, if completed, exceed 50,000 kilometres in length and crisscross the continent, chopping its ecosystems into scores of smaller pieces.
Cost-benefit assessment for 33 massive ‘development corridors’ that are proposed or under construction in Sub-Saharan Africa.William Laurance
Migrations are vulnerable even in the seas. Recent research shows that growing shipping traffic is an increasing danger to migratory great whales, basking sharks, and giant whale-sharks – all highly vulnerable to collisions with fast-moving ships, as well as disruption of their sensitive hearing and vocal communications by shipping noise and sonar, and pollutants from vessels.
A Red-Billed Oxpecker, which feeds on skin parasites of African mammals.Fernando Quevedo de Oliveira/Alamy Stock Photo
In 2004, a fence that had blocked a former zebra migration in Botswana was removed. By 2007 it was one of the longest animal-migration routes in the world.
And a few places on Earth are still free from fencing and fragmentation. The world-famous Seregeti ecosystem of Tanzania is an iconic example. In war-torn South Sudan, a spectacular mass migration of a million antelope — known as white-eared kob — is still intact because there are no fences.
And caribou still migrate in great herds across large expanses of northern Canada and Alaska.
Alarming news for Botswana
Collapsing migrations are a global concern, but right now conservationists are most worried about Botswana.
This mega-diverse nation in southern Africa is considering profoundly changing its wildlife management by expanding fences and cutting off wildlife migrations not considered beneficial to the country’s current priorities.
This would be a shocking decision, because Botswana’s wildlife conservation is almost entirely dependent on its mass migrations.
For wildebeest, zebra, eland, impala, kob, hartebeest, springbok and many other large migrants, isolation is a killer – destroying their capacity to track the shifting patterns of greening vegetation and water availability they need to survive.
And it’s not just grazing and browsing animals that are affected: entire suites of large and small predators, scavengers, commensal and migratory bird species, grazing-adapted plants and other species are integrally tied to these great migrations.
Lions attacking an Angolan Giraffe, one facet of Botswana’s complex migratory ecosystems.Michael Cohen
Botswana is already sliced into 17 giant “islands” by fences, erected in colonial times to protect the livestock of European farmers from foot-and-mouth disease.
But foot-and-mouth disease is far more likely to be spread by cattle, not wildlife. Fence-free strategies for managing disease risk also have have great potential.
Botswana is expected to have over 40,000 tourism-related jobs by 2028, showing their key importance to the national economy.Travel & Tourism Economic Impact: Botswana 2018
But you can kiss a lot of those tourism revenues goodbye if Botswana shatters its great migrations – killing off the spectacular living panoramas that are a magnet for the world’s nature lovers.
If we can avoid fencing and bulldozing critical parts of the Earth, we could hugely increase the chances that our most vibrant wildlife and ecosystems have a fighting chance to survive.
Six weeks before an expected May 18 election, this week’s Newspoll, conducted April 4-7 from a sample of 1,800, gave Labor a 52-48 lead. That’s a two-point gain for the Coalition since the last Newspoll, conducted four weeks ago, owing to the NSW election and the budget. This Newspoll has the narrowest Labor lead since Scott Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull.
An Ipsos poll for Nine newspapers, conducted April 3-6 from a sample of 1,200, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, a two-point gain for Labor since mid-February. While Ipsos was better for Labor, the February Ipsos was the infamous 51-49 after the Medevac bill passed.
Primary votes in Newspoll were 38% Coalition (up two), 37% Labor (down two), 9% Greens (steady) and 6% One Nation (down one). In Ipsos, primary votes were 37% Coalition (down one), 34% Labor (up one), 13% Greens (steady) and 5% One Nation (steady). Rounding probably assisted the Coalition on two party in February, and assisted Labor this time. As usual, the Greens vote in Ipsos is too high, and Labor’s too low.
Respondent allocated preferences in Ipsos were also 53-47 to Labor, and there has been no difference between respondent and previous election methods in Ipsos since Morrison replaced Turnbull. Under Turnbull, respondent preferences were usually better for the Coalition.
In Newspoll, 45% were satisfied with Morrison’s performance (up two), and 43% were dissatisfied (down two), for a net approval of +2, Morrison’s best since October. Bill Shorten’s net approval rose one point to -14, his best since January. Morrison led Shorten by 46-35 as better PM (43-36 four weeks ago).
In Ipsos, Morrison’s approval and disapproval were both down a point, to 48% and 39% respectively. Shorten’s net approval fell three points to -15. Morrison led Shorten by 46-35 as better PM (48-38 in February).
There are three questions Newspoll has asked after every budget since 1988: whether the budget was good or bad for the economy, good or bad for you personally, and whether the opposition would have delivered a better budget.
44% thought the budget good for the economy and just 18% bad; the +26 net score is the best for a budget since 2008. 34% thought they would be better off, and 19% worse off; the net +15 score is the best since 2007. In better news for Labor, by 45-37 voters thought Labor would not have delivered a better budget; this -8 score is the third best for Labor under a Coalition government, just one point less than in 2014 and 2018.
In Ipsos, by 41-29 voters thought the budget was fair, the +12 net is the best since 2015. 38% thought they would be better off and 24% worse off, the +14 net is the same as in 2018. By 42-25, voters thought Labor had better policies on climate change than the Coalition.
The 2018 budget was also well received, and the Coalition had its best polling of the current term during the period surrounding that budget. Six of the eight Newspolls conducted from late April 2018 to August gave Labor just a 51-49 lead, before the Coalition crashed to a 56-44 deficit after Turnbull’s ousting.
While last week appealed to the Coalition’s perceived strength on overall economic management, wage growth and climate change, which are perceived as weaknesses for the Coalition, are likely to be important during the election campaign. Attacks on Labor’s economic policies, such as their plan to abolish franking credit cash refunds, give the Coalition its best chance to win.
After revelations that One Nation solicited donations from the US National Rifle Association, some would have expected their vote to crash, but it has held up well.
In economic news, on March 21 the ABS announced that 4,600 jobs were added in February, well down from the over 39,000 added in January. While the unemployment rate decreased 0.1% to 4.9%, this was a result of lower workforce participation.
This week’s Essential poll, conducted April 4-7 from a sample of 1,069, gave Labor a 52-48 lead, unchanged from last fortnight. Primary votes were 38% Coalition (down one), 35% Labor (down one), 11% Greens (up one) and 5% One Nation (down two). Essential has tended to be worse for Labor than Newspoll since Morrison became PM.
By 51-27, voters approved of the budget; the +24 net is higher than the +16 net in 2018 or +8 net in 2017. Over 75% agreed with the infrastructure spending program and tax rebates for workers earning up to $90,000. By 26-20, voters thought the budget was good for them personally, a reversal from last fortnight’s pre-budget poll, when voters thought the budget would be bad for them personally by 34-19.
The Coalition was trusted over Labor to manage the economy overall by 44-29, but Labor was ahead by 45-31 on managing the economy in the interests of working people.
I wrote on my personal website about last fortnight’s Essential poll that gave Labor a 52-48 lead. Questions about views of world leaders had Theresa May’s ratings tanking since these questions were last asked in July 2018.
In pre-budget polling, a YouGov Galaxy poll for the News Ltd tabloids gave Labor a 53-47 lead. State breakdowns of primary votes suggested that the NSW election defeat had an impact on federal Labor’s NSW vote.
NSW election upper house late counting
With 68% of enrolled voters in the NSW upper house check counted, the Coalition has 7.9 quotas, Labor 6.5, the Greens 2.1, One Nation 1.5, the Shooters 1.1, the Christian Democrats 0.5, the Liberal Democrats 0.5, Keep Sydney Open 0.4 and Animal Justice 0.4.
Out of the 21 seats up for election, eight Coalition, six Labor, two Greens, one One Nation and one Shooter are certain to win. By also using the now complete initial count, analyst Kevin Bonham currently thinks two seats will go to Labor and One Nation, and the final seat is in doubt between the Liberal Democrats, Christian Democrats, Keep Sydney Open and Animal Justice.
European leaders’ summit on April 10 to decide on Brexit
On April 12, the UK is currently scheduled to leave the European Union, with or without a deal. With no deal likely by then, an April 10 European leaders’ summit will decide whether to grant the UK a long extension to Brexit.
Despite some reprieve in the 2019 federal budget, the ABC is still in dire financial straits. More job losses and a reduction in services remain on the agenda.
The Coalition government has provided another three years of tied funding of A$43.7 million specifically for the national broadcaster’s “enhanced news-gathering” program. This program supports local news (particularly regional and outer-suburban news gathering), national reporting teams and state-based digital news.
But this funding doesn’t address the broadcaster’s need for more stability in its operational funding.
In July, the ABC will start to feel the full impact of a three-year, A$83.8 million indexation freeze on its funding, which was contained in the 2018 budget. So devastating is the size of that cut – and the ones prior to that – that ABC managers are almost completely focused on money, undermining their capacity to be strategic about the future.
There is no provision in the 2019 budget to restore the funding lost over the past six years and certainly no boost to cater for the dynamic and changing media environment.
Audiences who value what the ABC does now – and what it needs to be doing to support Australian democracy into the future – should take a closer look at the numbers, the way the money has been allocated and the impact of that.
To illustrate the need for more secure operational funding for the ABC, one of the authors of this article, Michael Ward, conducted research on just how much the broadcaster stands to lose in the aggregate over the course of an eight-year period. Ward used a number of public financial sources to build the table below, including ABC portfolio budget statements and ABC answers to Senate Questions on Notice
One of the difficulties in looking at budgets is the way forward estimates work. As the figures in the table show, the past six budgets have included measures to reduce, remove or freeze (indexation) ABC funding, without adding any new funding initiatives.
This has resulted in an accumulated reduction in available funding of A$393 million over a five-year period, starting from May 2014. According to current budget forecasts, this also means the ABC stands to lose A$783 million in funding by 2022, unless steps are taken to remedy the situation.
The Coalition government and others would argue, however, the ABC actually received a reprieve in this year’s budget with committed funding for “enhanced news gathering” because it treats as “new” the renewal of tied fixed-term funding as it expires.
The “enhanced news gathering” and digital delivery funding was first enacted by the former Labor government in 2013. Although “enhanced news gathering” funding has been renewed twice by the Coalition government since then, including in this year’s budget, the amount allocated for the program was slashed in 2016.
So, while it appears that the current budget announcement is good news for the ABC, the reality is, it is simply a continuation of what should be seen as core business.
One way governments of all ilks have tried to control the ABC – and to win voters over – is by providing tied funding to specific programs like this. One of the earliest examples of tied funding was a National Interest Initiative by the Howard government in 2001, and later the Rudd government’s Children’s Channel and Drama Funding Initiative of 2009. These were seen as core to the ABC’s work, and were eventually made part of the ABC’s ongoing budget.
The problem, of course, is that voters do not understand the impact of the cessation of limited-term, tied funding programs.
We argue that tied funding is also contrary to the principles of independent public broadcasting because it effectively forces the broadcaster to prioritise its activities and programs at the current government’s whim. It also inhibits longer-term effective financial planning by the ABC.
Tied funding used by all parties
If elected, the ALP has committed to restore the A$83.8 million indexation freeze for the ABC included in last year’s budget. It has also promised an additional A$15 million for specific projects to restore short wave radio to the Northern Territory and add more local and regional content, emergency broadcasting and a news literacy program aimed at combating misinformation campaigns online.
These commitments are important, but the freeze is just the tip of a funding iceberg that the ABC has been dealing with for the past six years. The continuation of a tied funding approach doesn’t address the underlying budget problem. More needs to be done.
JERAA argued that the ABC has been cowed by repeated parliamentary inquiries, funding cuts and efficiency reviews. These have had a severe impact on the broadcaster’s ability to perform its important role for the Australian people, which includes production of excellent public affairs reporting, local programming, international news, children’s programming and services on a range of current and emerging platforms.
Tied funding stops the ABC from meeting the core components of its legislated obligations, particularly digital content delivery, where the cost of success – increased take up of services – carries an extra financial burden, unlike analogue broadcasting.
Unless the ABC has ongoing stability of funding and ideally an increase that allows it to keep innovating, it won’t be able to maintain relevance in this fast-moving, globalised media world, nor will it be able to continue as a watchdog on people in power, particularly governments.
Squids and octopuses could be considered the “parrots of the ocean”. Some are smart, and many have complex behaviours. And, of course, they have strange, bird-like beaks.
They are the subject of ancient myths and legends about sea monsters, but they do not live for decades. In fact, their high intelligence and short lifespan represent an unusual paradox.
In our latest research we have discovered several new species that have never been reported from New Zealand waters. Our study almost doubles the known diversity for the Kermadec region, north of New Zealand, which is part of the proposed, but stalled, Kermadec–Rangitāhua ocean sanctuary.
Collectively, squids and octopuses are known as cephalopods, because their limbs attach directly to their head (cephalus). Our team studies cephalopods in our part of the world – the waters between Antarctica and the most northern reaches of New Zealand, the Kermadec Islands – as well as further afield.
Our first inkling of an impressive regional diversity came as we began to open boxes of frozen cephalopod samples at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). These animals had been collected during a deep-sea survey voyage to the Kermadec Islands to better understand the region’s marine biodiversity. Members of the AUT Lab for Cephalopod Ecology and Systematics (ALCES), also known as the “squid lab”, had come to identify and examine them.
As we gently defrosted each specimen, we marvelled at their perfect suckers, iridescent eyes, and shining light organs. We noticed that many species were rare among New Zealand collections. There were some familiar faces, but also some we had only rarely or never encountered before in our local waters. Some were known from neighbouring regions; others, we suspected, might be entirely new to science.
We examined them, photographed each one, took small samples of muscle tissue for DNA analysis, and preserved them for additional work in the future. Then we set about systematically comparing our observations with what had previously been reported in New Zealand waters. And we were in for a surprise.
Doubling known diversity
Among the 150 cephalopod specimens that were collected, we identified 43 species, including 13 species that had not been previously found anywhere in New Zealand waters. Three entire orders – the taxonomic rank above family, which is the level at which, for example, egg-laying mammals split off from all other living mammals – had not been reported from this region: “Bobtail squids” (sepiolids), “comb-fin squids” (genus Chtenopteryx, order Bathyteuthoidea), and myopsid squids (coastal squids with eyes covered by a cornea).
We extracted DNA and obtained sequences for the species that had been seen for the first time in New Zealand waters. This allows us to compare them with individuals from other regions of the world. These included the strange tubercle-covered “glass” (cranchiid) squid Cranchia scabra, and the little “ram’s horn squid” Spirula spirula.
Examples of squid specimens collected recently from the Kermadec Islands Ridge: A) Histioteuthis miranda, B) Heteroteuthis sp. ‘KER’ (likely new to science), C) Chtenopteryx sp. ‘KER1’ (likely new to science), D) Leachia sp. (likely new to science), E) Pyroteuthis serrata, F) Enoploteuthis semilineata. Scale bars: 5mm.Images by Rob Stewart/Keren Spong, CC BY-ND
Five species appear likely new to science, across a number of families with colourful common names such as “strawberry” and “fire” squids (Histioteuthidae and Pyroteuthidae, respectively). These individuals were genetically distinct from all other specimens that had been previously identified and sequenced (by us or others). Their physical appearances will now need to be compared in detail with other similar-looking species in order to fully evaluate their taxonomic status.
In total, 28 of the species we encountered had not previously been reported in the Kermadecs. This brings the total number of species in the region to at least 70. Of these, half are not known to occur elsewhere in New Zealand waters.
Kermadec–Rangitāhua Ocean Sanctuary
The Kermadec Islands, north-north-east of New Zealand, represent a diverse and nearly pristine environment. The region includes (among other habitats) a chain of seamounts and the second-deepest ocean trench in the world.
Currently, the Kermadec Islands region is on a tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. A small proportion of the area is already protected by an existing marine reserve, which extends 12 nautical miles around each of five islands and pinnacles.
This map shows New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in light grey, the existing Kermadec Islands marine reserve in dark grey, and the proposed Kermadec–Rangitāhua Ocean Sanctuary outlined in black.Heather Braid, Kat Bolstad, CC BY-ND
The proposed Kermadec–Rangitāhua Ocean Sanctuary would extend the protection to 200 nautical miles and protect 15% of New Zealand’s ocean environment. It would be among the world’s largest marine protected areas.
We strongly support the establishment of the proposed sanctuary, especially since most of the cephalopod taxa newly reported by this research are deep-sea species whose habitat is not protected by the existing marine reserve.
Although the creation of the sanctuary is supported by most political parties, New Zealand First, which is part of the government coalition, opposes it. So does the fishing industry because fishing would be banned. It is possible that the sanctuary might be created with a lower level of protection than originally proposed (with some fishing still permitted), but the government has reached an impasse.
If the Kermadec–Rangitāhua ocean sanctuary were to be established, it would protect habitats that are used by over half of the known squid and octopus biodiversity in New Zealand waters, including 34 species that have so far only been reported from the Kermadec region.
Political Roundup: Has the Government lost the public debate on the capital gains tax?
Perhaps the public has looked at the Tax Working Group proposals for a capital gains tax and come back with a “no”. Certainly, the opinion poll published last night about the tax proposals looked quite definitive – the headline for Tova O’Brien’s Newshub scoop was:Large majority of New Zealanders don’t want capital gains tax – poll.
According to Newshub, a poll by Reid-Research – the polling company contracted to TV3 – “shows an overwhelming majority of voters – 65 percent – don’t think a CGT should be a priority for the Government. The poll found that just 22.8 percent think it should be a priority.”
More importantly, nearly 50 per cent opposed a capital gains tax on housing (with the family home exempt), against 39 per cent in favour. On the issue of businesses and farms being included, 54 per cent disagreed and 32 per cent agreed. And 69 per cent disagreed with a tax on shares, and 90 per cent disagreed with another tax on KiwiSaver.
Based on this poll, Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking has come out this morning to say the Government will ignore this poll at its peril: “If these numbers don’t wake them up, it might well be the break National have so badly been waiting for” – see: Numbers don’t lie, time for the Government to wake up over CGT.
In particular, Hosking says, it’s New Zealand First who will be most concerned: “these numbers, I would have thought, are about the final nail in the coffin for New Zealand First, who most see as the moderator of any excess that comes out of the Cullen report. If they weren’t hesitant to sign up before, surely the polling we’ve seen now is about as rock solid by way of proof as you could ever possibly want.”
Business NZ’s questionable data
However, Newshub’s Reid-Research poll wasn’t actually commissioned by them, but was instead paid for and set-up by Business New Zealand, a lobby group which is strongly opposed to the introduction of the full capital gains tax proposals. And, as always, the polling questions help determine the type of data produced.
So not only did Newshub report the survey in a questionable way, but the actual survey questions are rather unusual. For example, the headline figure is based on whether New Zealanders see the capital gains tax proposals as a priority. It is a useful question, with useful results, but it’s far from indicative of whether New Zealanders oppose the proposals.
Likewise, questions about whether the issue has harmed the government – 48 per cent say it has, against 33 per cent who say it hasn’t – are interesting, but not entirely useful. Similarly, it’s difficult to interpret the fact that 25 per cent of respondents say the issue would change how they vote, against 58 per cent who say it wouldn’t.
In general, when looking at the poll results, keep firmly in mind that the source is a lobby group with an interest in slanting the results a certain way. Similarly, the business group recently released research to show “estimates the ‘economic drag’ over the first five years of the proposed CGT regime at between $2.75 billion and $6.81b” – see Liam Dann’s Capital Gains Tax could cost NZ economy billions – Business NZ.
The head of Business NZ, Kirk Hope, explained that these concerning figures had been independently assessed by economists, and that the assumptions and estimates were actually “conservative” – i.e. the real figures are likely to be worse. However, this is all strongly challenged by Tom Pullar-Strecker in his article, What’s behind BusinessNZ’s claim CGT would cost $5 billion?
It turns out that many of Business NZ’s claims are less than rigorous. In fact, one of the economists, Chris Evans, who is cited as emphasising the likely high compliance costs of the new tax has been quoted out of context. Evans actually said “that the compliance costs would not be excessive”, and Pullar-Strecker reports his belief that the proposed CGT “would compare favourably with those in other countries, including Australia”.
Pullar-Strecker concludes his investigation into the lobby group’s report stating “BusinessNZ says it wants to start a debate, accepting its numbers aren’t perfect. But its figures may be better viewed as politicking dressed up as a study.”
This doesn’t mean that Business NZ are the only ones who might be accused of massaging the figures and evidence to suit their own arguments. Even the Tax Working Group and Treasury are being criticised for their questionable use of wealth inequality data to make their arguments in favour of change – see Troy Bowker’s Why argument of Capital Gains Tax fairness is based on unreliable data.
According to Bowker, the CGT report was based on wealth statistics gathered by Statistics New Zealand, which were used to show that few New Zealanders would be subject to the new taxes. However, “By the Department of Statistics own admission, it contains data that is so unreliable they cautioned against its use.”
Other capital gains tax surveys
There has been some other public polling about the tax proposals that provide additional and alternative information. The most recent was published just over a week ago, by the Horizon Research company, and this is best covered by Liam Dann in his article, More Kiwis support capital gains tax than oppose in new poll. Most notably, this survey showed much stronger support for the tax proposals: “44 per cent of New Zealand adults supported introducing a capital gains tax and 35 per cent opposed it. A further 16 per cent are neutral on the new tax, while 6 per cent did not know.”
This poll was particularly interesting and useful, because it also indicated how different voters and asset-owners felt about the proposals. Here’s the different political party supporters in favour and against: Labour (60 per cent support; 14 per cent oppose), National (23 support; 62 oppose), Greens (75 support; 14 oppose), and NZ First (30 support; 55 oppose).
In terms of asset owners: those with shares (56 per cent oppose), with rental properties without a mortgage (66 oppose); with rental properties with a mortgage (74 oppose); and those with farms or large lifestyle blocks (90 oppose).
Some farmers are actually showing increased support today for a capital gains tax on farms, particularly when the asset is brought and sold in a short space of time. Newshub reports today that “Federated Farmers vice president Andrew Hoggard told Newshub people’s gains from quickly selling on farms need to be targeted first” – see: Farm flippers should be taxed – Federated Farmers.
It’s also interesting to look at a survey of business owners, which was carried out by the MYOB company, and showed that opposition from this sector wasn’t as clear as might be assumed: “Most business owners are against a capital gains tax but a survey found fewer than half were strongly opposed and a fifth were supportive” – see Tom Pullar-Strecker’s Capital gains tax compromise inevitable, accounting body believes.
This article shows that “Backing for a CGT was strongest among ‘Gen Y and Z’ business owners – with more than a quarter of them happy to stomach the tax – and from business owners in Wellington, while ‘baby boomers’ were more likely to be opposed.” In addition, research in New Zealand from the Certified Accountants Australia found that “there was a minority of business owners who did not like a CGT but who felt it would be necessary to meet the country’s future social and economic challenges”.
New public debate on CGT
A new campaign was launched yesterday to provide a pro-CGT perspective in the current debate. The Tax Justice Aotearoa launch at Parliament is best covered by Tom Pullar-Strecker, who points out that “Much of the lobbying over a CGT to date has come from groups opposed to the tax, which include the Taxpayers Union”, and the new campaign is meant to even up the disparity – see: CGT supporters and Taxpayers Union take tax wrangle to Parliament.
The article reports concerns about the political independence of the new campaign, as well as whether taxpayer funds are being used to assist it, especially because of the involvement of the Public Health Association, which receives funding from the Ministry of Health. The article reports: “PHA chief executive Prudence Stone clarified it had not provided any cash or resources for Tax Justice Aotearoa to date but did not rule out doing so in future.”
Although Tax Justice Aotearoa’s petition appears to implicitly support the Government’s Tax Working Group proposals for a capital gains tax, including the exemption of a family home and the package being fiscally-neutral, two of the campaign’s organisers explain in more detail their advocacy of tax reform, which involves going further than what is currently proposed – see Paul Barber and Louise Delany’s Why we’re shouting about a capital gains tax.
In line with some of these messages, it’s also worth reading today’s opinion piece by Alison Pavlovich who emphases some of the selling points she believes are missing from the debate on the current proposals, such as the importance of equity in the tax system, and pairing of tax cuts with the CGT – see: The point being missed in the capital gains tax debate.
Thirty-nine people were arrested yesterday in Melbourne over an animal rights protest that blocked a major intersection. The protest caused chaos for commuters during the morning peak hour, and politicians and the media were quick to condemn the act.
The prime minister denounced the “shameful, un-Australian” conduct of “green-collared criminals”. The opposition leader commented that protesters should thank farmers, rather than attack them. And some people on social media ridiculed and abused those engaged in the protest.
Yet Australia, like most liberal regimes, should allow citizens to protest as part of their right to free speech. Civil disobedience has traditionally played a positive role in democratic societies. Indeed, the label “civil” is meant to signal something praiseworthy in the protest.
Civil disobedience isn’t the same as non-violence
Civil disobedience is traditionally identified with the non-violent campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King junior. But as I explain in my book on this subject, this has had the unwelcome result of suggesting that “civil” means “non-violent”.
After 39 activists were arrested, Superintendent David Clayton explained yesterday that Victoria Police:
…respect the right of people to protest peacefully.
This statement suggests the Melbourne protest was not peaceful, despite the fact protesters were holding placards that read:
This is a peaceful protest.
What many found despicable in this protest was the disruption of public traffic. They think the right to protest does not imply the right to cause others to remain stranded on their way to work. From this standpoint, the activists’ disruptive conduct constituted an act of violence and, as such, was incompatible with the principles of civil disobedience.
The danger of neutralising dissent
But this reasoning is misguided and dangerous. It’s dangerous because it risks neutralising the potential of civil disobedience as a form of dissent. When the government claims that only non-disruptive protests are “civil”, it’s also implying that those who seek to go beyond mere symbolic actions, and to have some impact on others through their protest, are censored as “criminal” and uncivil.
Sociologist Herbert Marcuse captured this risk with the notion of “repressive tolerance”. He argues that a government may successfully neutralise dissent by persuading citizens that there are “good” and “bad” ways of protesting. The good ones are those that cause no disruption, the bad ones are those that do – and citizens should engage in the good ones only.
But it is no coincidence that protests that cause no disruption are also the least likely to have an impact on public opinion and therefore force the government to take action.
This is exactly what occurred in Melbourne yesterday. After many non-disruptive protests that led to no answer from the government, the activists resorted to a disruptive act to force society to face the moral issue of animal treatment in the food industry. This was necessary to ensure their view, for once, was not ignored by the public.
What civil disobedience is and isn’t
I describe civil disobedience as an act of communication (albeit illegal). It is a way for citizens to “persuade” others of the necessity of changing a law, policy of practice. Its civility lies in the fact it shows respect and consideration for those it addresses.
But this need not be done in strictly non-violent ways. For example, in some cases forcing others to face our opinion (even against their will) is not uncivil, insofar as they remain free to decide whether to endorse or reject our view.
The conduct becomes uncivil when it seeks to “coerce” others to accept one’s view – for example, via threats. This is why terrorism is inherently uncivil.
Many people defended Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing as a form of civil disobedience, since he claimed to have leaked classified documents to the public “so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day”.
The same could be said of the Melbourne protest. One of the protesters explained:
All we want is for people to watch the documentary and understand what goes on in Australian abattoirs.
The protesters sought to persuade others to take action to promote animal welfare, not coerce them.
Of course, these activists resorted to an illegal act to carry out their protest, and for that reason they may be answerable to the law. Yet, I would argue, as civil “disobedients”, they should be treated with more leniency in comparison to standard lawbreakers.
Not all peaceful protest is civil
There is another important reason why we should resist the idea of civility as synonymous with non-violence. When right-wing groups decide to organise a peaceful protest in support of their racist views, their action may certainly be described as “non-violent”, insofar as it causes neither injury no disruption to others.
But this protest could never be considered “civil”, despite its non-disruptive nature, because at its heart lies an inherent disrespect for some segments of society.
Claiming that some people are less worthy than others, simply because they belong to a certain race or religion, is inherently uncivil. Those who engage in protest, even non-violent ones, to advance those claims should appropriately be condemned as uncivil disobedients.
Acclaimed actor and activist Anzac Wallace is being remembered by people in the film and political worlds for his rare talent and powerful personality.
The actor has died at the age of 76. His tangi will be at Ngā Whare Waatea Marae in Māngere.
Wallace, usually called “Zac”, was best known for his role in the 1983 film Utu (Revenge), which brought him critical acclaim and helped put New Zealand – and Māori – on the map.
Anzac Wallace as the guerilla leader Te Wheke in the 1983 film Utu … brought him critical acclaim and helped put New Zealand – and Māori – on the global map. Image: Ara Video/RNZ
The thrilling tale of conflict between Māori and British colonists in 1870s New Zealand is led by Wallace’s character Te Wheke, who sets out to take vengeance on the British forces who have killed his family and destroyed his village.
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Wallace had done little acting before taking on the role. He was working as a trade union organiser during the 1978 Māngere Bridge construction project dispute when he met Utu director Geoff Murphy.
That’s when Labour MP Willie Jackson also got to know him.
“Zac Wallace was a leader. There’s no doubt about it,” Jackson said.
‘Huge personality’ “In every area that he moved into, you know, he was born a leader and he just had this big, huge personality and he was a natural orator and he was a fighter for justice.”
Wallace ran into trouble when he was a young man and spent more than a decade in borstal and prison – the most serious a six-year sentence for armed robbery – but turned his life around after his release.
“He went from being in the D in Paremoremo [prison] to become a union leader and a really acclaimed actor and community leader,” Jackson said.
“So it’s such a successful life. He had so many skills and of course he had his flaws, too … but always his leadership stood out and he had a great heart for the people.”
When Utu was released, Jackson said it was an incredible source of pride for Māori, as well as for the rest of the country.
“We had so few Māori who had made it, in terms of international acclaim. You know, the Temuera Morrisons, the Cliff Curtises, the Taika Waititis, Kimberley, they came along quite a bit later. And so Zac was one of the first – if not the first – to really get some international acclaim.”
Actor-turned-lawyer Kelly Johnson, best known for playing car thief Gerry Austin in Goodbye Pork Pye, got to know Wallace on the set of Utu.
“We were in the bush, it was cold and with snow sometimes. So you end up sitting around, trying to keep warm and talking. And that’s how I got to know him.
‘Talk quite openly’ “It was a really fascinating, interesting time because we were discussing things that we don’t normally talk about. And we could confront them and talk about quite openly, about what happened in the past.
“And at the same time, there was all this stuff going on with the Red Squad and you know, the Springbok Tour. There was a sort of a weird parallel going on in real life.”
Anzac Wallace … “weird parallel going on in real life.”. Image: Māori TV
Anzac Wallace spoke to RNZ after Geoff Murphy’s death in December last year.
“At that time I didn’t trust maybe people and this bearded man rocked up on my doorstep with a cigarette – a durrie – hanging out of his mouth and asking me if I wanted to play in a movie.
“I always took those sorts of invitations like a joke. Who wants to know a thief? Who wants to know a burglar? Who wants to know an ex-prisoner?
“Geoff did. He was genuine.”
This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
The journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific has won a US$20,000 (F$42,617) grant in a boost environmental reporting in the Pacific.
The programme was one of 14 recipients of the competitive Internews/Earth Journalism Network (EJN) Asia-Pacific and Bay of Bengal media grants for 2019.
The EJN sees the grant programme as an opportunity for media, civil society organisations and academic institutions throughout Asia-Pacific to think critically and creatively about how to build local resources for reporting climate change, natural resource management and the environment.
The winners were selected from 70 applications based on two rounds of reviews. USP Journalism was the only grantee from the Pacific.
Internews EJN Asia-Pacific project director Sim Kok Eng Amy said the agency were glad to partner with USP Journalism to nurture future journalists in the Pacific and equip them with the skills and knowledge to report on climate change.
“I hope that, through this project, the young journalists will develop a passion for environmental reporting, and be inspired to report on the lives of those people most affected by climate change and their resilience in tackling climate change,” Amy said.
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USP Journalism, which comes under the School of Language, Arts and Media (SLAM), started in 1988, with more than 200 graduates serving the Pacific and beyond in various media and communication roles.
Won awards The programme has won a number of national and regional awards for environmental reporting, including the 2010 Vision Pasifika Climate Change Media Awards by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).
Other grantees will undertake projects that include:
Strengthening Thai journalists’ ability to cover transboundary environmental issues in neighbouring countries and at multi-stakeholder forums.
Providing story grants for journalists to investigate the impacts of climate change on coffee cultivation in Indonesia.
Establishing an online platform to allow for information exchanges and collaboration between local journalists, farmers, youth and women’s unions in the Mekong Delta.
USP Journalism has also partnered with Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre-initiated Bearing Witness climate change project with postgraduate students being sent to Fiji to do a series of reports over the past four years.
It’s a common refrain – western ecologists should work closely with indigenous peoples, who have a unique knowledge of the ecosystems in their traditional lands.
But the rhetoric is strong on passion and weak on evidence.
Now, a project in the remote Kimberley area of northwestern Australia provides hard evidence that collaborating with indigenous rangers can change the outcome of science from failure to success.
This research had a simple but ambitious aim: to develop new ways to save at-risk predators such as lizards and quolls from the devastating impacts of invasive cane toads.
Cane toads are invasive and highly toxic to Australia’s apex predators.David Nelson
All across tropical Australia, the arrival of these gigantic alien toads has caused massive die-offs among meat-eating animals such as yellow-spotted monitors (large lizards in the varanid group) and quolls (meat-eating marsupials). Mistaking the new arrivals for edible frogs, animals that try to eat them are fatally poisoned by the toad’s powerful toxins.
Steep population declines in these predators ripple out through entire ecosystems.
But we can change that outcome. We expose predators to a small cane toad, big enough to make them ill but not to kill them. The predators learn fast, and ignore the larger (deadly) toads that arrive in their habitats a few weeks or months later. As a result, our trained predators survive, whereas their untrained siblings die.
So as we cruised across the floodplain on quad bikes looking for goannas, each team consisted of a scientist (university-educated, and experienced in wildlife research) and a Balanggarra Indigenous ranger.
Although our study species is huge – a male yellow-spotted monitor can grow to more than 1.7 metres in length and weigh more than 6kg – the animals are well-camouflaged and difficult to find.
Over an 18-month study, we caught and radio-tracked more than 80 monitors, taught some of them not to eat toads, and then watched with trepidation as the cane toad invasion arrived.
Excitingly, the training worked. Half of our trained lizards were still alive by the end of the study, whereas all of the untrained lizards died soon after toads arrived.
That positive result has encouraged a consortium of scientists, government authorities, conservation groups, landowners and local businesses to implement aversion training on a massive scale (see www.canetoadcoalition.com), with support from the Australian Research Council.
A yellow-spotted monitor fitted with a radio transmitter in our study. This medium-sized male became CTA-trained and lived for the entirety of the study in high densities of cane toads.Georgia Ward-Fear, University of Sydney
But there’s a twist to the tale, a vindication of our decision to make the project truly collaborative.
When we looked in detail at our data, we realised that the monitor lizards found by Indigenous rangers were different to those found by western scientists. The rangers found shyer lizards, often further away from us when sighted, motionless, and in heavy cover where they were very difficult to see.
Gregory Johnson, Balanggarra Elder and Ranger.Georgia Ward-Fear
We don’t know how much the extraordinary ability of the rangers to spot those well-concealed lizards was due to genetics or experience – but there’s no doubt they were superb at finding lizards that the scientists simply didn’t notice.
And reflecting the distinctive “personalities” of those ranger-located lizards, they were the ones that benefited the most from aversion training. Taking a cautious approach to life, a nasty illness after eating a small toad was enough to make them swear off toads thereafter.
In contrast, most of the lizards found by scientists were bold creatures. They learned quickly, but when a potential meal hopped across the floodplain a few months later, the goanna seized it before recalling its previous experience. And even holding a toad briefly in the mouth can be fatal.
Comparisons of conditions under which lizards were initially sighted in the field by scientists and Indigenous rangers (a) proximity to lizards in metres (b) density of ground-cover vegetation (>30cm high) surrounding the lizard (c) intensity of light directly on lizard (light or shade) (d) whether the lizard was stationary or moving (i.e. walking or running). Sighting was considered more difficult if lizards were further away, in more dense vegetation, in shade, and stationary.Georgia Ward-Fear, University of Sydney
As a result of the intersection between indigenous abilities and lizard personalities, the overall success of our project increased as a result of our multicultural team.
If we had just used the conventional model – university researchers doing all of the work, indigenous people asked for permission but playing only a minor role – our project could have failed, and the major conservation initiative currently underway may have died an early death.
So our study, now published in Conservation Letters, provides an unusual insight – backed up by evidence.
Moving beyond lip service, and genuinely involving indigenous Traditional Owners in conservation research, can make all the difference in the world.
Georgia Ward-Fear (holding a yellow-spotted monitor) with Balanggarra Rangers Herbert and Wesley Alberts.David Pearson, WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions
This research was published in collaboration with James ‘Birdy’ Birch and his team of Balanggarra rangers in the eastern Kimberley.
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.
Election season means transport season: just as the recent New South Wales and Victorian elections gave us massive new transport promises, so too is the federal government relying on the enduring popularity of new roads and rail. But look beyond the rhetoric and the past three years have been largely business as usual. That leaves plenty of room for the next government, of whatever colour, to take a fresh look at how transport promises are made – and plenty of room to improve.
Last week’s federal budget committed to transport expenditure of A$7.4 billion in 2019-20, and A$33 billion over the four-year forward estimates period.
The government claims it’s spending a record A$100 billion over a decade. Yet the opposition claims: “Across the four years of this budget, Commonwealth investment in infrastructure actually falls, from A$8 billion to A$4.5 billion.” And Infrastructure Partnerships Australia says recent budgets are down on the long-term average by about A$11 billion over the forward estimates.
How much is the government actually spending?
With such polarised views, who are we to believe?
In reality, the expenditure for 2019-20 is absolutely normal. At 0.37% of GDP, it’s close to the midpoint of spending on transport under treasurers Scott Morrison, Joe Hockey and Wayne Swan. In each of the past ten budgets, annual transport spending in the year following the budget has been 0.26-0.53% of GDP.
What is different is the extent of promises that lie beyond the forward estimates period. The move to a ten-year pipeline of promises might be fine in theory, but an interested elector can rely only on what’s in the budget papers. And from that they would conclude there’s nothing unusual to see here.
All these figures concern grants to state governments, which are responsible for transport networks. But, in addition to these grants, the federal government has developed an enthusiasm for funding projects “off-budget”. In the past two years, the Commonwealth made equity investments of A$9.3 billion in Inland Rail and A$5.3 billion in Western Sydney Airport.
The Charter of Budget Honesty states that an investment can be treated as an off-budget equity injection only if the government has a “reasonable expectation” of recovering the investment. In other words, the entity must be expected to make a positive return over time.
But this gives governments a lot of latitude. A positive rate of return is not the same as a commercial one. And there seems little likelihood of commercial returns in either case.
For Inland Rail, it’s no secret that the Australian Rail Track Corporation will never be asked to repay the A$9.3 billion, even when project revenues start to flow in 2025. Let’s hope the finance minister is right to insist there’s no prospect the project will need even more taxpayer support, despite the risks identified in the budget papers themselves and by the Commonwealth Auditor-General. With no expectation of repayment, there is no practical difference between this “equity investment” and a grant.
The Morrison government has invested A$5.3 billion in Western Sydney Airport while ensuring any write-down will never show up in the budget bottom line.Mick Tsikas/AAP
For Western Sydney Airport, the government decided to build the airport itself after Sydney Airport Corporation declined its right to build it. The airport operator said the offer as it stood was “deeply uneconomic”. It cited operational, traffic, financial and political risks.
So it’s hard to share the confidence of the then treasurer (and now prime minister), Scott Morrison, when he said the new airport will “generate an income stream that’s going to pay for itself”.
In both cases, if a future government ends up writing down the fair value of these assets, this will appear on the balance sheet as a change to “other economic flows”. It won’t be separately identified. Nor will the write-down show up in the underlying cash balance figure that the media spotlight highlights on budget night.
The unavoidable conclusion is that pushing transport spending off-budget seriously diminishes not only the discipline that comes from competing for funds through the budget process, but also transparency in how public money is being spent.
But time passed and no eminent person was appointed. More time passed, ministers moved portfolio, and no eminent person was appointed. Finally, in October 2018, current minister Michael McCormack declined to commit to the inquiry.
An inquiry is no more than an inquiry, but a non-inquiry is a commitment to the status quo. Roads funding and roads investment are serious topics, and many commentators have argued that they are the laggards of regulatory reform.
A change to how road use is funded could significantly alter which roads are funded, what maintenance is done, and how networks are managed. It appears to have been all too much for this government. This task awaits a future government.
Labor’s promises on proper assessment of projects and business cases before investment decisions are made are welcome.Lukas Coch/AAP
The alternative government’s most important promises aren’t the sexy ones about electric vehicles. They are Labor’s promises that Infrastructure Australia should assess projects before the decision to invest, and to release assessed business cases. These promises may sound worthy and a little dull, but in reality they are big and welcome commitments.
It would be a significant improvement if whichever party wins government next month were to commit to, and follow through on, careful assessment of transport gaps and problems, consideration of the various feasible solutions, and rigorous evaluation of the preferred approach. And it’s not enough just to do this; it should be done in public.
Journalists provide checks on government, parliament and business, which threatens the country’s authoritarian politics and the limited democracy its Constitution imagines.
What is unusual is Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s decisive intervention in favour of three New Zealand journalists, who were arrested last week as they investigated environmental degradation by a Chinese property developer building a new resort.
Bainimarama insisted that there was no criminal inquiry in respect of the journalists and that they should be released. But it shouldn’t be assumed that he was declaring a new-found interest in freedom of the press. Nor should one accept the police commissioner’s assurance that the journalists were arrested by “a small group of rogue officers”.
It is more likely that they just didn’t understand why the usual restrictions on press freedoms didn’t apply in this case. As Bainimarama told parliament the following day:
It should be made clear: the news media has been an ally in accountability, helping to expose the [property development] company’s illegal environmental destruction.
Diplomatic sensitivities and Bainimarama’s genuine and long-held concern for environmental protection are at play in the apology that, according to New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, “seems” genuine.
Prime Minister Bainimarama is known for his environmental leadership. Here he visits residents affected by Cyclone Winston in 2016.AAP, CC BY-ND
On Tuesday last week – the day before the New Zealanders’ arrests – the Fiji Parliamentary Reporters’ Handbook was published in Suva. The handbook, launched in the presence of New Zealand’s deputy high commissioner and prepared with the support of Australian Aid and the UN Development Program, contextualised and affirmed the constitutional impediment to a free press.
There is scope in the Constitution to:
limit … the rights and freedoms [of the press] … in the interests of national security, public safety, public order, public morality, public health or the orderly conduct of elections.
Japan was also present at the launch. Like New Zealand and Australia, Japan is interested in promoting democracy and fundamental human freedoms, but also determined to restrict China’s growing influence in the region. Diplomacy requires complex compromise.
As Australia’s deputy High Commissioner Anna Dorney rather hopefully observed, democracy requires a media that:
… plays a critical role in society, providing crucial information that educates, enlightens and enriches the public to help inform the civil discourse crucial to a successful society.
The New Zealand journalists were arrested the following day.
Bainimarama’s diplomatic dilemma
Bainimarama faces a diplomatic dilemma. Fiji’s economy needs Chinese investment but not Chinese developers’ environmental degradation. Bainimarama is well regarded in international forums for his environmental policy leadership. Climate change is a centre piece in Fijian foreign policy. In 2018, six of the prime minister’s 14 foreign policy speeches dealt with the issue.
New Zealand’s “Pacific reset” foreign policy makes it an ally to Fiji in climate change policy. In other respects, the relationship is not so strong.
New Zealand, like Australia, had demanded Fiji’s suspension from the Commonwealth and the Pacific Islands’ Forum in 2009, three years after Bainimarama’s coup. Fiji has been re-admitted to both. International observers concluded that its general election in 2018 was transparent and credible. While elections are essential, Fiji shows that they are not all a functioning democracy requires.
Fiji’s regional isolation encouraged its “Look North” foreign policy. Its relationships with China and Russia developed. Russia has provided Fiji with military equipment in return for its support at the UN on its disputes with Georgia and Ukraine. From New Zealand’s perspective, these disputes posed a risk to international security.
But it is on China that the Fijian economy depends heavily and whose influence most concerns Australia and New Zealand. The Pacific reset policy addresses this concern explicitly:
The Pacific’s strategic environment is becoming increasingly contested and complicated, and New Zealand’s relative influence in the region is consequently declining.
New Zealand’s relative influence in Fiji is low in part because because it insists on “transparent, accountable, inclusive and democratic government systems” across the region. These features of democratic government enable coherent environmental policy, which is where Fiji and New Zealand recognise scope for significant cooperation. Climate change and disaster risk management are Pacific reset priorities.
We seek to assist Pacific Island countries in achieving effective global action on climate change and in adapting to and mitigating its effects … New Zealand has an influential role to play in leading debate about appropriate policy responses.
Fiji is a small state, with great strategic significance in the Pacific. The New Zealand journalists’ prompt release on prime ministerial intervention shows why.
The coin, developed in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups and designed by the Mint’s Aleksandra Stokic, features 14 different words for “money” from Australian Indigenous languages. But where do these words come from?
Money, or an object which abstractly represented the value of goods and services, did not exist in Australia before European colonisation. Trade occurred, but it was between items deemed to be of similar worth, for example, pearl shell, quartz, food or songs. With the entry of money into the Indigenous economy, new words were needed to refer to coins and later, notes.
Most Indigenous words for money come from words for “stone”, “rock” or “pebble”, no doubt in reference to the size and shape of coins. On the new 50 cent coin, you’ll find words for “stone” from across Australia:
Kaytetye, spoken in Central Australia, and Kaurna, the language of Adelaide, go against the trend by extending the words ngkweltye and pirrki (which both mean “piece”), to also mean “money”.
Gathang, from the Central New South Wales coast, uses dhinggarr “grey”, perhaps due to the colour of most coins, and walang “head”, presumably in reference to the monarch’s head on the coin. Wiradjuri, from the same area, also uses walang, but in this case it means “stone”.
Origin of the Indigenous words for ‘money’ on the new 50 cent coin.Felicity Meakins and Brenda Thornley
Other words for ‘money’ from Indigenous languages
The diversity of Indigenous words for money on the new coin is an attempt to reflect the linguistic tapestry of Australia, a nation of over 300 languages and many more dialects. However, the words on the coin are just a small sample of Indigenous terms for money.
Some languages differentiate between coins and paper money. Murrinh-patha, spoken in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory, uses palyirr “stone” for coins and we “paperbark” to mean notes.
Other languages have words that vary by denomination. Alyawarr, spoken just north of Alice Springs, uses aherr-angketyarr “lots of kangaroos” to refer to the A$1 coin, and rnter-rnter “red” in reference to $20 notes.
Alyawarr people also say kwert-apeny “like smoke” for $100 notes. This is perhaps confusing at first, until you recall the original light blue and grey $100 note (1984-1996) depicting Sir Douglas Mawson.
In some cases, terms for money have been borrowed from other languages. The English word “money” has been given a local flavour by different languages, for example: mani/moni (Kriol) and maniyi or tala (Warlpiri).
Another borrowing comes from Australia’s close neighbours. The legacy of 18th century Macassan traders from present-day Indonesia remains in words for “money” originally derived from rupiah (Indonesia’s word for currency). These include rrupiya (Mawng, Burarra, Djinang) and wurrupiya (Tiwi). (And note that Tiwi also uses wurrukwati “mussel shell” for “money”).
Probably the most innovative borrowing for money, still used throughout south-western Queensland, is banggu. The word derives from bank and –gu, the latter being used to express ownership. So banggu literally means “of the bank”, and perhaps emerged during the period in Queensland history when the state government was withholding wages from Indigenous people. These stolen wages are now thought to be worth as much as A$500 million in banggu.
Indigenous representation on Australian currency
Indigenous Australians have not always been well represented on Australian currency. Take the bark painting by David Malangi on the back of the old $1 note released in 1966, which was used without consent or acknowledgement, or the first polymer $10 note, released in 1988, which featured an anonymous Indigenous man painted up for ceremony.
Contrast this to 1995, when the Indigenous man on the $50 note was named as the first published Indigenous author, Ngarrindjeri writer David Unaipon, or 2017 when a commemorative 50 cent coin was designed by Boneta-Marie Mabo and released for National Reconciliation Week.
The use of multiple words for money on the new coin challenges the myth of a single Australian language. It also represents a shift to naming and individuation: from depicting Australian Indigenous people and their languages as a single group, to recognising the diversity of these groups and their languages.
But do we want these advancements? And – importantly – do we trust them?
Our research, published earlier this year in the European Journal of Marketing, looked at the roles technology plays in Australian homes. We found three main ways people assign control to, and trust in, their technology.
Most people still want some level of control. That’s an important message to developers if they want to keep increasing the uptake of smart home technology, yet to reach 25% penetration in Australia.
How smart do we want a home?
Smart homes are modern homes that have appliances or electronic devices that can be controlled remotely by the owner. Examples include lights controlled via apps, smart locks and security systems, and even smart coffee machines that remember your brew of choice and waking time.
But we still don’t understand consumer interactions with these technologies, and to speed up their adoption we need to know they type of value they can offer.
We conducted a set of studies in conjunction with CitySmart and a group of distributors, and we asked people about their smart technology preferences in the context of electricity management (managing appliances and utility plans).
We conducted 45 household interviews involving 116 people across Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia, and Tasmania. Then we surveyed 1,345 Australian households. The interviews uncovered and explored the social roles assigned to technologies, while the survey allowed us to collect additional information and find out how the broader Australian population felt about these technology types.
We found households attribute social roles and rules to smart home technologies. This makes sense: the study of anthropomorphism tells us we tend to humanise things we want to understand. We humanise in order to trust (remember Clippy, the Microsoft paperclip with whom we all had a love-hate relationship?).
These social roles and rules determine whether (or how) households will adopt the technologies.
Tech plays three roles
Most people want technology to serve them (95.6% of interviewees, about 19 out of 20). Those who didn’t want any technology were classified as “resisters” and made up less than 5% of the respondents.
We found the role that technology can play in households tended to fall into one of three categories, the intern, the assistant and the manager:
the intern (passive technology) Technology exists to bring me information, but shouldn’t be making any decisions on its own. Real-life example: Switch your Thinking provides an SMS-based tip service. This mode of use was preferred in 22-35% of households.
the assistant (interactive technology) Technology should not only bring me information, but add value by helping me make decisions or interact. Real-life example: Homesmart from Ergon provides useful data to support consumers in their decisions; including remotely controlling appliances or monitoring electricity budget. This mode of use was preferred in 41-51% of households.
the manager (proactive technology) Technology should analyse information and make decisions itself, in order to make my life more efficient. Real-life example: Tibber, which learns your home’s electricity-usage pattern and helps you make adjustments. This mode of use was preferred in 22-24% of households.
Who’s the boss?
According to our study, while smart technology roles can change, the customer always remains the CEO. As CEO, they determine whether full control is retained or delegated to the technology.
For example, while two consumers might install a set of smart lights, one may engage by directly controlling lights via the app, while the other delegates this to the app – allowing it to choose based on sunset times when lights should be on.
Roles for consumer and smart technology – the consumer always remains the CEO, but technology can be viewed as an intern, assistant, or manager.Natalie Sketcher, Visual Designer
Notably, time pressure was evident as justification for each of the three options. Passive technology saved time by not wasting it on fiddling with smart tech. Interactive technology gave information and controlled interactions for busy families. Proactive technology relieved overwhelmed households from managing their own electricity.
All households had clear motivation for their choices.
Households that chose passive technology were motivated by simplicity, cost-effectiveness and privacy concerns. One study participant in this group said:
Less hassle. Don’t like tech controlling my life.
Households prioritising interactive technology were looking for a balance of convenience and control, technology that provides:
A good support but allows me to maintain overall control and decision-making.
Households keen on proactive technology wanted set and forget abilities to allow the household to focus on the more important things in life. They sought:
Having the process looked after and managed for us as we don’t have the time to do it ourselves.
This raises the question: why did we see such differences in household preference?
Trust in tech
According to our research, this comes down to the relationship between trust, risk, and the need for control. It’s just that these motivations that are expressed differently in different households.
While one household sees delegating their choices as a safe bet (that is, trusting the technology to save them from the risk of electricity over-spend), another would see retaining all choices as the true expression of being in control (that is, believing humans should be trusted with decisions, with technology providing input only when asked).
This is not unusual, nor is this the first study to find the importance of our sense of trust and risk in making technology decisions.
It’s not that consumers don’t want advancements to serve them – they do – but this working relationship requires clear roles and ground rules. Only then can there be trust.
For smart home technology developers, the message is clear: households will continue to expect control and customisation features so that the technology serves them – either as an intern, an assistant, or a manager – while they remain the CEO.
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If you’re interested to discover your working relationship with technology, complete this three-question online quiz.
Over the past month, Australians and many people around the world have been listening – really listening – to politicians, for a change. Some politicians, that is. Jacinda Ardern, for one.
People everywhere have been moved by her comments, often to tears. She has been lauded for her demonstration of empathy and understanding of complex, emotionally charged issues that some others reduce to glib slogans.
How is it that the New Zealand prime minister is such a good speaker?
It’s because she is a good listener. Understanding and empathy, so lacking in much political discussion and debate, don’t come from being a good talker. They come from active, empathetic, inclusive listening.
I don’t wish to sound like yet another member of a movement to canonise Jacinda Ardern, but she stands as a good example of what people want from politicians. Policy, yes. Leadership, yes. But not a blustering, boasting, blowhard style of leadership focused on self-aggrandisement and berating and beating the opposition – a style of political discourse to which we are all too accustomed.
Leadership studies emphasise empathy. Princess Diana had it. Nelson Mandela had it. That did not make them weak. To the contrary, it made them strong and able to effect change.
Knowledge is important to produce informed policy. But understanding of people is also vital in a democracy. Understanding their affective (emotional) as well cognitive responses and their deepest concerns, fears and hopes requires listening. And listening to all sectors of society, not only elites and lobbyists.
Not listening is what led to Brexit
A research project I have led over the past four years inside a variety of political, government, corporate and non-government organisations has found 80% to 95% of communication resources are devoted to disseminating messages. That is, speaking, mostly about themselves. As little as 5% of the large investment by organisations in communication is devoted to listening.
Calling the referendum that resulted in Brexit was the result of not listening. The former Conservative government in the UK led by David Cameron did not understand the views and concerns of British people. How could that be when they spent money on research and a bevy of political advisers?
Research indicates three main reasons.
Many politicians and political parties rely heavily on polls with “tick a box” questions, and often small unrepresentative samples to measure support. But, as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump showed, polls often do not reflect the concerns or mood of a majority of citizens.
Politicians continue to play to traditional media, believing that media reflects public opinion, and that making headlines in newspapers or being on TV is a primary influence on people’s behaviour.
They rely on their political parties, not only for organisation, but as their “electorate” and “voice of the people”.
The problem for Australian politicians facing a federal election in May is that audience and influence of traditional media in Australia, and many Western countries, have been in severe decline for some time.
Journalism remains important – perhaps more important than ever. But many people, particularly young people and some major ethnic communities, get their information, news and advice from social media, peers and other sources.
The major political parties in Australia reportedly had 100,000 to 200,000 members in the 1950s, but that number had shrunk to less than 50,000 by 2013. In the UK, political party registration data reveal that the total membership of the three largest political parties amounts to just 1.6% of eligible voters.
In short, the goal posts and the sites of democratic participation have moved over the past decade or so – from major political parties and traditional mass media to social media, social movements, activist groups, special interest groups and small minority parties.
Studies of election campaigns show that politicians use social media primarily for posting slogans and political messages, rather than listening.
While some sites are “echo chambers” frequented by bots and fake accounts, there is also a large body of authentic public opinion voiced every day online – voices crying out to be listened to. There are also new types of community and environmental organisations that fall under the radar of mainstream politics.
It’s time for politicians to #listenfirst, learn and lead.
Did you know the definition of high blood pressure (hypertension) in the United States was recently greatly expanded? Overnight, tens of millions of people were reclassified, leaving one in every two adults with a diagnosis of hypertension.
The move has been welcomed by some but also widely criticised, amid concerns the expanded definition may bring more harm than good to many people, from unnecessary illness labels and unneeded drugs.
What about the condition called “chronic kidney disease” (CKD), diagnosed by measuring blood levels to estimate kidney function? Because it does not account for normal ageing, the current definition labels up to one in two older people as having “CKD”.
But many of those labelled will never have any kidney symptoms, chronic or otherwise, and there’s been repeated criticism within the medical literature. That broad new “disease” was created at a conference sponsored by a major drug company.
Then there are the recent changes to the definition of gestational diabetes which mean up to one in five pregnant women may now be diagnosed. But it’s unclear whether many among the newly diagnosed mothers or their babies might benefit from this expansion.
It’s time for a major change in how disease definitions and diagnostic thresholds are set. We outline a proposal for how this might happen today in the the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.
The growing problem of overdiagnosis
In all these examples, the danger is that more and more people may be overdiagnosed. Overdiagnosis means receiving a diagnosis that isn’t likely to benefit you.
Supporters of expanded definitions often have the best of intentions, motivated to diagnose ever milder problems and treat them early.
But early detection can be a double-edged sword. For some people you prevent serious illness, for others you overdiagnose and overtreat things that would never progress and never cause any harm.
Panels of experts determining where to set the threshold for the diagnosis of disease often have financial ties to drug companies.Africa Studio/Shutterstock
One common example is prostate cancer. Researchers recently estimated that more than 40% of all the prostate cancer now detected via testing healthy men in Australia may be overdiagnosed. In other words, those cancers would not have caused symptoms or problems during a man’s lifetime, yet they are now being detected and treated with surgery or radiotherapy, often with major complications.
Our research a few years ago studied the panels of experts who actually change the definitions of common conditions, such as high blood pressure or depression.
We found three things. When they made changes, panels tended to expand definitions and label more previously healthy people as ill.
Second, they did not appear to rigorously investigate the downsides of that expansion.
And third, these panels tended to be dominated by doctors with multiple financial ties to drug companies with interests in expanding markets.
A proposal to reform how diseases are defined
Today, an international group of influential researchers and family doctors launch a proposal to address this problem of expanding disease definitions. Published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, our proposal is for new processes and new people.
The new processes include rigorously examining evidence for benefits and potential harms, before reclassifying millions of healthy people as diseased. This was proposed in a world-first checklist for groups seeking to change definitions, developed by the Guidelines International Network.
As for new people, today’s article suggests new multidisciplinary panels led by generalists, rather than specialists. It calls for strong representation from consumer or citizen groups, and all members being free of financial ties to drug and other interested companies.
Overdiagnosis can lead to the overtreatment of things that would never progress and never cause any harm.Ronald Rampsch/Shutterstock
Where to from here?
Responding to overdiagnosis remains a complex and uncertain challenge, both for individuals, and those who run health systems.
But it’s clearly being taken more and more seriously. The World Health Organisation is co-sponsor of the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference in Sydney this year, where the science of the problem and solutions will be debated.
And just last week, leadership of the Nordic Federation of General Practitioners endorsed this proposal to reform the way diseases are defined. It’s likely others will follow suit, against strong resistance from vested interests.
But as we conclude in today’s BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine article, the time for change is now. We shouldn’t treat people as an ever-expanding marketplace for diseases, for the benefit of professional and commercial interests. We can no longer ignore the great harm to those unnecessarily diagnosed.
Eucalypts dominate Australia’s landscape like no other plant group in the world.
Europe’s pine forests consist of many different types of trees. North America’s forests change over the width of the continent, from redwood, to pine and oak, to deserts and grassland. Africa is a mixture of savannah, rainforest and desert. South America has rainforests that contain the most diversity of trees in one place. Antarctica has tree fossils.
But in Australia we have the eucalypts, an informal name for three plant genera: Angophora, Corymbia and Eucalyptus. They are the dominant tree in great diversity just about everywhere, except for a small region of mulga, rainforest and some deserts.
My research, published today, has sequenced the DNA of more than 700 eucalypt species to map how they came to dominate the continent. We found eucalypts have been in Australia for at least 60 million years, but a comparatively recent explosion in diversity 2 million years ago is the secret to their spread across southern Australia.
Hundreds of species
The oldest known Eucalyptus macrofossil, from Patagonia in South America, is 52 million years old. The fossil pollen record also provides evidence of eucalypts in Australia for 45 million years, with the oldest specimen coming from Bass Strait.
Despite the antiquity of the eucalypts, researchers assumed they did not begin to spread around Australia until the continent began drying up around 20 million years ago, when Australia was covered in rainforests. But once drier environmental conditions kicked in, the eucalypts seized their chance and took over, especially in southeastern Australia.
There are over 800 described species of eucalypts. Most of them are native only to Australia, although some have managed to naturally escape further north to New Guinea, Timor and Indonesia. Many eucalypts have been introduced to other parts of the world, including California, where Aussie eucalypts make cameos in Hollywood movies.
Eucalypts can grow as tall trees, as various multi-trunk or single-trunk trees, or in rare cases as shrubs. The combination of main characteristics – such as leaf shape, fruit shape, bud number and bark type – provided botanists with enough evidence to describe 800 species and estimate how they were all related to each other, a field of science known as “taxonomy”.
Since the 1990s and early 2000s, taxonomy has been slightly superseded by a new field called “phylogenetics”. This is the study of how organisms are related to each other using DNA, which produces something akin to a family tree.
Phylogenetics still relies on the species to be named though, so there is something to sample. New scientific fields rely on the old. There have been a number of eucalypt phylogenetic studies over the years, but none have ever sampled all of the eucalypt species in one phylogeny.
Our new paper in Australian Systematic Botany aimed to change that. We attempted to genetically sample every described eucalypt species and place them in one phylogeny to determine how they are related to each other. We sampled 711 species (86% of all eucalypts) as well as rainforest species considered most closely related to the eucalypts.
We also dated the phylogeny by time-stamping certain parts using the ages of the fossils mentioned above. This allowed us to estimate how old eucalypt groups are and when they separated from each other in the past.
Not so ancient
We found that the eucalypts are an old group that date back at least 60 million years. This aligns with previous studies and the fossil record. However, a lot of the diversification in the Eucalyptus genus has happened only in the last 2 million years.
Gum trees are iconic Australian eucalypts.Shutterstock
Hundreds of species have appeared very recently in evolutionary history. Studies on other organisms have shown rapid diversification, but none of them compare to the eucalypts. Many species of the eucalypt forests of southeastern Australia are new in evolutionary terms (10 million years or less).
This includes many of the tall eucalypts that grow in the wet forests of southern Australia. They are not, as was previously assumed, ancient remnants from Gondwana, a supercontinent that gradually broke up between 180 million and 45 million years ago and resulted in the continents of Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica, as well as India, New Zealand, New Guinea and New Caledonia.
The eucalypts that grow natively overseas have only made it out from Australia in the last 2 million years or less. Other groups in the eucalypts such as Angophora and Corymbia didn’t exhibit the same rapid diversification as the Eucalyptus species.
What we confirmed with the fossil record using our phylogeny is that until very recently, and I mean in terms of the Earth being 4 billion years old, the vegetation of southeastern Australia was vastly different.
At some point in the last 2-10 million years the Eucalyptus arrived in new environmental conditions. They thrived, they most likely helped spread fire to wipe out their competition, and they then rapidly changed their physical form to give us the many species that we see today.
Very few other groups in the world have made this amount of change so quickly, and arguably dramatically. The east coast of Australia would look very different if it wasn’t dominated by gum trees.
The next time you’re in a eucalypt forest, take a look around and notice all of the different types of bark and gumnuts and leaves on the trees, and know that all of that diversity has happened quite recently, but with a deep and long link to trees that once grew in Gondwana.
They have been highly advantageous, highly adaptable and, with the exception of a small number of species, are uniquely Australian. They are, as the press would put it, “a great Australian success story”.
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.
It might feel like the past decade of climate policy wars has led us into uncharted political waters. But the truth is, we’ve been sailing around in circles for much longer than that.
The situation in the late 1990s bore an uncanny resemblance to today: a Liberal-led government; a prime minister who clearly favours economic imperatives over environmental ones; emerging internal splits between hardline Liberal MPs and those keen to see stronger climate action; and a Labor party trying to figure out how ambitious it can be without being labelled as loony tree-huggers.
The striking parallels between now and two decades ago tell us something about what to expect in the months ahead.
After a brief flirtation with progressive climate policy in the 1990 federal election, the Liberals had, by the final years of the 20th century, become adamant opponents of climate action.
In March 1996, John Howard had come to power just as international climate negotiations were heating up. In his opinion, even signing the United Nations climate convention in Rio in 1992 had been a mistake. He expended considerable effort trying to secure a favourable deal for Australia at the crunch Kyoto negotiations in 1997.
Australia got a very generous deal indeed (and is still talking about banking the credit to count towards its Paris target), and Howard was able to keep a lid on climate concerns until 2006. But it was too little, too late, and in 2007 his party began a six-year exile from government as Rudd, then Gillard, then Rudd took the climate policy helm, with acrimonious results.
Abbott and his environment minister Greg Hunt did preside over some policy offerings – most notably the Direct Action platform, with the A$2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund at its heart, dishing out public money for carbon-reduction projects. The pair also announced an emissions reduction target of 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2030, which Australia took as its formal pledge to the crucial 2015 Paris climate talks.
But by the time nations convened in Paris, Malcolm Turnbull was in the hot seat, having toppled Abbott a few months earlier. Many observers hoped he would take strong action on climate; in 2010 he had enthused about the prospect of Australia going carbon-neutral. But the hoped-for successor to the carbon price never materialised, as Turnbull came under sustained attack from detractors within both his own party and the Nationals.
Then, in September 2016, a thunderbolt (or rather, a fateful thunderstorm). South Australia’s entire electricity grid was knocked out by freak weather, plunging the state into blackout, and the state government into a vicious tussle with Canberra. The dispute, embodied by SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s infamous altercation with the federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg, spilled over into a wider ideological conflict about renewable energy.
With tempers fraying on all sides, and still no economy-wide emissions policy in place, business began to agitate for increasingly elusive investment certainty (although they had played dead or applauded when Gillard’s carbon price was under attack).
In an era of policy on the run, things accelerated to a sprinter’s pace. Frydenberg suggested an emissions intensity scheme might be looked at. Forty-eight hours later it was dead and buried.
Turnbull commissioned Chief Scientist Alan Finkel to produce a report, which included the recommendation for a Clean Energy Target, prompting it to be vetoed in short order by the government’s backbench.
Within three months Frydenberg hurriedly put together the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which focused on both reliability and emissions reduction in the electricity sector. The policy gained support from exhausted business and NGOs, but not from the Monash Forum of Tony Abbott and cohorts, who preferred the sound of state-funded coal instead. And then, in August 2018, the NEG was torpedoed, along with Turnbull’s premiership.
The next man to move into the Lodge, Scott Morrison, was previously best known in climate circles for waving a lump of coal (kindly provided, with lacquer to prevent smudging, by the Minerals Council of Australia) in parliament.
Scott Morrison’s new-found enthusiasm for Snowy 2.0 stands in contrast to his earlier excitement about coal.AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Morrison’s problems haven’t eased. His energy minister Angus Taylor and environment minister Melissa Price have each come under attack for their apparent lack of climate policy ambition, and Barnaby Joyce and a select few fellow Nationals recently endangered the fragile truce over not mentioning the coal.
Meanwhile, Labor, with one eye on the Green vote and another on Liberal voters appalled by the lack of action on climate change, are trying to slip between Scylla and Charybdis.
Shorten’s offering
While Labor has decided not to make use of a Kyoto-era loophole (taking credit for reduced land-clearing), its newly released climate policy platform makes no mention of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, dodges the thorny issue of the Adani coalmine, and has almost nothing to say on how to pay the now-inevitable costs of climate adaptation.
What will the minor parties say? Labor’s policy is nowhere near enough to placate the Greens’ leadership, but then the goal for Labor is of course to peel away the Greens support – or at least reduce the haemorrhaging, while perhaps picking up the votes of disillusioned Liberals.
Overall, as Nicky Ison has already pointed out on The Conversation, Labor has missed an “opportunity to put Australians’ health and well-being at the centre of the climate crisis and redress historical injustices by actively supporting Aboriginal and other vulnerable communities like Borroloola to benefit from climate action”.
And so the prevailing political winds have blown us more or less back to where we were in 1997: the Liberals fighting among themselves, business despairing, and Labor being cautious.
But in another sense, of course, our situation is far worse. Not only has a culture war broken out, but the four hottest years in the world have happened in the past five, the Great Barrier Reef is suffering, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s purple will be getting more of a workout.
We’ve spent two decades digging a deeper hole for ourselves. It’s still not clear when or how we can climb out.
Boys, younger children and children from relatively advantaged families and neighbourhoods – particularly in Sydney – are more likely to delay starting school. These are some of the findings of our study on who chooses to delay sending their children to school and how a child’s age when they start school is related to their “school readiness”.
Every year, thousands of Australian families with four-year-old children face a difficult decision: to enrol their child in school or delay for another year. Delayed entry typically incurs a cost, such as childcare fees or lost wages. For this reason, not all families may be in the same position to make the decision to delay, even if they wanted to.
Research shows New South Wales tops the charts when it comes to delaying school entry. Our paper, published today in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, found one-quarter of children in NSW delayed school entry in 2009 and 2012, with geographic and social variation in the tendency to delay.
We also confirmed what many parents and teachers believe: older children are more likely to have the developmental skills in place to hit the ground running in the first year of school.
Measuring development
Rules about when children can start school vary internationally and across Australia. In NSW, the enrolment cut-off is July 31 and children must start school before they turn six.
This means parents of children born January to July must decide whether to send their child to school at the age of between four-and-a-half and five, or wait 12 months until they are five-and-a-half to six years old. Children with August-to-December birthdays have no choice about when to start school, except in special circumstances.
Our study used data on more than 100,000 NSW public school children in their first year of school. The data sets were collected as part of the Australian Early Development Census in 2009 and 2012. The census takes place every three years and is based on teachers’ knowledge and observations of the children in their class.
Teachers fill out a questionnaire for each child. It asks more than 100 questions covering five key domains of development: physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive, and communication.
Children’s development is scored between 0 and 10 on each domain. Children with scores in the bottom 25% are considered developmentally vulnerable or at risk. In this study, we considered children with scores above 25% in all five domains to be developing as expected.
We combined the developmental data with information from other routinely collected population data sets, such as birth registrations, midwives and hospital data, to better understand children’s health and family circumstances.
Who delays school entry?
Besides finding boys and children from more advantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to delay starting school, we also found children with higher developmental needs – such as hearing and communication impairments, and children who were born preterm – were among those more likely to delay school entry.
Family background played a role. Children born to mothers from Australia or northern Europe were more likely to delay. Children born to mothers from Asia, North Africa or the Middle East were less likely to delay. This may reflect a range of cultural, social and economic circumstances, as well as attitudes and beliefs. However, we did not have information about why families made their choices in this study.
Delayed school entry varied depending on where children lived, ranging from 8% to 54% of children in an area. In general, it was more common for children in regional areas to delay, compared with children from cities.
There was substantial variation within Sydney. Delayed school entry was least common among children living in the southwestern suburbs, which have great cultural diversity and more low-income households, compared with other areas in Sydney.
We found children were more likely to be ready for school with each additional month of age at the start of the school year. The differences in children’s development were quite small month to month – there wasn’t a big gap between August-born and September-born children, for example.
But the differences did add up: there was a substantial development gap between the youngest and oldest children in the first year of school. For example, around 60% of children who started school aged five-and-a-half to six years old had scores above the 25% cut-off point in all five development domains. Only 36% of those who started aged four-and-a-half met this threshold.
What does this mean for families and policymakers?
Every parent knows their child best. Families should consider the available evidence together with their own personal circumstances, advice from their local school or preschool, and any other factors that are important to their family when making the decision about when to send the child to school.
Our findings are also relevant to the ongoing debate about school enrolment policies in Australia and the potential impact of these on the make-up of classrooms and children’s school readiness.
One option for policymakers is to change the school enrolment cut-off date. For example, raising the minimum school starting age would remove the youngest group of children from the classroom, who are less likely to have the developmental skills to thrive in school. This would narrow the age range and development gap between the youngest and oldest kids in the classroom.
However, raising the school starting age might place pressure on families to provide preschool care, or restrict workforce participation for parents. A later start to school might also mean children enter the workforce a year later, potentially impacting total lifetime earnings.
A key question for future research is whether these initial age-related development gaps remain over time. The available evidence from other countries is mixed. Some studies have found younger children quickly catch up with older classmates. Other research shows older children have an advantage over their younger peers throughout childhood in multiple areas, including sports, mental health and test results.
After a three-year cycle of industry comment, review and revision, May 1 marks the adoption of a new National Construction Code (NCC). Overseen by the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), the code is the nation’s defining operational document of building regulatory provisions, standards and performance levels. Its mission statement is to provide the minimum necessary requirements for safety and health, amenity, accessibility and sustainability in the design, construction, performance and liveability of new buildings.
Widespread use of non-compliant building materials, and specifically combustible cladding, has been foremost in the minds of regulators. Three years ago, after the Lacrosse fire in Melbourne Docklands, the ABCB amended the existing code. This crucial revision has been carried forward into the new code.
Investigations into the highly publicised, structurally unsound Opal tower in Sydney found the design – namely the connections between the beams and the columns on level 10 and level 4, the two floors with significant damage — indicated “factors of safety lower than required by standards”.
Opal Tower report finds “construction issues”.
Just two months ago when the new code was released in preview form, we learnt that a significant number of approved CodeMarks used to certify compliance for a range of building materials are under recall. The Australian Institute of Building Surveyors posted urgent advice: “We are in the process of making enquiries with the ABCB and Building Ministers to find out when they were made aware that these certificates were withdrawn and what the implications for members will be […] and owners of properties that have been constructed using these products.”
Fire safety concerns are driving changes in the code. The new NCC has extended the provision of fire sprinklers to lower-rise residential buildings, generally 4-8 storeys. However, non-sprinkler protection is still permitted where other fire safety measures meet the deemed minimum acceptable standard.
The code includes new heating and cooling load limits. However, requirements for overall residential energy efficiency have not been increased. The 6-star minimum introduced in the 2010 NCC remains.
The code has just begun to respond to the problem of dwellings that are being constructed to comply but which perform very poorly in the peaks of summer and winter and against international minimum standards. The change in the code deals with only the very worst houses – no more than 5% of designs with the highest heating loads and 5% with the highest cooling loads.
It’s a concern that the climate files used to assess housing thermal performance use 40-year-old BOM data. Off the back of record hot and dry summers, readers in such places as Adelaide and Perth might be surprised to learn the ABCB designates their climate as “the mildest region”.
Lamentably, there has been no national evidenced-based evaluation (let alone international comparison) of the measured effectiveness of the 6-star standard. CSIRO did carry out a limited evaluation of the older 5-star standard (dating back to 2005). An evaluation for commercial buildings is available from the ABCB website.
Accessibility and liveability
Volume 2 of the NCC covers housing and here it is business as usual, although the ABCB has released an options paper on proposals that might be part of future codes. Accessible housing is treated as a discrete project. Advocates for code changes in this area, such as the Australian Network for Universal Housing Design (ANUHD), have written to the ABCB expressing disappointment.
A Regulation Impact Assessment on the costs and benefits of applying a minimum accessibility standard to all new housing has yet to see the light of day.
These proposals or “options” talk of silver and gold levels of design (there is no third-prize bronze option for liveable housing). Codes of good practice in accessible design have for decades recommended such measures.
Some argue that deep-seated problems have developed from a code that favours innovation and cost reduction over consumer protection. There is a cloud over the industry and over some provisions – or should we say safeguards and compliance?
Safety should not be a matter of good luck or depend on an accidental selection of a particular building material or system. New buildings born of this new code are hardly likely to differ measurably from their troublesome older siblings. The anxiety for insurers, regulators and building owners continues.
The National Construction Code adopts a performance-based approach to building regulation, but don’t expect the sales consultant to know the U-value of the windows, whether the doors are hung to allow for disabled access, or if the cleat on your tie beam is to Australian standards.
Anyone can propose changes to the NCC. The form is on the website. Consultants will be hired to model costs and benefits.
Regulatory reforms introduced through the ABCB over the past 20 years have produced an estimated annual national economic benefit of A$1.1 billion. That’s a lot of money! The owners of failing residential buildings could do with some of that cash to cover losses and legal fees.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, 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.
Politicians often invoke the word “reform” to convey the significance, or gravitas, of a particular policy change they are proposing.
However, the tax policies implemented over the six years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government should be more aptly described as: no reform, lots of tinkering, two blunders and some lost opportunities.
To be fair to the leaders of the Coalition, both Abbott and Turnbull began their prime ministerships professing a large appetite for tax reform.
In opposition Abbott and his treasury spokesman Joe Hockey had promised a major inquiry. Hockey said it would pick up where Labor’s Henry Tax Review left off:
We thought the Henry Tax Review was going to be a proper process. Now, that has obviously been an abject failure. We’ve said – Tony Abbott announced in Budget and reply speech – we will have a proper process for proper tax reform, and whatever comes out of that process, which will be a white paper, we will take to a subsequent election, seeking the mandate of the Australian people – their approval.
Treasury’s Re:think tax discussion paper, which is as far as the tax white paper process got.Source: Commonwealth Treasury
When Turnbull assumed the leadership, the draft white paper, which would have followed the discussion paper, was scuttled, and the process ended.
Tinkering…
Instead what resulted were marginal changes to personal income tax. One of the brackets was expanded and a new low and middle income tax offset was added.
Marginal changes to superannuation tax further added to the complexity of the tax system as a whole. The current superannuation system disproportionately rewards higher income earners because most contributions are taxed at the same low rate (15%) regardless of the taxpayers’ income tax rate.
The Coalition’s response was to apply a 30% tax on contributions for those earning $250,000 or more (down from the previous threshold of $300,000) and to cut the cap on concessional contributions from $30,000 ($35,000 for those aged 49 and over) to $25,000. And it capped at $1.6 million the amount that could be transferred into the “retirement phase” where fund earnings in retirement were exempt from tax.
Alongside these marginal changes, there was also a failed attempt to cut the company tax rate (only the tax rates for small companies were cut) and a muddled discussion about the progressivity of the income tax system.
All in all, many a tinker, but no reform.
Blunders…
Human-induced climate change is compromising the sustainability of our planet. The only way to solve it is by changing incentives using the economic toolkit at our disposal. The Carbon Tax was a good tax. It shifted the costs of pollution onto those who created it, instead of subsidising processes that damaged the environment.
No solution to climate change is possible without corrective taxes.
At some point we’ll have to climb that mountain again, assuming the mountain is not underwater before politicians come to their senses.
The repeal of the Minerals Resource Rent Tax was also a step backwards. By taxing rents (excess profits) instead of profits, it avoided the disincentives created by traditional company taxes. And, it was a good example of the kind of taxes that could eventually replace or supplement company tax.
…and lost opportunities
Changing the GST could have ensured at least one significant contribution to overall tax reform. At 10%, the rate is relatively low by international standards and applies to a shrinking share of spending, as more and more of our money is spent in places or on goods that aren’t taxed.
These factors, combined with the fact that GST is difficult to evade and less costly to administer, suggest that broadening the base is low hanging fruit on the tax reform tree, ripe for picking.
Instead, it may as well be forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. We’ve gone in the wrong direction by adding even more exemptions and cutting short talk of increasing the rate.
What remains is a system that applies different rates to different company sizes, one of few remaining dividend imputation systems in the world, and no discussion about the sustainability of corporate income tax revenue in the future.
All up, the government’s approach over the past six years has largely been piecemeal. It also managed to dismantle two of the most significant tax reforms that could have contributed to a more sustainable tax base in the long run.
Would Labor be better?
It remains to be seen whether a Labor government will be able to achieve more. Some of the party’s proposed changes, such as the treatment of capital gains, head in the right direction, but what it is offering falls short of comprehensive reform.
At the same time, many of its proposed changes will add additional complexity, fail to account for interactions within the entire tax system and use tax exemptions to reach goals that could be better achieved with payments.
Many an international tax reform was engendered by crisis, so there’s hope, of a sort. The opportunity still remains to get in early before weaknesses inherent in the current system become grossly apparent.
What we’ve got is unfair and its complexity rewards those with the resources to pay to understand and exploit it. It is overly reliant on income and company tax in place of indirect taxes, like consumption tax, and it tries to achieve too many disparate objectives, without consideration for the workings of the family and social security payments system.
There is much scope to improve things. What we need most are fearless leaders, from all sides of the political spectrum, who treat comprehensive tax reform as important and can work together to achieve it.
The big surprise in last week’s budget was the size of new income tax cuts – A$158 billion over a decade, in addition to the A$144 billion already promised in last year’s budget.
A lot of the plan doesn’t take effect until 2024-25, so it’s easy to dismiss as tax cuts on the never-never. But given it’s a central plank of the government’s campaign for re-election, it deserves closer scrutiny.
The major part of stage 1 is the Low and Middle Income Tax Offset – giving everyone earning less than $126,000 a cheque in the mail come July and then for the following three years. Stage 2 (2022-23) would lift the top threshold of the 19% and the 32.5% brackets. The biggest cuts would come in stage 3 (2024-25) when the government removed the 37% bracket and cut the 32.5% rate to 30%.
Everyone earning between $45,000 and $200,000 would face the same 30% marginal tax rate.
Unsurprisingly, in absolute terms the biggest beneficiaries would be high-income earners. More than half the benefit would go to the top 20% of earners, those with taxable income over $87,500 a year.
But to better understand what the plan would do to the progressivity of the system, we need to consider what would happen to rates without the plan.
Without change, the average tax rate would increase across the income distribution, as wage growth pushed people into higher tax brackets.
The plan would prevent some of that bracket creep by lowering future tax rates.
Most taxpayers would be better-off than without a change – but high-income earners would benefit the most.
It goes part-way to addressing bracket creep for low and middle income earners. Someone in the middle of the income distribution would pay 3.6% more tax in 2029-30 than today, instead of 6.1% more without the plan.
But Australia’s highest earners – the top 15% of taxpayers – would escape bracket creep entirely, paying the same average tax rate or less in 2029-30 than today.
This result would be a shift in the proportion of tax paid at different points in the income distribution.
Middle earners, those earning between the third to top and the third to bottom ten percents of the income distribution, would pay a larger share of tax in 2029-30 than they do today: 23% compared to 20%.
But high-income earners, those in the top fifth of the income distribution, would pay a smaller share of tax: 65% in 2029-30 compared to 68% today.
It’s more a tax cut than tax reform
The government has been keen to sell the tax package as a “huge reform” because it removes an entire tax bracket.
It says flattening the tax scale would create a greater incentive for higher-income earners to work. But unlike earlier tax reform packages, there has been little in the way of clear articulation or modelling to demonstrate that this would be the case. And there are reasons to doubt that it would be the case.
The people who would benefit most from the tax reform would be in the top 6% of the income distribution in 2024-25. Barring major changes to gender work patterns in the next five years, they would be disproportionately men, working full time. But as the Henry Tax Review pointed out, the people who are the most responsive to changes in effective tax rates are second-earners (mainly women) working part-time.
Proper reform of the income tax system would lower the economic barriers to second-earners working more: the increase in tax, the cuts in family and childcare benefits and higher childcare costs that accompany working more.
And it might not be affordable
The budget numbers point to a decade of surpluses, exceeding 1% of GDP by 2026-27, even with the tax cuts. But the surpluses rely on payments as a share of gross domestic product falling steadily over the decade, from 24.9% of GDP today to 23.6% by 2029-30.
Achieving such a reduction would require significant cuts in spending growth across almost every major spending area, during a period when we know that an ageing population will increase spending pressures, particularly on health and welfare. The Parliamentary Budget Office says ageing will add 0.3% of GDP a year to spending by 2028-29.
The approach marks a change since the 2016-17 budget, when the government forecast that payments would grow as a share of GDP over the decade because of the ageing population. There have not been enough significant savings measures in the past three budgets to explain the turnaround. It appears to be more driven by assumption than by reality.
If we were to make the still-conservative assumption that spending remained merely constant as a share of GDP at 24.9%, the third stage of the tax cuts would push the budget back into deficit in 2024-25.
The bottom line
The pre-election tax package finally does something about bracket creep – but solves it only for the highest of earners.
It passes up the opportunity for more comprehensive reform. And most disconcertingly, it punches a sizeable hole in government revenue just at the time an ageing population will start to demand that more money be spent.
The coin, developed in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups and designed by the Mint’s Aleksandra Stokic, features 14 different words for “money” from Australian Indigenous languages. But where do these words come from?
Money, or an object which abstractly represented the value of goods and services, did not exist in Australia before European colonisation. Trade was practised, but it was between items deemed to be of similar worth, for example pearl shell, quartz, food or songs. With the entry of money into the Indigenous economy, new words were needed to refer to coins and later paper money.
Most Indigenous words for money come from words for “stone”, “rock” or “pebble”, no doubt in reference to the size and shape of coins. On the new 50 cent coin, you’ll find words for “stone” from across Australia:
Kaytetye, spoken in Central Australia, and Kaurna, the language of Adelaide, go against the trend by extending the words ngkweltye and pirrki, which both mean “piece”, to also mean “money”.
Gathang, from the Central New South Wales coast area, uses dhinggarr “grey”, perhaps due to the colour of most coins, and walang “head”, presumably in reference to the monarch’s head on the coin. Wiradjuri from Central New South Wales also uses walang, but in this case it means “stone”.
Origin of the Indigenous words for ‘money’ on the new 50 cent coin.Felicity Meakins and Brenda Thornley
Other words for ‘money’ from Indigenous languages
The diversity of Indigenous words for money on the new 50 cent coin is an attempt to reflect the linguistic tapestry of Australia, a nation of over 300 languages and many more dialects. However, the words featured on the coin are just a small sample of Indigenous words for money.
Some languages differentiate between coins and paper money. Murrinh-patha, spoken in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory, uses palyirr “stone” for coins and we “paperbark” to mean notes.
Other languages have words that vary by denomination. Alyawarr, spoken just north of Alice Springs, uses aherr-angketyarr “lots of kangaroos” to refer to the A$1 coin, and rnter-rnter “red” in reference to $20 notes. Alyawarr people also say kwert-apeny “like smoke” for $100 notes – perhaps confusing at first, until you recall the original light blue and grey $100 note (1984-1996) depicting Sir Douglas Mawson.
In some cases, terms for money have been borrowed from other languages. The English word “money” has been given a local flavour by different languages, for example: mani/moni (Kriol) and maniyi or tala (Warlpiri).
Another borrowing comes from Australia’s close neighbours. The legacy of 18th century Macassan traders from present-day Indonesia remains in words for “money” originally derived from rupiah (Indonesia’s word for currency). These include rrupiya (Mawng, Burarra, Djinang) and wurrupiya (Tiwi). (And note that Tiwi also uses wurrukwati “mussel shell” for “money”).
Probably the most innovative borrowing for money, still used throughout south-western Queensland, is banggu. The word derives from bank and –gu, the latter being used to express ownership. So banggu literally means “of the bank”, and perhaps emerged during the period in Queensland history when the state government was withholding wages from Indigenous people. These stolen wages are now thought to be worth as much as A$500 million in banggu.
Indigenous representation on Australian currency
Indigenous Australians have not always been well represented on Australian currency. Take, for example, the use of a bark painting by David Malangi on the back of the old $1 note released in 1966, used without consent or acknowledgement, or the first polymer $10 note, released in 1988, which featured an anonymous Indigenous man painted up for ceremony.
Contrast this to 1995, where the Indigenous man on the $50 note is named as the first published Indigenous author, Ngarrindjeri writer David Unaipon, and 2017 where a commemorative 50 cent coin was designed by Boneta-Marie Mabo and released for National Reconciliation Week.
The use of multiple words for money on the new coin challenges the myth of a single Australian language. It also represents a shift in Indigenous representation to naming and individuation: from depicting Australian Indigenous people and their languages as a single group, to recognising the diversity of these groups and their languages.
Twenty-one MPs standing as independents have been elected, making up nearly half the Parliament, while the two largest of the eight parties voted in have just eight seats each.
-Partners-
Most constituencies recorded voter turnouts of more than 80 percent.
Female enjoyment of sex is typically associated with the human species.
But actually all female mammals have a clitoris, the highly sensitive organ that is linked with pleasure and orgasm in women.
And research is now starting to slowly unpack how the clitoris might be involved in sexual encounters in mammals. For example, a research paper presented at a biology conference this week showed that the clitoris in dolphins is very large, and more complex than we previously thought.
Let’s take a look at the biology and evolution of the clitoris – for science.
It starts in the uterus
All babies, regardless of whether they are destined to become a boy or a girl, begin development in the womb with a small bulge called a genital tubercle.
If the developing fetus is destined to become male, the fetal testes will produce the male hormone testosterone and the genital tubercle will develop into a penis. If, on the other hand, the fetus is destined to become a female, the fetal ovary will not produce any hormones and instead the genital tubercle will develop into the clitoris.
Both structures look very similar in the early days of pregnancy.
Since the penis and the clitoris both develop from the same structure, they share many similarities.
The clitoris has a hood in humans: this is the same as the foreskin in males. The clitoris has a glans, which is the same structure as the head of the penis in men. Both the penis and clitoris become engorged with blood when stimulated. And both structures are full of nerves which, at least in humans, provide a pleasurable sensation when stimulated.
A very recent science
But compared to the penis, the clitoris is not well studied even in humans.
Amazingly, it was not until the late 1990s that the complete anatomy of the human clitoris was accurately described by Australia’s first female urologist, Helen O’Connell. Her work to understand the detailed form and function of the clitoris provides answers to some basic biological questions about sex.
Such research also has implications in pelvic area surgery, where doctors can use this knowledge to avoid any loss of sexual function.
The external aspect of the human clitoris is just a very small portion of its entire structure. In this image, the dark pink and white structures are internal.from www.shutterstock.com
Because the penis and clitoris develop from the same tissue in the fetus, anything that affects the hormone balance in the embryo can impact its development. A great example of this is seen in the female spotted hyena.
In this mammal, the female rules the pack. She is larger and more muscular than the males because she is exposed to high levels of male hormones during embryonic development.
But this more muscled physique comes at a cost. The male hormones also affect the clitoris, turning it into a structure that looks like the male penis.
Unfortunately for the female hyena this 20cm clitoris contains the birth canal. So, the female needs to both mate and give birth through her clitoris, which often splits in the process, causing a high death rate in first time mothers.
There are other known differences in clitoris anatomy across species too.
The urethra is the tube through which urine passes to the outside of the body. Many animals have the urethra running through the clitoris (as it does in the penis) while in humans, the urethra opens at the base of the clitoris.
Most mammals also have a small bone in the clitoris to help it become rigid during intercourse. This is known as the os clitoris and again shares a counterpart in the penis, the os penis. Os clitoris and os penis bones are present in most mammals, and humans are unusual in not having one in either organ.
The jury is still out on whether all mammals experience orgasm.
Non-human primates almost certainly do, but it is difficult to measure pleasure in animals.
What is certain is that females who stick around for longer during the act of mating are much more likely to become pregnant and produce more offspring. So if a clitoris does enhance enjoyment, then it would be strongly selected for in nature through increasing the females chance of having offspring.
Although the clitoris is not well studied, there is evidence of larger clitorides – yes, this is the plural of clitoris – in animals in which sex plays an important part in relationship building. Examples include the matriarchal hyena, bonobo chimps, humans and most recently in the dolphin.
Lots of surprises
A paper released this week reveals that female bottlenose dolphins have clitorides similar to humans, and that female dolphins may experience sexual pleasure.
Researchers used a combination of dissections and 3D scans to explore the female genitalia of dolphins in detail.
The shape and structure of the dolphin clitoris is very similar to that of the human. Both animals have extensive areas of erectile tissue that are larger than the clitoral hood. The skin under the clitoral hood also contains bundles of nerves that may increase sensitivity, raising the possibility that sexual experiences can be pleasurable for female dolphins.
Computer reconstruction of the clitoris of the bottlenose dolphin, which researchers say is remarkably similar to the human clitoris in its structure and shape.Dara Orbach, Mount Holyoke College
However, there are also some differences in the location of the clitoris with respect to the vaginal opening and how it would be stimulated during copulation.
These comparative studies help us learn about the function of genitalia, and the evolution of sexual bonding across species.
Labor’s big-ticket election promise is a A$2.3 billion package to provide free medical scans and specialist consultations for cancer patients, plus automatic listing of new cancer therapies on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) once they’re recommended by the nation’s expert advisory panel.
One in two Australians will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85, and around 145,000 new diagnoses are made each year. So most of us have a close relative or friend who will be affected by the policy.
But there are some important policy considerations a Shorten government would need to plan for to ensure the package provides optimal care, improves patient outcomes, and does actually reduce out-of-pocket costs.
New therapies for cancer are rapidly evolving, and are often extremely expensive. Seeking treatment involves navigating a complex array of public and private providers across multiple health care sectors, often leaving patients with high out-of-pocket costs.
These costs are highly dependent on which providers the patients choose (and the fees they charge), the level of private insurance cover, and the volume of services used.
A recent Queensland study found the median out-of-pocket expenses for a breast cancer patient, for example, was A$4,192.
It’s possible but very time-consuming for patients to “shop around” to reduce costs. But this is an unreasonable burden to place on patients.
The Labor proposal provides an opportunity to develop a comprehensive cancer control program that encompasses prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and follow-up – at a reasonable cost.
Cancer treatment is well researched; there are clear evidence-based guidelines that establish clinical pathways for the best treatment.
Nevertheless, there is substantial variation in treatments given to cancer patients. This difference cannot always be explained by their clinical conditions, and sometimes the care is not evidence-based.
It’s important that the proposed reforms do not just fund more care, but support more of the best care.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten announced the A$2.3 billion cancer package in last week’s budget reply.Dan Peled/AAP
The approach that has shown promise in other countries is known as “bundled payments”.
Under bundled payments, a series of health care services – that can span over time and across multiple health care sectors and providers – are bundled together for funding purposes. This gives providers or institutions greater flexibility in how they spend money delivering care to the patient.
There is a danger that bundling can provide incentives to skimp on care, because the provider receives the same amount of funding no matter how much care is provided. But this can be addressed by monitoring the quality of care and the patients’ outcomes.
Ensuring the financial benefits flow to patients
Australian governments have made several attempts to provide better safety nets that cushion patients from extra charges.
Study after study shows that, in these circumstances, providers are likely to raise their fees. So while patients get some financial benefit, the doctors benefit also.
Under current Medicare rules, the Australian government does not and cannot determine doctors’ fees. It can only determine the amount of the Medicare benefit.
In general practice, most consultations are bulk-billed implying that the fee the doctor charges is equivalent to the Medicare benefit.
Only 31% of specialist consultations are bulk-billed, leaving more patients with an out-of-pocket payment.
What can government do to encourage cancer care providers to bulk-bill?
Labor has announced they will add a bulk-billing incentive payment, as occurs in primary care. Specialists will receive an additional payment if they bulk-bill a cancer-related service.
This will not guarantee that every patient will not incur any out-of-pocket costs – although it should increase the likelihood that they will. Indeed, the Labor target is that 80% of patients will be bulk-billed.
However, previous research has shown that while the GP bulk-billing incentive led to a reduction in costs for those eligible (concession card holders), it also increased costs for those not eligible.
Careful monitoring is required to ensure the volume of services – and their fees for non-cancer patients – do not go up.
A further unprecedented complication is that for some services, it will be necessary to differentiate Medicare payments on the basis of the patient’s cancer status.
To guarantee patients face no out-of-pocket costs would require more radical reform. Again, the bundled payment system could be a vehicle for such reforms whereby payments are conditional on all the patient’s service providers agreeing to deliver care with no additional fee to the patient.
Depending on whether a patient is privately insured, the bundled payment could be financed by private health funds and Medicare.
The Labor cancer package requires careful and rigorous research effort to inform and guide the policy development.
A new vision for Medicare
Medicare is now 35 years old. It was built on fee-for-service payment, and focused on short, acute episodes of illness.
Now it’s time to move to new funding mechanisms that provide better care for complex, ongoing conditions, at a cost patients and the country can be sure represent efficient use of resources.
Cancer is a good place to start and it could indeed be the most significant reform of Medicare so far.
Imagine a health system where every Australian was assured of optimal care, no matter what their illness or economic circumstances. That is a health system worth paying taxes for.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glenn C. Savage, Senior Lecturer in Education Policy and Sociology of Education, University of Western Australia
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.
School’s policy and funding
Glenn C. Savage, Senior Lecturer in Education Policy and Sociology of Education, University of Western Australia
The Coalition’s approach to schooling policy since the 2016 election has primarily focused on its Quality Schools agenda. This centres on increased funding (A$307.7 billion in total school recurrent funding from 2018 to 2029). It also attempts to steer national reform in areas such as teaching, curriculum, assessment and the use of evidence.
The Coalition wants to steer reform in teaching, curriculum, assessment and the use of evidence.from shutterstock.com
changes to the Australian Curriculum through the development of “learning progressions”. These describe the common development pathway along which students typically progress in their learning, regardless of age or year level
developing an online assessment tool to help teachers monitor student progress
reforms to improve the consistency and sharing of data
a review of senior secondary pathways to work, further education and training
establishing a national evidence institute to undertake research on “what works” to improve schooling outcomes
developing a national strategy to support teacher workforce planning.
Labor and the Coalition aren’t all that different when it comes to schools policy.Ellen Smith/AAP
The agreement ensures that by 2023, private schools will receive 100% of the recommended amount under the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) funding model, whereas most government schools will be stuck at 95%.
The states share a great deal of the blame. But it’s not a good look for a federal government promoting a commitment to needs-based funding.
What about Labor?
A Labor government would change some elements of the national reform conversation. But the extent to which it would radically shift the current trajectory is debatable.
But Labor also shares a great deal in common with the Coalition.
Both preference a strong federal role in schooling. Both support (at least in theory) the principles of the SRS, and there is significant alignment between parties when it comes to reforms in the National School Reform Agreement.
Labor has also been promoting the idea of a national evidence institute for some time and many reforms in the school reform agreement build directly on those established by Labor as part of its “education revolution” agenda from 2007-2013.
While the parties will draw dividing lines to make a choice between them look stark, they have more in common than they would like to admit.
Tim Pitman, Senior Research Fellow, Curtin University
Since the last federal election, the Coalition has been mostly dealing with the fallout from their ambitious policy agenda conceived under Tony Abbott, as laid out in the 2014 Higher Education Reform Bill. The chief aims of this policy were to:
cut higher education funding by 20%
increase subsidies to private providers
deregulate tuition fees.
The Coalition started their new government with no clear pathway to enact their vision for higher education.from shutterstock.com
The reforms were voted down by the Senate in late 2014 and again in early 2015. This meant the government had no clear pathway to enact their vision for higher education and fewer options for reducing higher education expenditure. One way to do the latter would be to increase the maximum student fee payable.
Another option would be to freeze increases to the amount the Commonwealth subsidised the universities to teach students, so in future years it would spend less, in real terms, on higher education. The government took this option in 2017, saving an estimated A$2.2 billion. Research funding also took a hit.
The government further announced it would introduce performance-based higher education funding, though it is still not clear how, exactly, performance will be defined.
Labor says if it is elected, it will end the freeze on increases to the Commonwealth student subsidies. Labor will also conduct an inquiry into post-secondary education, with one aim being to repriotise the importance of vocational education, so it sits alongside, not beneath, higher education.
Labor heads are also promising a A$300 million University Future Fund to fast-track funding for high priority research and teaching projects.
For both the Coalition and Labor, regional Australia is shaping up as a key battleground and this is already being reflected in higher education policy. In February 2018, the Coalition announced it was funding 22 regional study hubs across regional Australia to provide
study spaces, video conferencing, computing facilities and internet access, as well as academic support for students studying via distance at partner universities.
In November 2018, it followed with a further A$135 million in additional support for regional universities affected by their freeze on funding.
In response, Labor has upped the ante on the regional hubs, saying it will not only maintain support for the study hubs but will fund mentoring and pathways programs in the communities that have the hubs. It will also commit an additional A$174 million for equity and pathways funding to support students from areas with low graduation rates, many of which are in regional Australia.
Susan Irvine, Associate Professor, School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology
There are some recurring and predictable storylines in early childhood education election policies in Australia. At the last election, the Coalition’s main storyline was affordability.
Its central platform was the Jobs for Families Package – a controversial bill that promised a simplified and more generous fee subsidy to help parents cover the rising cost of education and care.
The Coalition introduced a subsidy for early childhood education, but the means test has some vulnerable children missing out.from shutterstock.com
It was controversial because it tied children’s access to early education with their parents’ participation in the paid workforce. To get the subsidy, families had to meet a new work activity test. Children whose families did not meet this test had their hours of early education cut in half.
A drawn-out battle in the Senate saw the bill eventually pass with some hard-fought amendments to support more equitable access for children and families experiencing disadvantage.
On the whole, the childcare subsidy has been a positive change for most Australian families. However, there is evidence that the continuing focus on parent work participation means some of our children in low-income families – who research shows will benefit the most from access to high quality early education – are missing out.
The Coalition’s other 2016 election commitment was funding for universal preschool education, focusing on four year olds in the year prior to school. However, this has been doled out on an annual basis. The result being no security for children, families and service providers.
In the 2019 budget, the government committed funding for universal preschool for all Australian children only until the end of 2020.
This is one of two key differences between the Coalition and Labor’s early childhood policies. Labor has committed to secure and sustainable funding for universal preschool. It has also committed to expanding access to three year olds, providing two years of early education prior to school entry.
The other key difference relates to broader investment in the early years workforce. The single most important factor influencing quality and children’s outcomes are the teachers and educators working with children. Australia urgently needs a new Early Years Workforce Strategy. The Coalition allowed the previous strategy to lapse and has remained silent on matters relating to pay and conditions.
Labor has announced a commitment to investment in the workforce, including funding to train more educators and teachers, and, has previously pledged support for professional wages for professional work.
Japan’s Nanzoin Temple is famous for its huge statue of a reclining Buddha. Its custodians are less laidback about the hordes of tourists the temple attracts. Signs in 12 languages now warn foreign visitors they may not enter in large groups.
It’s part of anti-tourist sentiment, driven by “the bad manners and abhorrent actions” of some visitors from abroad, reportedly growing all over Japan – and elsewhere in the world.
Nanzoin Temple.www.shutterstock.com
In Amsterdam, for example, city authorities have put a halt on new hotels and souvenir shops, and are cracking down on private rental platforms.
Tourism brings many benefits to communities around the world. But tourism hotspots are feeling the strain as tourist numbers increase. Locals resent being crowded out of restaurants and parks. They resent paying inflated prices. Most of all they resent tourists behaving badly.
The increasing prevalance of the badly behaved tourist, either in reality or simply as cultural meme, presents a serious issue for the tourism industry. In cities at tourism’s bleeding edge, such as Venice, resentment has boiled over into anti-tourism protests. In Barcelona the cause against foreign visitors has been embraced by left-wing nationalist activists. Their view is expressed in graffiti around Barcelona: “Refugees welcome; tourists go home.”
Unless the tourism industry does something to address underlying aggravations, such sentiments are likely to spread. There’s a danger tourism, instead of building bridges for cross-cultural understanding and friendship, will add to the stereotypical walls that separate people.
When in Rome…
Sometimes bad behaviour is a matter of perception, and comes down to cultural differences. There are places in China, for example, where it’s perfectly acceptable to leave your restaurant table, and the floor around it, an absolute mess. Two Chinese women visiting Japan, however, became the focus of international criticism due to a video that appeared to show them being asked to leave an Osaka restaurant because of their “disgusting eating habits”.
‘Please just go’
The question arises as to why tourists don’t make more effort to understand and follow local customs.
Sustainable tourism rests on a number of pillars. One of those is the need for the tourist to respect local people, cultures and environments.
The problem now, as other tourism scholars have pointed out, is that tourism is promoted as an activity of pure hedonism. Rather than being encouraged to see themselves as global citizens with both rights and responsibilities, tourists are sold an illusion of unlimited indulgence. They are positioned as consumers, with special privileges.
Is it any wonder that encourages indulgent behaviour and an attitude of entitlement?
The Tiaki promise
We know about some of the incidents mentioned because the perpetrators themselves recorded their crimes for posterity. On other occasion an offended local has done the filming.
Such is the case of the “pig” British tourists who created a media storm on their holiday to New Zealand in January. A video showing the rubbish they left behind at a beachside park turned them into a media sensation. More than 10,000 people signed a petition for them to be deported.
It’s a classic case study in how a local event can now so easily become a national or international incident.
But I believe New Zealand also provides a case study in how the global tourism industry can deal with antitourist sentiment by encouraging tourists to show greater respect.
To deal with multiple problems associated with tourists – including bad driving, damaging camping practices and to ignorance of safety in the outdoors, New Zealand’s tourism authority and operators are promoting “The Tiaki Promise”.
The Tiaki Promise.
Tiaki is a Maori word meaning to guard, preserve, protect or shelter. An associated principle is Kaitiakitanga, an ethic of guardianship based on traditional Maori understandings of kinship between humans and the natural world.
The Tiaki campaign thus asks tourists to look after New Zealand, “to act as a guardian, protecting and preserving our home”. In exchange it promises a warm welcome to those who care to care.
Such a principle of reciprocity is an inviting code for responsible tourism. The tourism industry’s challenge is to develop effective strategies to bring tourists and locals into better alignment.
The key is in communicating the priceless experiences that emerge from being with the locals rather than imposing on them.
Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
How did the months get their names? – Sylvie, age 8, Brisbane.
The names of the months are very old and they come from ancient Rome. Rome is the capital of Italy and several thousand years ago it was the heart of a very powerful empire (which is like a kingdom, only bigger).
In the very beginning of the Roman calendar (more than 2000 years ago), there were only 10 months in the year. The Romans based this version on the ancient Greek calendar. Later, however, the Romans added in two more. The names of some of the months also changed a few times.
Here’s how the early version would have looked.
This fancy fellow is Mars, the Roman god of war. March is named after him.Shutterstock
In the early days
MARCH: Happy New Year! March was the start of the year for the Romans. The beginning of spring was the time when everyone could go out and start fighting each other, so the month was named after Mars – the Roman god of war.
APRIL: The name for this month may come from a Roman word for “second” – aprilis – as it was the second month of the Roman year.
MAY: Spring is in full bloom for the Romans in May, and this month is named after Maia – a goddess of growing plants.
JUNE: This month is named after Juno, the queen of the Roman gods.
Here’s a statue of Juno, the Roman queen of the gods. June is named after her.Shutterstock
JULY: This month used to be called Quintilis – the Roman word for “fifth” as it was the fifth month of the Roman year. It was later changed to July by Emperor Julius Caesar after his family name (Julius). An emperor is like a king, only more powerful.
Here’s the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who decided to name a month after his family name (Julius). He called it July.Shutterstock
AUGUST: This month was first called Sextillia – the Roman word for “sixth”, as it was the sixth month of the Roman year. It was later changed to August by the Emperor Augustus, and he named it after himself.
SEPTEMBER: The name for this month comes from the Roman word for “seventh” – septimus – as it was the seventh month of the Roman year.
OCTOBER: The name for this month comes from the Roman word for “eighth” – octavus – as it was the eighth month of the Roman year.
NOVEMBER: The name for this month comes from the Roman word for “ninth” – nonus – as it was the ninth month of the Roman year.
DECEMBER: The name for this month comes from the Roman word for “tenth” – decimus – as it was the tenth month of the Roman year.
Then a few extra months were added…
JANUARY: This was one of the extra months that the Romans added to the year. This month was named after Janus – the god of beginnings and endings. He is often depicted as having two faces.
FEBRUARY: This is another extra month that the Romans added to the calendar. They put it right after January. Its name comes from a festival that was held at this time called Februa. The festival aimed to cleanse the city of evil spirits and welcome health and fertility.
Because the Romans put two new months into the year, the names of the months do not make sense anymore. If our year started in March as it did for the Romans, December would still be the tenth month.
But 450 years ago, people who used this calendar started thinking that January was the first month of the year. So now December in the twelfth month for the Western calendar.
Political Roundup: Shane Jones continues to skate on thin ice with ease
Hon. Shane Jones – New Zealand First MP and Cabinet Minister.
Shane Jones continues to skate on the thin ice of integrity. Yet he never seems to fall through. His latest controversy involved making public comments last week directed against the decision by one of his own government agencies to revoke the transport licence of a Northland logging truck company.
Jones may be the most problematic minister in the Labour-led Government. However, it’s increasingly clear that he can get away with questionable behaviour, not just because Jacinda Ardern allows him too, but because the survival of New Zealand First, and therefore the current government, is predicated on Jones playing to his support base.
Jones’ Northland trucking controversy
Heather du Plessis-Allan wrote yesterday about the latest Jones scandal and what it means – see: A Jones by any other name. She sums up the scandal like this: “This time he’s interceded with authorities on behalf of a trucking company owned by his mother’s great-great-great-grandmother’s great-great grandson. The trucking company racked up 116 speeding and traffic-related fines in four years. The authorities want the trucks off the road. Matua Shane – as he likes to call himself – had a word with those authorities.”
So why is this a problem? du Plessis-Allan says: “That should set off alarm bells because he’s the Associate Transport Minister. But hey, that’s not the hat he was wearing during the chat, he reckons. Nope. He interceded as the Champion of the Regions – as he likes to call himself. Because the Champion of the Regions was worried about the 1000 jobs that would be lost if the company folded.”
The transport license issue will be resolved in court. Last Monday the Whangārei company managed to get the High Court to impose a temporary suspension of the ban on their license.
For a more detailed outline of the case, see Matthew Theunissen’s very good article, Shane Jones denies conflict in comments on Semenoff Logging court case. This reports how at one stage this week, Jones said “constitutionally I must not comment on the High Court case” but “he then proceeded to do just that”. Jones also claimed that he hadn’t meddled in the decision-making process to revoke the transport licence, but “confirmed he had briefly spoken to the chief executive of the Transport Agency about the case”.
In terms of the “wearing different hats defence” that ministers often use, Theunissen says about Jones: “He also pointed out that the court case has not yet started, and said he had not been speaking as the Associate Transport Minister.” Jones is quoted: “I said those remarks as the Minister of Regional Development… I have no delegations for safety as Associate Minister of Transport. I have never once discussed this issue with Julie Anne Genter, who is the safety transport minister.”
The article also explains that Jones has been downplaying his personal connections with the owner of the trucking company – former Whangārei mayor Stan Semenoff, who has donated to Jones’ election campaigns in the past, and who he is related to.
It therefore seems that Jones is in trouble on five possible charges of constitutional impropriety or conflicts of interest: 1) he’s a Cabinet minister commenting publicly on a matter before the courts; 2) he’s using his role as a transport minister to pressure officials in his own agency about an operational matter; 3) he’s conflicted because he’s intervening on behalf of an electorate he’s trying to win as an election candidate; 4) he’s standing up for someone who he’s received financial support from; and 5) he’s personally related to the owner of the company that he is championing.
In the face of such criticisms, Jones has not retreated from his outspoken remarks. In Parliament, he said “The principles of comity and privilege are important constitutional privileges that define our system, but there is no stone that should be put upon the tongue of the champion of the regions to talk about the implications of decisions that our Government may, from time to time, be held accountable for.”
The problem, according to rightwing blogger David Farrar, is not just if Jones has stood up for the company publicly, but if he’s been fighting behind the scenes: “if Jones has had discussions with any officials or contractors of NZTA regarding the decision, then he must be sacked. If he has privately tried to pressure NZTA with regards to an independent safety regulatory decision, just because it involves a major employer in a seat he wants to win – he must go” – see: Has Shane Jones been doing a Justin Trudeau?
Farrar also brings up the problem that this is all about road safety: “The Government says it wants safer roads yet their Associate Transport Minister is attacking a regulatory decision to do just that.”
In terms of the safety record of the Semenoff Logging company, and why NZTA has revoked its license, see Anne Gibson’s informative article, Shane Jones wades in against NZTA over legal case against log trucker. She reports that “Meredith Connell managing partner Steve Haszard, who has been overseeing NZTA’s regulatory compliance, said the entity has been strongly encouraging Stan Semenoff Logging since 2016 to get the company to lift its safety standards.”
Haszard, who is contracted to help NZTA, is quoted: “The Transport Agency has given Stan Semenoff Logging every opportunity to provide evidence of improvement, but over the course of two audits and three years we have seen that this company is either unwilling or unable to comply with the necessary transport operator safety standards… The revocation is a safety decision, plain and simple. It’s not just about the safety of Mr Semenoff’s drivers, it’s about the safety of all Northland’s other road users”.
Interestingly, the trade union representing truck drivers, First Union, has been fully supportive of the Semenoff Logging company losing its license. Hamish Rutherford reports that First Union “says tough action by the Transport Agency is long overdue against Stan Semenoff Logging” – see: Shane Jones steps into case between company owned by ‘my mother’s cousin’ and NZTA.
A pattern of bad behaviour
Of course, the Northland logging truck controversy is only the latest in a long line of incidents that have raised questions about Shane Jones’ integrity and style of operating in this current government. Very helpfully, Alex Braae has catalogued these controversies – see: A brave attempt to count every Shane Jones mini-scandal over 18 short months.
Braae comments: “With the possible exception of Phil Twyford, no minister has generated more headlines over the current government’s term than Shane Jones. And a lot of them aren’t good headlines at all. So how does he keep surviving? The charmed career of Shane Jones continued on breezily this week. Despite opening up yet another target around perceived conflicts of interest for the opposition to aim at, there has been no suggestion whatsoever that he could be on the verge of being sacked.”
The apparent ability of Jones and his fellow NZ First Cabinet Ministers to get away with ethically questionable behaviour was discussed by Guyon Espiner, who raises examples of Jones providing misleading answers: “Such omissions can end ministerial careers. Ask Clare Curran, who had to exit Cabinet for failing to disclose her meetings. It matters because full disclosure about the spending of public money is at the core of a strong democracy” – see: Does everyone want Sonny Bill on their team?
Espiner uses sporting metaphors (after Jones painted himself as the Sonny Bill Williams of politics), and says “So where’s the ref or even the captain? The Prime Minister is largely on the sidelines watching Jones perform… Jacinda Ardern wasn’t prepared to say he had been misleading in answering questions… Jones doesn’t get the red card. He’s got the get out of jail free card. He’s answerable only to Winston Peters. And Peters is enjoying the show.”
Similarly, Mike Hosking comments that Jones’ various indiscretions show that the Prime Minister is lacking the will to control her NZ First ministers: “there seems no indiscretion she would find remotely troubling. Under Ardern you can do what you like, because she’s not into discipline. It will bite her eventually” – see: Shane Jones saga isn’t sackable – but it’s shonky, shady, loose and arrogant.
Writing last month about Jones’ previous controversy, Hosking says “it’s not sackable” but it “breaches all rules of good governance and common honesty. It’s shonky, it’s shady, it’s loose, it’s arrogant.”
Ultimately it means that the Labour-led Government is losing any rights to claim the high moral ground of transparency and integrity: “If the Cabinet Manual is to be dismissed when it suits, don’t have a manual. If indiscretions are to be explained away, don’t then say you’re wanting to be the most open, honest, and transparent government this country has ever seen. Because you can’t be both.”
Explaining the unpunished bad behaviour of Jones and NZ First
Hosking isn’t the only one arguing that the Government is suffering due to Jones’ antics. Herald political editor Audrey Young says that with Jones being out-of-control and undisciplined, the “message that sends the public is that coalition management is shambolic” – see: Shane Jones makes coalition management look shambolic.
But reporting on earlier bad behaviour, Young wonders if it’s deliberate: “What is Shane Jones up to? Did he just have a bad week in which his good nature has been subsumed by irascibility and poor judgment? Or is he embarking on a deliberate mission for New Zealand First to become more assertive in the Coalition Government?”
It’s the latter according, according to Heather du Plessis-Allan. In her column, she says: “The amazing thing is just how little Jones seems to care about having his integrity questioned. He just leans back, half closes his eyes, and chats about it like he’s explaining the ins and outs of why he chose Quarter Tea for the bathroom walls. In fact, it’s almost like Jonesy – as he likes to call himself – is deliberately breaking rules and forgoing principles.”
She says it’s all about attention-seeking: “in the same way that a junkie needs heroin, but also in order to keep his job. The party he belongs to is currently polling below the 5 per cent threshold. As in, half of that. They should be doing better.”
This is where Matthew Hooton’s recent column, Behaving badly is NZ First’s best bet, comes in, in terms of understanding what’s going on. He argues that although it might seem counterintuitive, bad behaviour is the party’s best chance of pushing its support levels back up in time for next year’s election: “NZ First knows it has no chance of reaching 5 per cent by loyally supporting the Government. Nor does it care if 90 per cent of voters think its behaviour is reprehensible. It needs to win the support of only 1 in 20 voters: anything more is pointless. Drawing on the Kiwi culture of larrikinism, bad behaviour is its best bet.”
It’s all about living up to the party’s anti-Establishment reputation, as well as differentiating themselves from Labour and the Greens: “Demonstrating that different rules apply to NZ First and making the nominal Prime Minister look weak is central to differentiating the party from its larger coalition partner ahead of 2020. The scandal then provided a pretext for Jones to go on the offensive. For NZ First, attacking journalists, threatening to smear named individuals under parliamentary privilege, making dark insinuations about the SFO and positioning big business as somehow treasonous have been core business for a quarter century. In everything he did this week, Jones had the full blessing of Peters and the NZ First caucus.”
Furthermore, Hooton writes in another column that Jones is the only hope for the survival of New Zealand First, and that Peters needs to step down as leader and deputy prime minister for his protégé to take over and re-launch the party – see: Move on Winston Peters, your time is up.
And Jones keeps getting away with his behaviour because Peters is clearly protecting him. As Alex Braae writes, Jones’ continued survival “might be because it remains politically impossible for the PM to get rid of him, whether she wanted to or not. NZ First is too powerful, and Shane Jones and Winston Peters are clearly very loyal to each other.”
Finally, despite Shane Jones recently comparing himself to Sonny Bill Williams, there’s an even more colourful comparison, and one that helps explain how Jones can get away with so much. Liam Hehir points to one of the characters in the British sitcom The Office: “This man is full of himself, makes vulgar jokes and often blunders over the line of acceptable professional decorum. For all his awfulness, however, Finch never seems to get in trouble” – see: Sorry but Shane Jones is Chris Finch from The Office.
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Swamp foxtail (Cenchrus purpurascens) is a delightful grass that forms a neat tussock up to a metre tall with a distinctive fluffy spikelet that resembles a fox’s tail.
Foxtails are widely used in horticulture. The purple forms are particularly popular in ornamental gardens and some have even become invasive weeds.
The foxtail grasses are more commonly seen in these cultivated settings, which has led to much confusion about swamp foxtails’ origins in Australia. The species is simultaneously an exotic weed from Asia, the dominant grass in an endangered Australian ecosystem and a rare native species in isolated desert springs.
The Conversation
Is it native?
It was uncertain for a while whether swamp foxtail is actually native to Australia. Although Europeans collected it near Sydney, it was possible the seeds had come with livestock on the early ships.
The plant’s fluffy spikelets resemble a fox tail.Shutterstock
This theory was put to rest by genetic studies that found small populations have existed in inland Queensland for hundreds of thousands of years.
The species spread southward and was first recorded in Victoria in the 1970s.
European records
Robert Brown, the botanist who accompanied Matthew Flinders as he circumnavigated the continent, made the the earliest European collections of the swamp foxtail near Sydney in 1802.
Despite the early date of the collections, it is feasible that the swamp foxtail was brought to Sydney within 14 years of settlement as a byproduct among grain or hay. However, while the species occurs naturally in Asia, the Javanese ports were not on the typical travelling route from Europe.
The intrepid adventurer Ludwig Leichardt later collected this species near the Gwydir River region. This collection provides more convincing evidence the swamp foxtail is native to Australia. It seems unlikely that, in the early years of colonisation, the swamp foxtail had been transported overland with the squatters who were spreading out from their successful properties in the Hunter Valley.
The spread southward
The history of herbarium records, from collections in the late 1800s and early 1900s, suggests swamp foxtail might have been native to Queensland and New South Wales.
Collections south of these locations happened after 1940. The species was not recorded in Victoria until the 1970s. It seems almost certain the swamp foxtail spread southward during the 20th century, in some places as an undesirable weed.
Unusual and isolated habitats
Aboriginal fire management possibly maintained natural grassy openings among the northern NSW rainforests. The curious “grasses”, as they were named, are well documented on early survey plans of the Big Scrub country. Many a place name, Howards Grass Road and Lagoon Grass Road among them, bear testament to their existence.
The surveyors provided detailed recordings of the dominant grass on the valley floors: the “foxtail”. The swamp foxtail is now rather rare on the valley floors of the Richmond and the Tweed River valleys, replaced by crops on prime agricultural land. It managed to survive in a few locations west of Murwillumbah and on springs, but large expanses of the foxtail grasslands have succumbed to the plough.
An extremely isolated population of the swamp foxtail at Elizabeth Springs in western Queensland.Author provided
A particularly unusual habitat for the swamp foxtail is the artesian springs that feed permanent wetlands in the semi-deserts of inland Queensland. The swamp foxtail occurs there in very local populations separated by hundreds of kilometres.
This raises the question: is the swamp foxtail a recent arrival on these tiny, strange and isolated ecosystems, or are these ancient populations?
Genetic studies have provided conclusive evidence of an ancient origin. The oldest lineage is the population at Elizabeth Springs to the south of Boulia. Its molecular signature suggests this population has been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years.
Where swamp foxtail does occur at springs, it is always accompanied by rare species that are seen only in those unusual wetlands.
Swamp foxtail demonstrates the complexity of defining a species’ origin. This species probably evolved in Asia, because this is where most of its relatives are found. It found its way to Australia, possibly through a migratory bird that dropped a seed in a desert spring.
It then had a second migration, either from the springs or from a repeat dispersal from Asia, and found a niche in the valley floors of subtropical landscapes. It was abundant in these moist and fertile habitats when Europeans colonised the continent in 1788.
Since then, the swamp foxtail has spread to temperate climates where it has become invasive and, in some situations, a minor pest. Quite a journey.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism looks into the wealth of President Rodrigo Duterte and his family, drawing the ire of the President. Duterte. Image: Rappler montage/Malacañang/Shutterstock
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has responded to what it called President Rodrigo Duterte’s “broadsides” aimed at PCIJ’s recent reports on the Duterte family’s wealth, saying there was no reason for the President to “lose his cool”.
“The PCIJ report was built on the Dutertes’ own declarations in their SALNs (Statements of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth) and data from official government records,” said PCIJ executive director Malou Mangahas in a letter sent to media groups.
“PCIJ had wished only for the Dutertes to offer clear, direct, straightforward replies to our queries. Instead of blaming PCIJ for the report. Mr Duterte should turn his attention [to] his deputies, notably Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo, for the failure of [the] Office of the President to attend to PCIJ’s request letters, over the last 5 months.”
On Saturday, April 6, the President claimed it was money driving investigative reports. While he did not mention PCIJ by name, the comments were made in the aftermath of the investigative group’s three-part report, “The Dutertes: Wealth Reveal & Riddles”.
“Makita mo ‘yung utak ng mga investigative journalism kaya…. Pera-pera lang. Binabayaran ‘yan kung gano’n kalaki. Pati nung lawyering ko,” said the President.
-Partners-
(Look at how those in investigative journalism think…. It’s all about money. They get paid a huge sum if the story is that big. They even included my lawyering.)
Opaque data President Duterte and his children Sara and Paolo separately and together offer token or opaque data that, under the law, they are required to reveal in their SALNs Duterte, Sara, Paolo mark big spikes in wealth, cash while in public office
How and why their fortunes are rising remain a mystery; the numbers do not seem to add up, reports PCIJ
The President said his late mother, Soledad Roa Duterte, was responsible for the family’s wealth.
“Putang ina ninyo. Hoy, ‘yung mga dilaw, all the time I was with my mother. Maski na noong mayor na ako, ang nagpapakain sa akin nanay ko. ‘Yung nanay ko ang may pera. ‘Yun ang nanay ko nag-iwan ng pera sa amin. Pero kung magkano, eh bakit sabihin ko sa inyo?” asked Duterte.
(You sons of whores. You yellows, I was with my mother all the time. Even when I was still mayor, it was my mother who fed me. My mother was the one who had the money. It was my mother who left money for us. But as to how much, why would I tell you?)
PCIJ detailed its efforts to solicit comments from the Duterte camp in letters sent beginning October 2018. According to Mangahas, it would have been “far better had Mr Duterte, daughter and Davao City Mayor Sara, and son and former Davao City vice mayor Paolo granted PCIJ’s request for comments, and possibly sit-down interviews, before the story ran.”
“Eh ngayon, tinitira kami ng mga anak ko. All about lawyering. Ano ba naman pakialam nila na what happened to my law office?” Duterte said in Iloilo City.
(Now, my children and I are being attacked. All about lawyering. What do they care about what happened to my law office?)
Among its findings, PCIJ reported that “the President, Sara, and Paolo separately and together offer a muddled mix of token or opaque data” in their SALNs.
PCIJ found spikes in the net worth of Duterte and his children. PCIJ said the President, Sara, and Paolo “have all consistently grown richer over the years, even on the modest salaries they have received for various public posts, and despite the negligible retained earnings reflected in the financial statements of the companies they own or co-own.”
The numbers, said the investigative group, “do not seem to add up.”
The Pacific Media Centre and Pacific Media Watch collaborate with Rappler and the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism.
The Polynesian Panthers were formed to resist police discrimination. Image: Michael Andrew/PMW
A replica of a 1970s living room in a Pacific family home. Image: Michael Andrew/PMW
Anzac Wallace as the guerilla leader Te Wheke in the 1983 film Utu … brought him critical acclaim and helped put New Zealand – and Māori – on the global map. Image: Ara Video/RNZ
Anzac Wallace … “weird parallel going on in real life.”. Image: Māori TV
The Solomon Islands Parliament chamber in Honiara. Image: Koroi Hawkins/RNZ Pacific
