Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW

In 2014 I rang artist Janet Laurence and suggested I write a book about her art. Not all of it, just the plant-related artworks. This was to be a philosophical musing on our mutual fascination with the crossover between art and the vegetal world. Now, five years later, it is time for a deeper, longer view of the artist’s work. A survey exhibition, with catalogue, is now launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.

Janet Laurence, Heartshock (After Nature), 2008 / 2019, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

Many accounts of the artist describe her as a peripatetic traveller, who flits to Japan one week and the Amazon the next – a flighty bowerbird who, in curator Rachel Kent’s words, has to be caught in a butterfly net.

My experience is different: I have only seen a rigorous scholarly approach. Her reading of environmental humanities scholarship, eco-theory and nature philosophy, is always up to date.

She texts me with quotes from the writings of the late ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose or forest expert Suzanne Simard. She sends me images of medieval texts drawn as inverted trees. Her knowledge of animal and plant science exceeds that of most scholars. Her intellectual character flows through each exhibition like a blood supply.

Janet Laurence reminds me of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who studied first with Plato and then with Aristotle, who gave him the task of finding connections between animals and plants. What resulted was the first systemisation of the botanical world, the Enquiry into Plants.

Read more: Explainer: what are the environmental humanities?

What Theophrastus endeavoured to find were plants’ character, their differences and their substance. His approach was categorical and observational. This kind of attitude resonates with Janet Laurence’s work. Her plant, fish and animal artworks are uncompromising, enduring, and have a constant scholarly form. She will not rest until her installations are perfectly complete. Her commitment is ferocious.

The second characteristic I associate with Janet Laurence is her political activism. She is an environmentalist, an activist. She deeply cares about the natural world, such as “nature” now is, and her work is a political tool to activate and engage her viewers. It is a cry, a howl, a mournful dirge. Many of us now feel we must use whatever weapons we have to raise the alarm for extinction and ecosystem depletions. Laurence’s new exhibition sounds that warning bell.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (still), 2015–16, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic bones, laboratory glass, collection of the artist. Image courtesy and © the artist

The final distinguishing character of Laurence’s work is its aesthetic allure. Laurence is mistress of the Wunderkammer, a “cabinet of curiosity” or collection of notable objects. This approach emerged in the 17th century and developed as the collecting of rare objects to suggest imperial power and sovereign superiority.

It is a methodology that Laurence uses in this survey exhibition, especially her new iteration of Deep Breathing, which was previously exhibited at the climate talks in Paris in 2015, at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (detail), 2015–16, installation view, Muséum National D’histoire Naturelle, Paris, 2015, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic boxes, laboratory glass, collection of the artist. Image courtesy and © the artist

Read more: Here’s looking at: Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef by Janet Laurence

This new version of the undersea hospital is richly bucolic and abundant. Projections on the blue end walls and glittering reflections of the massive Perspex boxes add to a sensation of being down in the watery deep. There are coral, sea creatures, turtles, cephalopods, shellfish.

However, the exquisite wonder is deceptive. This is only a reminder of the past. In fact, Deep Breathing is a hospital – triage, diagnosis and pathology procedures are undertaken here. The red thread that is woven through the white corals and endless vials and medical bottles is a blood transfusion. A desperate attempt to keep species alive.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, 2015–16 / 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

The museum has also commissioned a major new work called Theatre of Trees. This is an epic installation of five metre high concentric-circled fabric drops, mimicking the rings of a trunk.

Janet Laurence, Forest (Theatre of Trees), 2018–19, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

On three sides of the illusory and elusive circular structure are three rings, circus-like, which comprise a botanical library (the tree of knowledge), a wonder lab with 19th century specimens from the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences botanical collection, and an elixir bar for botanical infusion tasting.

The tree rings of silk, gauze and reflective fabric are alive with projected films in black and white. They are animated by screen-printed hand-painted photographic images. The experience of walking through these rings of fabric is ethereal. Time is slowed.

This is vegetal time, longer and deeper than human time. Tree root communication, seasonal changes, leaf nodes emitting chemicals – these are processes that follow a creeping hand of time.

These exquisite experiences, made rich and sensual by Laurence, beg the question: what are the categories of art that intersects with nature studies – known as “nature aesthetics”? How might Theophrastus categorise and document the epoch of art and nature where artists raise awareness for the damaged Great Barrier Reef, the endangered black cockatoo (whose bird song echoes through the museum’s galleries), the mysterious dragon blood tree or the extinct Thylacine.

Perhaps this work marks a new resolution around the idea of “nature aesthetics”, where nature now has new cultural meaning, beyond ideas of pristine landscapes or untouched wilderness. So, what are the criteria that make contemporary “nature aesthetics” work? Some of the contributing elements must be politics, even violence. Other elements must be the ability to change and to evolve.

Still more must retain sensation and beauty, those conventional but wily notions of aesthetic value. Janet Laurence’s nature aesthetic artwork is a mark in history, an historic point in time … to be watched, with care.

Janet Laurence: After Nature is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until 10 June 2019.

– ref. Janet Laurence: After Nature sounds an exquisite warning bell for extinction – http://theconversation.com/janet-laurence-after-nature-sounds-an-exquisite-warning-bell-for-extinction-112942

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

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss the departures of two more cabinet ministers – Steve Ciobo and Chris Pyne; the latest national accounts figures; Bill Shorten’s focus on slow wage growth; and Scott Morrison’s visit to the detention facility on Christmas Island.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on more cabinet departures, national accounts figures and Morrison’s Christmas island visit – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-more-cabinet-departures-national-accounts-figures-and-morrisons-christmas-island-visit-113194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Glencross, Research Fellow, Southern Cross University

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

When I first came across the kauri pine (Agathis robusta), I certainly wasn’t impressed by their growth. Mixed among other species in a young rainforest plantation, they seemed destined to be left behind by the faster-growing trees (I did think they looked nice, though).

But today I know I judged the kauri unfairly. They can survive for millennia, so they don’t bother doing all their growing in their first couple of decades. But come back 20 years later, and that unassuming tree will be well on its way to being one of the giants of the forest.

Read more: Lord of the forest: New Zealand’s most sacred tree is under threat from disease, but response is slow

The Conversation

Impressive by any measure

By any yardstick, kauri pines are truly unique and impressive. If time is our measure, then the kauri family, Agathis, has endured over epochs, with fossils found in Australia from the early to mid-Jurassic period. Having withstood the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and the evolution and diversification of our flora, 17 species of living fossil trees in the Agathis family remain.

Agathis is an iconic genus of large, ecologically important, and economically valuable conifers that now range over lowland to upper montane rainforests from New Zealand to Sumatra. So, if we judge a plant’s success in terms of its geographical spread or its ability to adapt to a range of conditions, the Kauri family is once again outstanding.

If we measure a plant by appearances, then the tall, robust and handsome Queensland kauri pine remains an impressive – albeit little-known – plant. Reaching up to 50 metres, it emerges above rainforest margins in tropical and subtropical eastern Australia. Its straight, round trunk can grow to 3m in diameter and a combination of smooth mottled bark, coppery new growth and dark green canopy make this tree a world-class ornamental. In parks and gardens across Australia, Kauri pine cuts a fine figure, growing to enormous sizes, even in southern regions.

Read more: Mountain ash has a regal presence: the tallest flowering plant in the world

Our Australian kauri pine, once common in the dry rainforests of Queensland, has become a victim of its own success. A heavy reliance on the highly regarded wood during the earliest stages of the colonial timber industry has left only a few old trees standing, mostly in remote areas or forest reserves. In my role as a research scientist, I have tracked down the kauri’s cousins in the Pacific regions, where the giant pines can now only be found on tops of mountains on remote islands. In New Zealand, the giant kauri that once covered large areas are in danger from the soil-based fungus Phytophora.

Germaine Greer, in her 2014 book White Beech, describes visiting a massive kauri tree on the North Island over 50m tall and 13.5m in diameter that is in danger of succumbing to the fungus after a life measured in millennia.

A useful tree

According to the Gymnosperm Database, Queensland kauri was first reported by Europeans in 1842 by Andrew Petrie, who found it growing in the Mary River country, and reported that the native peoples made their nets from its inner bark. A fine, even texture set this timber apart from the more common Hoop pine.

In the South Pacific, the cousins of the Australian kauri have a strong cultural significance and features in the Maori creation myth. The wood from the Southern Kauri (Agathis australis) was used for water craft, and the gum used in traditional tattoos (moko).

Enthusiastic attempts by the Queensland Forest Service to grow the kauri in plantations were devastated by large stick insects. As a result, kauris are now only grown at a very small scale in mixed species rainforest timber plantations, which is where I stumbled upon them.

Read more: Comic explainer: forest giants house thousands of animals (so why do we keep cutting them down?)

In about 2002, during my PhD study of young (8-15 years old) rainforest plantations, I first measured kauri as a small tree amongst the well-regarded cabinet timber species of mahoganies and white beech. At first glance, the appeal for me of this Jurassic fossil was merely aesthetic. They were not very impressive in terms of early growth in the plantations; so I focused my attention on the rapid, early growing species.

However, having ignored the kauri for about 10 years, I was astonished (upon return to my old study sites) at how rapidly the kauris had progressed. Not only is this species one of the best performers in terms of diameter growth, but it also has excellent form. It produces straight stems free of large branches that indicates excellent quality logs, for those growers who value wood quality.

My regard for the kauri is now much more than aesthetic; or even as quirky relics from deep time. These trees are showing themselves to be extremely resilient and competitive, under challenging climatic conditions, across a very wide range of sites. They have the capacity to withstand severe storms as well as longer term stresses, such as drought.

I now know that, given the kauri pine can live for many centuries, it is not advisable to measure their value according to the first decade or so of growth, but rather their productivity and resilience across their whole lifespan.

Read more: Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees

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

– ref. Kauri pines are late-blooming rainforest giants – http://theconversation.com/kauri-pines-are-late-blooming-rainforest-giants-112866

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brenda Midson, Editor, New Zealand Law Journal; Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato

This week, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Crimes Amendment Bill, abolishing the “year and a day” rule. This rule meant that no one could be liable for killing another person unless that person died within a year and a day of the act that caused their death.

This rule was one of the reasons why homicide charges were not laid against anyone for the deaths of 115 people in a building that collapsed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, even though a Royal Commission of Inquiry found the building did not meet code requirements. No one could be prosecuted for homicide because the earthquake occurred many years after the building was constructed – outside of “a year and a day”.

Doing away with the rule raises some interesting questions, both in relation to any proposed euthanasia laws and homicide more generally.

Read more: How antiquated legal language undermines complainants in cases of sexual assault

Operating and substantial cause of death

For someone to be guilty of homicide – whether it is murder or manslaughter – they must have some intention or fault and their act must be an “operating cause and a substantial cause” of death. This phrase comes from English case law and it essentially means that the original wound must be operating on the victim at the time of their death and be a substantial, if not the only, cause of death. This is not always easy to establish, especially when other events intervene.

Last year in England, Berlinah Wallace was charged with murdering her ex-partner, Mark van Dongen, after she threw sulphuric acid on him. What is unusual about this case is that Van Dongen did not die from the acid. His face and body were severely scarred, he was paralysed from the neck down, lost most of his vision and his lower left leg had to be amputated.

He spent more than a year in hospital and then went to Belgium where he successfully applied for euthanasia. Wallace was acquitted of murder, but she was found guilty of throwing a corrosive substance with intent, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 12 years.

In 1996, England and Wales abolished the year and a day rule so the fact that Van Dongen died more than a year after the acid attack did not prevent Wallace being charged. But a central issue in the case was whether her actions were the legal cause of death. The immediate cause of death was the actions of the doctors at the euthanasia clinic, but the jury had to decide whether the doctors’ actions made Wallace’s act of throwing acid legally inoperative as a cause of death.

The fact that she was acquitted of murder suggests the jury was not satisfied her actions were a substantial and operating cause of death, or that it was not reasonably foreseeable that Van Dongen might choose euthanasia as a result of his injuries.

Responsibility for our actions

While the year and a day rule is arbitrary, its repeal does raise some questions about the point at which we stop being responsible for the consequences of our actions. Justice minister Andrew Little said:

advances in medical science and life support machines that may keep victims alive for longer than a year and a day mean there is no longer any justification for this rule.

But from another perspective, this may be precisely why the rule is needed. While people do need to be accountable for harming others, especially if they intend to kill someone, other cases might require some reasonable limits.

Imagine a defendant whose negligent driving caused another person serious injuries, but because of “advances in medical science” the injured person lived for another ten years before finally succumbing to their injuries. Even if death was reasonably foreseeable at the time of the injury, a decade is a long time for a person to be uncertain of potential criminal liability, especially for homicide.

Some difficult questions

Euthanasia also raises some issues. In New Zealand, the Select Committee is due to report back on the End of Life Bill at the end of March. If we go ahead with some form of “assisted dying”, this could also extend the scope of liability beyond current limits.

Read more: The fear that dare not speak its name: how language plays a role in the assisted dying debate

The law generally says that we take our victims as we find them – if they have a particular vulnerability (a weak heart, for example,) that doesn’t affect our liability for harming them. This may be fair enough when it comes to murder, but to what extent should a defendant’s liability for manslaughter depend upon a victim’s voluntary decision to end their own life, even if they do have a susceptibility toward, say, self-harm?

This is a difficult question and I don’t suggest reinstating the year and a day rule is an answer. But its repeal means we may have to rethink the traditional criminal law approach to causation in homicide cases.

– ref. New Zealand’s repeal of “year and a day” rule expands liability for homicide – http://theconversation.com/new-zealands-repeal-of-year-and-a-day-rule-expands-liability-for-homicide-113042

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pani Farvid, Senior Lecturer, Psychology, University of Auckland

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, addressing gender inequality in New Zealand remains a challenge. As the first country to grant women the vote, we have a long way to go to until there’s genuine equality across all genders.

Inequality spans gender-based violence (including sexual violence, intimate partner violence and family violence), women’s participation in public life, women’s representation in leadership roles, the continued gender pay gap, and the deteriorating position of minority and immigrant women.

Research has long indicated that gender inequality exists primarily because of the idea that there are two separate and different genders, with men and women thought to have different skills.

But gender is not biological or “naturally” tied to bodies. It is a product of culture and has varied considerably over time. I argue that we need to teach children about gender as early as possible to prevent sexism before it becomes ingrained.

Read more: Gender equity. The way things are going, we won’t reach true parity until the 22nd century

Sex and gender

Since the enlightenment period, we’ve assumed that women and men are different but “complementary”. This model is problematic because traditional masculine traits (assertiveness, rationality, aggressiveness) are more highly valued and associated with prominent social roles. Traditional feminine traits (nurture, sensitivity, intuitiveness) are associated with submissiveness and less socially valued roles.

It is now accepted that sex and gender are different things. The American Psychological Association has recently stated:

Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

Read more: Parents can promote gender equality and help prevent violence against women. Here’s how

More similar than different

Multiple reviews and meta-analyses of psychological literature have consistently found men and women are more similar than they are different when it comes to a host of psychological traits and mental functioning. These include cognitive performance, mathematical abilities, personality traits, social behaviours, emotions, aggression and leadership.

There are some biological realities such as pregnancy, child birth and lactation. But social and biological research indicates that outside of these, men and women are equally equipped for parenting and caregiving.

The focus needs to shift from being mostly on women, to changing the nature of gender relations, debunking gender polarity and promoting softer masculinity. Boys and men would also benefit from this, as it offers them more options for how they can be.

To do this, prevention strategies are needed to address the covert and overt sexisms that lead to gender inequality.

Gender equality education in schools

Gender equality education should begin when children enter the education system and continue throughout. This needs to address the history and nature of gender inequality and sexism. It also needs to provide students with the tools to dismantle rigid gender binaries (including sexism) and offer them more options for gender identification and expression.

Read more: Why education about gender and sexuality does belong in the classroom

Based on my own research, the research of others and the gender equality policies of the Swedish government, I make the following recommendations for New Zealand policy makers and educators:

• gender equality education needs to start when children enter the education system and continue throughout
• tenets of a gender equality approach (debunking rigid gender norms and gender polarity) need to be reflected in the school curriculum
• training of teachers needs to incorporate gender theory and gender equality training
• students need to be seen as more than the sum of their gender, but as complex people
• each student needs to be approached as a sophisticated individual who is capable of embodying and desiring several changing gendered identities
• the school curriculum needs to include lessons on the social production of gender, gender roles and gender categories
• schools need to incorporate curricula on global citizenship, which includes an awareness and acceptance of diversity and the promotion of equality for all humans
• schools need to include lessons on ethical sexual and relational practices towards all, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation (including in online communication)
• the education system needs to identify and interrupt hetero-normative, hetero-sexist, and patriarchal practices that are part of society and, at times, part of school culture
• schools need to introduce the use of gender-neutral language that challenges the boy/girl binary
• school should provide gender-inclusive bathrooms for transgender and non-gender conforming students.

To address the ongoing manifestations of gender inequality in New Zealand, we need innovative thinking focused on prevention. Such an intervention would be research-based, aimed at curbing sexism and gender inequality before it occurs.

We know all violence is preventable. But preventing gender-based violence requires changing enduring norms and beliefs about the nature of gender and men’s and women’s roles within relationships and society. Gender equality education and teaching of ethical citizenship is a fresh direction that can redress entrenched patterns of sexism and gender inequality.

– ref. Beyond the binary: how teaching children about gender could help reduce sexism – http://theconversation.com/beyond-the-binary-how-teaching-children-about-gender-could-help-reduce-sexism-113140

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Williamson, Senior Lecturer, Human Resource Management, UNSW Canberra, UNSW

We are in the midst of an outpouring of feminist activism kicked off by the pink pussy hat movement in the United States and propelled by #MeToo, which has spread to Australia where a range of luminaries have been named as harassers.

And yet we are also in the midst of a backlash, a concern that gender equality has moved too fast, aided by “gender fatigue”.

Twenty-seven years ago, Susan Faludi created a furore by documenting what she said was a backlash against women. She said it wasn’t new, as evidenced by penalties imposed on childless and unwed women in ancient Rome, and witch burnings of medieval Europe. Each was a response to perceptions that women were gaining ground.

This time it is taking the form of a resurgence of the men’s rights movement, and also in the cries of #notallmen. It is evident in the trolling occurring on feminist websites, negative comments in the media and the rape, violence and death threats inflicted on feminist activists.

That’s in social media and society. What about the workplace?

Backlash in the form of fatigue

It can be as simple as organisational silence and inaction. Even in organisations where managers and workers are committed to the idea of equality, it can take the form of resistance to specific initiatives.

It is aligned to gender fatigue, or seeing further advances in gender equality as a “non-issue”.

My colleagues (Associate Professor Linda Colley, Dr Meraiah Foley and Professor Rae Cooper) and I have examined managers’ and employees’ understanding of gender equality and have often been told “gender is not an issue here”.

It is as if they are tired of hearing about it and want it to be “done”.

While we have found many organisations which are well advanced in their gender equity journey, we have yet to find one in which it is actually done.

What’s worth aiming for

Sometimes women are told that the remaining gender inequality is their own fault. #Metoo has been blamed for men being afraid to mentor women. Women are told to “lean in” – to focus on empowering individuals rather than women in general.

British researchers Hazel Conley and Margaret Page say real change will only be achieved when there is

an understanding of gendered power and its intersections with other forms of inequality, individual commitment to act on this knowledge and the collective organisation to approach gender equality.

That understanding might lead to non-hierarchical organisational structures with different concepts of power. It might subvert the concept of work so that it is no longer regarded as the guiding force of lives. It might mean working to live, not living to work. It might mean that there isn’t paid work and other work, just “work”.

It might make future backlash unnecessary, and gender fatigue redundant.

This article is an edited version a recent address given by Sue Williamson as president of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand.

– ref. Backlash and gender fatigue. Why progress on gender equality has slowed – http://theconversation.com/backlash-and-gender-fatigue-why-progress-on-gender-equality-has-slowed-112706

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

The 2019 federal election, like most before it, is unlikely to be won or lost on foreign policy. Yet diplomacy is increasingly crucial to ensure the everyday well-being of Australians.

Foreign policy is no longer an elite, secret activity that affects only the powerful or political. For an open economy like Australia’s, with mobile citizens in a shifting but interconnected region, it is the stuff of everyday life.

As 2019 began, I outlined the volatile events that lay on the immediate horizon for Australian foreign policy. I dealt with big meetings like APEC in Thailand and the G20 in Japan, and elections for Australia’s partners in some of our most important relationships, like India and Indonesia. I noted the difficulties of implementing big policy ideas like the “Pacific pivot” and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And, of course, there is the delicate business of crafting independent foreign policy positions while acknowledging the giant panda/bald eagle in the room.

Read more: Australia should brace for a volatile year in foreign policy in 2019

When the then foreign minister, Julie Bishop, commissioned the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, she noted it was designed to help Australian diplomacy be more proactive. She said:

… it’s about looking at the kind of framework that needs to be in place so that we’re not reacting to events, we’re strategically positioned to manage, maybe even shape, events.

Invest in shaping our region’s future

One key election issue should rest on who is most willing to invest in Australian diplomacy. We must increase our capacity to be nimble if we wish to shape events instead of being hostage to American and Chinese fortunes.

It is difficult with limited resources, but we must create as many diplomatic options as possible to reframe problems and create non-military solutions over the next decade. That means heavy engagement in international forums.

Moreover, Australia must become a state that helps the international community solve problems associated with climate change in our region and at home through climate diplomacy. There is simply no more time to waste.

Sophisticated soft power

Australia should invest in a sophisticated soft power strategy, pending the wisdom gained by the DFAT Soft Power Review. Uncertainty in international relations creates opportunities for smart pivotal powers. Now is the time to invest in innovation in public diplomacy and focus on a strategy that harnesses the strengths of our First Australians, our migrants, the business community, universities, charities, creative industries, cities and regions.

Australia needs a sophisticated soft power strategy that connects our well-travelled and outward-facing multicultural citizenry to our nation-branding. We should lead with our values. This approach is certainly not doing New Zealand any harm. Photos and videos of NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Arden addressing the United Nations with her baby created a diplomatic moment in 2018.

We also need to be principled and decent in our international interventions. We need our face to the world to be more diverse and reflect our citizenry.

DFAT should continue to focus on delivering the Gender Strategy and the Women in Leadership Strategy as matters of key importance, as well as consolidating the success of the Ambassador for Women and Girls. Whatever the election result, the foreign minister, Marise Payne, and shadow minister, Penny Wong, are both excellent emblems of Australian commitment to equality on the world stage.

Some ideas to enhance our soft power include:

• DFAT to be more creative in digital diplomacy
• DFAT developing a youth strategy and creating a new thematic ambassador to reflect the youth of our region
• the foreign minister convening a meeting of Australian mayors to map diplomatic activity and coordinate a strategy. More broadly, DFAT should consider the rise of cities as diplomatic actors in our region
• DFAT to support and engage more with international students and diaspora in Australia
• Australian universities to increase their investment in international relations and diplomatic skills, which are useful for many global professionals.

Free and fair trade

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently released data showing Australia recorded a A$22.2 billion trade surplus in 2018, the highest ever for a calendar year.

Metals, ores and minerals (A$94.9 billion) and coal, coke and briquettes (A$66.7 billion) were our biggest exports, followed by natural gas and rural goods. Service exports are growing, but a transition away from reliance on extractive industries towards services and the digital economy may be a painful one.

Moreover, modern trade deals go deep into standards and consumer services. Most Australians still do not realise the implications for domestic policy raised by the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and other free trade agreements.

The next government should commission a Trade White Paper and think seriously about better ways to involve the community in trade negotiations.

Tell the story

We must increase efforts to explain Australian foreign policy in accessible and transparent ways to all kinds of domestic audiences. Foreign policy must be reframed as a non-elite issue. Bill Shorten noted this in a headland speech designed to connect DFAT more with everyday conversation. He said:

John Curtin and Ben Chifley knew this, they understood the connection between the lives of working Australians and the corridors of international diplomacy.

Read more: Australia should brace for a volatile year in foreign policy in 2019

At the same time, we have to rewrite the current international narrative that Australian democracy has lost its way because the constant changes of PM give the impression of political instability.

I recently saw a tote bag that said “Ban the Single Use Prime Minister”. I have written previously about the idea of reversing some of the churn damage caused by our revolving prime ministers to our foreign policy reputation by using Bishop, Payne, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull as envoys on particular issues.

Signature ideas – Australian conflict resolution

We need bigger ideas that the Australian public and people around the world can connect with. The time has come to support John Langmore’s idea of a specialised mediation unit in DFAT.

Australia must invest more in preventive diplomacy as volatility increases – perhaps in partnership with New Zealand. Many scholars and practitioners have argued that Australia should build our negotiation and mediation capacity through DFAT. We have the talent – both here and inside the United Nations.

Vote global

DFAT clearly needs more resources to undertake the role Australians need it to accomplish in the next decade. Increased DFAT investment should be coupled to the Defence White Paper investment targets. To shape the future, we need to invest now.

– ref. Next government must find Australia’s place in a turbulent and rapidly changing world – http://theconversation.com/next-government-must-find-australias-place-in-a-turbulent-and-rapidly-changing-world-110794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Flinders University

Review: A Man of Good Hope, Adelaide Festival

In a world where so many are escaping brutality, war, persecution, and loss of land, is it possible to tell the story of just one displaced person, and in so doing, tell the story of many? With A Man of Good Hope, a theatrical adaptation of a biography of the same name by Jonny Steinberg, the Cape Town-based Isango Ensemble suggests the answer is yes.

An energetic cast of over 20 actor-singer-dancer-musicians are shaped by director Mark Dornford-May’s dynamic and lively staging. They take the audience on a journey alongside the play’s central character, Asad Abdullahi, as he is driven from his home in Somalia and across thousands of kilometres through Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

Unfolding over a 22-year period, multiple actors play Asad as a boy, a young man, and as an adult. We first see Asad as a grown man, as Steinberg evidently first encountered him. He is weighed down by life, wearing sadness like a mask.

The performance takes the audience through 22 years of Asad Abdullahi’s life. Keith Pattison

And in the next scene, when we see him as a ten-year old standing in the doorway of his childhood home in Mogadishu, Somalia with his mother, we understand why.

Virtually overnight, his entire clan, one that knows its lineage across 25 generations, is branded the enemy. Soldiers bang on the front door. His mother is unceremoniously shot.

In a moment, Asad becomes a homeless child from a clan slated for extermination. This is a world where men with guns are everywhere, where anyone can be shot or killed at any time by anyone, where a life can be taken on a whim.

After Asad’s mother is murdered, he attaches himself to another survivor, a woman living on the streets. By age 10 he is with her in Kenya at a refugee camp run by the United Nations. There everyone dreams of life in America, a place where “everyone is rich”, “everyone is free” and, in one of the few lines that elicits laughter from the audience, “there are no guns”.

Abandoned a second time by the mother figure he has adopted, he becomes a survivor, a clever street kid, an operator. As he puts it, “I belong to everyone; I belong to no one”.

By the time he’s a young man, he is living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he falls in love with a Somali woman who has been subjected to female genital mutilation. After paying off people smugglers, the two briefly end up together in South Africa.

Asad trades goods in a remote black township, experiencing more alienation and persecution, causing his wife to flee the country with their child. But he stays, believing, “I have a better chance to change my fate by staying and fighting”.

The play’s rapid-fire action takes place on a steeply raked stage comprised of what look like wooden planks, surrounded by corrugated iron walls, suggesting the world of South African shantytowns.

Props are used sparingly, serve multiple functions, and are sometimes ingeniously transformed, as when, for instance, a door becomes the roof of a crowded bus, held aloft by the passengers underneath, while the boy Asad rides on top in the open air.

A door is used as the roof of bus in A Man of Good Hope. Keith Pattison

This is a show with much singing and dancing, while many of the performers take turns playing the standing, marimba-style instruments on both sides of the stage. As the predominant orchestral sound, the percussive marimba becomes problematic as it always retains a kind of chirpy, upbeat quality and is not able to deliver much nuance or tonal shading.

Song too was integral to the storytelling, and some of the evening’s most powerful moments were when group choral singing created a huge sound, full of luscious, rich harmonies. Less successful were some of the sudden shifts from speech to song, with many short passages consisting of a single phrase or two suddenly sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech or in a kind of operatic style that came across as awkward or forced.

A Man of Good Hope is a show filled with song and dance. Keith Pattison

In terms of storytelling, each new tragedy begat another one equally or more horrible, with most of the play’s scenes ending with some kind of dramatic confrontation. While this is no doubt reflective of the trajectory of Asad’s life and parallel to the structure of the book, on stage it can at times feel plodding, even predictable.

Despite these shortcomings, this is a memorable, challenging, high-octane piece of theatre. A Man of Good Hope is ultimately no tale of triumph over adversity. As the play ends, Asad says goodbye to his writer friend Jonny for the last time, making it clear, despite the well-meaning writer’s protestations, that he has no interest in ever reading his own story.

As Steinberg himself observes in the program notes, “the story is not for him; it is for others”. Ultimately, it can only be for us, those fortunate enough to have had lives not marked by trauma.

A Man of Good Hope is playing as part of the Adelaide Festival until March 11.

– ref. A Man of Good Hope is no tale of triumph over adversity, but it is the story of many – http://theconversation.com/a-man-of-good-hope-is-no-tale-of-triumph-over-adversity-but-it-is-the-story-of-many-113105

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

This week the Greens announced their refugee policy. It includes allowing private citizens to sponsor refugees as part of its plan to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake by 10,000. In December, Labor also announced plans to increase the existing community sponsored refugee program by up to 5,000 places per year.

Australia’s little-known community support program (CSP) allows individuals, businesses or community organisations to fund and sponsor the travel and resettlement of refugees into Australia from overseas.

But the number of visas allowed under the CSP is part of the overall quota in Australia’s humanitarian program. This means that, for each refugee sponsored privately, one less place is available in the government-funded resettlement program.

The CSP also requires the sponsored refugee to be capable of getting a job quickly and have functional English. Altogether, this suggests the CSP seeks to exploit the goodwill of the community while shifting the cost of resettlement away from the government.

Community sponsorship of refugees in Australia

The history of community involvement in refugee sponsorship dates back to the community refugee resettlement scheme. The program ran from 1979 to 1997 and resettled more than 30,000 refugees, primarily from Vietnam.

Australia’s current program began with the community proposal pilot in 2013. This provided 500 places, again from within Australia’s refugee and humanitarian program (which has a capped quota for each financial year). This meant the overall humanitarian intake didn’t increase under the pilot, but the government did save money. Community sponsors covered the cost of existing resettlement places for the first year as well as paying significant visa fees.

Read more: Private resettlement models offer a way for Australia to lift its refugee intake

The government conducted a public consultation and review of the program in 2015. While it never publicised the findings of that consultation, documents obtained under Freedom of Information show 13 out of 17 respondents recommended the program should operate in addition to the existing refugee and humanitarian program. The responses also showed there was a perception the program was merely a “cost cutting scheme”.

The community support program was introduced in 2017 after the summit on refugees held in New York at the end of 2016. At the summit, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that

in addition to our existing programs, Australia will… create new pathways for refugees to resettle in Australia through the establishment of 1,000 places under a Community Support Program, where communities and businesses can sponsor applications and support new arrivals, leading to better settlement outcomes.

But rather than being “in addition”, the CSP again takes places from Australia’s existing refugee and humanitarian program, currently capped at 18,750 per year.

The CSP also introduced a number of new requirements. These include that refugees must have “adequate English”, be aged between 18-50 and “have a job offer or skills to enable you to get a job quickly”. Such requirements prioritise the country’s economic priorities over humanitarian need.

The 2017-18 budget promoted the CSP as a way for the government to raise A$26.9 million. This revenue gain comes from the extraordinarily high fees associated with the program. Altogether, the fees amount to more than A$100,000 to sponsor a refugee family of five.

What is the community saying?

Governments all over the world are looking at ways to increase community involvement in resettling refugees. Canada has been running a program that has facilitated the private sponsorship of more than 300,000 refugees since 1978.

Our unpublished research shows that Australian community members are eager to sponsor and support refugees to settle in Australia. But the current program is expensive, restrictive and does not expand Australia’s resettlement numbers. These problems have dissuaded community groups from getting involved.

Read more: FactCheck: is this the greatest period of humanitarian need since WWII?

A coalition of refugee and community organisations has formed the Community Refugee Sponsorship Initiative (CRSI). This calls on the government to develop a new sponsorship model “to enable people to come together to add to, not reduce, Australia’s resettlement places”.

They have collected the names of more than 13,000 community members who would sponsor refugees should the current model be reformed.

The CSP can expand our refugee program

Both the Greens’ and Labor’s policies pledge that the number of people coming to Australia under refugee sponsorship will be in addition to those under the humanitarian program. They also propose to abolish the problematic requirements that undermine the humanitarian principle of refugee resettlement.

To date, the CSP has been largely used by people living in Australia as a form of family reunion. This is because other safe pathways for families to be reunited have been closed off or limited by the government.

More than 90% of the 1,000 refugees resettled through the current CSP have been sponsored by family members, rather than the wider community. The CSP is also limited to refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bhutan, Syria and Iraq, with a significant majority coming from Syria and Iraq.

Private sponsorship will continue to function as an expensive form of family reunion until better options are made available.

Community sponsorship of refugees has the potential to transform refugee resettlement. It can significantly expand the scale of Australia’s humanitarian migration program, allowing the public to supplement the government-funded humanitarian migration program. This means more refugees finding safety every year, when other resettlement programs (such as that in the US) are shrinking.

When done properly, community sponsorship engages the broader community in the resettlement of refugee arrivals. It can challenge and rewrite government-led narratives about refugees and asylum seekers.

– ref. Community members should be able to sponsor refugees for the right reasons, not to save the government money – http://theconversation.com/community-members-should-be-able-to-sponsor-refugees-for-the-right-reasons-not-to-save-the-government-money-112230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duygu Yengin, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Adelaide

International Women’s Day is a good time ask two critical questions about economics: do we have enough women in it, and does it matter?

Women are less likley to take it up than they used to be.

Twenty five years ago around half of the students studying Year 12 economics were female. Today it is only around one third. In universities, only about 20% to 30% of undergraduate economics are female.

In public sector, one third of the economists in senior management roles are women. In academia it is far worse: fewer than 10% of economics professors are women, compared of 20% of professors in science, technology and maths.

Here’s why it matters:

• Around half of the customer base for most businesses are women, and around half of our citizens and voters are women. Government and business decisions can affect women and men differently. If economists are mainly of one gender they are likely to miss things.

• More generally, research finds that diversity among decision makers leads to better decisions.

• Even though the models and methods economists use are gender-neutral (at times inappropriately so), the types of questions economists choose to analyse are not. Greater diversity will lead to a greater diversity in the topics being examined.

There’s little doubt that male and female economists do things differently.

New research finds that female central bankers work with greater independence and deliver lower inflation than male central bankers.

A study of US economists finds that male and female economists differ significantly in their approach to the fields of health, labour markets, taxation, environment, government spending on welfare or military.

Why so few women study economics

It’s partly a function of it being a male-dominated discipline. Study after study finds that when both man and women receive low grades in a discipline dominated by men, it is the women who are the most likely to drop out.

Another study finds that when men and women of equal mathematical ability are asked to rate their ability, women rate it less highly than men.

Their teachers rate them worse too. Letters of recommendation for women tend to be shorter and focus more on personality traits and less on skills or intellect than those for men.

The effects are weaker when women have female teachers. Role models matter.

And women are more likely to study economics when they are told about its real life impact. University outreach can help.

Outreach material. University of Adelaide

Why academia leaks

The gender gap gets worse the higher women attempt to progress.

Some economists think this is not a problem: if there aren’t many women at senior levels in the field, it must be because they’re not very interested or not very productive.

It is a simplistic view that ignores the drivers of apparent productivity. Women are more likely than men to be given teaching and un-promotable administrative duties at the cost of research time.

They find it harder than men to find co-authors to write academic papers.

When they do, it matters less. One study finds that co-authorship for a man has the same impact on tenure as writing a paper a solo, but not for a woman.

And female solo-authored economics papers are held to higher standards than those written by men, delaying publication by as much as six months, and resulting in fewer successful publications.

Student evaluations also suffer from unconscious bias. Students rate online teachers more highly when they they use male names than female names, regardless of the actual gender.

Read more: Unconscious bias is keeping women out of senior roles, but we can get around it

By themselves none of these barriers may amount to much, but combined, they work to slow down the progress of women and disguise true merit.

Why it won’t fix itself

The gender gap in economists will not disappear naturally. Indeed, the progress in closing it has stalled.

True progress won’t be achieved until we agree that there are problems with the system, rather than women.

Women think so. A 2014 study found that more than 50% of female economists believe the profession is set up to favour men. Men do not: more than 75% believed it either favoured neither gender or favoured women.

Research presented by Shelly Lundberg of the University of California, Santa Barbara to a gender economics workshop organised by Australia’s Women in Economics Network in February found that progress in the United States stalled in the mid-2000s. It is unlikely to restart until both genders recognise that the barriers facing women are real.

Read more: Economics needs to get real if we want more young Australians to study it

– ref. Why women in economics have little to celebrate – http://theconversation.com/why-women-in-economics-have-little-to-celebrate-112859

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

We are but weeks away from an election in New South Wales – polling day is on March 23 – and it will be eagerly watched. Not just for the outcome but for the implications for the looming federal election.

That’s according to Dr Andy Marks, a political scientist from Western Sydney University, who tells us on the podcast today that this state election outcome may give us some clues on how some global political themes are playing out here in Australia.

“It’s not just about state politics. Increasingly the Australian electoral cycles, federally and at the state level, are subject to changes in political dynamics internationally. We’re seeing the erosion of centrist politics around the world […] and that even affects humble New South Wales.”

He predicts a weakened Nationals Party will be facing a strong challenge from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and that One Nation’s Mark Latham is almost a sure bet to win a spot in the NSW upper house.

“I do think you’ll see a minority Coalition government returned but the really interesting play is what happens in the upper house. Currently, the Coalition have to deal with two to three independents or minor parties to get stuff over the line,” said Dr Marks.

“I think what we’ll see in the coming parliament is that that the ranks of cross-benchers will expand quite dramatically, up to seven to nine cross-benchers. So that makes negotiations pretty fraught.

“This is really going to be new territory,” he said. “We’ve got One Nation returning to the fold. Mark Latham, their number one ticket holder in the upper house, will get in. But potentially they’ll get two seats in the upper house. You’ll have an emboldened Shooters and Fishers Party.

“So you really have a really broad field and it’s going to mean negotiating the passage of bills will be pretty difficult.”

We also talked about:

• why East Hills (which takes in suburbs like Panania, Condell Park, the Bankstown aerodrome, Padstow, Revesby and others) is the most marginal seat in NSW

• how a plan to demolish and rebuild two stadiums turned into a political headache for NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian

• why Michael Daley, who took over from Luke Foley as NSW Labor leader late last year, is only now just making his mark

• how local issues in rural seats may end up deciding the fate of the state

• what it all means as we head into the May federal election.

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Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

ABC news report on 2GB interview

2GB interview clip.

Image:

Chris Pavlich/Dean Lewins(AAP)

– ref. Mark Latham in the upper house? A Coalition minority government? The NSW election is nearly upon us and it’s going to be a wild ride – http://theconversation.com/mark-latham-in-the-upper-house-a-coalition-minority-government-the-nsw-election-is-nearly-upon-us-and-its-going-to-be-a-wild-ride-113119

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, ARC DECRA Fellow, Australian National University

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

For a generation, politics has been wearying for those of good heart and outright damaging to those targeted in the culture wars unleashed in the 1990s. How this happened, and whether it will continue, are questions pressing hard upon us.

The traditional post-war political struggle pitted class and concerns about inequality, opportunity and redistribution against capital and concerns about profits, property rights and the shoring up of traditional social structures.

Over the past two decades, the moorings of this “left” versus “right” paradigm of political competition have morphed somewhat – in the latter case, drastically.

The “left”, traditionally organised around better pay and conditions for working people, has incorporated post-materialist political concerns around identity (most recently, for example, marriage equality rights) and the environment. The Australian Labor Party has continued to straddle the tensions to which this occasionally gives rise, first evident in the 1970s and increasingly significant in the new millennium. The proposed Adani coal mine provides the latest example of this.

The founding of the Australian Greens in 1992 was a structural expression of this development. The party provided a political home for progressives unwilling to practise a politics involving the trade-offs and compromises necessary to achieve government in its own right. The downside is that the Greens mostly acquire influence but not power.

These two main parties on the “left” mirror the existence of the two main parties – the Liberal Party and National Party – on the “right”. But, unlike the Liberals, who rely on the Nationals to form coalition governments, Labor generally returns enough members at elections to govern without needing another party’s support. The exceptions to this are the ACT and Tasmania, where proportional representation systems deliver more minor party MPs than elsewhere.

Read more: The Morrison government’s biggest economic problem? Climate change denial

Two decades of race-baiting politics

The “right” over the last two decades in Australia has imported the US Republican Party playbook. President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” exploited race in the late 1960s to realign white working-class Democratic Party supporters in the American south with the Republican Party.

In the mid-1990s, the Liberal prime minister, John Howard, followed suit. “Dogwhistling” on race recruited traditional white working-class Labor voters to the Liberal-and-National-Party-voting “Howard’s battlers” camp.

From 2001 Howard used the so-called “war on terror” to heighten racial tensions for political gain more explicitly. His government broke from previously bipartisan migration policies to harness migration to national security concerns well beyond what was necessary to actually address those concerns.

Tampa and the “children overboard” scandal were prominent examples. Recent manifestations include the whipping up of unfounded fears about ethnic gang violence in Melbourne and flagrant accusations about the likely consequences of the “Medevac” bill passed by parliament against the government’s will in February 2019.

Australian politics has been hostage for a generation to the divisive, racialised politics practised by Howard and his Liberal and National Party (LNP) successors, wedging Labor, which struggled to refocus the agenda beyond it.

Right’s strategy looks to be losing its sting

However, 2019 may well be the year this long cycle of race-baiting politics from the “right” in Australia exhausts itself. The Morrison government’s oversight of inhumane practises in offshore immigration detention centres, and the “no bid” tendering of responsibility for some of these to dubious corporate entities, are becoming perceived proxies for incompetent government.

Despite recent efforts to recharge it, the fear factor inculcated by the LNP around migration seems to have dissipated. Several moderate conservatives have been elected to the crossbench who in the pre-Howard era would have stood as Liberal candidates rather than as independents. They are living proof that even many on the “right” have little stomach for playing Nixon-style politics in Australia any more, even as it flourishes anew in the US through President Donald J. Trump.

This shift occurs in the context of the LNP recently being seen to be wrong-footed on several totemic policy issues: the environment, gender equity and gay rights. With saturation support from Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation media outlets and several commercial radio shock jocks, climate change denial, the trivialisation of gender equity issues and refusal of marriage equality for the LGBTQI community were consistent political winners for the LNP – until the moment they were not.

Along with the diminishing dividends of the LNP’s race-baiting for political gain, this hints at the renewal of Australian voters’ better instincts. The LNP tropes of the last two decades seem exhausted.

Are we at a turning point?

The successful plebiscite vote for marriage equality in 2017 may well have been a turning point. The revolt of female Liberal MPs over their treatment at the hands of male colleagues may be another.

Increasingly vocal dissidents within the wider LNP urging action on climate change is a further hopeful sign. Prime-age cabinet ministers like Kelly O’Dwyer, who lamented last year to Liberal colleagues that they were widely seen as “homophobic, anti-women climate deniers”, are voting with their feet and departing parliament at the next election.

Read more: A ‘woman problem’? No, the Liberals have a ‘man problem’, and they need to fix it

Together, this points to a possible sea change – a welcome one – in Australian politics after a long, acrid 20-plus years of disrespect, division and denial.

A Labor Party strengthened by rules reinforcing, rather than allowing the undermining of, the leader has arguably been central in this shift. Internecine warfare has been replaced by steady attention to policy issues rather than questions of leadership personnel.

Secure in his position, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten goes to the election confidently advancing some politically risky policies on negative gearing, dividend imputation and humane treatment of refugees. The quality of the Labor frontbench is as strong as at any time since the Hawke-Keating era.

The nascent appetite in the electorate for hope over hate, for forward momentum over susceptibility to artificially stoked fear, favours a change to government capable of decisive action on the big neglected issues, of which climate action is second to none.

The successful reframing of Australian politics from fear to hope is a mighty challenge, one undertaken against the massive dead weight of Australian media influence reinforcing our baser instincts over the past 20 years. It seems to be under way. One can only hope it succeeds.

– ref. After years of vicious culture wars, hope may yet triumph over hate in Australian politics – http://theconversation.com/after-years-of-vicious-culture-wars-hope-may-yet-triumph-over-hate-in-australian-politics-110887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Porch, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Earth Science, Deakin University

Forget the apes, we live on “The Planet of the Beetles”. Welcome.

With an estimated 387,000 formally described species, beetles (Coleoptera) are the most species-rich of the five mega-diverse groups of insects. The others are wasps, ants and bees (Hymenoptera), flies (Diptera), true bugs (Hemiptera), and butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera).

Read more: The battle against bugs: it’s time to end chemical warfare

Today’s publication of 103 new species of weevils from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is a timely reminder that, after several hundred years of research, we have not even described half of the insect diversity out there. Not even close. Especially in the tropics.

This seems particularly important in light of recent media attention on the global loss of insects (which may or not be an “insectageddon”, depending on how you look at the data).

Knowing what we have

Ideally, before we worry about what we are losing, it would be nice to know what we have.

Guesstimates of the number of beetle species on Earth suggest that only about one quarter of the species out there have been described.

Although most British species were described by the middle of the 19th century, in many parts of the world it is easy to find new species and will be for many decades, providing they hang on that long.

Read more: Curious Kids: If an insect is flying in a car while it is moving, does the insect have to move at the same speed?

And it’s probably best to set aside the notion of cracking a bottle of champagne with every new species discovery. As writer Simon Barnes says, referring — in Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom — to people who discover new species, “they’d be pissed all day”. If you work on weevils, you’d be comatose.

Welcome weevils

Alexander Riedel, a weevil specialist from Germany, and Indonesian museum curator Raden Pramesa Narakusumo are working on the Asia-Pacific weevil genus Trigonopterus.

These small weevils, mostly several millimetres long, are distributed from Samoa in the Pacific through northern Australia to Sumatra. Australian Trigonopterus (32 described species) are mainly restricted to subtropical and tropical rainforests of the east coast, north from around the Queensland/New South Wales border.

The authors’ latest paper describes 103 new species from Sulawesi (Celebes of old) including several they named after Asterix, Obelix and Idefix – principal characters in the French comic series The Adventures of Asterix.

Asterix and Obelix don’t like the Romans much.

Species names are always lower-case and the genus always begins with a capital: for example “Trigonopterus asterix Riedel”, named after Asterix. Italics are used to show that we are talking about a genus and/or species name. The author or authors primarily responsible for describing the species are traditionally appended to the end of the name.

A small greenish forest-dwelling species is named after Yoda of Star Wars fame, and several others after well-known biologists including Charles Darwin, James Watson and Francis Crick (the latter two identified the structure of DNA).

103 new weevil species from Sulawesi: can you pick the differences between them all? Alexander Riedel

Naming is fun but hard

Naming species in novel ways is more common that you might think. Just this week one of 14 new northern Australian dung beetle species was named Lepanus sauroni Gunter & Weir, after, you guessed it, Sauron of Lord of the Rings fame. Part of the beetle’s abdomen resembles the Eye of Sauron.

Most of the new Trigonopterus (and Lepanus) species are named after the locality where they were discovered, their collector, or distinctive characters they might have.

Read more: Why so many Australian species are yet to be named

You might imagine coming up with 103 new names would be relatively easy, but it’s not that simple. There were already 341 Trigonopterus described (mostly by Riedel and colleagues), and the new names have to be different. The names for new species of this genus described in the future, and there are hundreds more, will have to be different again.

Living in Melbourne, as I do, there are plenty of undescribed invertebrate species including, of course, weevils. If you know what you are doing, many of these are abundant and easy to find. Some may represent charismatic, colourful, fascinating or old evolutionary lineages. Many of these species are known and are preserved in national or international collections awaiting description, but plenty of others are unseen and uncollected.

Who cares? And why?

A widespread lack of enthusiasm for invertebrates translates to a broader lack of knowledge and engagement, and the inevitable “who cares anyway?”.

In Wonderful Life, author Stephen Jay Gould writes:

Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

Describing species, and revealing what is where, fundamentally underlies major fields of biology like ecology, evolution and biogeography, contributing to a deeper understanding of the complexity of life on Earth.

If we’re to prevent the loss of major parts of our biodiversity to extinction, a deeper understanding of the planet’s numerically dominant invertebrate life is critical. Fortunately, there are those like the authors of these papers who follow their passion, and back it up with a lot of highly skilled work.

– ref. Welcome Asterix, Obelix and Yoda! Finding fun in the serious matter of discovering insects – http://theconversation.com/welcome-asterix-obelix-and-yoda-finding-fun-in-the-serious-matter-of-discovering-insects-113036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arian Wallach, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney

As a woman working in the environmental sciences, it was always obvious to me that most of my colleagues are men. This tended to focus my attention on surviving in a field in which I automatically contribute to diversity just by being there.

Recently though I stopped to consider what I could do to support diversity. For the first time, I thought seriously about how my own choices were influencing gender balance.

Read more: Gender inequalities in science won’t self-correct: it’s time for action

I decided to take a critical look at the gender representation within my own academic portfolio, paying particular attention to projects I led. These are the ones where I had substantial agency in selecting who would be invited to join a research project.

I then asked a simple question: how many women have I invited to work with me? The answer is: not many.

My CV has a gender bias

My gender-biased CV is, frankly, embarrassing. I can count on a single hand the number of women I have invited to collaborate with me on publications and grants.

Of my peer-reviewed publications in which I was lead author, 96% of my co-authors are men. On publications in which I was co-author, 77% are men.

The first woman I invited to co-author a publication was in 2015, four years after completing my PhD, and eight years after publishing my first manuscript. Since then, I have published with only two other women.

All of the co-investigators on my research grants are men. Yup, I actually haven’t shared a single research dollar with a female colleague.

Read more: Why I joined #500queerscientists

How could this have happened?

The answer, I believe, lies with awareness and concern for others. It simply did not occur to me that I could or should play an active role in shaping my professional community.

My discipline (environment) is clearly male-biased, as is my research field (ecology of large carnivores). A quick search on Google Scholar for the keywords of my research area brings up publications almost exclusively written by men. So it’s no surprise that my immediate community of collaborators are men. To create a more diverse community, I would need to actively reach out.

Gendered network of top co-authors, with women in pink and men in blue. Starting with myself at the centre, and my top-10 co-authors in the first layer; followed by their top ten co-authors; and ending with their single top author in the outer layer. Total population: 24♀ (21%) and 89♂ (79%) (1st layer – 0♀:10♂; 2nd layer – 17♀:52♂; 3rd layer – 6♀:27♂). Data from Research Gate (February 2019). Arian Wallach, Author provided

Making a personal commitment to diversity

Success in science is about more than the individual. Science is a highly collaborative field. Academic careers are made, not only by the projects we lead, but also by the projects we are invited to collaborate on.

In this way, the work of science lends itself to a feminist ethic which appropriately highlights the importance of community and relationships.

I believe in institutional targets and quotas. I also believe in individual commitments.

I am committed to increasing the diversity of my personal academic community. To do this, I have begun the slow journey of bringing more academic women into my community. I am pleased the gender balance in my peer-reviewed publications is starting to show signs of change.

Commitment to increasing gender equity in my peer-reviewed publications is starting to show signs of improvement. Proportion of women co-authors (excluding me) in publications I have led and co-coauthored, and manuscripts expected to be published in the near future. Arian Wallach, Author provided

Of course, there are other important forms of inclusion and diversity to be mindful of, including race, ethnicity, nationality, identity, and religion.

Inviting women, and other underrepresented peoples, to participate in research projects and scholarly activities is something all academics can do, whether as PhD students or professors. As another way to improve diversity, academics based in rich countries can reach out to academics from countries that have less access to research funds, or forge new international relationships.

Read more: Friday essay: what do we want to be when we grow up?

Even in less collaborative fields and projects, we can pay attention to who we are citing in scholarly publications. This is important because citation counts are an important measure of academic success.

Incorporating marginalised peoples in our professional communities may feel risky, particularly for early career researchers. After all, it is often necessary to work with well-established academics to develop, and at this point in time most in this category are men.

In order to enhance diversity in our professional communities we need not exclude existing colleagues and experts, we need only start to actively expand our network to be more inclusive.

A richer scholarly life

The benefits for institutions and for science in having diverse views, experiences, cultures, and backgrounds is well known. It is similarly valuable for individual creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. Teams with more women are collectively smarter.

I cannot say whether my CV is uniquely lacking in diversity. Some areas of science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) are more male-biased than others. But I suspect I am not unusual.

There is a long way to go before science becomes a project that truly belongs to all of humanity. But it seems to me that if we all pay more attention to how we form our professional communities, in a way that is attentive to structural inequities, we can change things a lot more quickly.

– ref. My CV is gender biased. Here’s what I plan to do about it – http://theconversation.com/my-cv-is-gender-biased-heres-what-i-plan-to-do-about-it-112871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Harvey-Smith, Professor and Australian Government’s Women in STEM Ambassador, UNSW

In Australia, only 16% of STEM graduates (Higher Education and VET) are women, and 27% of the total STEM workforce is female.

So how can Australians support women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM)? Nominating and supporting them in applications for high profile opportunities, prizes and awards is a great place to start.

Read more: ‘Walking into a headwind’ – what it feels like for women building science careers

The economic imperative for greater female participation in STEM is overwhelming. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, upskilling just 1% of the Australian workforce into STEM roles would add $57 billion to Australia’s gross domestic product over 20 years.

But increasing gender equity in STEM matters beyond just economics. As a society we have a moral duty to make sure that women can participate equally in the high‑growth areas of technologically-skilled jobs. We should not put up with a situation where half the population is ill‑equipped to take part in vast areas of employment as technology rapidly evolves.

In December 2018, I was appointed as the Australian Government’s Women in STEM Ambassador. My role is to advocate for gender equity in STEM, increase awareness of opportunities for women in STEM, build the visibility of women working in these fields and drive cultural and social change.

Self-belief is vital

Relatively low representation of women in STEM careers has many well documented causes.

One reason that makes its presence felt at an early age is lower self-efficacy (the belief in your ability to succeed) experienced by young women, compared to young men in mathematics and the physical sciences.

Read more: Study of 1.6 million grades shows little gender difference in maths and science at school

Publicly recognising female excellence and leadership in STEM can go some way towards addressing this issue.

Representation in public life can also provide a strong set of role models to young women and shine a light on career paths that may not feel achievable. Promotion of role models also helps retain women in STEM careers by defying gender stereotypes and reinforcing that successful STEM careers are possible.

Increasing visibility

What is being done to improve the visibility of female STEM role models? There are many exciting projects currently underway that provide a platform for women in STEM professions.

One is the ABC’s recent push to sign up more female subject-matter experts, given that only 26% of media mentions in relation to STEM stories in Australia are female..

The Australian Academy of Science’s upcoming STEM women database will offer a similar service, by collating information on verified female experts who can be contacted for academic, consulting or media projects.

Science and Technology Australia’s Superstars of STEM program is providing training and opportunities for 60 female STEM practitioners in the latest round of their program. This will hopefully propel many of them into the public eye, improving gender balance in the STEM media for future generations.

Read more: The hunt for the Superstars of STEM to engage more women in science

And the winner is…

Public awards and honours are another excellent avenue for celebrating female STEM talent. The most well-supported national awards provide media coverage, prize money and an increased platform for recipients to pursue projects for social benefit related to their area of expertise.

My 2016 award of the Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Australian Science Research led to several exciting and unexpected career opportunities for me, including media and public speaking engagements that raised the profile of my science.

The Tall Poppy Awards also engage the public in celebrating scientific excellence and recognise its importance in forming public policy.

Arguably the highest-profile accolade is the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science. With a total award fund of $750,000 given to outstanding scientists, innovators and science teachers, they have the biggest budget in the business. Winning a PM’s Prize is often life-changing, leading to new opportunities and greater impact for the recipient’s work.

Prize winner Sarah Chapman pictured with Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013. Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science

For example, Sarah Chapman won the 2013 PM’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools. Subsequently selected as a Queensland Government Science Champion, her innovative teaching strategies were featured on ABC’s Lateline.

In 2016, Chapman was awarded a Barbara Cail STEM Fellowship and travelled overseas to gather evidence of international best practice in STEM education. With fellow recipient Dr. Rebecca Vivian she released a report: Engaging the Future of STEM: A study of international best practice for promoting the participation of young people, particularly girls, in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), which has contributed to the formulation of national STEM engagement policy.

In 2017, Jenny Graves was the first solo female recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.

Read more: X, Y and the genetics of sex: Professor Jenny Graves awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science 2017

Nominate a woman

Awards are effective methods of recognition since they acknowledge and reward excellence in research, teaching and innovation and share the contemporary stories of STEM excellence with the public. By publicly recognising women’s achievements in science we reflect the collaborative and diverse nature of the field today and boost the careers of their winners.

Women are less likely to be nominated for awards and when they do win, they are likely to receive less prestigious awards with lower prize money.

Read more: Minding the gender gap in science prizes

This International Women’s Day, you can make a difference by nominating a deserving scientist, innovator or science teacher for recognition.

There are only four days left to nominate for the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science: they close on 12 March 2019. The Tall Poppy Science Awards close on 10 April 2019, and the Eureka Prizes close 3 May 2019.

– ref. Women in STEM need your support – and Australia needs women in STEM – http://theconversation.com/women-in-stem-need-your-support-and-australia-needs-women-in-stem-113054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bianca Fileborn, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Melbourne

Emerging in October 2017 in response to allegations of sexual assault perpetrated by Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo highlighted the potential for traditional and social media to work together to generate global interest in gender-based violence. Within 24 hours, survivors around the world had used the hashtag 12 million times.

Eighteen months later, #MeToo is showing few signs of slowing down. Stories continue to appear in world media about sexual harassment and assault. The accused are predominantly powerful men in the entertainment industry, with musician Ryan Adams providing a recent example.

Read more: What the Harvey Weinstein case tells us about sexual assault disclosure

More recently, we have seen the corporate world tapping into the potential of #MeToo to ask how men can do better to call out sexist attitudes and behaviours that condone violence against women. The one that caused the most debate was Gillette’s advertisement questioning whether this is the “best a man can be?”

The #MeToo movement has undoubtedly reverberated through our cultural and political landscape. It is hard to deny its impact.

What is less clear is whether it is changing how we discuss gender-based violence and gender equality, and whose experiences are able to be shared. This is especially so given the well-documented issues with media reporting on gender-based violence.

Mainstream media reporting on sexual violence

While sexual violence has received increased media attention in the wake of #MeToo, it is also important to interrogate how it is being talked about. Arguably, much of the #MeToo reporting reproduces problematic stereotypes and reinforces sexual violence as monstrous and removed from everyday life.

One analysis of journalists’ reporting on Harvey Weinstein in our forthcoming book on the #MeToo movement found that the media continued to reproduce stereotypes and problematic tropes of victim-blaming. They routinely ignore relevant reporting guidelines.

Media reporting on the divisive Aziz Ansari case has produced both problematic and heartening results.

Read more: Yes means yes: moving to a different model of consent for sexual interactions

Taking a look at Australian reporting on this case, it was clear some articles excuse pressure and coercion as simply “the reality of sex” for women. One article even stated that “relenting can often mean consenting”. This reproduces problematic understandings of sex and gender relations, in which men are naturally aggressive initiators of sex, and women the passive gatekeepers of sexual activity.

However, some articles provided more nuanced reporting that recognised “relenting is not consent” and that:

more commonplace circumstances of coercion … account for a decent proportion of people’s traumatic sexual experiences.

This kind of reporting helps to unpack the complexities of sexual violence. It highlights that there are also harms associated with more everyday “grey area” behaviours.

As journalist Jane Gilmore’s “Fixed It” series that rewrites media headlines demonstrates, there is still a serious issue with the language the media use to talk about sexual violence. However, some #MeToo reporting shows a promising start in shifting discourse around sexual violence, opening up space for nuance and diversity in survivors’ experiences.

Social media and survivors speaking out

The #MeToo movement has also been significant online, with millions of survivors sharing their experiences on social media. Indeed, simply writing “me too” has become a shortcut for referencing an experience of sexual harassment or assault for survivors without having to say what actually happened.

This collective disclosure is a powerful act and should not be dismissed. Disclosing online can act as a kind of informal justice.

Online disclosure also allows survivors to seek support and act in solidarity with each other. It can help survivors to recognise their own experiences and realise they are not alone.

Mass disclosure through #MeToo also demonstrates the “magnitude of the problem” of sexual violence.

However, it is difficult to know what, if anything, has changed in the absence of any systematic analysis of #MeToo social media activity in Australia. Emerging international research suggests some survivors joined in #MeToo to draw attention to the political and structural nature of sexual violence and to challenge a perceived silence around this violence.

LGBTQ+ survivors in this study indicated they spoke out to ensure the experiences of these communities were included in #MeToo and to shift how we talk about sexual violence.

This suggests that involvement in #MeToo goes beyond simply sharing stories. Some survivors are able to articulate and draw attention to the underlying causes of sexual violence.

Yet it is equally true that social media continue to be a site of harm for women and gender-diverse people. It is implicated in the perpetration of sexual violence and misogyny as much as it is also a space for survivors to “speak out” about their experiences.

It is unclear whether or how this potential for backlash and online violence might shape how survivors talk about their experiences online. But it certainly influences whether they choose to disclose online.

Australia’s notoriously strict defamation laws have also limited how survivors can talk about their experiences. For example, it has been difficult for Australian survivors to “name and shame” their perpetrators as part of #MeToo.

We also need to be wary of making overly positive interpretations of survivors’ speaking out online. While it can be positive, it is not necessarily progressive.

For instance, survivor speech (and responses to that speech) circulating on social media that “goes viral” or gets picked up by mainstream media can sometimes reinforce stereotypes of what “real” sexual violence is. This was evident in some public responses to the Aziz Ansari case.

In speaking out, survivors may also call for punitive, criminal justice responses that reinforce other systems of oppression and power.

Speaking out about experiences has long been a staple part of anti-rape activism. But after nearly four decades of mobilisation on the issue, it seems survivors are continually having to speak out. And it is often similar voices that are heard: usually those of white, middle-class, heterosexual, and cisgender women.

The #MeToo movement has faced critique for replicating these gendered and racial divisions, suggesting that the movement is limited in its potential to create space for all survivors to be seen and heard. As such, the ways sexual violence is discussed on social media continue to represent only a limited range of experiences.

Moving forward from #MeToo

The progress and outcomes of social movements are almost always uneven. In the case of #MeToo, while this was indeed a watershed moment, there is still much to be done.

In particular, it is clear that while #MeToo has generated some change in what types of sexual violence are being discussed in social and mainstream media, and how, these shifts have been patchy at best.

Better training for journalists and editors reporting on sexual violence is one avenue to pursue. Social media platforms must also take more responsibility for moderating online misogyny (and other forms of hate speech) that perpetuates myths and problematic attitudes about sexual violence.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Anne Summers on #MeToo and women in politics

The #MeToo movement demonstrated how widespread sexual violence is in our communities. This shocked and outraged many people. But the work of effectively responding to and addressing the causes of these experiences remains – and is the most challenging piece of this project.

The National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

– ref. #MeToo has changed the media landscape, but in Australia there is still much to be done – http://theconversation.com/metoo-has-changed-the-media-landscape-but-in-australia-there-is-still-much-to-be-done-111612

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

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

China policy will not be a vote-shifting issue in the 2019 federal election. As usual, the economy and tax in particular will dominate this election.

But from a foreign policy standpoint there is no more important issue than achieving a reasonable balance between the United States, Australia’s security guardian, and China, its linchpin economic partner.

Getting the balance right and thus avoid being wedged between its security and economic interests represents what is arguably the most significant foreign policy challenge in Australian diplomatic history since Federation in 1901.

Mostly a unity ticket – but with some key differences

In 1972, the Whitlam Labor government ditched an anomalous attachment to Taiwan as China’s legitimate representative. Since then, China policy has, for the most part, been bipartisan.

Read more: Australia and China push the ‘reset’ button on an important relationship

Little separates Labor and the Coalition in a relationship that increasingly has been driven by economic ties. But there are nuanced differences.

Senior Coalition and Labor spokespeople have recently delivered addresses in Singapore that provide a useful insight into their thinking.

In January this year, Defence Minister Christopher Pyne spoke at the Fullerton Forum convened by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. A year ago, Labor’s foreign policy spokesperson, Penny Wong, addressed the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Both Pyne and Wong cautioned against allowing tensions between the US and China to divert Australia from pursuing its own interests, even if those interests do not accord with those of its security guarantor. Pyne said:

Unquestionably, rivalry between the US and China will be a feature of our international outlook in the foreseeable future. However, it is critical that US-China relations do not come to be defined in wholly adversarial terms.

In Wong’s case, she says simply that it remains “in the interests of all South East Asian nations that the US remains strategically engaged in the region”.

Where the two sides differ by degree lies in Wong’s assessment of risks to a “rules-based” international order posed by competition between an established and rising power.

She is gloomier than Pyne about the international outlook. She told her Singapore audience:

Whether or not you agree with President Trump’s view that the international rules-based system is not working, there is no disputing the international rules-based order is under its greatest period of stress since the end of the second world war.

Pyne was more sanguine. He said:

Cold War commentary fails to see a fundamental but defining difference, namely the world’s economies are far more closely integrated and mutually dependent than they were when the West contested the Soviet bloc.

How would a Labor government change the relationship?

Where this is leading is that a Labor government would probably make a more conspicuous effort to bolster regional partnerships with the ASEAN bloc and India as a hedge against tensions between the US and China.

Labor might also seek to give itself more flexibility in positioning Australia between its strategic ally, the US, and its dominant economic partner, China. This fine-tuning would need to be carried out subtly to avoid upsetting cornerstone security arrangements that have served the country well.

Wong uses the phrase “constructive internationalism” – borrowed from Labor’s former foreign minister, Gareth Evans, who coined it a quarter century ago – to define Australia’s national interests.

In the Evans formula, the phrase describes a policy that is motivated by values in pursuit of interests. “If interests describe the reasons for action, values describe the motives for action,” Wong told her Singapore audience.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne meets Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing in November 2018. AAP/EPA/Thomas Peter

Where both sides of Australian politics converge is on the need to engage China, but not at the expense of disregarding Beijing’s flagrant attempts to assert its sovereignty in disputed waters of the South China Sea. Pyne put it like this:

There is no gain in stifling China’s growth and prosperity … We are not interested in containing China, but we are interested in engaging and encouraging China to exercise its power in ways that increase regional trust and confidence.

The building and militarisation of artificial features in the South China Sea, for instance, has not increased regional confidence in China’s strategic intentions.

This might be regarded as an understatement.

Labor’s position on China’s overreach in the South China Sea mirrors that of the Coalition. Wong said:

Should the Australian Labor Party form government, we will certainly be advocating resolution of territorial claims and the exploitation of fishing stocks and seabed resources through negotiations between claimants rather than through unilateral action such as the militarisation of artificial islands.

Read more: Australian-Chinese author’s detention raises important questions about China’s motivations

In his Fullerton lecture, Pyne raised the possibility of Australia joining “multilateral activities in the South China Sea to demonstrate they are international waters”.

In his reference to so-called FONOPs (freedom of navigating exercises), he stopped short of indicating whether Australia planned to join allies in sailing within 12 nautical miles of China’s militarised features in South China Sea waters. The Coalition has not ruled out this possibility.

What is unarguable is that, after a long period of US strategic dominance, Australia’s security environment is shifting dramatically. Neither major party can escape this reality.

Pyne made some telling points that reflect the extraordinary complexity and dimensions of a region in flux – one that fleetingly, we should remind ourselves, anticipated an American century.

That prospect disappeared in the blink of an eye as China’s spectacular economic rise, linked with an expansion of its military capabilities, shifted the regional power balance.

The challenges ahead

Pyne’s scorecard brings home the scope of the challenge facing the next government, Coalition or Labor, in getting middle-power settings right. Or, put another way, to avoid being crushed by bigger players.

The Indo-Pacific is home to eight of the ten most populous nations on earth. Half of the world’s population calls it home.

Twelve of the member states of the G20, including the three largest economies in the world, are Indo-Pacific nations. And nine of the world’s ten busiest seaports are in the Indo-Pacific, as are seven of the world’s ten largest standing armies.

In the latest Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute (SIPRI) survey of global military spending, Australia ranks 13th. This is ahead of Canada and behind Italy. Five Indo-Pacific nations spend more on defence – the US, China, India, Japan and South Korea.

China’s military expenditures are six times those of Australia’s defence allocation.

Where the Pyne and Wong speeches overlap is in their warnings of the risks of isolationism. This can be read as a rebuttal of Donald Trump’s “America First” policies. Pyne said:

We fall short of our economic potential when parties choose to withdraw behind walls and withdraw from mechanisms designed to make us stronger.

Australia envisages a region that is more closely integrated and where we all collectively reject isolationism. We must work together not apart.

Labor would endorse those sentiments. Wong makes it clear that, for the time being, she would regard the prospect of the US reverting to a more collaborative posture as remote.

No matter who forms the next government, Australian policymakers are dealing with an end of certainty in a region remaking itself. They will need to be flexible – and resourceful.

– ref. No matter who wins the next election, managing the China relationship will be tricky – and vital – http://theconversation.com/no-matter-who-wins-the-next-election-managing-the-china-relationship-will-be-tricky-and-vital-110792

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide

Glyphosate is back in the news again. The common weed killer, which has previously attracted controversy for its possible link to cancer, has been found in beer and wine.

Researchers in the US tested 15 different types of beer and five different types of wine, finding traces of the pesticide in 19 out of the 20 beverages.

So how much should we be worried? Hint: not at all. The amount detected was well below a level which could cause harm. And there are insufficient details in the methods section to feel confident about the results.

Read more: Stop worrying and trust the evidence: it’s very unlikely Roundup causes cancer

How was this study conducted?

One of the first things I do when evaluating a piece of research is to check the methods – so how the researchers went about collecting the data. What I found didn’t fill me with confidence.

The authors say they set up their experiment based on a technique called a mass spectroscopy method. This methodology has been used to measure the quantities of glyphosate in milk (but not alcoholic drinks). Mass spectroscopy is a very sensitive and specific method, and the authors quote the concentrations that can be reliably detected in milk with this approach.

But the method they actually used is called enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Importantly, you can’t use the concentrations that can be reliably detected with the mass spectroscopy to describe ELISA sensitivity. They’re not compatible.

Glyphosate is the pesticide which makes up many weed killers. From shutterstock.com

ELISA is sensitive, but typically not as sensitive as mass spectroscopy, which uses an entirely different physical method to measure glyphosate.

ELISA also has issues of cross contamination. Biological samples for glyphosate measurement, whether ELISA or mass spectroscopy, need careful sample preparation to avoid cross-reaction with any other materials in the sample such as the common amino acid glycine, which looks quite similar to glyphosate and is present in much higher quantities. But the authors didn’t give any detail about the sample preparation used.

These issues make it difficult to be confident in the results.

We’ve seen this before with claims of detection of glyphosate in breast milk, which could not be duplicated. So given the lack of detail around the methodologies used, we should be cautious about taking these figures at face value.

What did they find?

For the sake of argument, let’s accept the researchers’ values and take a look at what they mean.

The highest level of glyphosate they measured was 51.4 parts per billion in one wine (in most of the beverages they found much less). That’s equivalent to 0.0514 miligrams per litre (mg/L).

The authors cite California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard’s proposed “No Significant Risk Level” for glyphosate consumption of 0.02 mg/kg body weight/day. The limits are based on body weight, so a heavier person can be exposed to more than a person who weighs less, taking into account body volume and metabolism.

This is much lower than the EU Food Safety Authorities’ and Australia’s regulatory allowable daily intake of 0.3 mg/kg body weight/day.

But again, for argument’s sake, let’s use the Californian proposed limits and look at the wine in which the researchers measured the highest amount of glyphosate. With those limits, an average Australian male weighing 86kg would need to drink 33 litres of this wine every day to reach the risk threshold. A 60kg person would need to drink 23 litres of this wine each day.

Read more: Drink, drank, drunk: what happens when we drink alcohol in four short videos

If you’re drinking 33 litres of wine a day you have much, much bigger problems than glyphosate.

Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen. Those levels of alcohol consumption would give you a five times greater risk of head, neck and oesophageal cancer (and an increased risk of other cancers). The risk of glyphosate causing cancer is nowhere near these levels. The irony is palpable.

This isn’t even taking into account the likelihood of dying of alcohol poisoning by drinking at this level – which will get you well before any cancer.

And that’s using the highly conservative Californian limits. Using the internationally accepted limits, an average adult male would have to drink over 1,000 litres of wine a day to reach any level of risk.

So how should we interpret the results?

The report does not contain a balanced representation of the risks of glyphosate.

They cite the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s finding of glyphosate as class 2 (probably) carcinogenic (alcohol is class 1, a known carcinogen).

But they don’t mention the European Food Safety authority finding that glyphosate posed no risk of cancer, or the WHO Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues report showing no significant cancer risk to consumers under normal exposure.

They cite a paper on glyphosate supposedly increasing the rate of breast cancer cell growth, but not the papers that find no such thing.

They don’t cite the most important study of human exposure, the Agricultural Health Study which is the largest and longest study of the effect of glyphosate use. This study found no significant increase in cancer in highly exposed users.

Read more: Research Check: can even moderate drinking cause brain damage?

The “report” claiming that there is glyphosate in wine and beer provides inadequate information to judge the accuracy of the claimed detection, and does not put the findings in context of exposure and risk.

Even taking their reported levels at face value, the risk from alcohol consumption vastly outweighs any theoretical risk from glyphosate. Their discussion does not fairly consider the evidence and is weighted towards casting doubt over the safety of glyphosate.

So you may enjoy your beer and wine (in moderation), without fear of glyphosate.

Blind peer review

This is a fair and accurate assessment of the study and its findings. That said, it is prudent for the scientific community to remain attentive to changes within the food supply and issues of potential risk to public health. Considering the increasing use of glyphosate by the food industry, we need continued diligence in this area. – Ben Desbrow

Research Checks interrogate newly published studies and how they’re reported in the media. The analysis is undertaken by one or more academics not involved with the study, and reviewed by another, to make sure it’s accurate.

– ref. Research Check: do we need to worry about glyphosate in our beer and wine? – http://theconversation.com/research-check-do-we-need-to-worry-about-glyphosate-in-our-beer-and-wine-112771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Glasser, Honorary Associate Professor, Australian National University

We are entering a new era in the security of Australia, not because of terrorism, the rise of China, or even the cybersecurity threat, but because of climate change. If the world warms beyond 2℃, as seems increasingly likely, an era of disasters will be upon us, with profound implications for how we organise ourselves to protect Australian lives, property and economic interests, and our way of life.

The early warning of this era is arriving almost daily, in news reports from across the globe of record-breaking heatwaves, prolonged droughts, massive bushfires, torrential flooding, and record-setting storms.

In a new special report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, I argue that Australia is not facing up to the pace of these worsening threats. We need a national strategy to deal specifically with climate disaster preparedness.

Read more: Explainer: are natural disasters on the rise?

Even without climate change, the impact of these natural hazards is enormous. More than 500 Australians – roughly the same number who died in the Vietnam War – die each year from heat stress alone. The annual economic costs of natural disasters are projected to increase to A$39 billion by 2050. This is roughly equivalent to what the federal government spends each year on the Australian Defence Force.

Climate change will dramatically increase the frequency and severity of many of these hazards. The number of record hot days in Australia has doubled in the past 50 years, and heatwaves have become longer and hotter. Extreme fire weather days have increased in recent decades in many regions of Australia. Shorter and more intense rainstorms that trigger flash floods and urban flooding are also becoming more frequent, and sea level has been rising at an accelerated rate since 1993.

Australians are already exposed to a wide range of the hazards that climate change is amplifying. Almost 4 million of our people, and about 20% of our national economic output, are in areas with high or extreme risk of tropical cyclones. Meanwhile, 2.2 million people and 11% of economic activity are in places with high or extreme risk of bushfire.

Chronic crisis

As the frequency of extreme events increases, we are likely to see an increase in events happening at the same time in different parts of the country, or events following hard on the heels of previous ones. Communities may weather the first few setbacks but, in their weakened state, be ultimately overwhelmed.

Large parts of the country that are currently marginally viable for agriculture are increasingly likely to be in chronic crisis, from the compounding impacts of the steady rise of temperature, drought and bushfires.

The scale of those impacts will be unprecedented, and the patterns that the hazards take will change in ways that are difficult to predict. Australia’s fire season, for example, is already getting longer. Other research suggests that tropical cyclones are forming further from the Equator as the planet warms, putting new areas of eastern Australia in harm’s way.

This emerging era of disasters will increasingly stretch emergency services, undermine community resilience, and escalate economic costs and losses of life. Federal, state and local governments all need to start preparing now for the unprecedented scale of these emerging challenges.

Queensland as a case study

Queensland’s recent experience illustrates what could lie ahead for all of Australia. Late last year, a major drought severely affected the state. At that time, a senior manager involved in coordinating the state’s rebuilding efforts following Cyclone Debbie commented that his team was in the ironic situation of rebuilding from floods during a drought. The drought was making it difficult to find water to mix with gravel and to suppress the dust associated with rebuilding roads.

The drought intensified, contributing to an outbreak of more than 140 bushfires. This was followed and exacerbated by an extreme heatwave, with temperatures in the 40s that smashed records for the month of November. Bushfire conditions in parts of Queensland were classified as “catastrophic” for the first time since the rating scale was developed in 2009. More than a million hectares of bush and farmland were destroyed – the largest expanse of Queensland affected by fire since records began.

Just days later, Tropical Cyclone Owen approached the Queensland coast, threatening significant flooding and raising the risk of severe mudslides from the charred hillsides. Owen set an Australian record in dumping 681 millimetres of rain in just 24 hours – more than Melbourne usually receives in a year. It did not, however, diminish the drought gripping much of the state.

A few weeks later, record rains flooded more than 13.25 million hectares of Northern Queensland, killing hundreds of thousands of drought-stressed cattle. As two Queensland graziers wrote at the time: “Almost overnight we have transitioned from relative drought years to a flood disaster zone.”

From drought to deluge. AAP Image/Andrew Rankin

Time to prepare

We need to begin preparing now for this changing climate, by developing a national strategy that outlines exactly how we move on from business as usual and adopt a more responsible approach to climate disaster preparedness.

It makes no sense for the federal government to have two separate strategies (as it currently does) for disaster resilience and climate change adaptation. Given that 90% of major disasters worldwide are from climate-related hazards such as storms, droughts and floods, these two strategies should clearly be merged.

One of the prime objectives of the new strategy should be to scale up Australia’s efforts to prevent hazards from turning into disasters. Currently, the federal government spends 30 times more on rebuilding after disasters than it does on reducing the risks in the first place.

Read more: Properties under fire: why so many Australians are inadequately insured against disaster

Australia should be leading global calls for urgent climate action, not just because we’re so vulnerable to climate hazards, but also for traditional national security reasons. We are the wealthiest nation in a region full of less-developed countries that are hugely vulnerable to climate change. Shocks to their food security, economic interests and political stability will undermine our own national security.

No military alliance, deployment of troops or new weapon system will adequately protect Australia from this rapidly escalating threat. The only effective “forward defence” is to reduce greenhouse gases globally, including in Australia, as quickly as possible. Without far greater ambition on this front, the scale of the disasters that lie ahead will overwhelm even the most concerted efforts to strengthen the resilience of Australian communities.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on The Strategist.

– ref. Australia needs a national plan to face the growing threat of climate disasters – http://theconversation.com/australia-needs-a-national-plan-to-face-the-growing-threat-of-climate-disasters-113107

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Wallis, Lecturer and Research Fellow, University of Southern Queensland

What happens if you decide to jump in, Escape to the Country-style, and flee the city rat race?

Well, for a start, your identity begins to change in response to the new place around you. This change happens inside you, but is also reflected in the objects you surround and clothe yourself with.

Read more: How moving house changes you

My recent research looked at the stories of two women who moved from the city to the country and published books about their experiences. Hilary Burden moved from London to rural Tasmania and wrote about it in A Story of Seven Summers. Margaret Roach, author of And I Shall Have Some Peace There, moved from New York City to rural upstate New York. The two women tell the story of their moves, but at the same time, they narrate a journey of changing identity that is shared with others through the clothes they wear.

In memoirs such as these, the authors interpret the events they write about, but so does the reader, who brings their own understandings to their imagined experience. This allows readers to imagine a new way of living too, through the pages of the book. Through this, they might imagine their own SeaChange.

Clothes are part of our identity

When people get dressed each day, they let others know who they are, or who they think they are, in an identity-sharing performance. The clothes the authors discuss in the pages of their memoirs effectively map how their identity changed and how they shared this change with the people around them by wearing different styles of clothes from the ones they wore before. These items combine to produce a narrative that lets others understand those around them more clearly.

This Northern Territory family’s clothing is part of who they are. Dave Hunt/AAP

Most of the time people are not even aware that they are doing this. They just pick and choose the things they like from the vast array of options open to them.

Sometimes, however, it becomes clear that the clothes that once worked for a person just do not “fit” any more. This can happen in the process of life transformation, including moving from the city to the country the way these women did.

Roach had experienced a long and successful career at Martha Stewart Omnimedia. She knew how to dress for her professional role and had confidence in sharing her wealth and status through the expensive suits she bought. When she moved to the country, however, she could not dress in the same way. With her career behind her, she asked herself: “Who am I if I am not mroach@marthastewart dot com any longer?”

Unsure, and in pyjamas

This lack of clarity about her evolving identity is shown in the pyjamas she starts to wear during the day. Far from familiar terrain, and experiencing a state of flux and transition, Roach finds it simpler just to remain in her nightclothes and not have to figure out her new identity via the clothes she wears. Understanding this dilemma, Roach describes how her old way of living no longer fits her new self:

…like the wardrobe hanging in my closet, a vestige of a life left behind, it just doesn’t resemble me any longer.

She talks about how her clothes no longer fit, mentally or visually, with her new life in the country. With real insight, she writes:

The outside packaging … has to match what’s going on inside of me.

This understanding enables her to finally reconcile who she is to where she now lives. Once she negotiates this process, she is able to manage the transition of her clothing and visual identity to what works in her new country home.

Burden’s move across oceans starts a similar journey. She writes:

I knew I wanted to shed the stuff I associated with cities: suits … dressing up, being very important or busy or loud.

Country clothing is both more practical and an expression of identity. bernatets photo/Shutterstock

These had once enabled her to present and perform her class identity and status to others, but they no longer suited her work outside at a farmers’ market in rural Tasmania. Her clothes needed to fit the time and place she lived in, but she found they did not. These old clothes end up in garbage bags on a journey to the op shop, and Burden adapts to share her new identity through her clothes.

These memoirs offer a glimpse into lives and identities within the imaginative space they create, permitting identity to be shared through language and text. They show how moving to the country impacts identity, and how these people need to work through this process of change to adapt to their new life and feel comfortable in their new location.

Next time you contemplate moving to the country, just be sure to factor in the cost of a whole new wardrobe!

– ref. New home, new clothes: the old ones no longer fit once you move to the country – http://theconversation.com/new-home-new-clothes-the-old-ones-no-longer-fit-once-you-move-to-the-country-112137

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Cassells, Associate Professor, Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, Curtin University

The good news this International Women’s Day is that women are now moving through the ranks into management roles faster than men.

If things continue at this rate it will take just two more decades for women to hold the same number of full-time management positions as men.

For lower-level managers, it could happen even sooner, perhaps in just ten to eleven years.

But for the top spot of chief executive, we are unlikely to see women holding half the positions until 2100. That’s right: until the turn of the 22nd century, 80 years away.

Projected dates women should achieve parity with men

BCEC|WGEA Gender Equity Insights Series 2019: Breaking through the Glass Ceiling

The Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre has crunched five years of data collected by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and discovered that while the glass ceiling that has prevented women from holding high-level jobs is receding, the ceiling governing salaries remains pretty much in place.

At every management level, in every industry, the spread of salaries available to male managers is much wider and higher than the spread available to female mangers.

The top paid 10% of male mangers earn at least $600K in total salary, whereas the top paid 10% of female managers earn $436K, a difference of over $160K.

Which industry has the worst glass ceiling?

The real estate industry has the biggest difference, with the pay gap between the top male and female managers reaching nearly 36%. Access to commissions and bonuses is undoubtedly a key driver, as, when base salaries are compared the real estate industry has only the fifth widest gap, behind retailing, health care and social assistance, arts and recreation, and administrative and support services.

Retailing has the second widest gap when total remuneration is considered, with a difference of almost 35% between the top earning male and female managers. The next widest are in the finance and insurance industry, the health care and social assistance industry and arts and recreation.

So wide are the gaps that they themselves appear to be limiting the number of women in management.

Using statistical regression we estimate gender pay gaps within management combine to cut the proportion of women who are full-time managers by an average of 9.9 percentage points and the proportion of women who are part-time managers by 7.9 percentage points.

Managerial gender pay gaps by salary and industry, 2018

Managerial gender pay gaps by salary and industry, 2018. BCEC|WGEA Gender Equity Insights Series 2019: Breaking through the Glass Ceiling

What works best?

Further work using the Workplace Gender Equality Agency data gives the ability to uncover what works best in driving gender equity.

It’s clear leadership is key.

Having a female chief executive increases the proportion of managers who are female by an average of 8.6 percentage points.

Moving from all-male to gender-equal boards increases the proportion of full-time managers who are female by 7.3 percentage points and the proportion of part-time managers who are female by 13.7 percentage points.

Effects of company policies and characteristics on shares of female managers, 2018

BCEC|WGEA Gender Equity Insights Series 2019: Breaking through the Glass Ceiling

Policies that support women to combine work and family life are also critical to seeing women advance.

Combining them with accountability is important in making them work. We find flexible workplace policies are twice as effective at increasing the share of part-time managers if they are reinforced with reporting to the board.

Workplaces that offer employer-funded paid parental leave schemes covering 13 or more weeks halve the share of managers who resign during paid parental leave compared to those that offer access to only the Australian government scheme.

Workplaces that provide on-site childcare stem the loss of female managers during paid-parental leave by almost one fifth.

Read more: If we’re serious about supporting working families, here are three policies we need to enact now

The findings of our report, as with the findings of earlier reports in the series, show clearly that companies have at their disposal a range of specific actions they could take that would hasten the move toward gender equity in pay and progression. Leadership, female representation on boards and accountability are among them.

If companies want to attract and retain the best talent, they must start looking at the return they receive from their investments.

But some glass ceilings are proving harder to break than others, particularly when it comes to parity in pay and representation at the highest level.

Companies need to show a real commitment to change to make sure we don’t have to wait another 80 years before women are as likely to run companies as men.

– ref. Gender equity. The way things are going, we won’t reach true parity until the 22nd century – http://theconversation.com/gender-equity-the-way-things-are-going-we-wont-reach-true-parity-until-the-22nd-century-112685

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Boraman, Lecturer in Politics, Massey University

Strikes were supposedly something of the alleged “bad old days” of the 1970s. But during the first year of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Labour-led government, a strike revival ensued. At least 70,000 people, if not more, walked out last year. Strikers included nurses, teachers, bus drivers, port workers, fast-food workers, retail workers, steel workers and public servants.

While official figures for 2018 have not been published yet, this represents the highest number of people involved in strikes since the late 1980s, and possibly the most working days not worked due to stoppages since 1992. For many strikers, it represents the first time they have participated in walkouts.

An unexpected strike wave?

According to some, this strike wave was not supposed to happen. Trade unions were thought to be too weak to strike.

One employment relations textbook asserted in 2009 that “strike action is seen increasingly as an inefficient and outdated strategy”. The Public Service Association (PSA) secretary Erin Polaczuk recently argued that as unions today have become more feminised and mature, they have increasingly avoided “stupid oppositional behaviour”.

Nevertheless, women have led the strike wave. Women made up the majority of participants in most strikes, and female union delegates were often at the forefront of disputes. Indeed, stoppages have mostly occurred in majority female occupations such as teaching, nursing and government sector work in general.

Read more: How to tackle NZ’s teacher shortage and better reflect student diversity

It is as difficult to predict strike waves as it is to predict recessions. This is because both are the result of many complex causes, including the unpredictable nature of human agency. This wave is no exception.

Political causes

Political factors help to partly explain the stoppages, but cannot be blamed solely for causing the unrest. In their classic 1974 study, Strikes in France, Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly argued somewhat controversially that greater political opportunities produce strike waves. This view concurs with the opposition National Party’s attempt to pin blame for the strikes on the new Labour-led government because that government has raised expectations that wages will increase.

But when compared to another political factor, rising expectations and greater political opportunities seem to be a minor cause. That variable is how successive Labour and National-led governments since 1984 have been wedded to a neoliberal practice of tight government spending. Even if Labour has somewhat loosened the government purse strings recently, it still strongly adheres to “fiscal responsibility” through its budget responsibility rules.

The level of government spending is a significant factor in causing the strikes simply because the government employs most workers who have gone on strike. Long-term neoliberal austerity has caused public sector workers’ wages to fall well behind those of most others.

Read more: Partially right: rejecting neoliberalism shouldn’t mean giving up on social liberalism

Economic causes

Economic factors (or political-economic factors) other than neoliberal cutbacks are also crucial. Academic research generally regards economic variables as pivotal. Economist Ganesh Nana has suggested that neoliberalism has suppressed wages for the vast majority of workers for a long time, leading to a low-wage economy.

Studies have found neoliberal politics and economics have mostly enriched those at the top at the expense of the rest of the population. According to Council of Trade Unions economist Bill Rosenberg, labour’s share of national income has declined from a peak of 71% in 1981 to 61% in 2016. At the same time living costs have risen, particularly in recent years due to rising accommodation costs. Hence it seems this is a “catch-up” strike wave to reverse decades of stagnant or declining real wages.

This corresponds with theories that strikes happen in “long waves”, with strike peaks emerging after periods of subdued activity. Scholars like Beverly Silver argue that increased exploitation and commodification of labour (such as under neoliberalism) can lead to a delayed, pendulum-swing counter-response. This rejoinder reflects shifting patterns of workplace bargaining power and class composition (such as the rise of white-collar labour and the “knowledge economy”).

Subjective causes

Political and economic factors, long term or short term, cannot explain all. The subjective side of strikes is also important.

If we listen to strikers, they commonly claim they are being underpaid and overworked. Working in underfunded and understaffed occupations produces unrelenting and unhealthy high-pressure jobs. Being lumbered with more work for less or stagnant pay (in real terms) has caused much underlying dissatisfaction over the long term. This discontent has finally bubbled to the surface in the form of strikes.

Research suggests strike waves sometimes occur simply because people see others striking. Sociologist Michael Biggs argues that “optimism escalates with participation”, making the unthinkable achievable. In short, successful strikes breed more strikes.

Some fear that the strike wave of 2018, which looks set to continue into 2019 due to several recent junior doctors’ strikes, will mean a return to the strike-prone decades of the 1970s and 1980s. A major strike wave is probably unlikely given, among many other factors, the legal restrictions that outlaw most forms of strikes, including strikes outside bargaining periods between unions and employers, political strikes, solidarity strikes and wildcat strikes. Unions represented only 17% of the waged workforce in 2017 and are concentrated in predominantly white-collar public sector unions that lack traditions of striking.

Finally, most recent strikes have been short-lived and have generally not occurred in economically strategic or vital industries. The strike wave would probably have far greater economic and political impact, for better or worse, if it spread to those working in key economic sectors, such as in the tourism, dairy and meat-processing industries, and in logistics and the financial sector. Yet it seems at this stage workers in most of these sectors are unlikely to strike, despite indications of a similar underlying discontent with wages and conditions.

– ref. Overworked and underpaid: the revival of strikes in New Zealand – http://theconversation.com/overworked-and-underpaid-the-revival-of-strikes-in-new-zealand-111728

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Muecke, Chair professor, University of Adelaide

This piece is republished with permission from GriffithReview 63: Writing the Country (Text), ed Ashley Hay.

At the same time as a headline in The Guardian announced: “Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms”, we could also read that $3 billion had been left by healthcare tycoon Paul Ramsay to set up, under the direction of right-wing former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, a plan to install courses on “Western civilisation” in major Australian universities.

This contrast is confusing, but telling. Civilisation has nothing to do with science as such (DNA is indifferent to it), nor is it something a passing political initiative can uphold. But with a long view of Australian history, the concept of civilisation is caught precisely in this politically charged dichotomy: between an Indigenous civilisation and a recently arrived “Western” one.

It seems that the upholders of the latter would like the former to remain dubious and “ancient”, of little relevance to the future of the country. This essay is a personal reflection on the possibilities for a more reasonable hybrid definition of “civilisation” based on Australian soil.

What does the word mean? Well, it is city life, if you follow the etymology. From the Latin civis, we derive the group of words that includes “citizen” and “civil”. Outside of the walls of the city roamed the uncivilised, those speaking barbarian tongues. There is a prejudice about civilisation that is reinforced every time the Tigris and Euphrates are cited in accounts of world history as being the “cradle of civilisation”.

A young man jumps from the old Fallujah bridge into the Euphrates river in Iraq in 2011. There is a prejudice reinforced every time the Euphrates and Tigris are cited in accounts of world history as being the ‘cradle of civilisation’. Mohammed Jalil/EPA

Sometimes contesting “cradles” are noted in China, India or the Americas. But rarely mentioned are the oldest continually surviving “cultures”, those of Australia, because it is still hard, in the European tradition, to think of civilisation without cities. But perhaps the idea of building walls to keep others at bay is not such a civilised idea. Let’s consider what civilisation might mean in Australia today, starting with what The Guardian reported as the first civilisations of the country, since they stood the test of a very long period of time – without walls.

Valuing traditional law

I would like to define civilisation as planned, sustainable collective living. The usual definition of it as human society defined by “urban development, social stratification … and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment”, as given in Wikipedia, is crying out for revision because it ignores sustainability and relegates non-human life, “nature”, to a resource. Perhaps a new ecological perspective is what is needed as we endeavour to reset modernity, to reboot the idea of living in a civilised fashion within the limits of our earthbound existences.

Far from advocating that Australians today can learn from the wisdom of Indigenous traditions about living “in harmony with nature”, we shall have to rethink the very concept of a singular nature and be aware that it, too, was a colonial imposition on the hundreds of types of country that had in place highly managed, biodiverse ways of living.

So the first step in rebooting civilisation in Australia will be to start with the oldest heritage, in the very places where most Australians can’t see any heritage at all – places they call “remote” simply because they are a long way from cities. The distancing effect of calling them remote contributes to their fragility and degradation at the same time as it generates and invests all major values in the self-assurance of big city life.

But cities, too, are vulnerable, especially in the light of the environmental threats that demand we reset the parameters of civilised life. Tim Flannery, in his 2005 book The Weather Makers, speaks, as many do, about climate change as a threat to civilisation as we know it. He makes it clear he is talking about cities: “Very large cities lie at the heart of our global society, and our most valued institutions are found in them.”

It is a scale-based logic, because those cities under a 100,000 people are not likely to host a university and they need to be over a million to have an opera house. He speaks of the vulnerability to climate change of just this kind of civilisation, because infrastructure designed to deliver water or electricity to millions can be disrupted rapidly, while small towns are more likely to have manageable self-sufficiency.

What he doesn’t mention, as an Australian, are the civilisations that persisted here for many thousands of years. He could have thought of the way the word was used in that context by American anthropologist Lloyd Warner in his 1937 study of the Yolngu, A Black Civilisation. If the Yolngu have flourished for up to 50,000 years, while the kind of civilisation based on large cities could self-destruct after only a few hundred, perhaps it is time to recalibrate what we mean by civilisation.

Today, the Yolngu are among the more robust of Indigenous communities, with their celebrated artistic heritage, their annual Garma Festival, and their business and political skills. A Yolngu kid wanting higher education can head into university in Darwin or another major city, or decide to develop traditional knowledge further by sitting with Elders to eventually “graduate” as a law boss. Or both. Both are viable institutions, so let’s explore their differences for a moment, bearing in mind that one may be more vulnerable to climate change events.

A clan member of the Yolngu people prepares to perform the Bunggul traditional dance during the Garma Festival near Nhulunbuy, East Arnhem Land, last year. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Traditional law and culture is an institution, even if it is not housed in bricks and mortar, and doesn’t need a large annual budget. The Yolngu call it “wangarr”; it is “tjukurpa” in central Australia and “bugarrigarra” in the west Kimberley, where I have worked. People invest time and energy in it, organise each other in different roles and strive for collective outcomes that are highly valued. It includes the process of initiation through which people are literally “made”; in that sense you can’t be a “proper” Aboriginal person without going through the law.

But isn’t it hopelessly idealistic to give value to such traditional institutions, when clearly they can’t be configured in terms of economic progress? Today’s world is one in which everything can be given an economic value, and entities are defined by competition and inequality. Under this regime, traditional knowledge would have to be gathered up by a university or by native title law and turned into accountable knowledge of a more whitefella sort.

For the latter articulation, gaining native title gives communities (sorry, “bodies corporate”) the right to negotiate with mining companies and hence gain royalty or compensation income. That’s just the way things work, you might say. This is the real world, suck it up. And don’t even think about getting a real pay-to-learn university until your community has grown to 100,000.

A monocultural push

Such scaled economisation of the world – reducing everything to the same mechanisms for creating monetary value – is, unfortunately, a monocultural push that tends to destroy the plurality that is civilisation itself. How so? Well, civilisation, as it is defined by those who see it as a collective planning for better ways of living rather than as a dog fight, is one in which numerous religions can have adjacent temples, where scientific knowledge advances, where the law is impartial, the arts flourish and politicians prioritise our collective problems. For the sake of the argument, let’s call the opposite of this a primitive society. Primitives seek to dominate with their narrow agenda.

So if science sought, in the name of its own principles, to slap down the other institutions, debunk religion, dismiss the arts as merely subjective and so on, it would be primitive. People inhabiting a pluralist civilisation will assert the value of difference by saying things like, “Well, we do things this way, but we respect those other folk doing it their way.” You will notice that this is just the kind of wishy-washy relativist talk that the Ayn Rands of the world would denounce as weak liberalism.

For them, only competitive force gains real value; there are only winners and losers, patriots or enemies. Or that’s how they talk. If neoliberal ideology had succeeded in dominating the world, then public bars would be full of poker machines, corporations would be able to buy politicians, art schools would be shut down, the neutrality of the law would be impugned, churches would be profitable, scientific method questioned and Indigenous heritage sites declassified to clear the way for mining. Unthinkable! Thank goodness civilisation in Australia is more robust than that.

Our fragile civilisation

Australia has had some good moments. Once known as the lucky country, it profited from postwar agricultural and industrial development, which morphed into a mining boom until suddenly, very recently, it became stuck between two unsustainable delusions. The country doesn’t know where it came from or where it is going. It still falsely claims that its heritage is white (those more than 50,000-year-old civilisations count for nothing much except tourism revenue), and it is deluded into thinking that it can continue to profit from an ever-expanding global economy.

The Rio Tinto West Angelas iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of West Australia in 2014. Alan Porritt/AAP

Certainly, this situation has been developing for half a century, but it is the threat of environmental disasters that has suddenly introduced a weird reversal of time. We can’t rely on past form any more. Now it is an actually knowable climate-changed future that is crashing back onto the present with an argument that we must make sensible policy changes. It is this that has opened the fault lines of denial in what I want to call our “fragile civilisation”.

It is like we are stuck on an interminable intercontinental flight and the pilot announces that we will have to land, somewhere, and it is actually a nightmare. We can’t go back to pre-modern life before carbon-fuelled industrial acceleration, and the globe we thought could accommodate everyone’s economic growth is just not big enough to do that. We need to land somewhere else: on Earth perhaps, where we will be bound by Earth’s rules rather than fantasies of endless global expansion; or even escape to another planet.

Two great thinkers have informed me as I composed this essay. It was Bruno Latour, the French philosopher of science, who told me the allegory of the nightmare plane trip with nowhere to land, and who once greeted me when I arrived in Paris with a friendly, “Welcome to civilisation!” His irony was alluding, at the time, to Tony Abbott’s infamous “absolute crap” line on climate science in 2009. The other great influence on me was Paddy Roe, a Goolarabooloo Elder from the west Kimberley who died in 2001.

Roe was born well before World War I and had seen his hometown, Broome, go through the throes of colonisation. Feudal pastoralism and the murderous pearling industry were to give way to resource extraction, but in the middle quiet period of the 20th century, when assimilation policy was the norm, he woke up to the fact that his cherished “bugarrigarra” (law and culture) was dying out. Looking for boys to go through the law, he saw them instead dressed up nicely on their way to church and school, where they learned to look down on the ways of the old people.

Paddy Roe photographed in 1979. Photo: Dieter Kirchner

Paddy Roe mobilised some other law bosses and they did what they could to revive positive interest in their heritage. They did this under the name of Goolarabooloo, which is an ancient name for “west coast cultures”. It was never a tribal or language name, but was created long ago to unify a string of communities that follow the songline of the ceremony used every season to sing the boys into men. When the people gather to perform the ritual they draw down on the sacred authority of the “bugarrigarra”, while also drawing in the totemic plants and animals as participants. As custodians, they are conscious that their job is to bring the country to life.

Read more: The case for Gularabulu by Paddy Roe

This Goolarabooloo society is thus more expansive than small tribal or language groupings. One could call it a cultural confederacy, a bit like the European Union. That concept was invented, after seeing the horrors that paranoid nationalism produced, to consolidate peace after the great European wars.

Perhaps it was with the same motive of keeping the peace that the Goolarabooloo ancestors came up with this unifying structure that made people come together to vitalise the country they loved with the gift of new young life: boys who would gain important knowledge as they turned into men.

Without this expansive and inclusive philosophy, internecine warfare may have been more common. Life would indeed have been less civilised.

Indigenous foundations

As the oversize aircraft of late modernity circles, looking for a place to land, Indigenous Australian civilisations are still there in their places. They have always known the overriding importance of caring for their own territories. They are willing to negotiate once again, and this time the stakes are on a planetary scale. But more locally, how can we reconcile Australia’s Indigenous heritage – our civilisational foundation, as I have argued – with the economic story that has brought huge benefits, but is now hitting a wall?

If we reinstall confidence in our public institutions, granting them their own dignity and autonomous power and not making them compete quite so much, then we will have perpetuated the plurality of ways of being in the world that many see as the basis for civilised life. These institutions reform themselves as a matter of course. Today they need more urgent reform to be adequate for the future crises of the Anthropocene, and each can incorporate the knowledge of the first civilisations in very useful ways.

It is the essence of scientific knowledge to be testable and reliable over time, but there is more than one way of assuring this. Steve Salisbury, a palaeontologist from the University of Queensland, can produce a rebooted palaeontology that treats Indigenous people as colleagues and values mythological accounts of dinosaurs as knowledge that complements the discipline, not as mere belief. In the aesthetic field, we have already seen the revolution in painting that was the movement originating in Papunya.

People examine a painting in the exhibition, Papunya Painting: Out of the Australian Desert at the National Art Museum of China in 2010. Karen Fielding/National Museum of Australia

Art critic Robert Hughes called it the last great art movement of the 20th century, and it continues to inspire other art forms. It also created a valuable industry, spinning off into other economic benefits. Each major institution can thus be reset with the Indigenous foundations in place. Mabo was such a moment for Australian law.

Read more: Friday essay: how the Men’s Painting Room at Papunya transformed Australian art

In this way, the somewhat difficult concept of civilisation can be recuperated, not by rising to the defence of unlimited scientific and economic progress, nor by taking Enlightenment values as given, but by specifying how the institutions that negotiate such values can be reformed. I clearly don’t mean “reform” in the euphemistic sense used by conservatives bent on actually dismantling these institutions or selling them off. They are happy to see one set – economic institutions – as “naturally” dominating all the others.

One must be careful not to let the concept of “civilisation” be too easily returned to cultural or racial categories (as in “Islamic” or “Jewish” civilisation) that lead to Samuel Huntington-like clashes. Instead, the focus here is more usefully on the collective value of public institutions as defenders of civil behaviour and common resources, including the resources usually called “natural”.

Paddy Roe had a beautiful way of expressing the sovereignty of his Goolarabooloo country. He invited everyone in. He was delighted to teach people, show them places and sing the songs. He set up one of the first Indigenous heritage trails, the Lurujarri Trail, which his descendants have run for 30 years. It has invited hundreds of people to walk a songline along the beach north of Broome. As they walk they get a feeling for country (the local word for this is “liyan”) that may even be transformative for them, a bit like the curiously named “naturalisation” ceremonies that initiate the new citizens of a nation.

It is a curious name because the usual ceremony is simply about giving a person a new legal status. But I’d like to appropriate the term to drive home my conclusion. Naturalisation is not about getting closer to the nature of a country. No one is “close to nature”. No, not Indigenous people, even if wilderness advocates like to think so. We are all negotiating our way through the inevitable entanglements of nature and culture.

So to avoid the pitfalls of a notion of civilisation as forever transcending and dominating nature, with the pious hope of leaving barbarous instincts behind, we might have to take the ecological step of imagining future Australian citizens being “re-naturalised” in particular “countries”, a process in which the natural and the civilised are no longer in opposition. The controls of the modernist airliner have now been recalibrated. In order to land we shall have to be refitted, realistically, to the scale of what each territory is capable of sustaining.

With the Anthropocene, says Bruno Latour, we have made the “rather distressing discovery that humans have become a geological force”, one that is capable of destroying our planetary home. But he goes on to say it could become “an index of an entirely different composition: that of a possible civilisation”. This is a new kind of civilisation that he calls “earthbound”, meaning both tied to territory and heading towards it.

As Australia continues its work-in-progress that I have attempted to call our “hybrid civilisation”, we can weave into its composition the knowledge of country, and the love of country, that makes us all its privileged custodians.

– ref. Friday essay: rebooting the idea of ‘civilisation’ for Australian soil – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-rebooting-the-idea-of-civilisation-for-australian-soil-112682

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

Josh Frydenberg is highly ambitious – in the fashionable jargon, you’d call him a “forward-leaning” politician. But even he must be surprised, reviewing the past 12 months, at where he is, given where he was.

Mid last year he was working up the National Energy Guarantee for the Turnbull government. By August that had imploded, decapitating the then prime minister but catapulting Frydenberg into the treasurership.

Great job. Just an unfortunate time to have it. Rather a parallel with the situation of Chris Bowen, appointed treasurer in the ill-fated second Rudd government, and now Frydenberg’s opposite number.

As Scott Morrison is trying to persuade people that voting Labor will land them in a recession (he is careful with the wording but that’s his thrust) Frydenberg this week had to counter the economic pointy-heads seizing on the latest national accounts as showing a “per capita recession”.

To put this notion in simple terms, the low December quarter growth rate (0.2%) when looked at against population, meant that on a per person basis growth has now gone backwards for two quarters.

The technical definition of “recession” is two quarters of negative growth.

It should be stressed that Australia is NOT in a recession. But you see the political risk for the government of these musings. No wonder Morrison dismissed the “per capita recession” term as a “made up” statistic.

Read more: Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise

Leaving the “per capita” debate aside, with the government campaigning on its economic management, it is not good for it to have the latest numbers showing growth slowing to an annual rate of 2.3%, though Morrison tries to feed the economic challenges into his don’t-trust-Labor narrative.

The national accounts are the last big set of economic numbers before the April 2 budget. The Treasury boffins, under secretary Phil Gaetjens, are now putting them into the figuring as Morrison, Frydenberg and other members of cabinet’s expenditure review committee work on the policy measures in a budget that will be driven almost totally by the needs of the election to be held within weeks of its delivery.

Gaetjens and Frydenberg might reflect, incidentally, that this, the first budget for each of them as secretary and treasurer, is likely to be their last in these roles – if the opinion polls are right.

Labor has indicated it would probably sack Gaetjens (who was chief of staff to Morrison when he was treasurer). And a treasurer ousted in an election wouldn’t normally expect to get another bite at that job, though Bowen looks like he will be the exception.

The stakes could hardly be higher for Frydenberg’s maiden budget. It will needs a certain “wow” factor – a centrepiece, or *series of measures, to appeal to as many voters as it can reach. It has to avoid landmines (sometimes even small things can blow up) and dubious numbers; either could give the opposition grist for the scrutiny that will follow.

The political climate in the run up to the budget will be influenced by another election – on March 23 in NSW.

With the two sides in that state close in the opinion polling, uncertainly about what’s happening in the regions and an optional preferential voting system, there is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen there.

In a legislative assembly of 93, 47 is the number for a majority. If the Coalition loses six seats it will be forced into minority government. At present the Berejiklian government has 52 seats, Labor 34, Greens 3, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers 1, and there are 3 Independents.

If there is a big swing in NSW, it will further rattle the federal Coalition before the budget. The only upside would be the Morrison government might hope NSW voters had got rid of some of their general angst in the first of the two visits they are making to the polls this year.

On the other hand, if the Berejiklian government did better than anticipated, that would give a morale boost to the Feds (whether justified or not).

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Ian McAllister on voters and issues in the coming election

Once budget week (which will include Bill Shorten’s reply on the Thursday night) is finished, the question will be whether Morrison announces the election immediately for May 11, or opts for a May 18 poll.

(There has been speculation he could go even later, to the extreme inconvenience of the Australian Electoral Commission, but that would seem pointless.)

As things stand, it is hard to see what the government would gain by delaying until May 18. With campaigning already in full swing, voters will be totally sick of it by budget time and surely will want the election over as soon as possible after that.

If the government did not call the election immediately budget week was finished, this would allow more Senate estimates hearings. That week contains two days of hearings; without a poll announcement, they would continue another week.

These interrogations of ministers and officials work to the advantage of an opposition. Remember how in 2016, Labor extracted the decade-long cost of the proposed company tax cuts (nearly $50 billion) which it used to effect in its campaign?

Whether the election is May 11 or 18, the campaign will be much about the budget, putting maximum pressure on Frydenberg, only months into the treasury job. Not least, colleagues will be able to look at his performance through the lens of his potential suitability for the job of opposition leader.

Read more: Event: your Q&A with Michelle Grattan in Melbourne

The week brought some extra pressure on the Treasurer, this time on the home front, with high-profile barrister and refugee advocate Julian Burnside declaring he will run for the Greens in Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong. Burnside will be campaigning hard on climate change. A former member of the Liberal party, Oliver Yates, was already in the Kooyong field, with messages on climate and Liberal divisions.

In 2016, Frydenberg had about 58% of the primary vote with Labor and the Greens nearly equal (almost 20% and nearly 19% respectively).

Frydenberg’s primary vote would have to take a huge hit for him to be at any risk (and his record on the NEG has him on the right side of the climate debate). But the presence of Burnside will mean the Treasurer will have to put extra effort into his electorate just when he’ll be stretched to the maximum in the national campaign.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Josh Frydenberg has a great job at the worst time – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-josh-frydenberg-has-a-great-job-at-the-worst-time-113129

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mazlan Maskor, PhD and Master of Organisational Psychology Candidate | Leadership Science, The University of Queensland

If you see a group of people and hear them chanting, “Ole’s at the wheel! Tell me how good does it feel!” you have found yourself among Manchester United supporters.

Manchester United (known as Man U, or just United) is one of the world’s best-known and most successful football clubs, a dominant force in English and European football for decades.

But two months ago it was looking like a tumbling, lethargic, vulnerable giant – in sixth position in the English Premier League, way behind arch-rivals Liverpool (in first place) and Chelsea (fourth).

Since then it has climbed to fourth in the Premier League and advanced to the quarter finals of both the FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League.

The major change: the sacking of team manager Jose Mourinho and his replacement with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Manchester’s Diogo Dalot, left, and Scott McTominay, right, celebrate after defeating Paris Saint-Germain on March 6 in the UEFA Champions League. Ian Langsdon/EPA

United’s turnaround has been dubbed “The Solskjaer Effect”. It defies conventional wisdom about leadership.

Mourinho, a professional coach and manager since 2000, was considered one of the best in the business. Appointed to manage United in 2016, he was expected to deliver football glory. But his tenure was mired by controversy, conflict and poor performance.

Solskjaer’s appointment as caretaker manager came as a surprise. He has had a long association with United as a player, but was unproven as a manager of a big club.

What is it about Solskjaer that has brought United’s resurgence? It’s a story of successful “identity leadership”, rallying a disengaged group of underperforming players into a cohesive and effective unit.

Our glory is more important than my glory

An effective leader advances the group’s goals over personal goals.

Solskjaer has shown he understands what he needs to do for United to win games and trophies. As the Norwegian explained in one press conference, his job “is to help the players and make them grasp the opportunity now because they all want to be part of Man United”.

Jose Mourinho, a controversial figure at Manchester United. cristiano barni/ Shutterstock.com

“I’m going to be here to help them,” he said, “to help the team.”

The team’s impressive victories have seen him already surpass several records by going undefeated in his first 11 games in charge.

He has humbly played down these achievements. When pronounced the English Premier League’s manager of the month in January, he was quick to attribute the award to the contribution of his coaching staff and players.

This is a stark contrast from his predecessor. Mourinho was often divisive and adversarial. Among Mourinho’s less endearing moments was when he reportedly stormed out of a press conference in August 2018 demanding more respect for his individual success as a coach.

Read more: Is there a way back for José Mourinho? As a sport psychologist, I see a hard road ahead

True leaders always look to deflect the attention on them as individuals. They emphasise that they represent the group. They declare their commitment to serving, as Solskjaer has done, regardless of whether he gets hired permanently.

We are stronger together

An effective leader brings people together.

Solskjaer joined United at a time of turmoil and chaos. With positivity and exuberance, he has united the team with a collective cause. “I love working with good players,” he has said. “They are good people, the players. They want to learn. They want to improve.”

After the team’s first loss under his leadership, he called it a learning experience and avoided the blame game.

Manchester United players celebrating their 2-0 win against Chelsea in the FA Cup on February 18, 2019. Silvi Photo/Shutterstock.com

By showing confidence in his players, he has empowered them to perform.

This again has been a contrast to Mourinho, who alienated players by chastising them in public.

A true leader treats every person in their team as valuable, no matter what the person’s role. Solskjaer’s collaborative approach acknowledges that everyone contributes to the success of the group.

Which is to say, the group is greater than the sum of its parts.

Group values

An effective leader respects the identity of the group.

Solskjaer played for United for almost a decade, and was integral to the club’s golden era. He then spent a few years on the coaching staff. He knows what Manchester, the city, the club and the team, are about.

The way United is supposed to play, he says, is “exciting football” – using fast-paced and attacking tactics.

Mourinho, on the other hand, attempted to stamp his own brand of defensive football on the squad – a style of play described as stodgy and unstructured. In doing so, he disregarded the club’s identity and stymied the players’ natural strengths.

Overall, Solskjaer’s behaviour demonstrates the principles of identity leadership, a model of effective leadership supported by psychological science research.

Read more: Leaders only inspire when we feel part of their group

To be a great leader you don’t have to be most successful, intelligent, or even most competent person in the room. It is about how hard you work at managing a collective sense of “we” among the people in a group and respecting the values of this group.

Full disclosure: the author is a proud Manchester United supporter.

– ref. It’s not about him: leading lessons from Manchester United’s caretaker manager – http://theconversation.com/its-not-about-him-leading-lessons-from-manchester-uniteds-caretaker-manager-112281

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Milford, Professor, Queensland University of Technology

Captain Marvel flies into movie theatres from today, and apart from introducing a great new hero who combines the righteousness of Captain America and the humour of Thor: Ragnarok, it’s also a cultural reference bonanza for anyone who grew up as a child of the 1990s.

There are the obligatory references to the now-declining Blockbuster video store, a fantastic music soundtrack (Nirvana, Hole, TLC to name a few), and tech jokes galore.

Read more: Fingerprint and face scanners aren’t as secure as we think they are

We see the origin story of her character Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, meet the Shield agents in the early days, and get set up with an interstellar conflict with some satisfying subversion of your typical expectations.

Blockbuster takes a beating, and perhaps a premonition of its future prospects. Marvel Studios.

So let’s go back to the ‘90s (like the movie’s website does) to some long-forgotten tech as well as some that has aged surprisingly well, and see how it all checks out, both scientifically and historically.

Don’t mess with this pilot.

Projecting holograms through a landline phone

Upon landing on Earth, Danvers raids a Radioshack shop and with a few deft modifications manages to set up a hologram communicator from a conventional wired phone.

The projection side of this feat would take some pretty impressive tweaking of 1990s technology (she appears to set everything up in a few minutes), but the bandwidth side of things can be analysed – that’s the amount of data needed for a hologram communication.

The bandwidth required for holograms varies widely, but figures of about 10Gbps are mentioned in the literature. There are also proposals to use 5G’s up to 10Gbps bandwidth to do holographic projections.

So if Danvers’ modifications have upped the bandwidth to modern day 5G standards, it’s feasible she could receive sufficient data to get a hologram up and running.

Verdict: A plausible projection.

Digital reading speed

There are lots of nostalgic tech moments in the movie – an internet connection dropping out, and the whole crew waiting around for a computer to read data from a CD.

Although done for humorous reasons, this depiction is entirely accurate, as anyone who lived through the 1990s can attest.

CD read speeds varied from hundreds of kilobytes (kB) per second to 6 megabytes (MB) per second. Even with the fastest disc drives of the time, it could take many seconds to read even a moderate-sized file, and minutes to read an entire CD’s worth of data (about 700MB).

Compare that to today – we have USB drives with capacities up to 1 terabyte, and read speeds of more than 400 megabytes per second.

Verdict: Painfully on point.

Fighters – not much has changed

In one of the secret hanger bases in the movie we get a shot of what looks remarkably like a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft.

We get a sneak peak at an F-22 Raptor. Marvel Studios.

With the movie set in 1995, it’s somewhat plausible there could be a prototype F-22 at a secret base – the plane flew for the first time in 1997. Danvers is meanwhile seen to be flying F-16s at a normal aircraft base.

What’s also interesting is while on-board electronics and related technology have changed significantly, the core airframe tech has not advanced much over the past nearly quarter of a century – the F-22 is still considered to be one of the best aircraft around today.

Verdict: Fighter is fair.

Lifting fingerprints off sticky tape

To escape a fingerprint-tagged room, Nick Fury grabs a piece of plastic tape and runs it over where a staff member grabbed his ID card. He uses the fingerprint on the tape on the reader to unlock the door.

Lifting fingerprints. microgen/123rf.com

Grabbing fingerprints off a surface with tape can be done if the surface is prepared through a process called dusting. Dusting uses a fine powder to stick to the oily residue left by a fingerprint, which is then transferred to a piece of tape.

But Fury doesn’t appear to do any surface preparation, lifting the print directly off the ID card, which is pushing plausibility.

Verdict: Fury’s fingerprinting fail.

What do we know about non-carbon-based life?

All life on Earth is based on the element carbon. This is why when you burn either wood or meat, all you are left with is charcoal, which is mostly just pure carbon.

But when one of the alien Skrulls dies and the body examined, the doctor says it is definitely not carbon-based.

This is theoretically possible. We’ve known for a long time that life on other planets could also be based on other elements that are similar to carbon, for example silicon.

Even though carbon and silicon might look very different, chemically they are very similar regarding the kinds of chemical reactions that are needed to support life. This is because they are in the same column in the periodic table of elements.

But then the doctor says something strange, whatever the alien is made of, it’s not from the periodic table.

This is highly unlikely. All known matter in the universe exists on the periodic table, and the alien doesn’t seem to be made of any strange unknown substance like dark matter, just rubbery green flesh.

Verdict: Off the planet.

Paging the ‘90s

Nick Fury’s pager features quite prominently in this movie. Paging technology was all the rage back in the late 1980s and ’90s.

With today’s mobile and smart phones, texting (SMS and MMS), a huge range of messaging apps and always-on connectivity everywhere, you might think pagers would have gone the way of dial-up internet. But that’s not quite so.

Pagers have a much longer range than phones, are harder to hack, don’t store conversation histories (important for privacy and security), and are more reliable during natural disasters.

They are still used by many emergency services and medical personnel who need to be contactable in extreme emergencies even when all other power and communications might be down.

Verdict: Retro tech still comes to the rescue.

The verdict

She gets knocked down … and she gets up again. Marvel Studios.

The movie is a fun chance to be reminded of all the technology and culture of a quarter-century ago, and to think how much (and how little) has changed.

Read more: Virtual reality adds to tourism through touch, smell and real people’s experiences

The movie’s depiction of the 1990s is generally pretty spot-on – a fun way for a younger audience to be introduced to what life was like before smartphones and ubiquitous high-speed internet. The pain of removable media, unreliable and slow internet connections, and having to go to the store to get a movie is all captured humorously on film.

Marvel Studios

– ref. Remember Blockbuster, Nirvana and pagers? The new Captain Marvel lives in the 1990s – http://theconversation.com/remember-blockbuster-nirvana-and-pagers-the-new-captain-marvel-lives-in-the-1990s-112617

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

Māori and Pasifika populations in New Zealand experience poorer health than other New Zealanders. Some of this inequity is due to health policies and uneven access to health care.

The New Zealand government often appoints committees and advisory groups, connected to government agencies, in an effort to reduce inequities in health. In our research, we explored the experiences of Māori and Pasifika members on advisory boards in influencing policy development.

We interviewed Māori and Pasifika public health leaders, with a century of collective experience between them, and found that their knowledge was often devalued. They experienced tokenistic engagement and racism. Some indicated that it took considerable effort to establish credibility, be heard and make an impact.

Here are five ways we found that racism manifests in health advisory groups.

Read more: Aboriginal – Māori: how Indigenous health suffers on both sides of the ditch

1) Navigating the room

All participants acknowledged the strategic importance of advisory group work and the challenges of being a solitary or minority voice. They experienced not being heard, a lack of respect, and the absence of authentic consultation and support for Māori and Pasifika health. Several participants noted their contributions were often not recorded in minutes.

The leaders we interviewed developed their own strategies to navigate this challenge. They drew strength and solidarity from other minorities and spoke out or used official complaints channels when necessary. They were proactive in seeking better outcomes and used their seniority to ensure the group remained focused on reducing inequities of health.

2) The battle for evidence

Participants noted that Māori and Pasifika knowledge and research are considered less rigorous and perceived as anecdotal evidence. Government officials relied on research from overseas, usually North America and Europe, which was assumed to be “gold standard” and “best practice”, even though it might not have been tested locally.

The leaders observed how white participants in the advisory group assumed their knowledge was superior and were reluctant to examine the causes of health disparities in ways that would generate equitable health outcomes.

3) Working with government officials

Those interviewed for our research project found government officials had their own cultural and political biases. They were often subsumed in the “bureaucracy of government” and had to work within the politics of prevailing ministers. When combined with high staff turnover and a higher proportion of officials who are new migrants or not culturally competent or experts in the subject matter this led to the development of strategies that are likely to generate health inequity.

4) Suspicions of tokenism

Good policy building requires authentic engagement and functional relationships, yet this was not the experience of those we interviewed. They experienced being invited to advisory groups to create an impression of inclusiveness rather than having a substantive input into policy.

A specific example of this is engaging with Māori kaumatua (elders) as only a ceremonial presence. They are often there to open a meeting instead of being invited to bring their particular cultural expertise to ensure there is a stronger Māori voice.

5) Witnessing and experiencing racism

Most participants disclosed witnessing and experiencing behaviour consistent with racism – patterns and practices of disadvantage or marginalisation. Some named it “covert” or “sophisticated” racism.

Specific examples included a health equity champion who didn’t want anything to do with Māori health, and a proposed breast screening program that was going to target Māori women through a mosque, even though Māori make up a very small percentage of people attending mosques.

We consider that it is the government’s obligation to engage with Māori to fulfil obligations under the te Tiriti o Waitangi. But institutional racism within the policy process fails to create meaningful engagement and consultation.

Read more: Explainer: the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi

In our research we observed the determination of Māori and Pasifika leaders to remain focused on health outcomes and to engage with government. More work is needed, but the possible solutions we identified include cultural and anti-racism training for white policymakers.

– ref. Māori and Pasifika leaders report racism in government health advisory groups – http://theconversation.com/maori-and-pasifika-leaders-report-racism-in-government-health-advisory-groups-112779

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sandra D’urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne

Review: Arbus and West, Melbourne Theatre Company

In the world premiere production of Arbus and West, playwright Stephen Sewell appears to be straying into unchartered territory. He is renowned for being a hard-hitting political writer, whose epic plays are almost always described as “dark”.

Here Sewell reimagines the real-life encounter between Hollywood icon Mae West and avant-garde photographer Diane Arbus. Key moments in the lives of these two fascinating 20th century artists provide the seductive scaffolding for the play.

It is far from documentary-like, however. The dialogue is charming and comedic, while the theme of women’s eviscerated position in society slowly boils and erupts to the surface.

The biographies of both Arbus and West are compelling fare. West is lauded as a trailblazing Hollywood performer, an activist and emblem of female sexual agency. Arbus is known for redefining the photographic gaze, focusing on human subjects who were considered pariahs and shunned by American society during the 1960s. In 1971, Arbus committed suicide.

West felt Arbus’s portrait of her was unflattering and in Sewell’s play never forgives her for it. But the play doesn’t rest entirely on fact. The women are at once real historical figures but also emblems of different artistic genres, political sensibilities, and strands of feminism.

Arbus and West each have compelling biographies. Jeff Busby

Arbus and West’s encounter is a mere snapshot in time, taking place over the course of an afternoon. The production transforms this small moment into a sweeping panorama, as though the event of their meeting transcended historical time altogether, delivering a dreamy interpretation of the human condition, and the position of women within it.

The drama takes place in West’s apartment, a monument to camp style, with its chandelier, white upholstered furniture, and multi-storeyed window bathing the space in an almost transcendental light.

Many scenes unfold as duologues between Arbus (Diana Glenn) and West (Melita Jurisic), but also between West and her live-in dresser and devoted assistant Ruby (Jennifer Vuletic).

The play begins with Ruby eagerly preparing to assist West with her costume changes during a stage performance. We hear but do not see West singing before an adoring audience – a master of ceremony refers to the size of her breasts as the fictional crowd roars.

The play is a series of duologues between Arbus and West, and between West and her assistant Ruby. Jeff Busby

A sense of creeping nostalgia sweeps over the stage, enhanced by the effect of West’s voice travelling across distant space and time. West retreats backstage when Ruby reluctantly delivers the news of Arbus’s suicide. She shrugs it off but is clearly affected.

The female gaze

The play then jumps back in time to where West is preparing for an interview and photoshoot with an unknown photographer. When the photographer named Arbus arrives, we discover she’s a woman. West doesn’t know how to be the object of a woman’s gaze. It is foreign, disconcerting, far too intimate and penetrating.

Quippy one-liners dominate the first act: “If you’re a photographer”, West says to Arbus, “I’m a monkey’s gynaecologist”.

Discussion about what is real and what is fantasy abound. Arbus seduces West with her poetic interpretation of life but repels her in equal measure. West and Ruby agree to unravel the mystery of Arbus: what does she want, why does she insist on capturing the truth, the ugly side of humanity?

By the end of the first act we see West in a state of rapture. She’s convinced that Arbus is an emissary come back from the dead to deliver her a message: that she’s been living a half-life from which she needs to “wake up”.

West unravels the message while spontaneously sharing an earth-shattering confession with Ruby, recalling the gruesome beheading of a childhood friend. The murderer was the girl’s father – his motive can only be described as Freudian. West has a dawning realisation: Arbus is a manifestation of the murdered girl.

Stephen Sewell’s play escapes definition as one particular genre. Jeff Busby

Jurisic as West is captivating in this moment, as she grapples with the truth and horror of the supressed memory. Sarah Goodes’ directorial hand is subtle, but shifts the mood convincingly with West delivering the details of the murder as a direct address to the audience.

Part of the pleasure in Sewell’s writing for this play is that the genre escapes us. Not a straight theatrical biopic, it verges on a supernatural crime thriller, a feeling greatly enhanced by the elements of production and the actors’ commanding performances.

But we already know who the dead person is (Arbus) and the circumstances surrounding the death: suicide. Here Sewell delivers a different kind of crime thriller that transcends the particulars of these characters’ lives. The silent villain is an enduring misogyny that sweeps across historical time like a nuclear explosion.

Towards the end of the play, Arbus whispers a secret into West’s ear. It is a galvanising moment, where the pair become conspirators. After much suspicion and argument, West finally acquiesces to Arbus’s desire to photograph her candidly.

It is as though the playwright is whispering to us. I can’t be sure of the message, but I suspect that Sewell has found a different way to be political with this play. He empathises with West’s realisation that being a woman is tantamount to living in a dream state, trapped in a condition of artifice and alienation from the world.

It is to enter a contractual agreement to live as though you were a species of living dead trapped beneath a crust of glamour. A narcotic existence, so seemingly pleasurable and sensual that the terror of it escapes all our notice.

I may be over-reaching here, but in the era of #MeToo in the Australian theatrical context there is something deeply hopeful about our most prominent playwrights developing a feminist politics in their work.

Arbus and West is playing at Arts Centre Melbourne until March 30.

– ref. In Stephen Sewell’s charming Arbus and West, feminism boils to the surface – http://theconversation.com/in-stephen-sewells-charming-arbus-and-west-feminism-boils-to-the-surface-112950

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bianca Fileborn, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Melbourne

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

Gender-based violence (GBV) seems recently to have been almost constantly on the public radar. The global #MeToo movement prompted daily reporting on sexual violence (albeit with a focus often limited to glamorous Hollywood celebrities).

In Australia, high-profile cases such as that of Saxon Mullins sparked renewed debate on sexual consent and led to a New South Wales government inquiry.

The prominence afforded to GBV in recent public debate may give the impression that progress is being made – that it’s “on the agenda” and our institutional, social and cultural responses to this violence are improving. To a certain extent, this is true.

Read more: FactCheck: is domestic violence the leading preventable cause of death and illness for women aged 18 to 44?

A range of recent developments suggest our efforts to address GBV are increasingly robust and sophisticated. These include the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria and the Andrews government commitment to implement all recommendations arising from this. In Queensland, there has been debate about whether the state’s archaic responses to sexual offences should be reviewed.

Australia has a longstanding (though not unproblematic) National Plan to Prevent Violence against Women and their Children. Several national organisations are dedicated to researching and preventing GBV. More recently, OurWatch has announced its Respect and Equality Program, a comprehensive, whole-of-institution approach to working with universities to prevent sexual violence on campus.

So far, so good?

At the same time, the evidence on GBV paints a grim picture.

Despite these aforementioned efforts, men continue to murder women in Australia at a rate of at least one woman a week. Names such as Eurydice Dixon, Aiia Maasarwe and Masa Vukotic remind us of this fact all too well.

However, we must remember that in the vast majority of cases, men kill women they know. Most recently, the ex-partner of dentist Preethi Reddy has been identified as a key suspect in her murder.

One in five women will experience sexual violence and one in two will experience sexual harassment in their lifetime.

Crime data suggest the reporting of sexual violence is increasing. This could be interpreted as a positive development. Given the vast under-reporting of sexual violence, survivors may be feeling more confident and able to report.

However, prosecution and conviction rates for adult sexual offences remain low. And the criminal justice system is still considered a largely negative experience for victim-survivors.

The National Community Attitudes Survey shows that attitudes towards GBV continue to be poor in a large minority of the population. Hostile reactions to the recent Gillette campaign suggest that at least some men (#notallmen) remain resistant to interrogating and changing norms of masculinity that underpin this violence.

Despite some undoubtedly positive developments, much more work remains to be done. GBV is a complex, multifaceted issue and there is no magic bullet that will solve such an ingrained issue. It is a stubborn problem that requires a sophisticated, well-resourced and sustained response.

Here are some of the issues politicians should be addressing in the lead-up to the federal election.

Service provision and funding

Front-line services providing support to victim-survivors continue to be vastly underfunded and unable to keep up with demand. For example, the last federal budget allocated A$18.2 million towards such services. This is a paltry amount when compared to the A$48.7 million dedicated to contentious plans to “commemorate” Captain Cook.

The Morrison government has since pledged to dedicate $328 million to addressing domestic violence should the Coalition be re-elected. While this is considerably more than the additional $60 million in funding announced by Labor to support women leaving violent relationships, both figures pale in comparison to the $1.9 billion in funding from the Andrews government in Victoria.

Given that GBV is estimated to cost the Australian economy A$22 billion per year, this level of (under)funding speaks volumes about the priority placed on supporting survivors and working with perpetrators.

Lack of access to support is particularly acute for certain groups who may be excluded from mainstream services, or who require more specialist support. For example, LGBT, culturally diverse and Indigenous victim-survivors often face a lack of inclusive services.

The national plan may make these issues worse. It has been criticised for paying “lip service” at best to the experiences and needs of these groups, which highlights the need for a truly intersectional approach to GBV.

Inquiries and recognition

Several national inquiries are under way or on the cards that relate to GBV.

The #MeToo movement brought to light (again) the issue of sexual harassment and violence in the workplace. Promisingly, this led to the launch of a National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces. There is already good evidence to suggest that workplace harassment is rife, under-reported and has ongoing consequences, particularly for women.

It is also vital that we bring to light the experiences of under-recognised groups who sit outside the young, white, middle-class and heteronormative focus of much research, policy and practice in this field.

The recently announced Royal Commission into Aged Care has the potential to contribute towards achieving this. Its terms of reference include “all forms of abuse” against the elderly. Sexual and gender-based violence against older people remains largely hidden and poorly understood, often obscured under the lens of “elder abuse”.

Read more: Fleeing family violence to another country and taking your child is not ‘abduction’, but that’s how the law sees it

Calls for a royal commission into the disability sector are also well founded. People living with a disability face some of the highest rates of sexual and other violence. Despite the socially constructed vulnerability to sexual violence of people living with disabilities, there is a lack of attention to the specific support needs and prevention efforts required. Access to justice responses is limited.

Federal government support for a royal commission may go some way to addressing these issues. However, while such inquiries can be essential for bringing to light the nature and extent of GBV, on their own they are insufficient to generate change. We must also ensure recommendations are fully implemented and appropriately resourced.

Working towards primary prevention

Finally, we must ensure that efforts to prevent violence before it occurs continue to be supported, evaluated and resourced.

These efforts must be informed by a broad cultural and social approach if we are to eliminate GBV in all its forms. An expanded focus that includes other systems of oppression that underpin GBV, including heterosexism, racism, ableism and ageism, is required.

Evaluations of primary prevention campaigns and educational efforts show that these can and do lead to positive change.

To really bring about change, our approaches to prevention need to be holistic, multifaceted and consistently reinforced across different contexts.

– ref. Acting on gender-based violence must be a priority for the next federal government – http://theconversation.com/acting-on-gender-based-violence-must-be-a-priority-for-the-next-federal-government-110765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bradley Smith, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, CQUniversity Australia

Of all Australia’s wildlife, one stands out as having an identity crisis: the dingo. But our recent article in the journal Zootaxa argues that dingoes should be regarded as a bona fide species on multiple fronts.

This isn’t just an issue of semantics. How someone refers to dingoes may reflect their values and interests, as much as the science.

How scientists refer to dingoes in print reflects their background and place of employment, and the Western Australian government recently made a controversial attempt to classify the dingo as “non-native fauna”.

Read more: Why the WA government is wrong to play identity politics with dingoes

How we define species – called taxonomy – affects our attitudes, and long-term goals for their conservation.

What is a dog?

Over many years, dingoes have been called many scientific names: Canis lupus dingo (a subspecies of the wolf), Canis familiaris (a domestic dog), and Canis dingo (its own species within the genus Canis). But these names have been applied inconsistently in both academic literature and government policy.

This inconsistency partially reflects the global arguments regarding the naming of canids. For those who adhere to the traditional “biological” species concept (in which a “species” is a group of organisms that can interbreed), one might consider the dingo (and all other canids that can interbreed, like wolves, coyotes, and black-backed jackals) to be part of a single, highly variable and widely distributed species.

Members of the Canis genus: wolf (Canis lupus), coyote (Canis latrans), Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas), dingo (Canis dingo), and a representative of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).

But the “biological” species concept used to name species came about long before modern genetic tools, or even before many hybrid species were identified by their DNA (such as the “red wolf,” an ancient hybrid of grey wolves and coyotes found in the southeastern United States).

Few people would really argue that a chihuahua, a wolf, and a coyote are the same species. In reality there are many more comprehensive and logical ways to classify a species. In our latest paper we argue that a holistic approach to defining species is essential in the case of the dingo and other canids.

Our work shows conclusively that dingoes are distinct from wild canids and domestic dogs based on many different criteria.

Truly wild

The first criterion is that dingoes are wild animals, and live completely independent from humans. This is fundamentally different to domestic, feral, or wild dogs, which must live near human settlements and rely on humans for food and water in some way to survive.

Yes, the dingo might have arrived in Australia with humans, and we know that Aboriginal Australians have had a close relationship with dingoes following the latter’s arrival. But neither of these observations excludes dingoes from being wild.

Read more: Dingoes do bark: why most dingo facts you think you know are wrong

For example, a relationship with humans does not constitute the rigorous definitions of domestication. Consider the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), which was also introduced to Australia by people and are now free-ranging: they are also not considered to be domesticated. Neither are wild animals such as birds that we feed in our backyards domesticated simply because they are sometimes fed by us.

Ecological role

In fact, dingoes have been living wild and independently of humans for a very long time — they have a distinct and unique evolutionary past that diverged some 5 to 10 thousand years ago from other canids. This is more than enough time for the dingo to have evolved into a naturalised predator now integral to maintaining the health of many Australian ecosystems.

Read more: Dingo dinners: what’s on the menu for Australia’s top predator?

Dogs do not have the brain power or body adaptations to survive in the wild, and they cannot play the same ecological role as dingoes. From this ecological perspective alone, the two species are not interchangeable. Dingoes are Australia’s only large (between 15-20 kg), land-based predator, and as such play a vital role in Australia’s environment.

Shape and size

Viewed alone, the overall shape of the body and skull does not easily distinguish wild canids from dogs, mainly because of the sheer diversity among different breeds of domestic dogs.

But there are some important body differences between free-ranging dogs and dingoes, mainly in the skull region (as shown here and here).

Cranial 3-D reconstructions of a dingo (bottom) and a free-ranging dog (top), highlighting the differences in cranial morphology mentioned in the text.

Behaviour

Dingoes (and other truly wild canids) have some fundamentally unique behaviours that set them apart from dogs (although like shape, there are often exceptions among the artificial dog breeds). For example, dingoes have significantly different reproductive biology and care-giving strategies.

There are also differences in brain function, such as in the way the two species solve problems, and dingoes and dogs communicate differently with humans.

Read more: Why do dingoes attack people, and how can we prevent it?

Genetics

While dingoes and dogs obviously share an ancestral relationship, there is a lot of genetic data to support the distinction between dingoes and dogs.

While dingoes share ancestry with ancient Asian dogs from 10,000 years ago, the dingo has been geographically isolated from all other canids for many thousands of years, and genetic mixing has only been occurring recently, most probably driven by human intervention.

Since the 1990s, genetic markers have been in widespread use by land managers, conservation groups, and researchers to differentiate dingoes from domestic dogs.

A summary of the evolutionary relationships among wolves, dingoes and modern domestic dogs. Dingoes and other ancient lineages of dog such as New Guinea singing dogs form a distinct lineage separate from modern domestic dogs that have undergone successive generations of artificial selection.

What’s at stake?

Even acknowledging the dingo’s uncertain and distant past, lumping dingoes and dogs together is unjustified.

Labelling dingoes as “feral domestic dogs” or some other misnomer ignores their unique, long, and quintessentially wild history in Australia.

Read more: Why do some graziers want to retain, not kill, dingoes?

Inappropriate naming also has serious implications for their treatment. Any label less than “dingo” can be used to justify their legal persecution.

Further loss of dingoes could have serious, negative ecological consequences, including potentially placing other Australian native animals at increased risk of extinction.

– ref. The dingo is a true-blue, native Australian species – http://theconversation.com/the-dingo-is-a-true-blue-native-australian-species-111538

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

Australia’s big little economic lie was laid bare on Wednesday.

National accounts figures show that the Australian economy grew by just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018. This disappointing result was below market expectations and official forecasts of 0.6%. It put annual growth for the year at just 2.3%.

But the shocking revelation was that Gross Domestic Product per person (a more relevant measure of living standards) actually slipped in the December quarter by 0.2%, on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the September quarter.

These are the first back-to-back quarters of negative GDP per capita growth in 13 years – since 2006.

We’re going backwards, for the first time in 13 years

The reason this is significant is that the Australian convention around what constitutes a recession is two back-to-back quarters of negative growth GDP growth.

Since more people in the economy mechanically increases overall GDP, you might think that measuring things on a per-person basis gives a better sense of whether we are better off or worse off.

And you would be right. Why then, do we talk so much about overall GDP?

One answer is that in a lot of advanced economies there isn’t very much population growth, so overall GDP is a good enough measure.

Population growth hides it

The more insidious answer in Australia is that, for a long time, our high population growth, fed by a high immigration rate, has masked a much less rosy picture of how we are doing. And neither side of politics has wanted to admit it.

At 1.6% a year, Australia’s population growth is roughly double the OECD average, which is perhaps why we hear politicians say things like “Australia continues to grow faster than all of the G7 nations except the United States,” as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg did this week.

The good news is that standard economic theory tells us that in the long run, immigration has very little impact on GDP per capita in either direction, unless it drives a shift in the population’s mix of skills.

But in the short term, it depresses GDP per capita because fixed capital such as buildings and machines has to be shared between more workers.

Read more: Solving the ‘population problem’ through policy

The business lobby doesn’t want us to focus on that because population provides more customers as well as more workers, allowing them to grow without growing domestic market share or exports.

Governments don’t want us to focus on it because adjusting for population growth makes GDP growth look small or, as at present, negative. Also, the tax revenue from the population growth is factored into the official budget forecasts – but the extra social spending needed isn’t always factored in.

Pro tip: watch for population growth as a fudge factor generating a return to surplus in next month’s budget.

There’s a better way of getting at the truth

That said, GDP itself – per capita or not – is not a great measure of the standard of living. That’s why in 2001, the Bureau of Statistics began also reporting real net national disposable income.

It is a measure with advantages over GDP. As the bureau points out, it takes account of changes in the prices of our exports relative to the prices of our imports – our terms of trade. If the prices of our exports were increasing much faster than the prices of our imports (as happened during the mining booms), our standard of living would climb and real net national disposable income would reflect it, where as gross domestic product would not, although it would reflect increased income from increased export volumes.

To get at living standards per person, which is what we are really interested in, the bureau also publishes real net national disposable income per capita.

The graph shows that so far the growth rate of real net national disposable income per capita hasn’t changed much, and that it has been negative for far fewer quarters than in the Coalition’s first term in office.

It bounces around with changes in the prices of imports and exports, and is generally climbing less than when export prices were really high.

A year of two halves?

The treasurer painted 2018 as a “year of two halves”.

The first half was great – the annualised GDP growth rate (what it would have been had it continued all year) was a very impressive 3.8%.

The second half was just 1%.

I’m not sure the change was that clear cut. As I wrote last September, there have been troubling signs for some time, despite the solid headline growth.

Household savings have been plummeting, real wage growth has been stagnant, housing prices have been falling in Sydney and Melbourne. Together they put significant pressure on household spending, which accounts for about 60% of GDP.

Those concerns are now mainstream. Good news on export prices has rescued tax receipts for the time being, and will probably also rescue real net national disposable income per capita.

Read more: Vital Signs: National accounts show past performance no guarantee of future results

But the fundamentals of the Australian economy are looking somewhat weak. Like the US and other advanced economies, we are living in an era of secular stagnation – a protracted period of much lower growth than we had come to expect.

And until we do something to tackle it, such as a major government investment in physical and social infrastructure, we will continue to faces anaemic wage growth, shaky consumer confidence, and mediocre economic growth per person.

– ref. Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-australias-sudden-ultra-low-economic-growth-ought-not-to-have-come-as-surprise-113026

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathleen Daly, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

Australians can be proud of what the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse accomplished, but they cannot be proud of the National Redress Scheme (NRS).

With the Joint Select Committee’s review of the NRS set to be released in the coming weeks, it’s important to look back on how the NRS emerged and the ways it strayed from the recommendations of the royal commission.

In September 2015, the royal commission released its report on redress and civil litigation. It proposed a redress scheme with three elements: a direct personal response, counselling and psychological care, and a monetary payment.

Read more: Royal commission report makes preventing institutional sexual abuse a national responsibility

And it set forth principles to guide redress, such as being “survivor-focused” by providing justice to survivors and not protecting the interests of institutions.

On June 19 2018, the NRS bill passed with bipartisan support in both houses of parliament, but it did not adhere to these principles, nor reflect the spirit of what the royal commission had recommended.

Protecting the interests of institutions ultimately prevailed over providing justice to survivors.

So how and why did this happen?

Creating a national scheme

Creating a national scheme was a complicated exercise. To do so, Australian states had to refer their legislative power for redress to the Commonwealth. Without state referral, non-Commonwealth institutions – both government and non-government – could not participate.

The Commonwealth began negotiating with the states in January 2016. In November that year, then Attorney-General George Brandis and then Minister for Social Services Christian Porter issued a press release announcing that a Commonwealth Redress Scheme (CRS) would be established.

The release said the maximum payment would be $150,000, not the $200,000 figure the royal commission had recommended.

That day, Porter held a press conference where he was asked to explain why the maximum was reduced. He said:

we have had intensive negotiations with the states and territories, and with churches and charities. And we were trying to design a monetary redress payment that offered appropriate recognition, but maximised our opportunity to get other organisations to opt-in to the scheme.

In October 2017, the CRS bill was introduced into parliament. The government’s strategy was to move the bill along while at the same time encouraging states and non-government institutions to opt-in to the scheme. If no states did so by July 1 2018, the scheme would be for survivors of abuse in Commonwealth institutions only.

That day, Porter was asked on ABC radio why people with convictions for sexual offences or other serious crimes were not eligible for the scheme. Porter explained that the decision was made in “deep consultation” with state attorneys-general who were of the “almost unanimous” view that to “give integrity and public confidence to the scheme”, there needed to be limitations for those who “had committed serious crimes, particularly sexual offences”.

The exclusion was a condition for the states to opt-in, and a “powerful reason why [the] decision was made”, according to Porter.

In the same interview, he dropped another bombshell: counselling and psychological care would be capped at $5,000 per person. No explanation was given. The royal commission did not recommend a criminal history exclusion nor a cap on counselling.

As the CRS bill moved through parliament, media stories and submissions to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee focused on the reduced maximum payment, criminal history exclusion, and cap on counselling. Concerns were also raised that the scheme was for sexual abuse only, and that important scheme details were to be contained in delegated legislation, or what is also termed “the rules”. This meant the minister would announce them at a future date, and they would not be subject to parliamentary scrutiny or debate.

Two crucial elements in the delegated legislation were the Assessment Framework and the Direct Personal Response Framework. The Assessment Framework assesses both the monetary payment and monetary support for counselling and psychological care. The Direct Personal Response Framework outlines a limited number of ways a responsible institution may engage with a survivor, including an apology or statement of regret, and steps taken to prevent abuse in the future.

It was not until August 13 2018, two months after the passage of the NRS, that these frameworks were tabled by the minister. Both departed strongly from what the royal commission had recommended.

The shift from a Commonwealth to a national scheme occurred in May 2018, when a COAG intergovernmental agreement on the NRS was signed by New South Wales and the ACT. New South Wales introduced legislation referring the power to make laws about redress to the Commonwealth.

Later that month, the NRS bill was introduced into federal parliament. A Senate review in March had called attention to gaps between what the Royal Commission had recommended and what was in the CRS bill. The NRS bill maintained and, at times, widened these gaps.

The widening gaps between the royal commission and the NRS

We identified 17 contentious matters in the NRS bill.

Five matters that received considerable attention were the maximum monetary payment, criminal history exclusion, cap on counselling, assessment framework, and the eligibility of sexual abuse only.

But 12 others were just as consequential.

They related to government and institutional responsibilities (funder of last resort and institutional opt-in timeframe); application and payment requirements (single application, indexation of payment, acceptance period, deed of release, lack of external review); other eligibility criteria (no application from gaol, citizenship and residency, age limit); scheme reporting; and the direct personal response.

All 17 matters departed from what the royal commission recommended except three: the eligibility of sexual abuse only, indexation of payment, and no external review.

The pressure points for the departures were economic and political costs to government and non-government participants, and to a lesser degree, the convenience of the scheme operator.

As the NRS legislation moved toward passage in June 2018, many politicians said it was “imperfect”, but they would support it. Such support was often couched in pro-survivor rhetoric. For example, Senator Louise Pratt said:

Survivors have in some instances waited all their lives for justice, and they should not have to wait a minute longer.

In fact, politicians’ hands were tied: they could not change the bill because this would require renegotiating the framework of redress decided by members of the state and federal executive. Such delay would jeopardise the Commonwealth’s promised start date of July 1 2018.

We want to see a fair and effective redress scheme. To make that happen, elements in the current scheme will need to change.

But is there any hope for change? Perhaps.

A bipartisan Joint Select Committee (JSC) on the Oversight of the Implementation of Redress Related Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been receiving submissions and holding hearings over the past five months.

Read more: Listen to abuse survivors and advocates to clear the way to a national redress scheme

The JSC has learned that survivors are having many problems applying to the scheme and understanding how best to present their case. Witnesses to the JSC and committee members themselves have expressed disbelief about the Assessment Framework: it privileges penetrative sexual abuse above all other types, and it caps the monetary support for counselling based on the type of abuse.

We provided evidence to the JSC of the many ways the NRS departs from the royal commission’s principles of redress.

We also provided evidence of how poorly the scheme compares with other world redress schemes in the ways it assesses the severity and impact of abuse, supports counselling, and excludes certain groups. Compared to numerous examples that the royal commission offered for the direct personal response, the NRS stuck to a bare minimum and severely weakened the power of this innovative redress element.

Will the JSC report, delivered in early April, produce findings that make politicians, the media, and the public take notice?

The timing is not optimal with a federal election looming and other matters taking greater precedence. Post-election, let’s hope that the failure of the NRS to provide justice to survivors receives the attention it deserves.

– ref. National Redress Scheme for child sexual abuse protects institutions at the expense of justice for survivors – http://theconversation.com/national-redress-scheme-for-child-sexual-abuse-protects-institutions-at-the-expense-of-justice-for-survivors-112954