Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jim Stanford, Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work, Australia Institute; Honorary Professor of Political Economy, University of Sydney

When it comes to studying economics, Australian high school students are voting with their feet. According to data gathered by the Reserve Bank of Australia, year 12 enrolments in economics courses have plunged 70% nationwide over the last 25 years. Enrolments are so low, many schools are abandoning the subject altogether.

And it’s not just that there are fewer students taking economics. Those that do sign up seem rather … well … alike. There are now about twice as many boys than girls taking economics (compared to a 50-50 ratio in 1992). And most of those boys now come from higher-income families.

Read more: Women are dropping out of economics, which means men are running our economy

Economics enrolments at universities haven’t done much better. The number of university students choosing economics has stagnated for a quarter-century, even as student numbers surged. They’re shunning economics in favour of other subjects: whether that’s popular science, technology, engineering and maths, and business programs or socially relevant disciplines such as political-economy and environmental studies.

If we really want more young Australians to study economics (and not just boys from high-income families), the profession needs to reinvent itself – and become a lot more relevant to the big issues young people care about.

The problem with faith in the free market

The Reserve Bank (RBA) worries about students’ lack of interest in economics, and has started a mini-campaign to encourage more young Australians to heed the call of supply and demand. The RBA is lobbying state governments to update their economics curricula, and it sends ambassadors out to classrooms to advocate for economics – emphasising, among other points, that economics graduates earn relatively high salaries.

Economics is one of the most male-dominated professions, and most come from high-income families. Joel Carrett/AAP

We share the RBA’s concern about the terrible lack of diversity in economics (it’s one of the most male-dominated professions, even worse than STEM courses). But the RBA’s campaign inadvertently symbolises what’s wrong with the whole profession: emphasising high salaries in an attempt to reverse falling enrolments only confirms that economics is still infatuated with markets and incentives. This misses the whole point about the most urgent and interesting problems in the world today.

There is no question today’s students are a passionate, socially aware generation. They rightly worry about the world they’re poised to inherit: scarred by climate change, inequality, angry populism, and possibly worse. Not to mention many of those students may never hold a normal permanent job (relegated instead to a never-ending series of “gigs”), and most can’t imagine being able to buy a house.

Given these critical challenges, we can’t blame today’s students for rushing into other disciplines – anything, it seems, but economics. After all, the social and environmental problems they confront are precisely the outcome of the ideological, market-worshipping canon still taught in most economics textbooks.

Markets are efficient. Supply equals demand. Private competition is best. Workers are paid according to their productivity.

Read more: How governments have widened the gap between generations in home ownership

Young people who want to improve the world quickly reject these tenets of economic theory. We, Jim and Richard, think students actually accomplish more to fix the actual economy by studying environmental studies, gender studies or social work, rather than immersing themselves in the theoretical games of free-market economics.

The RBA itself shares the blame for this state of affairs. Its narrow approach to economic policy is largely focused on suppressing inflation and letting markets take care of everything else.

For example, the RBA still claims Australia is almost at full employment. But they define that as 5% unemployment, according to the discredited theory of “non-accelerating inflation unemployment”. This neglects its responsibility, explicitly enshrined in the Reserve Bank Act to create more jobs as its top priority.

Students have proven themselves active and engaged in political and economic issues many times over. Lukas Coch/AAP

It’s a great intellectual irony that neoliberal economics, based on the theory that the market always knows best, is being abandoned by its own “market” (namely, prospective students). They are rejecting its idealised vision of supply and demand in favour of any number of more relevant, interesting disciplines: from business and marketing, to international relations or public health.

And the response of the discipline’s true believers is that its customers (the students) are somehow uninformed and don’t know what’s best for them.

Economics needs context

We both studied economics for many years, we love our profession, and we fervently hope more critical-thinking, passionate young people will take up this discipline – mostly to help us save the economy (and the planet) from conventional economics. But for economics to play a more helpful, critical role, it must thoroughly reinvent itself – and fast.

Read more: Home ownership falling, debts rising – it’s looking grim for the under 40s

It must abandon its ideological and self-serving faith in the efficacy of private markets. It must embrace the social, historical, and environmental context of work, production, and distribution. And it must commit to truly building a better world, rather than justifying the status quo.

Apologising for inequality, selfishness, and pollution rather than confronting them has been the way of free-market economics since its invention. Most young people, understandably, yearn for something else. Let’s give it to them.

– ref. Economics needs to get real if we want more young Australians to study it – http://theconversation.com/economics-needs-to-get-real-if-we-want-more-young-australians-to-study-it-112060

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

The Court of Arbitration for Sport is due to rule on an application by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) that athletes such as South Africa’s Caster Semenya, who have “differences of sexual development”, must medicate to reduce their testosterone levels for six months before competing internationally.

The IAAF claims that the proposed rules will “create a level playing field to ensure all female athletes have an equal chance to excel”. Semenya has filed an appeal against the IAAF.

Those who argue that women with differences of sexual development and transgender should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports usually claim that their testosterone levels and different muscle-to-fat ratios give them an unfair advantage over their competitors. But excluding these women from competition is unfair and potentially a human rights violation.

Read more: Why it might be time to eradicate sex segregation in sports

A breach of human rights

Those with differences of sexual development include women who are born with genetic conditions that give them athletic advantages more commonly attributed to males. Hyperandrogenism, for example, causes the individual to produce more testosterone than is typically present in women.

Semenya and India’s Dutee Chand are both thought to have this condition and have been subjected to intense public scrutiny as a result.

There is also the issue of transgendered women athletes who want to compete against other women. Transgender New Zealand weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, competed in the 2018 Commonwealth games, amid complaints from the Australian Weightlifting Federation. Another New Zealander, Kate Weatherly, a transgender downhill mountain bike rider, has faced the same kind of scrutiny and challenges to her right to compete against other women.

There is disagreement among experts about whether transgender women do in fact have a physical advantage. Some evidence suggests the opposite is true and the therapy required to transition to a woman results in lower levels of testosterone than are found in women generally.

Laurel Hubbard has been subjected to monthly testosterone tests and her testosterone levels are lower than a “normal” female. Part of the problem here, too, is the assumptions about the characteristics of “normal”.

The level playing field is a myth

These issues aside, what precisely is an unfair advantage? Those who believe transgender women and women with different sexual development should be able to compete in women’s categories point to athletes such as Michael Phelps who has extraordinary physical characteristics that give him a huge competitive advantage in swimming, including his long arms and flexible feet. What makes his advantage fair? Is it because these are qualities Phelps was born with?

If so, then Semenya and Dutee and others who are born intersex or with hyperandrogenism should not cause sporting organisations any problems. But what about transgender athletes? Does the fact they have “chosen” to become women mean they have brought about this state of affairs and so they can justifiably be excluded? And if so, what of all the competitive advantages other women bring with them?

The level playing field is a myth. Aside from these genetic or biological advantages, athletes all differ in terms of the resources they have available to buy the best equipment, trainers and coaches and so on. Should these factors be considered as giving athletes an “unfair” advantage?

Self-identification

In New Zealand, under section 28 of the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Act 1995, a person may apply to the Family Court to have their birth certificate record they are of the opposite sex to that already recorded on the document. There are certain conditions that must be satisfied, and the application must be supported by “expert medical evidence”.

But a new bill proposes to replace the existing process with one based on self-identification, to “allow people to have greater autonomy over their identity”. The Select Committee also recommended including the options of “inter-sex” and “X (unspecified)” to recognise non-binary sexual and gender identities.

A self-identification policy does have the potential to impinge on women’s rights as well as for abuse by males who do not actually identify as women. Both Semenya and Chand have identified as women from birth. Hubbard and Weatherly are also women, notwithstanding that they were assigned a different biological sex at birth.

They should all be treated as such for all purposes. Regardless of their biological sex – if in fact there is such an incontrovertible thing – they are not men masquerading as women to secure a competitive advantage. A nuanced approach is called for; while a self-identification policy may not be the answer, neither is an approach that requires medical intervention as a pre-requisite for recognition.

– ref. Sex and sport: how to create a level playing field – http://theconversation.com/sex-and-sport-how-to-create-a-level-playing-field-112219

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Attard, Associate Professor, Mathematics Education, Western Sydney University

The recent royal commission into banking has revealed rampant wrongdoing by the big banks. As a result, there is renewed public interest in school banking schemes. The Commonwealth Bank’s Dollarmites program has once again come into the spotlight.

Dollarmites was awarded a 2018 Choice Magazine Shonky award. The program has over 300,000 active participants, and although it’s not the only school banking program, it’s the largest by far.

Read more: Should banks play a role in teaching kids about how to manage money effectively?

According to the Commonwealth Bank, the motive behind the Dollarmites program is to teach good savings habits and develop financial literacy. But I could find little independent research evidence it actually does.

On the surface, the Commonwealth Bank’s intentions are good. But research has found 40% of people develop loyalty to their banks and continue banking with them into adulthood.

We need to consider other options. Here are some research-backed alternatives.

Alternatives to school banking

Financial literacy can be taught both at home and at school, in practical and meaningful ways. If we consider the core business of schools to be learning, then our classrooms are not an appropriate place for the distractions of corporate marketing. There is definitely no time to be wasted on the logistics of organising school banking.

Read more: Financial literacy is a public policy problem

In fact, schools have several options when it comes to teaching financial literacy. There are a number of free resources already aligned to the curriculum.

Parents should have conversations about budgeting with their children. ASIC comic To the Max/AAP

In my research, using ASIC’s MoneySmart resources, financial literacy was combined with maths. Students did activities that allowed them to deal with real money while applying maths skills.

For example, some students borrowed money from the school principal to set up small businesses. They then ran their business at a school market day, and used their profits to buy Christmas gifts for underprivileged children.

Simple activities such as setting up classroom economies or allowing children to help plan events (such as class excursions) are also excellent at engaging children in financial literacy in a fun, realistic and interactive way.

Findings from my study showed learning about money and maths improved engagement, understanding of mathematical concepts and knowledge of financial concepts such as budgeting, profit and loss, lending and interest.

There are also resources such as Banqer, a free subscription-based app that allows students to manage fictitious money to budget and cover expenses (such as “renting” a desk). In my professional opinion, apps such as this are high quality. They may have corporate sponsorships, but are offered brand-free, which is preferable.

Parents can teach financial literacy too

Parents are one of the biggest influences on the financial habits of children. Parents have a responsibility to model good financial behaviours.

Involving children in shopping, having discussions about family budgeting and encouraging children to save some of their pocket money using a bank account of their choice all contribute to the development of financial literacy. These are really simple, everyday things parents can do to help their children learn financial literacy.

Read more: Teaching kids about maths using money can set them up for financial security

– ref. Don’t bank on Dollarmites to teach financial literacy: here are our alternatives – http://theconversation.com/dont-bank-on-dollarmites-to-teach-financial-literacy-here-are-our-alternatives-112213

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cristina Rocha, Director of Religion and Society Research Cluster, Western Sydney University

We’ve seen countless spiritual leaders and religious institutions embroiled in sexual abuse scandals around the globe. Most people are familiar with the scandals in the Catholic Church and other mainstream religious groups. But there have also been scandals in Ashrams, and Zen and Tibetan Buddhist groups.

The latest scandal involves the Brazilian faith healer João Teixeira de Faria, known as João de Deus (John of God), who in the past two decades has become a global guru for hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Even celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and performance artist Marina Abramovic have visited and promoted him (before the scandal).

John of God claims to be an unconscious medium for spirits who heal through him. He rose to fame due to his remarkable healing methods – he performs actual physical surgery without anaesthesia. Pilgrims don’t seem to develop infections and many report a cure of their symptoms after seeing him.

In her book John Of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing, the co-author of this article, Cristina Rocha, interviewed Westerners who visited John of God. They told her they were seeking not only physical but also emotional and spiritual healing. Many said the experiences at the healing centre were a turning point, which made them believe in the power of the supernatural and changed their lives.

During the decade-long research, Rocha heard rumours about the sexual abuse of women but nothing was ever substantiated. Previous investigations resulted in no convictions.

Read more: The Catholic Church is headed for another sex abuse scandal as #NunsToo speak up

Everything changed in early December, 2018 when 13 women told stories of being sexually abused by de Faria in an explosive interview on Brazilian prime-time TV. Many more women disclosed their abuse to Brazilian police. So far, around 600 Brazilian and foreign women and young girls have described similar experiences of sexual abuse, including rape allegations.

It’s been reported that police found unregistered weapons and around US$400,000 in several currencies hidden in de Faria’s home, in addition to around US$10 million in bank accounts. Allegations have also surfaced of the imprisonment of poor young women who were paid to bear babies for adoption overseas. de Faria denies the allegations.

John of God surrendered himself to police in December and has been remanded in custody since the investigations began. Court cases are likely to follow.

The power of spiritual leaders

Australia’s royal commission into child sex abuse exposed that children and other vulnerable groups were far more likely to be sexually abused in religious and spiritual settings. We also know victims often don’t report abuse for fear of retaliation and deep shame. Those who did report their abuse were often not believed and punished further.

Some John of God followers are skeptical of the allegations against him. Facebook (screenshot, name concealed)

In some cases, even after religious and spiritual leaders are found guilty, many followers have a hard time believing the man whom they trusted and was holy in their eyes was actually a sexual predator.

Many foreign followers of John of God have been sceptical of the allegations. This may be because the tour guides who take groups to see the him have downplayed the scandal on social media.

Spiritual organisations are largely patriarchal and hierarchical and there is little or no transparency and accountability. This makes sexual abuse perpetrated by spiritual leaders particularly problematic.

Spiritual leaders such as de Faria tend to be charismatic and are seen as having special powers derived from supernatural sources. They are treated with reverence, often feared and understood as extraordinary men. So, they command a double authority; first as men and second as otherworldly due to their connection to the supernatural.

After witnessing one of de Faria’s surgeries, one follower told Rocha:

This is what I said to myself, ‘This is what Jesus did.’ He was divine power, divine healing incarnate. He used himself to deliver this type of energy people needed. When I saw that, I was like, ‘This is my place. He will heal me’.

The charisma of the leader makes victims believe they are chosen and given special status. This creates a powerful emotional attachment to the spiritual leader, which can put them at risk of manipulation and abuse.

Read more: John of God: my encounter with Brazil’s accused faith healer

They may doubt the truth of their own experiences of abuse (they may think they are not holy enough to understand what is happening to them). They may fear being ostracised by the religious community or the wrath of the supernatural world.

The royal commission heard evidence that a spiritual leader “can look into a person’s soul and know exactly what is right for them”, including using sexual force as part of a what the leader may claim to be a necessary path to spiritual enlightenment.

Women who were allegedly abused by John of God reported he told them sexual contact was a way to heal them and they would be cursed if they were to reject his requests.

What should we do about it?

The arrest of John of God, and the discovery of the extent of the abuse among women and children, is a wake-up call to further investigate the ways in which spiritual leaders and their groups operate outside the bounds of organisational accountability and transparency.

One immediate way forward is for governments to introduce laws that regulate the bureaucratic practices of such organisations through instituting professional standards, criminalising non-disclosure. Appropriate staff training and ensuring mandatory reporting protocols for all staff should also be instituted.

This would send a strong signal and draw a clear line about what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour by all leaders in such positions of power, and crucially make an immediate difference to the safety of women and children in spiritual organisations.

– ref. #MeToo catches up with spiritual healers: the case of Brazil’s John of God – http://theconversation.com/metoo-catches-up-with-spiritual-healers-the-case-of-brazils-john-of-god-112215

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vivienne Glance, Hon Research Fellow in Poetry and Theatre studies, University of Western Australia

Review: The Magic Flute, Perth Festival 2019

As the overture ends, the red curtains at His Majesty’s Theatre rise to reveal a flat, white floor-to-ceiling wall. This suddenly transforms to show a young man being chased through a forest by a red dragon-like serpent. But the performer on stage is not really running; he is standing still, with a pair of comic, animated legs projected onto a white board from his waist down.

This opening sequence sets the tone for the Komische Oper Berlin’s cinematic production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade’s interpretation of this popular and oft-performed opera (first performed in 1791) is unlike any previous production staged in Australia. Teaming up with animator Paul Barrit and co-director Andrade, both from UK theatre company 1927, Kosky’s version captures the vaudeville anarchy of the original opera.

The singers inhabit a world filled with monsters, magic, revenge, death, love and lust: a perfect fairy tale scenario. The colour-filled era of 1930s German expressionism and the black and white of the popular silent movies of the 1920s provide consistent design motifs for Barritt’s exquisite, hand-drawn animation.

Paul Barritt’s animation draws upon the aesthetics of German expressionism and silent films of the 1920s. Toni Wilkinson

German expressionism emphasised the artist’s feelings over reality, and the more fantastical elements of this opera are well-suited to this style, full of bright colours and simple shapes. Blending this with live action and live music (Western Australian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hendrik Vestmann) makes the production quite unique. The performers add to this with stylistic movements straight out of silent film, including wide-eyes and exaggerated tip-toeing steps.

The opera’s protaganist, the young prince Tamino, was sympathetically portrayed by Aaron Blake on opening night (most roles are rotated between two performers). He has a compelling presence on stage, and there is a wonderful sequence where his soaring tenor voice is accompanied by animated creatures from the constellations, charmed by his magic flute.

Tamino’s unlikely companion, the bird-catcher, Papageno, was performed in a canary-yellow suit by Joan Martín-Royo. He is wonderfully entertaining, and shows a versatile emotional range moving from alcoholic euphoria through suicidal despair, to undying, stuttering love. The duet when Papageno is finally together with his love Papagena, played as a stockinged chorus girl by Talya Lieberman, is delightful and made even funnier by the exaggerated animation.

No Magic Flute review would be complete without comment on the Queen of the Night and her rendition of the famous aria, “Der Hölle Rache” (Hell’s Revenge). Kosky and Andrade depict the queen as a spider with coloratura soprano, Christina Poulitsi, placed high up on a platform.

The Queen of the Night is depicted as a spider in Barrie Kosky’s production.

While the screen is filled with her prodding, spindly legs, the singer is confined in a body sleeve. Nonetheless, she displays her range and virtuosity with a note-perfect performance.

The woman Tamino falls desperately in love with is Pamina, sung beautifully by Soprano Iwona Sobotka on opening night. She played the heroine-in-need-of-rescue to perfection, but despite the sexism spouted by some characters, Pamina showed courage, determination and integrity.

That said, she does fall into despair when she believes she is no longer loved by Tamino, and Sobotka sings Pamina’s aria with great feeling as she contemplates suicide.

Pamina and Papageno in The Magic Flute. Toni Wilkinson

Indeed, The Magic Flute is a problematic work when to comes to the portrayal of women. For example, the Three Ladies who serve the Queen of the Night start complaining about each other in the first scene.

Male characters make generalised statements about women’s failings: when Pamino’s captor, Sarastro states that “women do little but talk a lot” there was an audible groan from the audience; and Papageno dreams of catching a thousand women by bewitching them with his pipes.

However, these attitudes are countered by the suggestion that if a woman has no fear of death or night, then she is worthy to enter Sarastro’s Temple. Pamina earns this respect from the Temple knights by accompanying Tamino on his trail of Fire and Water, wonderfully realised through animation with images of skeletons in the bowels of the earth and deep-ocean creatures.

The original opera also has racist elements, with the black slave, Monstatos, depicted as a self-loathing, sexual predator. This production side-steps this by making this character look like Nosferatu from the 1922 silent horror movie. He is played so villainously by Ivan Tursic that he provoked pantomime “boos” during his curtain call.

Monstatos is portrayed villainously by Ivan Tursic. Toni Wilkinson

Despite the historical problems with this 200-year-old opera, Kosky and Andrade have created a visual spectacle that, along with the fine performances, provides an enjoyable and accessible night of opera.

However, there are limitations to the staging. The flat wall across the stage onto which the amazing animation is projected includes five access doors placed high up, each with one-person-sized platforms in front. Another door is in the centre at the stage level. This means that characters can only be positioned across the front of the stage or on these platforms.

Efforts are made to break up the staging by having the characters bring on hand-held projector screens, but at times it felt a little repetitive. Yet that is a minor quibble. With a packed house on opening night, it seems audiences will never tire of this fantastical tale.

The Magic Flute is playing at Perth Festival until February 23.

– ref. Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute is a contemporary spectacle, despite the opera’s outdated attitudes – http://theconversation.com/barrie-koskys-the-magic-flute-is-a-contemporary-spectacle-despite-the-operas-outdated-attitudes-112284

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

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini and Michelle Grattan talk about the week in politics. They discuss Julie Bishop finally announcing her retirement and how damaging this might be for the Liberal party; the pressure on Mathias Corman following his dealings with travel company HelloWorld; and the cyber security concerns after revelations that the major parties’ networks were hacked.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Bishop’s boots were made for walking

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Julie Bishop’s retirement and misbehaving ministers – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-julie-bishops-retirement-and-misbehaving-ministers-112299

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

Many commentators have compared Labor’s support for the Medevac legislation with the Tampa incident in late August 2001. The implication is that Labor lost the 2001 election due to Tampa, and could lose this year’s election due to Medevac.

Political commentator Katharine Murphy has said she was certain at the time Labor leader Kim Beazley “had just lost the election” after announcing Labor would vote against retrospective legislation giving the Coalition government the power to forcibly remove the Tampa from Australian territorial waters.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: the MV Tampa and the transformation of asylum-seeker policy

But are the claims that Labor lost the 2001 election due to the Tampa true? The Poll Bludger, William Bowe, kindly sent me the polling data for the 1998-2001 term, on which the historical BludgerTrack is based. BludgerTrack is a bias-adjusted poll aggregate.

I have used this data to create the graph below of the Coalition vs Labor two party preferred vote during 2001. The election was on November 10.

BludgerTrack two party preferred vote during 2001.

The graph shows that Labor had a massive lead in March 2001 of about 57-43, but it gradually narrowed to about 52-48 by the time Australian government involvement in the Tampa incident began on August 26. The Tampa was denied permission to dock at Christmas Island and deliver asylum seekers who had been rescued.

The Coalition received about a two-point boost from the Tampa affair to draw level with Labor. However, it had a much bigger lift from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which lifted the Coalition’s vote five points to about a 55-45 lead. As the shock of the attacks wore off, the Coalition’s vote fell back to a 51.0-49.0 victory on election day (November 10).

If the Tampa had occurred in 2001, but not September 11, other issues, such as the economy, health and education, would probably have appealed to people in the lead-up to the election more than boats. Labor could have recovered to an election-winning position. September 11 made national security a huge asset for the Coalition government at the 2001 election.

If not for September 11, Labor may have won the 2001 election. The Tampa put the Coalition into a tie with Labor, not a lead.

Analyst Peter Brent in Inside Story thinks that, given economic factors, the Coalition would probably have won the election by 51-49 without either the Tampa or September 11. You can achieve this result by drawing a line from the Coalition’s nadir in March to the election, with the assumption that the slow improvement in the polls had continued.

Read more: If Beazley had become prime minister instead of Rudd, might we have had more stable government?

However, the graph shows the Coalition’s recovery had stalled for over a month before the Tampa. Even though the September 11 shock had faded by the election, the boost it gave to the importance of the Coalition strength of national security assisted the Coalition at the election.

Labor did not lose the 2001 election because of the Tampa, and they are unlikely to lose the 2019 election because of their support for the Medevac bill. I believe the shock factor of terrorist incidents has been reduced by their frequency. There were two terrorist atrocities shortly before the 2017 UK general election, yet UK Labour performed much better than expected at that election.

Eight UK Labour and three Conservatives MPs form new Independent Group

On Monday, seven UK Labour MPs resigned from their party to form The Independent Group. In the next two days, another Labour MP and three Conservative MPs also resigned to join The Independent Group.

While other causes, such as alleged antisemitism within Labour, have been cited, the reason these defections have happened now is Brexit. The defecting MPs are strongly opposed to their former party’s handling of Brexit, and all want a second referendum on Brexit – currently opposed by both major parties.

The Independent Group MPs have consistently voted in favour of proposals to avoid a “no deal” Brexit when the UK leaves the European Union on March 29. However, these MPs votes will not change. To avoid a no deal, either other MPs votes must change, or the major parties need to reach a compromise. The next important Brexit votes will be on February 27. The article I wrote on my personal website in January about why a no deal Brexit is a plausible scenario is still relevant.

– ref. 2001 polls in review: September 11 influenced election outcome far more than Tampa incident – http://theconversation.com/2001-polls-in-review-september-11-influenced-election-outcome-far-more-than-tampa-incident-112139

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

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced this week that a “sophisticated state actor” had targeted the big Australian political parties in a major cyber attack, the revelation threw up more questions than answers.

Who did it and how? What data did they get their hands on? How vulnerable is our data – and our democracy?

Read more: We’ve been hacked – so will the data be weaponised to influence election 2019? Here’s what to look for

To make sense of it all, we’re hearing today from Nigel Phair, the director of UNSW Canberra Cyber and an expert on the intersection of crime, technology and society.

He said that while hacks like these should be seen as “the new normal” there was good reason to be concerned.

“Just merely having a breach is quite a big deal. Secondly, you look at the information that they hold. Political parties have information on donors – who they are and how much they give and what they want for it. They have information on the electorate, they have information on their own party politics and tactics for Senate Estimates for Question Time, those sorts of things,” he said.

“So that’s a lot of rich data that you could then use as a nation state to infiltrate other areas to perhaps change voter outcomes.”

The hackers may have used social engineering techniques such as phishing to gain access to the data, he said.

“They are quite unsophisticated attacks. It’s often spoofing an organisation or a person and getting someone, an end user, to reveal login credentials. And because we share passwords across multiple logins, that’s how you gain access to a trophy asset,” he said, adding that the hack served as a reminder to use a password manager and ensure all passwords are long and strong.

“I think we should be very concerned. We’ve got a great case study from the US. We’re very allied to the US and when you look at how nation states have disrupted that election I think it’s a given that there are many out there that’ll disrupt ours.”

You can read an edited transcript of the interview below.

Read more: A state actor has targeted Australian political parties – but that shouldn’t surprise us

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ABC news report

Image:

AAP (Various)/Shutterstock/The Conversation

Transcript

SUNANDA CREAGH: And so what’s the main concern? Why was everybody so worried about this, particularly earlier this week?

NIGEL PHAIR: I think when you look at the history with the attack in the US on the DNC (Democratic National Committee), and a lot that’s been reported in the US about nation states trying to infiltrate the election process over there and change people’s voting habits and we’re some weeks/months from an election here – it strikes at the heart of what could be our dear beloved democracy, when you have nation state actors trying to influence voting outcomes.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And what do you think this week’s events tell us about the cyber security weaknesses here in Australia?

NIGEL PHAIR: It tells us that no organisation is immune. It tells us that cyber is another vector for people trying to win the hearts and minds of people.

SUNANDA CREAGH: If I was a sophisticated nation state using this as a strategy to achieve that goal, how might this sort of hack help me achieve that goal? What do you think they were actually trying to do here?

NIGEL PHAIR: There’s a number of things that they’ve achieved. Firstly, is the goal of doing the hack. When we look at parliament house, we look at the political parties, when we think about it, they’re revered from a democratic perspective. Just merely having a breach is quite a big deal.

Secondly, you look at the information that they hold. Political parties have information on donors – who they are and how much they give and what they want for it. They have information on the electorate, they have information on their own party politics and tactics for Senate Estimates for Question Time, those sorts of things. So a lot of rich data that you could then use as a nation state to infiltrate other areas to perhaps change voter outcomes.

SUNANDA CREAGH: China has strongly denied that it was involved but a lot of speculation has focused on that country, as opposed to Russia or another state actor that’s been linked to this kind of behaviour in other contexts. In Australia, why do you think speculation has focused on China as a potential perpetrator?

NIGEL PHAIR: Basically because they’re a near neighbour to ours, they’re in our arc of instability. They’re well known for their theft of intellectual property online. They’re well known for not adhering to the international norms of cyberspace. Add that all up and that’s why people keep pointing the finger at them.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And I believe there’s news reports that China was linked to other previous hacks of universities and parliament and other key pieces of computer infrastructure around Australia. Is that right?

NIGEL PHAIR: That’s right. They’ve been well known to do a range of cyber attacks on a range of different organisations – government, non-government, commercial etc.

SUNANDA CREAGH: So in the context of concerns that Australians have about the government’s capacity to keep our personal information safe – and I’m thinking here about the talk around My Health Record, the census – what does this hack tell us, if anything, about how capable the government and people in power are at guarding our private details?

NIGEL PHAIR: I think we need to go back a couple of steps before we start to think about this. Government, what they haven’t done is take the citizenry of Australia on a journey. They haven’t explained to them what it means to participate in a digital economy. What it means to be a good online citizen and transact with government and social media, commercially, e-commerce. If we had that narrative from the outset then people could understand that the internet is just another public place where they act ethically and lawfully and responsibly to what they do in the real world, then I think we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Because people would be able to have an informed decision about what it means to participate with My Health Record, or participate in an online census or other government instruments. But at the moment we just never had that background and people don’t have the certainty and because of that they make knee-jerk reactions.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Where do you land on this issue, do you think the government is capable of keeping that data safe?

NIGEL PHAIR: I think the government is capable of keeping it safe. The systems around My Health Record for example are really quite secure and there’s a lot of technologies, a lot of process and a lot of policy to ensure. But the reality is if there is going to be a breach of my health record, it’ll probably happen at a doctor’s surgery where there’s an unpatched or unprotected computer, or a user not using a good password, or accidentally emailing the wrong patient records to someone. It will be the end user compromise which we’ll see will be the failure. And that’s what the government isn’t investing in. It’s great to say they have a great secure system themselves but again we need to wind the clock back several years and start telling people this is what it means.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Just on this hack, how might it have been actually perpetrated? Can you just explain that to me in really basic terms?

NIGEL PHAIR: We don’t know yet until the forensic examination is done about how it occurred. Invariably, it was most probably some sort of social engineering attack against someone on the network. Most probably a phishing attack or something similar, where a person is targeted rather than the network itself is targeted. But again, until we know the forensics, we’re just speculating.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And those phishing and social engineering attacks, am I right in thinking they mainly focus on trying to get somebody to reveal their password or their login details to another person who is perhaps impersonating somebody else or impersonating an official password reset type email. Is that the sort of thing you mean there about the social engineering?

NIGEL PHAIR: Invariably, they are quite unsophisticated attacks. It’s spoofing an organisation or a person. Getting someone, an end user, to reveal login credentials and because we share passwords across multiple logins, that’s how you gain access to a trophy asset.

SUNANDA CREAGH: So the lesson there for all of us really is never reuse your password details and get a password manager. Am I right?

NIGEL PHAIR: You are right.

SUNANDA CREAGH: We’ve heard some commentators saying that this is the new normal, that this type of attack really should be expected in this day and age. What do you think about that?

NIGEL PHAIR: It’s been the new normal for quite some time. The reality is, most organisations get hacked just don’t know they’ve been hacked. This is all of a sudden a trophy matter, it’s come at the time where parliament is sitting, so it’s really got some attention in society, which is a great thing. And added to that the government that’s come out and actually said this is what’s happened and that is a completely different policy shift, whereas before it was swept under the carpet.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Do you think that’s a positive policy shift?

NIGEL PHAIR: There’s a great positive. We need to start having a conversation about what it means to be online and what it means to participate. And the fact is there’s countries out there, there’s actors out there trying to do us harm and Australians need to be brought into that confidence.

SUNANDA CREAGH: There was a lot of talk about this at the start of this week, but it really has sort of shifted off the news headlines toward the end of the week and some people are now saying that was a lot of noise over what? And I’ve seen some media commentators saying that this was an announcement that fed into a narrative of fear as election day draws closer. And that is a criticism that’s been directed at the government in the past in their rhetoric around border control and security in more general terms. To what extent do you see this announcement as about safety and awareness and how much of it is politics?

NIGEL PHAIR: I couldn’t put a percentage on either way but I focus purely on the safety and awareness side of it. I just think that’s the value of the message – is the safety and awareness.

SUNANDA CREAGH: It’s an important message to get out to make people aware of those risks. And, as you say, bring them into that conversation around online security and online participation in an active globally networked world, is that right?

NIGEL PHAIR: That’s right.

SUNANDA CREAGH: So what needs to be done? What should governments do to reduce risks and educate people?

NIGEL PHAIR: So the first thing for their internal networks, they need to do a proper risk management exercise. They need to identify the key target assets they hold and work out how sensitive that information is and put appropriate controls around where that data sits. Whether it’s a technology stack, whether it’s internal, cloud-based, those sort of decisions. And secondly, who has access to it, why they have access to it and how they access it. And once you start doing some simple things like that, you’ll find the cyber security posture of parliament house or a political party or anyone else in corporate Australia can really change the way that they’re viewed from a cyber security perspective.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And if, and I know this is speculation, but if the source of the problem was somebody sharing their login credentials or being victim to a phishing scam or victim to some social engineering then it sounds like it’s possible that some education is needed around that issue and what to be aware of and how not to get tricked online.

NIGEL PHAIR: Well, that’s a tough one. There aren’t sufficient technical controls to protect our data and ourselves online. In fact, we should’ve looked for any technical silver bullet. Likewise, we know education doesn’t work either. But education is all we have. So all we can keep doing is reinforce the message, particularly amongst young people as they grow up and participate in the online economy, and hopefully as time goes on we’ll be better protected for it.

SUNANDA CREAGH: In other words, not forgetting to address the capacity for human error in our effort to cover off and protect ourselves from technical error.

NIGEL PHAIR: Human error, but also the use of third parties and outlying people that you might not have specific command and control over.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And going back to this week’s hack, if I am an individual who has given my details as a donor or as a supporter to a political party, what does this hack tell us about what we as individuals might do in future to protect our data?

NIGEL PHAIR: Well, if you think you’ve (experienced) a loss of your data through this process, the first thing to do – contact the party that you’ve made say the donation or whatever it might be to. Secondly would be to start thinking about how that data or information that’s been stolen might be used against you – whether it’s identity theft or takeover, for example. So you need to start monitoring your bank accounts, you need to start thinking about consumer credit that might be done in your name. So you should be probably doing a credit reference check.

SUNANDA CREAGH: What advice do you give to people who want to use best practice in keeping their details safe online?

NIGEL PHAIR: Best thing you can do is use strong and long passwords. More stealthy it is, the harder it will be to guess by anyone else. Second, don’t replay the same password across multiple logins. Thirdly, be really wary when online and navigating around social media and e-commerce and other places. Really think about where you put your personal information in and why you’re placing it into a particular website or a portal.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Now, in the US we’ve heard about state actors really appearing to have an influence on election outcomes. How concerned do you think Australians should be about that happening here?

NIGEL PHAIR: I think we should be very concerned, we’ve got a great case study from the US. We’re very allied to the US and when you look at nation states that have disrupted that election I think it’s a given that there’s many out there that’ll disrupt ours.

SUNANDA CREAGH: So what can we do about that?

NIGEL PHAIR: It’s a tough one. We need to start working with all the players involved. And this is where the social media companies come into it. Your Googles, your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Instagrams etc. Because that’s the place of choice that nation states will use to send out any bespoke messaging.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Should we be changing any progression we’re making in Australia towards electronic voting?

NIGEL PHAIR: We have zero progression towards electronic voting, unfortunately, and I think it’s a great thing. But because we had the census failure, because we had the robo-debt issues, because we had the My Health Record issues, as a population there’s no way in my generation that we will see electronic voting. We just won’t countenance it because of the perceived risks. I’m a pro-online guy. We doom and gloom everything online too much and I’m guilty for doing that. But we want people to participate online. We are great and early adopters of mobile smart devices and we love being online itself, so it makes sense for service delivery to be online, it makes sense to order your food online, to do social media, participate in everything, there’s a lot of good benefit. But because we hear this messaging all the time about the government can’t deal with online issues, there’s already this level of distrust and dissatisfaction out there that voting will just be another one of those things. And the facts just don’t support that.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Would there be anything that you’d change about the way political parties collect or are allowed to collect data on people given that they seem to be a perfect target or a growing target?

NIGEL PHAIR: Oh, there’s lots I’d change. Primary to that is the Privacy Act and adherence to the privacy principles of which political parties don’t need to.

SUNANDA CREAGH: In what way? What change would you make?

NIGEL PHAIR: Well, I’d ensure that political parties have to adhere to the privacy principles when it comes to the collection, the storage, retention and dissemination of personally identifying information.

SUNANDA CREAGH: And what are the privacy principles?

NIGEL PHAIR: Well the privacy principles, there’s 13 of them, inform organisations in Australia where they have a turnover of more than A$3 million about how they should collect data, how they should store that data, how they should disseminate it and how they should destroy it. There’s some simple advice that’s provided by the Australian Office of the Information Commissioner. And they’re quite easy to adhere to, but unfortunately political parties are exempt from that and I see that as being a bad thing.

SUNANDA CREAGH: So we’re at a point where I guess you’d have to assume that basically anybody could be a target for a hack and any organisation could be. So what options are there for organisations like political parties that don’t have My Health Record level of security set ups or government scale security set ups?

NIGEL PHAIR: Well, the first thing they have to do is acknowledge that they’re are a target. Then they have to go through a risked-based process to understand what their information assets are, what their technology stack is, and who has access to it and make sound investment decisions around that. We can no longer, as a society, just say “it’s not us that gets hacked, it’s always someone else”. I mean, there is a cost of participating online.

SUNANDA CREAGH: Nigel Phair, thank you so much for talking to us.

NIGEL PHAIR: Pleasure.

– ref. ‘I think we should be very concerned’: A cyber crime expert on this week’s hack and what needs to happen next – http://theconversation.com/i-think-we-should-be-very-concerned-a-cyber-crime-expert-on-this-weeks-hack-and-what-needs-to-happen-next-112070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig O’Neill, Director of the Macquarie Planetary Research Centre/Associate Professor in Geodynamics, Macquarie University

It’s almost 40 years since scientists discovered what wiped out the dinosaurs: an asteroid hitting Earth near modern-day Mexico. That was it, or so we thought.

A paper published today in Science further supports an alternative hypothesis: that catastrophic events following the impact could have helped cause the end of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life.

This builds on earlier work – including some published last year – suggesting a connection between the asteroid impact, increased volcanic eruptions, and the mass extinction event.

Sudden impact

Back in 1980, the American experimental physicist Luis Alvarez, his geologist son Walter and their colleagues published an influential paper in the journal Science.

Read more: Life quickly finds a way: the surprisingly swift end to evolution’s big bang

In it, they outlined evidence of a global catastrophe, buried in a layer spread all over the planet, about 66 million years ago.

They found high levels of iridium – a rare element in Earth’s crust, but common in meteorites. They found shocked quartz – grains of quartz with telltale fractures from the blast wave of the impact, as well as evidence of molten rock thrown out from the impact blast.

With the later discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, the case seemed sealed.

The reign of the dinosaurs ended with a meteorite impact, marking the end of the Cretaceous, and start of the Paleogene period, called the K-Pg boundary.

Was there something else?

Yet within the Earth science community, discontent continued to simmer.

Two of the largest mass extinctions in the geological record both coincide with the largest exposed continental flood basalt events in the past 542 million years. They are the end of the Permian 251 million years ago, and – as today’s Science paper highlights – the dinosaur extinction at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

The coincidence seems too great.

In understanding the link between flood volcanism, meteorite impacts and extinctions, timing is everything.

In the new Science paper, a team from the United States and India present some of the most precise dates yet for the enormous eruptions in India, in a unit known as the Deccan Traps – an enormous flood basalt province in Western India that covers more than 500,000km² and in places is more than 2km thick.

Map outlining exposed areas of the Deccan Traps in modern day India. Courtney Sprain

They found that the best date for the Chicxulub impact – at 66.052 million years ago – was within 50,000 years of the peak eruption period of the Deccan Traps, meaning that the impact, and the ramp-up in volcanism, were essentially simultaneous.

A seismic connection

A connection between an impact in the Caribbean and volcanism in the Indian Ocean may seem tenuous, but in planetary science these associations are not uncommon.

One dramatic example is the Caloris Basin on the planet Mercury – a 1,500km-wide structure from an earlier meteorite impact.

Antipodal (at the opposite side of the planet) to this is a bizarre, fractured landscape called the disrupted terrain, which formed from shock waves from the impact at Caloris.

This forms a precedent of sorts – an impact can create geological changes at vast distances. But back on Earth 66 million years ago, Chicxulub and the Deccan Traps weren’t quite antipodal.

The Deccan Traps formed when that part of what is now India was roughly over present-day Reunion Island, a small French Island near Madagascar. This island is still volcanically active, and powered by the same mantle upwelling that caused the Deccan volcanism.

The Yucatan Peninsula, like much of the Americas, was significantly closer to Europe (see below).

Reconstruction of Earth’s plates at 66 million years ago. The stars show the position of the Deccan Traps near India, and Chicxulub impact in Mexico. Image created by C O’Neill using GPlates (Gplates.org), Author provided

But that may not matter. It has long been argued, since at least Charles Darwin in 1840, that earthquakes may trigger eruptions.

The mechanisms are not well understood. Suggestions range from bubble formation in magmas, to the development of fractures in the crust allowing magma to escape faster.

It has been recognised, though, that despite their distance from earthquakes, some volcanoes are simply more sensitive to earthquake activity than others, particularly very active volcanoes. Few volcanic events were more active than the Deccan Traps.

Deccan Traps lava flows in Western Ghats, India. Courtney Sprain

Increased volcanic activity

At the same time as the Deccan volcanic ramp-up, the global mid-ocean ridge system in the Pacific and Indian Oceans seems to have experienced increased activity.

Formed when two plates move apart, ocean ridges form the most extensive volcanic system on the planet.

Analysis of global gravity has indicated anomalously thick crust at the K-Pg boundary, formed due to excess volcanic activity. This effect is only seen in the fastestspreading, and thus most volcanically active, systems in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Together, these observations suggest a global pulse of volcanic input at the time of the Cretaceous mass extinction, driven by the shock wave of the Chicxulub impact.

Wipeout

Exactly how this perfect storm of natural disasters – an asteroid collision and increased volcanic activity – drove the mass extinction of so much life on Earth is unclear at the moment.

As Science paper’s first author, Courtney Sprain, a former UC Berkeley doctoral student now at the University of Liverpool, UK, puts it:

Either the Deccan eruptions did not play a role – which we think unlikely – or a lot of climate-modifying gases were erupted during the lowest volume pulse of the eruptions.

Read more: Curious Kids: How many dinosaurs in total lived on Earth during all periods?

Volcanism can warm the Earth, due to eruption of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon-dioxide. It can, along with impacts, also cool the atmosphere by adding sulfur aerosols or dust, respectively.

Gases can also reach the atmosphere from magma stewing below the surface, even without eruptions.

It’s not precisely clear how all these combined to decimate terrestrial and marine ecosystems, but an accurate timeline of events is critical to unravelling these interactions.

– ref. How the dinosaurs went extinct: asteroid collision triggered potentially deadly volcanic eruptions – http://theconversation.com/how-the-dinosaurs-went-extinct-asteroid-collision-triggered-potentially-deadly-volcanic-eruptions-112134

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, The University of Queensland

In a scene right out of a thriller, agents from the Filipino National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) raided journalist and editor Maria Ressa’s Manila office at 5pm on Wednesday February 13, after most courts had closed. They took her from the Rappler newsroom where she is editor, to a police watch house and threw her in a cell.

Ressa’s lawyer bagged up enough cash to post bail and rushed to the only available judge who was presiding over the night court. The judge refused bail, forcing the journalist to spend the night in prison before another judge finally released her the following day.

Ressa’s crime? According to the NBI, she had been arrested on charges of “cyber-libel” – online defamation – for a story alleging a prominent businessman was involved in criminal activity.

Why it matters

Maria Ressa’s case is important not only because a government used a crime statute to intimidate and lock up a journalist for what should have been treated as a civil dispute, but because of what it says about the way governments are increasingly using the “rule of law” to silence the legitimate work of journalists.

“As a journalist, I know firsthand how the law is being weaponised against perceived critics,” Ressa told CNN.

“I’m not a critic,” she continued. “I’m a journalist and I’m doing my job, holding the government to account.”

Ressa is one of the world’s most decorated reporters. A former CNN correspondent, she set up the news website Rappler.com early in 2012 with a group of colleagues. Since then, it has won numerous awards and become one of the most respected news organisations in the Philippines, fearlessly covering the Duterte government and the consequences of its war on drugs that has claimed thousands of lives.

Last year, TIME Magazine named Ressa a “Person of the Year” – among several journalists including the recently murdered Jamal Khashoggi – for her courageous defence of press freedom.

Ressa was one in a number of journalists recognised by Time Magazine as TIME MAGAZINE / HANDOUT/EPA

Read more: Four journalists, one newspaper: Time Magazine’s Person of the Year recognises the global assault on journalism

Rappler published the disputed story in May 2012, four months before the government passed the cyber-libel law. (Under the Philippines’ constitution, no law can be retroactive.) The law also requires complaints to be filed within a year of publication.

The NBI said Rappler had updated the story in 2014 (it corrected a spelling error), and argued that because the story was still online, the website was guilty of “continuous publication”.

The cyber-libel charge is the latest in a long string of legal attacks Rappler is fighting off. Ressa told CNN she is involved in no less than seven separate cases, including charges of violating laws that prohibit foreign ownership of media companies and tax evasion.

She vehemently denies all the allegations, and to date there has been no evidence to support them. Instead, the legal assault has widely been condemned as a blatant attack on press freedom.

After the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – responsible for registering companies in the Philippines – warned it was revoking Rappler’s license to operate because of breaches of the ownership laws, Philippines Senator Risa Hontiveros tweeted this was “a move straight out of the dictator’s playbook. I urge the public and all media practitioners to defend press freedom and the right to speak truth to power.”

The Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines expressed “deep concern” over the SEC decision, saying it was “tantamount to killing the online news site”. And, the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines said the decision

will be remembered in Philippine press history infamy. It is the day that a government built on democratic principles struck a blow on one of the pillars of Asia’s most vibrant democracy.

The SEC has allowed Rappler to continue operating while the case is pending, but the threat of closure remains.

In its defence, the country’s justice department denied it was an attack on press freedom, arguing free speech did not give licence to engage in libel. That is true of course, but the way the authorities in the Philippines have been twisting the law to suit a blatantly political purpose should be troubling to all of us.

Read more: Maria Ressa: journalists need protection in Duterte’s Philippines, but we must also heed the stories they tell

How governments silence journalists

The Duterte administration isn’t the first to do this. It happened to my two colleagues and I in Egypt, where we were charged and convicted for terrorism offences after we spoke to the Muslim Brotherhood – the group who had six months earlier been ousted from power as the first legitimately elected government in Egypt’s history.

Peter Greste and colleagues were arrested in Egypt in 2014. KHALED ELFIQI/EPA

As responsible journalists, we had a duty to speak to all parties involved in the political crisis, and for doing our jobs, we were sentenced to seven years for “promoting terrorist ideology”.

Turkey is the world’s most prolific jailer of journalists, with 68 in prison. Yet all are there on terrorism charges.

And the problem is not limited to authoritarian regimes. As much as former US President Barack Obama spoke out in our defence while we were imprisoned in Cairo, his administration used the Espionage Act (passed in 1917 to deal with foreign spies) more than all his predecessors combined.

The act was applied against government workers leaking information to the press. If the leaks exposed genuinely sensitive information, this would be understandable, but in almost every case it was to go after journalists or their sources revealing politically embarrassing stories.

Read more: United States will stay on the Greste case, Ambassador says

In Australia, a slew of laws have come in that, in their own way, choke off journalists’ ability to hold the government, courts and individuals to account. Whether it is the data retention law that makes it almost impossible to protect sources, or the chronic overuse of suppression orders that restrict journalists’ capacity to report on court cases, or defamation laws weighted heavily in against the media, all make the our societies more opaque without providing protection for legitimate journalistic inquiry.

As Maria Ressa said after she was released on bail:

Press freedom is not just about journalists. This is certainly not just about me or Rappler. Press freedom is the foundation of every Filipino’s right to the truth. We will keep fighting. We will hold the line. This has become more important than ever.

– ref. Press freedom under attack: why Filipino journalist Maria Ressa’s arrest should matter to all of us – http://theconversation.com/press-freedom-under-attack-why-filipino-journalist-maria-ressas-arrest-should-matter-to-all-of-us-112056

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Nixon, Lecturer, Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science, Swinburne University of Technology

The Morrison government has finally agreed to a royal commission into the abuse of people living with disability – if the states get on board.

After hearing horrific tales of abuse and neglect in the media this week, it’s easy to understand why the government waved the motion through parliament: some of our most vulnerable citizens have been beaten, raped, and even killed at the hands of those supposedly caring for them.

The statistics are alarming. Up to 90% of women with disability have been sexually assaulted. And people with disability are three times as likely to die prematurely than the general population from causes that could have been prevented with better quality care.

But to provide victims with justice, we need to better understand why people with disabilities are more vulnerable to abuse and assault.

Read more: Why schools desperately need a royal commission into the abuse of disabled people

There’s no one reason

There are lots of theories as to why people with disabilities are at increased risk of victimisation.

Some scholars suggest it’s because people with disability are more likely to be economically disadvantaged, making them more vulnerable to crimes. They say it’s social disadvantage and not disability per se that leads to higher rates of assault.

But this doesn’t explain high rates of abuse even when people with disability are well-resourced, or who live in privileged areas.

Then there is the dependency-stress theory. This suggests that because people with disability often need carers, their carers get stressed and sometimes act aggressively in response to demands.

This doesn’t stack up well either. It seems to blame the victim – “if only you didn’t need so much”. And attributing abuse of people with disability to carer stress probably wouldn’t be helpful in reducing rates of assault.

They may also be unintended consequences of attributing abuse to dependency and stress. Stressed carers may be unwilling to seek support if they think people will suspect they may abuse the person they care for, and this could in turn drive abusive behaviour underground.

More compelling is the idea that increased risk of victimisation is a combination of factors in the environment (such as chaotic, poorly run residential care homes), the motives of the offender (such as sexual gratification), and characteristics of the victim (the person may depend on the offender for help with daily living, such as bathing).

Read more: We count what matters, and violence against people with disability matters

There are also aspects of victims with a disability that make them more appealing to a potential offender. A disabled person with communication difficulties, for example, may require help with dressing and may have trouble reporting the offence. This provides an opportunity to offend with a low risk of detection.

One strength of these types of multi-factor explanations is the recognition of the complexity of victimisation, which is unlikely to be the product of a single cause.

Some crimes are seen as less serious

Explanations of offending against people with disabilities must include the social context. As Australian Disability Discrimination Commissioner Alastair McEwin argues, as a society we often view crimes against people with disabilities as less serious.

We see evidence of this type of disempowerment in the criminal justice system. If people with disability are seen as less competent as witnesses, or can’t access support to navigate the distressing nature of the court system, this creates barriers to the prosecution of offenders, and perpetuates abuse cultures.

In fact, crimes tend to have to be very serious to be reported to police at all. In our research, we found reports of sexual assault were more than six times more likely for people with intellectual disability, compared with people without a disability.

But when looking at reports of theft, this was far less likely to be recorded by police when the victim has an intellectual disability.

People with intellectual disability aren’t less likely to be victims of theft. Research shows that when you ask people with disability about their experiences, theft is quite common. Rather, it seem these types of offences don’t necessarily meet a “threshold” for reporting to police.

Read more: Abuse and neglect of people with disabilities demands zero-tolerance response

Still, even violent crime and rape still go unreported in official records, often because of fear of a loss of services for the person. This is especially true if the service where the assault happened is the only local option, or the perpetrator is a family member.

A person with disability, able and given the opportunity to self-report, may be discouraged by fear of losing their home, being placed in a more restrictive or unfamiliar setting, fear of reprisal, or even out of affection for the offender.

Time for justice

We need to provide opportunities for people with disabilities to report victimisation, and empower them to access justice. A royal commission is a good place to start.

We also need to provide stable housing, support and personal care that is not reliant on a single service, or a single carer. This would mean viable alternatives are available for people with disabilities who may find themselves in dangerous or abusive circumstances.

Fundamentally, we need to shift community attitudes, starting with service delivery, police, health professionals and the legal profession. When society holds attitudes that people with disability are lesser, this creates obstacles to accurately accounting for, and holding to account, the instances of abuse and assault we know are all too common.

– ref. People with disability are more likely to be victims of crime – here’s why – http://theconversation.com/people-with-disability-are-more-likely-to-be-victims-of-crime-heres-why-111999

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon KA Robson, Honorary Professor, University of Sydney

Many people on a tropical island getaway might take a jungle hike, or learn about the local wildlife. My colleagues and I went one better: we tracked down the world’s biggest bee species, which hadn’t been spotted for decades, while on holiday in Indonesia’s North Molucca islands.

Wallace’s giant bee, Megachile pluto, is fascinating for many reasons. It’s the largest of all known living bees, with a body length about that of a human thumb and a wingspan of more than 6cm. What’s more, its last confirmed sighting in the field was in 1981. After numerous efforts to rediscover it, it was unclear whether the species still remained in the wild.

Beenormous: M. pluto is roughly four times the size of a European honeybee. Clay Bolt, Author provided

The bee also has a special place in scientific history. It was first collected by the British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, as part of his work in the Malay Archipelago. He described the female bee as “a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle”.

Wallace not only independently derived the theory of natural selection as an explanation for evolution alongside Charles Darwin, but his detailed studies of the distribution of animals gave rise to the famous Wallace Line, a boundary that splits Australia and Asia and helps to explain the distribution patterns of many plants and animals.

Read more: Wallacea: a living laboratory of evolution

Holiday plans

How did four biologists from across the globe, two from Australia (myself and Glen Chilton) and two from the United States (Eli Wyman and Clay Bolt), end up on this journey?

My involvement started at the prompting of Glen, who although specialising in ornithology and writing was interested in both Wallace and the rediscovery of potentially extinct species. He became aware of the existence of the world’s largest bee, and after two years of cajoling I agreed that searching for the bee would represent an excellent holiday.

During the planning for our trip, we became aware that Eli and Clay were also, independently, planning to travel to the Moluccas to search for M. pluto. After a brief Skype call we decided it made sense to join forces and collaborate. So despite our two duos never having met in person, we were a team heading out into the field.

And what a great team it was: Eli’s expertise in all things bee-related; Clay’s fantastic photographic skills; Glen’s enthusiasm and knowledge of Wallace; and my own fascination with the evolution of insect behaviour.

On the ground

We converged on the island of Ternate and began our search across the North Molucca islands for termite mounds containing bee-sized holes, helped by two excellent local guides, Ekawati Ka’aba and Iswan Maujad.

M. pluto is a solitary bee species that forms communal nests inside termite mounds, using its mandibles to collect and apply tree resin to the inner walls of its nest. So we knew what to look out for.

After five fruitless days of searching termite mounds, we were about to call it quits and head for a late lunch when we spotted another mound near the edge of a path.

Inspection with a torch and binoculars revealed a hole that looked promising. Clay scaled the tree and reported that the hole looked to be lined with resin – very exciting. Our guides constructed a platform from branches, we inspected the hole in more detail, and there she was. Cue intense excitement and cries of jubilation as we all rushed to peer inside and catch a glimpse.

Now that we had the bee, we had to be able to prove it, so we put away our iPhone cameras in favour of better-quality (but riskier: the bee might escape!) footage with more professional photographic and video equipment. We gently coaxed her out of her nest and into a small flight chamber, and then eventually Clay got the magic shot, where we released the bee back onto her nest and photographed her at the entrance to her home. Mission accomplished.

Capturing the evidence. Simon Robson, Author provided

Confirming that the world’s largest bee species is still alive is an enticing development for ecologists. We can learn a lot about the ecology, behaviour and ecological significance of this giant. Amid a global decline in many insects, it’s wonderful to discover this special species is still surviving.

Read more: Ten years after the crisis, what is happening to the world’s bees?

We also hope our discovery will galvanise conservation movements in Indonesia, and we were inspired by the reception our journey met with many people in the conservation and forestry fields of the North Molucca islands.

We would love more work to be done to assess the bee’s current conservation status. Plans to produce a documentary about Wallace and the rediscovery of this bee are underway, and we hope that its rediscovery provides further impetus to conservation efforts generally.

Not a bad outcome for a holiday!

– ref. Catch the buzz: how a tropical holiday led us to find the world’s biggest bee – http://theconversation.com/catch-the-buzz-how-a-tropical-holiday-led-us-to-find-the-worlds-biggest-bee-112138

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia Lane, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney

A “granny flat agreement” is an informal arrangement between a parent and their adult child or children. The parent (often elderly) contributes funds to create granny flat accommodation either by modifying a home or by buying a suitable property in the name of the children. In return they agree to provide the parent with a lifetime right to live in the granny flat, or at least until the parent needs residential care.

Many of these arrangements work out well. The older person then enjoys the love and support of having their family close by as they age.

When an arrangement of this kind goes wrong, however, it can seriously threaten the wealth, autonomy and dignity of the elderly parent. If the relationship between the parent and child, or child’s spouse, breaks down and the parent is asked to leave the property, he or she may be left with nothing.

Read more: Flatting in retirement: how to provide suitable and affordable housing for ageing people

Read more: Co-housing works well for older people, once they get past the image problem

How does the law treat granny flats?

The parent’s only chance of recovering her contribution is to go to court. These court cases depend on applying a complex set of rules.

The parent must prove the contribution was not a gift but that they supplied funds as part of an arrangement that the parties would live together. Agreements creating interests in land need to be in writing, and usually there is no written agreement.

The court can apply equitable principles. A parent who contributed to improving the property ought to have the contributions back, or a proportionate share of the property returned if the arrangement ends prematurely, because it is unjust for children to retain the benefit of the contribution without providing the granny flat.

A parent who made a contribution to renovations or extensions ought to get that back if living arrangements break down. Paul Maguire/Shutterstock

Where the court finds that the parent relied on a promise by the child that the parent would have an interest in the house, or at least a right to live with the child for life, the child can be required to repay the contribution.

This often means the child must sell their house if they cannot refinance to obtain the money to pay the parent. If the parent is entitled to a share of the property, the house has to be sold to realise the parent’s share.

The problem for parents is that court cases cost money, unless Legal Aid is available, but only parents who are truly destitute qualify for assistance. The parent has to produce evidence of the arrangement or the promise. They often have to recount conversations from many years ago to prove there was an arrangement. The children have to spend money on their own lawyers.

Parents and children very rarely put these agreements in writing and almost never consult a lawyer. Sometimes, to help the child get finance, a parent may have told the lender the contribution was a gift.

All this makes court cases complex, difficult and expensive.

Read more: The Financial Services Royal Commission highlights the vulnerability of many older Australians

In New South Wales, the Property (Relationships) Act 1984 may apply to granny flat disputes, but the parent still has to show how they contributed to the child’s property. Other states and territories – including Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and ACT – have similar laws for couples, which might apply to family arrangements. However, the NSW legislation is broader, which makes things worse for parents outside NSW.

When a dispute arises, the parties usually want to resolve the matter as quickly and as cheaply as possible. But court cases can take a year or more to get to hearing. Affidavits must be prepared and financial documents reviewed. During this time the parent may be living in emergency housing, often at public expense.

The picture gets worse if the child’s marriage breaks down. The parent’s claim then gets taken into family property proceedings between the child and their spouse in the Family Court or Federal Circuit Court. This can take even longer than going to the Supreme Court.

A better way to resolve disputes

Parties to these disputes need fast access to a system of practical rules for separating the parties’ property interests, and one that offers early mediation. These rules would cover factors such as increases in the value of the property, how long the parties lived together, what benefits they received, and other discretionary considerations. Such rules might provide the basis for a set of statutory guidelines for a tribunal to apply.

Civil and administrative tribunals emphasise informality and conciliation, so giving these tribunals jurisdiction to resolve granny flat disputes according to statutory guidelines would arguably be more efficient than going to the Supreme Court or Family Court.

Parents and children who trust each other may be reluctant to get legal advice on a granny flat arrangement, but they really should. Alexander Raths/Shutterstock

Parties really should seek legal advice on granny flat arrangements before they commit to the deal. But parents often trust their children and are optimistic that they can live together as a family. If a lawyer provides advice to an elderly parent individually and with an awareness of their client’s possible incapacity or vulnerability to undue influence, that gives all parties a chance to decide what they want to happen if the relationship breaks down.

Centrelink recognises granny flat arrangements, so parents’ contributions are not automatically treated as a gift. Gifting attracts an asset test under which the parent might be deemed still to have the funds contributed, which could reduce their pension.

The children can also be worse off if the Tax Office considers that the child accepting the contribution made a capital gain because the parents’ contribution increased the value of the home.

Although the Australian Law Reform Commission has looked at some aspects of this issue, action is need to reduce the complexity of existing equitable and statutory rules. Elderly parents should not have to take their children to court in expensive legal proceedings to retrieve the contribution that was meant to ensure they had a secure home in their later years.

Read more: We need more flexible housing for 21st-century lives

– ref. When granny flats go wrong – perils for parents highlight need for law reform – http://theconversation.com/when-granny-flats-go-wrong-perils-for-parents-highlight-need-for-law-reform-103335

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

The supermarket giant Woolworths this week broke ranks and announced it was going to stop selling A$1 per litre milk. It will now charge A$1.10, or A$2.20 for two litres.

Chief executive Brad Banducci made it clear that there was more to the decision than straightforward economics:

We’ve heard the outlook will continue to be extremely tough for dairy farmers… This is affecting milk production and farm viability, which is devastating for farmers and the regional communities in which they live.

The Labor Party has been threatening to impose a minimum farm-gate price.

Will what Woolworths is doing help farmers? Only a bit.

Milk prices are internationally set

The so-called “milk wars” began on Australia Day 2011 when Coles announced it was cutting milk prices to A$1 a litre.

Woolworths and Aldi followed suit.

The milk market does not just consist of dairy farmers, supermarkets and customers. There are also the processors – companies such as the ASX-listed Murray Goulburn, Parmalat, Lion and Fonterra – that stand between farmers and supermarkets. Then there is the international market for dairy products like butter, cheese and milk powder.

The biggest determinant of farm gate prices in Australia is not what the major supermarkets do, but world dairy prices.

The Department of Agriculture says 37% of Australian milk production is exported.

Add to that the roughly 35% that goes into locally consumed butter, cheese and milk powder that is subject to competition from imports. You can quickly see the prices of nearly three-quarters of the milk produced in Australia are set globally.

Dairy Australia has a higher estimate. Because even fresh milk is subject to foreign competition, it believes 90% of the annual movement in farm-gate prices comes from changes in international prices.

Those changes are beyond the effective control of Australian farmers and regulators.

Many of them are the result of changes in the exchange rate.

International prices are generally set in US dollars. That means a rising Australian dollar can cut the return to Australian farmers, while a falling Australian dollar can enhance it.

Farmers have been angry at Coles and Woolworths for squeezing prices. Protest rally in Melbourne, 2016. Mal Fairclough/AAP

Processors get the cream

It is tempting to think an increase in retail prices, like the Woolworths 10 cents, would help farmers. But it normally wouldn’t, much.

Someone between the cow and the customer would get the 10 cents, but not necessarily the farmer.

When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission examined the dairy industry last year it:

did not obtain any evidence that supermarket pricing, including $1 per litre milk, has a direct impact on farm-gate prices

Further, farmers’ lack of bargaining power means they are unlikely to benefit from an increase in the retail (or wholesale) prices of private label milk or other dairy products

Even if processors were to receive higher wholesale prices from sales to supermarkets, this does not mean the processors will pay farmers any more than they have to.

This time it will be different. Woolworths says “every cent of the increase will end up with Australian dairy farmers”. The processors have guaranteed it.

Normally there would be no guarantee that an increase in the wholesale price would flow through to farmers. The processors could pocket it, and the inefficient ones could use it to stay in business, to the long-term detriment of customers.

Consumers are at one end of the line…

Banducci said Woolworths was “acutely aware of the budgetary pressures facing many of our customers and have not taken this decision lightly”.

He is right to recognise it will hurt customers.

It won’t, mind you, hurt customers who buy branded milk like a2 – whose marketing success under chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka has pushed the value of the company to A$10 billion, making it bigger than Lendlease, Medibank Private, the AMP and Coca-Cola Amatil. Not bad for a company that didn’t exist at the turn of the century.

Instead it will hurt customers who can afford it the least. For a typical family of four with average milk consumption, the extra 10 cents a litre works out at about A$40 a year.

…and farmers at the other

Dairy farming is difficult, and much of Australia is less than ideally suited to it. Farmers have to contend with volatile prices, drought and isolation.

They are the least powerful players in the “value chain” that runs from cows to customers via importers, processors and supermarkets.

Neither government intervention nor higher retail prices can do much to help them.

Read more: Low milk prices unearth the supply chain’s dirty secrets

– ref. Vital Signs: why more expensive milk won’t help farmers much – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-why-more-expensive-milk-wont-help-farmers-much-112145

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angelina Hurley, PhD candidate, Griffith University

I am from Queensland. Unfortunately, from personal experience I know racism well. An early recollection of this was at six years old, my first sporting event at a new school.

I beat the local, white school hero in my opening sprint race. My win wasn’t met with congratulation, but instead with shock and tongue-in-cheek commentary about how it wasn’t a surprise I won because I was black, and black people run fast. Also, if I ever got in trouble with the cops (inevitability implied) at least I could easily get away. Hilarious!

First Nations people’s lives are dominated by white opinion and voices. In this power relation, humour is of central importance. For Aboriginal people, ridicule, denigration and insult delivered under the guise of, or trying to be passed off as, humour is nothing new. Negative stereotypes of First Nations peoples constitute the humour of the dominant culture, which often dehumanises the marginalised “other”.

Yet humour is also a way of giving voice to Aboriginal people, of telling the truth. What interests me, makes me laugh the most, and what I believe should be a focus and obligation, is taking the opportunity to educate through humour. Not being scared to tell it like it is.

Still, whatever is usually presented as the “norm” in mainstream society, predominantly in the media, has much influence over what informs perceptions of what is natural and normal. A series of recent events have prompted much commentary about what is and isn’t offensive – and to whom – all under the umbrella of humour. And they were laced with attitudes and racial stereotypes that did not bode well for better relations with First Nations peoples.

My first examples are of cartoons by Mark Knight and the late Bill Leak. I do understand that the definition of a caricature is an exaggerated and skewed depiction of certain characteristics. However, several now notorious examples by Leak were laced with more than just humorous intent. This so-called humour was just a racist set of negative stereotypes concerned with sex, violence and family life. Two stand out: his cartoon that portrayed domestic violence as part of a usual cultural experience for First Nations peoples, and another that painted Aboriginal men as irresponsible alcoholics.

Stereotypes like these also ring true for other people of colour, as we saw with the cartoon by Mark Knight depicting Serena Williams at the US Open. Said Knight: “The cartoon was just about Serena on the day having a tantrum. That’s basically it.”

Yet from the perspective of peoples of colour, it was obvious that the image was not simply about Serena having a tantrum. Not only was there misrepresentation of Serena in the cartoon but also of Naomi Osaka who is of Japanese and Haitian descent but was depicted as a white women with blonde hair. The ugly stereotypes represented here for us were rude and lazy.

Read more: The Herald Sun’s Serena Williams cartoon draws on a long and damaging history of racist caricature

Ignorance not a defence

Given the long careers of both Leak and Knight, it was very hard to believe any rebuttals about their lack of knowledge of the history of their art and denying offensive intent in these depictions. Defences of ignorance and the right to free speech, denials, and claims of being censored by political correctness and reverse racism are disingenuous. To simply respond to the discourse with phrases like “it’s political correctness gone mad” immediately attempts to dismantle and dismiss any relevance and truth behind our voices and perspective.

As a humorist and creative artist myself, I understand and accept the comedic rules around no holds barred and truth telling. However, as South African writer Sisonke Msimang said on the ABC’s Q&A program last September:

I also reject the notion that ignorance can presume innocence and that ongoing ignorance and especially denial is a vehicle for purposeful offence.

It wasn’t just white cartoonists that took us by surprise last year. International comedian and host of the Daily Show Trevor Noah also disappointed us, to say the least. An event highly anticipated by First Nations audiences – his tour of Australia – turned sour very quickly when a YouTube clip of Noah’s emerged. It quickly made the rounds through our community, raising a few red flags and a lot of questions. The call went out. Should we be supporting this guy?

The offence lay in the inference of us as Aboriginal women being inferior, being ugly and repulsive, and only worthy of consideration as objects of sexual satisfaction. I was also personally surprised at Noah’s inability to draw parallels between South Africa’s apartheid and our White Australia policy – after all, his mother is black.

Noah since 2013 has built a reputation for using humour to speak against and critically analyse racism. He has a widespread popularity that is explicitly based on anti-racist views. Dr Chelsea Bond and I subsequently invited him on our radio show to explain himself. He attempted to – but no apology was forthcoming.

What underlies the representation of Aboriginal peoples in mainstream society is a long history of denial of the norms of the brutality, cruelty and genocide. The term “political correctness” is often used to imply that those who resent this sort of racialised comedy just lack a sense of humour.

But we use humour in a different way. In Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour, Professor Lillian Holt provides an overview of what she deems Australian First Nations peoples’ uniquely indefinable sense of humour. It is a universal vehicle used by the disadvantaged and marginalised as a means of expression, a tool of healing, survival and diversion from hard times.

Holt cites a scene in Phillip Noyce’s Backroads (1977), one of the first Australian films to be made with Indigenous collaboration. In it, Bill Hunter’s character, Jack, stops to ask directions from a blackfella sitting by the road.

Hey, Jackie, can I take this road to the pub?

You might as well, you white bastard. You took everything else.

Bill Hunter and Gary Foley in Back Roads (1977). imdb

Social media

A lot of comedy evolves from being a part of an oppressed group and making sense of that. And while you are trying to make sense of it you have to laugh about it.

Social media have become an important avenue for Indigenous humour. It’s a safer, less policed and regulated space in which to speak out than we’ve historically been used to.

A perfect example of this was the response to the recent Studio 10 panel in which Kerri-Anne Kennerley forcefully aired her views about First Nations peoples in remote communities. Her claims that those attending a Change the Date rally had probably never even been to the outback or a regional community weren’t taken lightly by our people.

What Kerri-Anne and Studio 10 received in response were not only expert, factually informed, firsthand responses, but also black clap backs (i.e. a quick, witty, critical comeback). The Aboriginal twittersphere was quickly inundated with the hash tag #ThingsKAKdid.

Tweets under #ThingsKAKdid included mock postings of fictional events such as the time KAK went on the Freedom Rides, the time she opened the Aboriginal tent embassy and the time she toured with the Warumpi Band. One post featured Kerri-Anne’s head superimposed onto Gough Whitlam’s, handing dirt from the land into the hands of legendary Aboriginal rights activist Vincent Lingiari.

As always in times of hardship, attack and dismissal, we survive and prevail through humour.

– ref. Friday essay: it’s not funny to us – an Aboriginal perspective on political correctness and humour – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-its-not-funny-to-us-an-aboriginal-perspective-on-political-correctness-and-humour-111535

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

As a parliament that will be unmourned winds down to the election, this fortnight has been the season for goodbyes from those departing (voluntarily).

The most dramatic was Thursday’s announcement by Julie Bishop that she isn’t running again.

Bishop’s claim she’d reconsidered her plans on the basis she believed the government will be re-elected doesn’t wash. She was always expected to bail out – it was a matter of when she’d say so.

Though anticipated, Bishop’s departure is another blow for the woman-poor Liberal party – and another reminder of the costs of tearing down Malcolm Turnbull.

Read more: Liberals lose yet another high-profile woman, yet still no action on gender

If he had remained prime minister, the government would be going to the polls with Bishop deputy Liberal leader and foreign minister. The Liberals would still have a “woman problem”, but they’d also have a woman in their leadership team – she of those famous red shoes she dubbed her “comfortable work boot”.

Bishop still smarts over her colleagues, including those from her home state of Western Australia as well as the party’s moderates, refusing to support her in the August leadership ballot, when she was humiliated with only 11 votes. The moderates argued they were operating tactically, to stymie Peter Dutton.

Would the government have been better off electorally if the Liberals had chosen Bishop over Scott Morrison? If Morrison does badly in May, history will ask that question.

Bishop is not the street brawler Morrison is. But if she had won the leadership and gone immediately to an election, the result could have been interesting.

Read more: Julie Bishop to quit parliament at the election

Among many others leaving parliament are cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer, former Labor ministers Wayne Swan, Jenny Macklin and Kate Ellis, and Nationals senator John “Wacka” Williams. “Wacka” never served on the frontbench but his dogged pursuit of the financial sector’s scandals gives him a legacy more substantial than many ministers leave.

In this parliament’s dying days a bow is due to Speaker Tony Smith. He’s not retiring but if there is a change of government, his speakership will be over.

When he was press secretary to then-treasurer Peter Costello, the joke about Smith was that he would say to media queries, “off the record, no comment”. As Speaker, Smith has asserted his “voice”; he has been fair and strong. On Thursday, he gave fellow Liberal Tim Wilson a rap over the knuckles for the highly political way he has handled a parliamentary inquiry into the opposition’s policy on franking credits.

It’s often said of organisations that the whole is greater than the sum of the individuals. With our parliament, the contributions of some (albeit too few) individuals outshine the impression voters have of the collective.

No one is sure if the political weather changed in this fractious fortnight, which has been chaotic for both sides.

Labor defeated the government in the House early last week over the medical transfer legislation, but since then has been trying to minimise the harm to itself.

So when the government declared sick transferees would be sent straight to Christmas Island – a plan designed to trap the opposition rather than a sensible medical policy – Bill Shorten just agreed. He wasn’t going to let more political capital seep away.

Labor knows it has taken a hit among some voters with its support for the legislation, though this could be partly mitigated by the issue involving the role of doctors, respected in the community.

The Coalition grabbed the controversy as a life raft, but then found itself blown somewhat off course by the Helloworld affair.

That cluster bomb has managed to strike both a current and a former minister. It started with a story about Finance Minister Mathias Cormann booking flights for a Singapore holiday through a mate, Helloworld CEO and Liberal party treasurer Andrew Burnes, and the company failing to process his credit card for payment.

Read more: View from The Hill: Minister who watches the nation’s credit card overlooks his own

It then spread to disclosures about Helloworld subsidiary QBT getting speedy access to the Australian embassy in Washington, allegedly courtesy of the close friendship Burnes has with ambassador and former treasurer Joe Hockey (a big shareholder in Helloworld.)

Hockey was frustrated that his travel arrangements were being handled unprofessionally, which provided a potential opening for QBT.

Whistleblower Russell Carstensen, formerly group general manager of QBT, wrote in a Thursday letter to a Senate estimates committee that in April 2017, when Carstensen was in Europe, Burnes had contacted him to say “he had arranged a meeting with Mr Hockey and I had to fly home via Washington to meet with him”, which he did.

According to Carstensen, when he asked Burnes how the appointment with the ambassador could be arranged so quickly, Burnes replied “Hockey owes me”.

Burnes late Thursday said he hadn’t organised any meeting, adding “I emphatically deny ever having told Mr Carstensen that Mr Hockey ‘owes me’ or any words to that effect”.

Wherever the story goes from here, the public’s take will be simply one of mates doing favours for mates, adding to people’s cynicism about politicians generally and the government in particular.

The mates affair is unlikely to have the same direct impact as the medical transfer controversy. The strength of that issue, however, will be determined by whether any boats appear. If there are none, Labor could dodge a bullet because the government’s rhetoric will start to sound hollow.

While this fortnight has had that “end of term” feel, of course there is the big test to go before the parliament finishes.

Just as in 2016, a budget will be used as an election launching pad. It’s a gamble for the Coalition. Last time – when the Turnbull government built the budget around company tax cuts – it didn’t end so well.

The Morrison government has to shape an April 2 budget that shores up its economic credentials as well as offering some voter bait – a budget that’s reasonably received on the night and can underpin a campaign.

Bill Shorten must produce a parliamentary reply two days later that mixes demolition with some positive initiatives.

No pressure anyone.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Bishop’s boots were made for walking – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-bishops-boots-were-made-for-walking-112251

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Jensen, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra

Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently said both the Australian Parliament and its major political parties were hacked by a “sophisticated state actor.”

This raises concerns that a foreign adversary may be intending to weaponise, or strategically release documents, with an eye towards altering the 2019 election outcome.

Read more: A state actor has targeted Australian political parties – but that shouldn’t surprise us

While the hacking of party and parliamentary systems is normally a covert activity, influence operations are necessarily noisy and public in order to reach citizens – even if efforts are made to obscure their origins.

If a state actor has designs to weaponise materials recently hacked, we will likely see them seek to inflame religious and ethnic differences, as well as embarrass the major parties in an effort to drive votes to minor parties.

If this comes to pass, there are four things Australians should look for.

1. Strategic interest for a foreign government to intervene

If the major parties have roughly the same policy position in relation to a foreign country, a foreign state would have little incentive to intervene, for example, in favour of Labor against the Coalition.

They may, however, attempt to amplify social divisions between the parties as a way of reducing the ability of Australians to work together after the election.

They may also try to drive down the already low levels of support for democracy and politicians in Australia to further undermine Australian democracy.

Finally, they may also try to drive the vote away from the major parties to minor parties which might be more favourable to their agenda.

This could be achieved by strategically releasing hacked materials which embarrass the major parties or their candidates, moving voters away from those parties and towards minor parties. These stories will likely be distributed first on social media platforms and later amplified by foreign and domestic broadcast media.

It is no secret that Russia and China seek a weakening of the Five Eyes security relationship between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. If weakened, that would undermine the alliance structure which has helped prevent major wars for the last 70 years.

2. Disproportionate attention by foreign media to a local campaign

In the US, although Tulsi Gabbard’s polling numbers rank her near the bottom of declared and anticipated candidates for the Democratic nomination, she has received significant attention from Russia’s overt or “white” propaganda outlets, Sputnik and RT (formerly Russia Today).

The suspected reason for this attention is that some of her foreign policy positions on the Middle East are consistent with Russian interests in the region.

In Australia, we might find greater attention than normal directed at One Nation or Fraser Anning – as well as the strategic promotion of Green candidates in certain places to push political discussion further right and further left at the same time.

3. Promoted posts on Facebook and other social media platforms

Research into the 2016 US election found widespread violations of election law. The vast majority of promoted ads on Facebook during the election campaign were from groups which failed to file with the Federal Election Commission and some of this unregistered content came from Russia.

Ads placed by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which is under indictment by the Mueller investigation, ended up disproportionately in the newsfeeds of Facebook users in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – two of the three states that looked like a lock for Clinton until the very end of the campaign.

What makes Facebook and many other social media platforms particularly of concern is the ability to use data to target ads using geographic and interest categories. One can imagine that if a foreign government were armed with voting data hacked from the parties, this process would be all the more effective.

Read more: New guidelines for responding to cyber attacks don’t go far enough

Seats in Australia which might be targeted include seats like Swan (considered a marginal seat with competition against the Liberals on both the left and the right) and the seats of conservative politicians on GetUp’s “hitlist” – such as Tony Abbott’s and Peter Dutton’s seats of Warringah and Dickson.

4. Focus on identity manipulation, rather than fake news

The term “fake news” suffers from conceptual ambiguities – it means different things to different people. “Fake news” has been used not just as a form of classification to describe material which “mimics news media content in form but not in organisational process or intent” but also used to describe satire and even as an epithet used to dismiss disagreeable claims of a factual nature.

Studies of propaganda show that information need not be factually false to effectively manipulate target audiences.

The best propaganda uses claims which are factually true, placing them into a different context which can be used to manipulate audiences or by amplifying negative aspects of a group, policy or politician, without placing that information in a wider context.

For example, to amplify concerns about immigrants, one might highlight the immigrant background of someone convicted of a crime, irrespective of the overall propensity for immigrants to commit crimes compared to native born Australians.

This creates what communication scholars call a “representative anecdote” through which people come to understand and think about a topic with which they are otherwise unfamiliar. While immigrants may or may not be more likely to commit crimes than other Australians, the reporting creates that association.

Among the ways foreign influence operations function is through the politicisation of identities. Previous research has found evidence of efforts to heighten ethnic and racial differences through Chinese language WeChat official accounts operating in Australia as well as through Russian trolling efforts which have targeted Australia. This is the same pattern followed by Russia during the 2016 US election.

Liberal democracies are designed to handle conflicts over interests through negotiation and compromise. Identities, however, are less amenable to compromise. These efforts may not be “fake news” but they are effective in undermining the capacity of a democratic nation to mobilise its people in pursuit of common goals.

Read more: How digital media blur the border between Australia and China

The Russian playbook

No country is immune from the risk of foreign influence operations. While historically these operations might have involved the creation of false documents and on the ground operations in target countries, today materials can be sourced, faked, and disseminated from the relative security of the perpetrating country. They may include both authentic and faked documents – making it hard for a campaign to charge that certain documents are faked without affirming the validity of others.

Most importantly, in a digitally connected world, these operations can scale up quickly and reach substantially larger populations than previously possible.

While the Russian interference in the 2016 US election has received considerable attention, Russia is not the only perpetrator and the US is not the only target.

But the Russians created a playbook which other countries can readily draw upon and adapt. The question remains as to who that might be in an Australian context.

– ref. We’ve been hacked – so will the data be weaponised to influence election 2019? Here’s what to look for – http://theconversation.com/weve-been-hacked-so-will-the-data-be-weaponised-to-influence-election-2019-heres-what-to-look-for-112130

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Dew, Professor of Sociology, Victoria University of Wellington

The use of pharmaceuticals is on the rise and, globally, the expenses for drugs are projected to reach US$1.5 trillion by 2021.

The ageing of populations is one of the drivers of this upward trend, but another important influence is our growing tendency to treat conditions and circumstances we didn’t use to medicalise.

Read more: Medicines to treat side effects of other medicines? Sometimes less is more beneficial

Proto diseases

One reason for this medicalisation is the creation of new conditions. The goal of preventing future disability and early death has fashioned new disorders – including high cholesterol and blood pressure. Such proto diseases are based on a person’s risk profile at a time when disease is not present and symptoms are not felt.

Proto diseases can be identified in an ever growing proportion of the population. The belief that treating these conditions will lead to future cost savings drives up drug consumption, aimed at bringing cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose levels into line.

A simple shift towards lowering the threshold that determines when someone should be taking such drugs can lead to a substantial expansion in the number of people who are offered them by health professionals. While these medicines can indeed prevent future disease for individuals, if one takes a population health approach, it is not a given that cost savings will outweigh costs incurred.

Evidence-based medicine

Another driver is the dominance of evidence-based medicine (EBM). The idea of basing medicine on evidence would seem to be common sense. However, sitting at the top of the hierarchy of evidence-based medicine is the evaluation procedure of the double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

Read more: Randomised control trials: what makes them the gold standard in medical research?

This particular type of trial was designed to assess the efficacy of medications. The first such trial assessed the use of streptomycin in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Following the fallout from the thalidomide tragedy in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an increased impetus to put in place rigorous procedures for the assessment of potentially toxic pharmaceuticals by clinical trials. This effort to prevent lethal and dangerous drugs getting on to the market was transformed from a test for new drugs to a standard that all therapeutic interventions were expected to meet.

This remains the case even though many therapeutic interventions – surgery, counselling, public health advice – do not work like drugs and are not as easy to assess. As a consequence, medications are about the only form of therapeutic intervention that can successfully become evidence-based.

Since the development of the evidence-based medicine movement, there has been a trend where health professionals are required to follow evidence-based protocols and guidelines. These guidelines are an effective way of promoting the expansion of medication use. If health professionals do not follow standards and guidelines – for example don’t ask you to take a cholesterol test when you reach a certain age and recommend the cholesterol-lowering drug – they are in danger of being viewed as incompetent practitioners.

For many people their sense of identity is shaped by their relationship to medications. At times they may be reliant on drugs for some quality of life, but they often have to trade off what is gained against at times debilitating side effects.

Read more: We’re all at risk from scary medicine side effects, but we have to weigh the risks with the benefits

Remedies and poisons

Some pharmaceuticals work very well. They can help prolong life and ameliorate symptoms. Many people will recall situations where they were glad a drug was readily available.

But the Greek term pharmakon refers to both remedy and poison. Pharmaceuticals are well known for their toxic effects, which is one reason why access to many drugs is carefully controlled, requiring a medical doctor’s prescription. But research shows that even with doctors overseeing these drugs, side effects occur on a large scale and we have woefully inadequate means of reporting side effects and adverse reactions.

The costs of responding to adverse drug reactions and the disease and premature death they can cause makes side effects an important public health problem. Yet only around 10% of serious adverse drug reactions are reported to agencies that monitor drug safety.

To deal with this issue, we need to consider trends in drug consumption, regulation and policy. We need to understand how decisions about drug use are made in clinical consultations and in homes, and how drug monitoring agencies, drug subsidising agencies and drug trial methodologies work.

There is little resistance to the ever expanding use of pharmaceuticals. Individuals, health professionals and health care institutions, nation states and international health agencies are increasingly governed by the dominance of pharmaceutical approaches to health care.

But there are interventions that we could be putting in place to ameliorate this expansion. We need to develop more rigorous vigilance procedures so that when drugs come on the market, they are carefully monitored for adverse reactions, and both patients and health practitioners are actively encouraged to report any concerns to drug monitoring agencies.

We also need to regulate the advertising of prescription medicines more tightly, particularly in New Zealand where drug companies can advertise their products and only have to make fleeting reference to possible side effects.

– ref. As pharmaceutical use continues to rise, side effects are becoming a costly health issue – http://theconversation.com/as-pharmaceutical-use-continues-to-rise-side-effects-are-becoming-a-costly-health-issue-105494

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Paul Mika, Senior Lecturer, School of Management, Massey University

Tourism is New Zealand’s biggest export earner, contributing 21% of foreign exchange earnings. The latest data show tourists added NZ$39.1 billion to the economy and the industry has seen a 44% increase over the past five years.

But tourism also brings unwanted pressures on infrastructure and natural resources. Recently, a conference focused on sustainability in tourism and how the industry could contribute to the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), ratified in 2015 as the playbook for global development to 2030.

Read more: We’re in the era of overtourism but there is a more sustainable way forward

The meeting challenged the growth agenda that continues to dominate thinking in the tourism industry. The rhetoric around the SDGs came under fire for being based on ideas of utilitarianism (maximising growth and profits) and managerialism (all problems are solvable with good management).

An uneasy tension was evident in how sustainability is viewed. On the one hand, the narrative was one of hopelessness because sustainability in tourism is constantly counter-punched by commercialism and inequalities between locals and outsiders. On the other hand, there was hope. Sustainability in tourism should be possible because corporates allude to re-imagined approaches to social responsibility and indigenous tourism operators see SDGs as compatible with their values and needs.

Read more: ‘Sustainable tourism’ is not working – here’s how we can change that

Here are five major insights on the role of tourism in sustainable development.

1) The SDGs are not infallible

They are full of contradictions and tensions, and born of an institution of ultimate compromise – the United Nations. The UN advances progress based on a “middle ground” approach. For now, the SDGs represent accepted wisdom about what a good life might look like in 2030.

2) Sustainability means change

Sustainability requires a change in mindset, beliefs, assumptions, habits and behaviours – not just of some, but everyone. Everybody stands to lose if we do not achieve a more sustainable world.

According to ancient indigenous wisdom, we are all interconnected, and the UN is beginning to appreciate that. The real challenge is how we institute a shift toward sustainability, after generations of market-driven economics that will not easily release us from its grasp. Like during all major disruptions, we must address root causes to procure lasting effects.

In economic parlance, achieving a shift from growth to sustainability requires us to rethink the incentives and rules (carrots and sticks) we use to guide entrepreneurs and enterprises. We might see sustainability rise in the entrepreneur’s estimation because of natural catastrophes, abhorrence at widespread poverty, and when consumers demand it.

3) We are a long way off

Companies and policymakers are a long way off working out how to do the SDGs justice, but some are making a pretty good start. One global tourism operator, for example, immediately after a major earthquake in one of its prime destinations raised $400,000 from an appeal. They also believed that getting tourists to return would offer longer term benefits to locals, so donated 100% of the profits from travel to the region in the year after the quake to the rebuild. Their philosophy: profit first, then purpose follows. More growth enables the company to do more good. This makes sense because you cannot help anyone if you don’t have the money. But if you wait until you have money to have purpose, then sustainability is merely about economic attainment, only one strand of the many ideals within the SDGs. We should, instead, be aiming for ‘inclusive tourism’ which moves us some way toward tourism being the transformative, partnership-centred, equitable benefit-sharing between companies and local communities that might sustain people and environments over generations.

4) Indigenous perspective

Indigenous knowledge presents alternative sets of values and behaviours that are inherently sustainable and offer potential models.

Indigenous communities are often deprived of opportunity and resources to develop sustainable enterprises of their own. Some indigenous entrepreneurs who start their own enterprises are affected by public doubt about whether they can or should do it. There is also the issue of how indigenous lands should be used – either for large-scale foreign-owned resorts that usually preclude local ownership or for small-scale locally owned ones that are accessible to locals.

5) Customer power

As tourists, tourism operators and tourism agencies, we ought to be prepared to look beyond the idyllic post card images to understand the undesirable consequences of tourism: waste, working conditions, water quality and impacts on the environment. It is important we become discerning customers who ask about sustainability of products and services.

– ref. Five insights that could move tourism closer towards sustainability – http://theconversation.com/five-insights-that-could-move-tourism-closer-towards-sustainability-110594

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emmanuel Stamatakis, Professor of Physical Activity, Lifestyle, and Population Health, University of Sydney

Have you recently carried heavy shopping bags up a few flights of stairs? Or run the last 100 metres to the station to catch your train? If you have, you may have unknowingly been doing a style of exercise called high-intensity incidental physical activity.

Our paper, published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, shows this type of regular, incidental activity that gets you huffing and puffing is likely to produce health benefits, even if you do it in 30-second bursts, spread over the day.

In fact, incorporating more high intensity activity into our daily routines – whether that’s by vacuuming the carpet with vigour or walking uphill to buy your lunch – could be the key to helping all of us get some high quality exercise each day. And that includes people who are overweight and unfit.

Read more: Health Check: high-intensity micro workouts vs traditional regimes

What is high intensity exercise?

Until recently, most health authorities prescribed activity lasting for at least ten continuous minutes, although there was no credible scientific evidence behind this.

This recommendation was recently refuted by the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Report. The new guidelines state any movement matters for health, no matter how long it lasts.

This appreciation for short episodes of physical activity aligns with the core principles of high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT in a hugely popular regime involving repeated short sessions, from six seconds to four minutes, with rests from 30 seconds to four minutes in-between.

Among a range of different regimes, we consistently see that any type of high intensity interval training, irrespective of the number of repetitions, boosts fitness rapidly and improves cardiovascular health and fitness.

That’s because when we regularly repeat even short bursts of strenuous exercise, we instruct our bodies to adapt (in other words, to get fitter) so we’re able to respond better to the physical demands of life (or the next time we exercise strenuously).

Read more: Yes, your kids can run all day – they’ve got muscles like endurance athletes

The same principle is at play with incidental physical activities. Even brief sessions of 20 seconds of stair-climbing (60 steps) repeated three times a day on three days per week over six weeks can lead to measurable improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness. This type of fitness indicates how well the lungs, heart, and circulatory systems are working, and the higher it is the lower the risk for future heart disease is.

In fact, research suggests physical activity intensity may be more important for the long-term health of middle-aged and older people than total duration.

Achievable for everyone

The main reasons people don’t do enough exercise tend to include the cost, lack of time, skills, and motivation.

Exercise regimes like high intensity interval training are safe and effective ways to boost fitness, but they’re often impractical. People with chronic conditions and most middle aged and older people, for example, will likely require supervision by a fitness professional.

Walking to and from the supermarket is a good option if it’s not too far. From shutterstock.com

Aside from the practicalities, some people may find back-to-back bouts of very high exertion overwhelming and unpleasant.

But there are plenty of free and accessible ways to incorporate incidental physical activity into our routines, including:

• replacing short car trips with fast walking, or cycling if it’s safe

• walking up the stairs at a fast pace instead of using the lift

• leaving the car at the edge of the shopping centre car park and carrying the shopping for 100m

• doing three or four “walking sprints” during longer stretches of walking by stepping up your pace for 100-200 metres (until you feel your heart rate is increasing and you find yourself out of breath to the point that you find it hard to speak)

• vigorous walking at a pace of about 130-140 steps per minute

• looking for opportunities to walk uphill

• taking your dog to an off-leash area and jogging for 30-90 seconds alongside the pup.

Read more: Four common myths about exercise and weight loss

This type of incidental activity can make it easier to achieve the recommended 30 minutes of physical activity a day. It can also help boost fitness and make strenuous activity feel easier – even for those of us who are the least fit.

– ref. Don’t have time to exercise? Here’s a regime everyone can squeeze in – http://theconversation.com/dont-have-time-to-exercise-heres-a-regime-everyone-can-squeeze-in-111600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Walter Jarvis, Director, UTS Master of Management; Lecturer in Managing, Leading & Stewardship, University of Technology Sydney

The banking royal commission has seen spectacular resignations, calls for changes in the law, and calls for cultural change within banks.

But what about changes in education, which is where much of what’s wrong begins?

Business schools teach the people who will one day be the managers and leaders who run banks and other financial institutions.

They have had a hand in driving much of what came before the commission – the prioritisation of profit (ends) over how people are treated (means).

They’ve taught the theories that have led to obscene executive compensation and unprecedented earnings inequality.

They are arguably a “force for evil”, purveyors of “immoral profit strategies”.

One professor has suggested the only way to fix them is to bulldoze them.

Amorality as a ticket to respect

They’ve become like this – probably amoral rather than immoral – in order to seem values-free, like the physical sciences such as chemistry and physics that are accorded so much respect.

But what they have taught hasn’t been values-free. Business schools have taught that there’s an imperative to maximise profits, almost no matter what. It may have even become self-fulfilling, freeing students from a sense of moral responsibility.

The idea comes from the “homo economicus” strand of economic theory, much challenged in economics itself. Managers, shareholders, customers and everyone else are said to be selfish maximisers of personal wealth and power with little regard for honesty and decency.

Because managers’ incentives are linked to the value of their company’s shares (shareholder value primacy), they are said to put shareholder value above everything else.

There’s an alternative

There’s another way, and it’s gaining ground. More and more universities are teaching stakeholder theory, in which corporations exist to create value for multiple stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, communities and ecologies, rather than only shareholders.

At the University of Technology Sydney we are also teaching a course entitled Managing, Leading and Stewardship in which students learn what it’s like to be in “morally unequal” situations. We invite them to explore organisational and management practices more aligned to moral equality; including cooperatives, commons, and employee ownership.

They are introduced to the well recognised German-based “enterprise” or mitbestimmung model, in which workers are elected as directors, taking between one-third and one-half of all supervisory board positions.

It is a governance model in which labour (workers) and capital (management) are not just deemed equally important but are held jointly responsible for the long-term well-being of the enterprise. It has operated in Germany and other parts of Europe for more than 70 years.

Sometimes it is known as the “two boards” model (a supervisory board and a management board). The recently-declared US 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has incorporated it into in her Accountable Capitalism policy.

It’s a dignity threshold

UTS and business schools in the United States are also developing courses that ask students to role play decisions with ethical dilemmas.

At the base of these courses is the idea of a “dignity threshold”, the minimum level of respect that should be accorded to people affected by and engaged in a business – not only those directly involved (customers and employees), but also those indirectly affected, such as local schools, hospitals, and government agencies.

“Dignity” means being treated as the moral equal of anyone else, a definition outlined in the book Humanity without Dignity by Andrea Sangiovanni.

At the royal commission, it became clear that many of those affected by the misbehaviour of banks and related institutions could sense that they weren’t being treated as morally equal. They were dehumanised and treated as means to do what many witnesses from within the sector said was their sole purpose: making money.

Read more: Banking Royal Commission: no commissions, no exemptions, no fees without permission. Hayne gets the government to do a U-turn

If we want our future managers and leaders to stop engaging in such conduct, we will need to start teaching them about how to be morally as well as financially accountable.

It is what publicly funded universities are for – to project and enhance society’s values.

The legitimacy of business (and business schools) hinges on ensuring they do it.

The Conversation

– ref. What are we teaching in business schools? The royal commission’s challenge to amoral theory – http://theconversation.com/what-are-we-teaching-in-business-schools-the-royal-commissions-challenge-to-amoral-theory-110901

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorana Bartels, Professor, School of Law and Justice, University of Canberra

Justice reinvestment seeks to reduce the number of people in prison by investing money that would have been spent on prisons in early intervention, prevention and diversion. It involves working with communities to design local solutions to address the drivers of crime and imprisonment.

In 2013, a Senate committee recommended that the Commonwealth take a leadership role in supporting the implementation of justice reinvestment and provide funding for a trial of justice reinvestment in Australia.

Read more: As Indigenous incarceration rates keep rising, justice reinvestment offers a solution

In 2017, the Australian Law Reform Commission released its Pathways to Justice report on the over-incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It recommended that Commonwealth, state and territory governments establish an independent justice reinvestment body and justice reinvestment trials. Both of these should have significant Indigenous involvement.

There has not been any coordinated response to either of these reports, but there are small justice reinvestment projects in most states and territories. In New South Wales, the Bourke Maranguka Justice Reinvestment project has recorded:

• a 23% decrease in police-recorded incidents of domestic violence
• a 14% decrease in bail breaches for adults
• a 42% reduction in days spent in custody for adults
• a 31% increase in year 12 student retention rates
• a 38% reduction in charges across the top five juvenile offence categories.

An impact assessment by KPMG found the project achieved savings of $3.1 million in 2017.

The ACT example

The ACT has one prison, the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC), which houses all prisoners. The prison opened in 2010 as Australia’s first human rights prison, but has failed to live up to its goals.

This is partly due to it being overcrowded. According to the Report on Government Services, the AMC operated at 108% of its design capacity in 2017-18. Operating at or above 95% “compromises the ability of prison management to safely and humanely manage prisoners”.

The ACT imprisonment rate has increased by 24% since 2015, compared with a 13% increase nationally.

The ACT government was advised it would cost $200 million to expand the AMC. Last week, it announced it had ruled out expansion. Instead, it will redirect $14.5 million into a range of community programs, legislative reforms and policy initiatives. These include:

• improving rehabilitation options, including a purpose-built “reintegration centre” for up to 80 prisoners. This will allow for a wide range of programs, including trauma and relationship counselling, alcohol, tobacco and other drug rehabilitation, and job training skills – all of which have been associated with reduced reoffending

• establishing a bail accommodation support service and exploring accommodation issues for detainees after their release – one in three detainees at the AMC were homeless or living in a hostel immediately before they were imprisoned

• expanding the Strong Connected Neighbourhoods program, which supports people in high-density housing and has been shown to reduce crime

• continuing a family-centric program delivered by Indigenous-run organisations, which has shown promising results.

The female imprisonment rate in the ACT has increased by 98% since 2015, compared with a 19% increase for men. In addition, 32 of the 36 women (89%) who entered the AMC in the September 2018 quarter were unsentenced, compared with 85% of men and 75% of prisoners nationally. The increase in women’s imprisonment nationally has been the subject of recent media attention, especially in the context of their experience of family violence and imprisonment for unpaid fines in Western Australia.

Read more: FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth?

Unfortunately, the government’s announcement did not expressly consider the specific needs of women, including the intersection between their victimisation histories, substance abuse, mental illness and offending behaviour. The need for gender-sensitive responses has been the subject of previous research in the ACT context.

Nevertheless, the ACT is to be commended for its initiative. This represents the most far-reaching commitment by an Australian government to justice reinvestment. It is significant that the policy is called “Building Communities Not Prisons”. As the ACT justice minister has stated:

Justice reinvestment is honest about the reality of incarceration in Australia. While crime rates are going down, incarceration rates are going up. The most just justice system is a system that acts early to help prevent the kinds of circumstances that can lead to crime in the first place.

How Australia can address its addiction to prisons

Australia’s imprisonment rate has risen year on year since 2011. We have a higher imprisonment rate than Canada and every country in Western Europe.

Read more: State of imprisonment: can ACT achieve a ‘human rights’ prison?

In 2016, the NSW government announced that it would spend $3.8 billion building new prisons. The corrections minister, David Elliott, said:

This is, it must be said, not money the state government is happy to spend … My personal preference would always be that this money, this NSW taxpayers’ money, is spent on schools and hospitals. But governments do have a choice in how they allocate the public’s money. And the evidence supporting justice reinvestment is strong and growing.

In September 2018, the Queensland government asked the Queensland Productivity Commission to undertake an inquiry into imprisonment and reoffending. In its draft report, the commission described imprisonment as a “growing policy problem” and stated that “increasing imprisonment can make the community less safe”. It also recognised that imprisonment “is costly, and this cost is borne by the community”.

It remains to be seen what the commission recommends, but all Australian governments should have the courage to follow the ACT’s lead and invest in communities, not razor wire.

– ref. Australian governments should follow the ACT’s lead in building communities, not prisons – http://theconversation.com/australian-governments-should-follow-the-acts-lead-in-building-communities-not-prisons-111990

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Towler, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, UNSW

Yenny is 26 years old, lives in Melbourne, and has a very specific talent.

One day, she was driving her car when she recognised a man who had been several years below her at high school and whom she hadn’t seen for more than ten years. What makes this particularly impressive is that she recognised him from the briefest glimpse in her rear-view mirror while he was driving the car behind hers.

Yenny recounts many such amazing feats of recognition and is one of a very small proportion of the population known as “super-recognisers”. She was the top performer on a national test of face recognition abilities in Australia, coming first out of 20,000 participants.

Read more: Combining the facial recognition decisions of humans and computers can prevent costly mistakes

Could you learn to spot a face as well as Yenny? Well … maybe. Our new research shows that many training courses offered in this field of expertise are ineffective in improving people’s accuracy in face identification.

But other ways of learning how to identify faces may work; we’re just not yet sure exactly how.

In-demand expertise

Super-recognisers are used by police and security agencies to spot targets in crowded train stations, monitor surveillance footage, and track people of interest.

During the 2011 London riots, for example, super-recognisers from the Metropolitan Police identified more than 600 people from very poor-quality surveillance footage – a task that not even the best facial recognition software can perform reliably.

So can anyone become a super-recogniser? Can you make up for a lack of superpowers through training? In our paper we assessed the effectiveness of training courses given to practitioners who make facial identification decisions for a living.

We reviewed 11 training courses that comply with international training standards from Australia, UK, US and Finland.

Sample test of face recognition: are the side-by-side images of the same, or different people? Answers can be found in the paper acknowledgements (click on journal link). Towler and colleagues, PLOS ONE, CC BY

We found that training courses typically teach facial anatomy – focusing on the muscles, bones and shape of the face – and instruct trainees to inspect faces feature by feature. Novices and genuine trainees completed one of four training courses and we tracked their identification accuracy from before to after training.

Surprisingly, we found the training courses had almost no effect on people’s accuracy. This was especially surprising to the people who took the training – an astonishing 93% of trainees thought the training had improved their ability to identify faces.

Our research shows that even the world’s best available training – used to train police, border control agents, forensic scientists and other security personnel – does not compensate for talent in face recognition.

This is consistent with recent research suggesting that our face identification abilities are largely predetermined by genetics.

Forensic facial examiners

This may come as disappointing news to people who hope to become a super-recogniser. But all is not lost.

Scientists have recently discovered that some specialist groups of practitioners show very high levels of accuracy. Forensic facial examiners routinely compare images of faces to turn CCTV images into informative face identification evidence in criminal trials. Recent work shows that they too outperform novices in very challenging tests.

CCTV footage doesn’t always produce clear images, so identifying people can be difficult. Shutterstock.com

Forensic facial examiners present a paradox for scientists. They perform face identification tasks with a high degree of accuracy, and this ability appears to be acquired through professional experience and training.

Our study suggests there is no benefit of face identification training courses when tested immediately before and after.

In addition, previous work has suggested that merely performing face-matching tasks in daily work is not sufficient to improve accuracy. Some passport officers have been working for 20 years and perform no better than others who have been working for just a few months.

Read more: Passport staff miss one in seven fake ID checks

This paradox suggests there is something particular about the type of training and professional experience that forensic facial examiners receive that enables them to develop visual expertise in identifying faces, and which isn’t provided by standard training courses.

How do they do it?

In our current research we are working closely with government agencies to uncover the basis of forensic facial examiners’ expertise. For example, we now know that part of their expertise comes from using a very particular comparison strategy, where they break the face down into individual facial features and then slowly and systematically assess the similarity of each feature in turn.

Interestingly, the nature of this expertise appears to be qualitatively different to that of super-recognisers – Yenny recognised her old classmate using a quick, intuitive process as she glanced in the rear-view mirror.

Super-recognisers can pick out a face they may have seen only once before. Shutterstock.com

However, these snap judgements made by super-recognisers may not be suitable for the type of identification evidence that forensic facial examiners give in court, where a careful analysis of facial images is necessary to support identification decisions. Importantly, forensic facial examiners provide detailed reports of the observations used to support their decisions, which can then be cross-examined in court.

Trainable vs hardwired

Super-recognisers and forensic facial examiners use distinct routes to high performance in face identification.

Effective training appears to target the slower, deliberate and analytical visual processing that characterises forensic facial examiners.

The faster and more intuitive skill that enabled Yenny to recognise faces of relative strangers in her rear-view mirror is likely to be untrainable, and hard-wired.

This raises the question of how to balance these different sources of expertise. It may be that super-recognisers are best suited to surveillance-type roles, such as monitoring CCTV or searching for targets in large crowds.

Forensic facial examiners may be better suited to providing identification evidence to the court, which requires thorough explanations of how and why the expert came to their decision.

Alternatively, it may be possible to train super-recognisers in the expert skills characterising forensic facial examination, or to form teams that include both types of expert.

The aim of our work is to integrate these sources of human expertise with the latest face recognition software to improve the accuracy of face identification evidence. Such a system can make society safer, but also fairer, by reducing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

Can you beat Yenny’s high score of 88% on the super-recogniser test? Find out here.

– ref. Super-recognisers accurately pick out a face in a crowd – but can this skill be taught? – http://theconversation.com/super-recognisers-accurately-pick-out-a-face-in-a-crowd-but-can-this-skill-be-taught-112003

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Humphery-Jenner, Associate Professor of Finance, UNSW

The Hayne Royal Commission began and ended with strident criticism of the mortgage broking industry.

It recommended brokers be required to act in the “best interests” of intending borrowers, and that intending borrowers, rather than the successful lender, pay the broker’s fee.

So-called “trailing” annual payments from lenders would be outlawed as soon as possible and upfront commissions outlawed after two or three years.

It’s the only set of recommendations the government has been lukewarm about adopting, announcing instead that while brokers will be required to act in the best interests of borrowers and from July 1 2020 will no longer be able to accept new trailing commissions, decisions about upfront commissions will be delayed until a further review, to take place “in three years time”.

The government is right to be cautious.

What’s the problem with commissions?

Both the royal commission and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission are concerned commissions:

• encourage brokers to recommend mortgages that borrowers cannot plausibly afford

• cause the broker to recommend higher paying products over lower paying products, potentially to the detriment of borrowers.

So what’s the go with brokers?

Typically a borrower approaches a broker who works with banks to secure a loan.

According to ASIC, the method of payment is fairly standard:

• the broker receives a commission from banks for each successful home loan. The commission is often divided into an upfront payment and a trailing commission, which is paid over time

• the lender benefits because it can spread its commission expenses over time. It can also terminate commissions if it believes a broker has behaved badly

• the commission rates are relatively similar across lenders, with upfront commissions typically ranging from 0.46% to 0.65% of the loan amount, about $3,000 on a $500,000 loan. Trailing commissions typically range from 0.1% to 0.35% of the ongoing loan, about $1,000 per year on a $500,000 loan

• lenders can also offer bonus payments, loyalty payments and “soft dollar commissions” which take many forms, including overseas conferences and holidays, shopping vouchers and tickets to sporting events

• loan aggregators can also play a role. They provide back-office support and ancillary services to brokers. Some are partly owned by banks. These banks receive a slightly larger share of loans from brokers who deal with these aggregators than from brokers that don’t.

In practice brokers often provide good service

ASIC research finds that regardless of the conflicted remuneration structure the interest rates brokers obtain for clients are not significantly worse (or better) than those obtained by borrowers who deal with banks direct.

Their clients are slightly different, on average two years younger than bank clients and with incomes about A$6,000 lower. Brokers’ clients borrow slightly more than direct bank clients and their loans are more likely to be interest only.

Although until legislation has not compelled brokers to act in clients’ best interests, other professional standards often do so.

And brokers are keen to get referrals and repeat business, which relies on brokers providing good service in the first place.

They’ve little incentive to push bad loans

Because banks compete for business, they tend to pay similar commissions, in much the same way as they tend to charge similar interest rates. It means that in practice there is isn’t much incentive for a broker to recommend one lender over another. This is especially so when you factor in the desire to get repeat business, and referrals, which they would lose if they pushed poor products.

And it is hard to recommend unnecessary loans. Borrowers usually come to brokers to arrange loans for homes they are already planning to buy. There aren’t that many extra dollars in recommending clients borrow more, and even if brokers did recommend higher loans they would still be subject to banks’ serviceability and equity checks.

At the moment banks are highly reluctant to lend large sums at high loan to valuation ratios.

All this means that commissions have a muted effect on brokers’ lending recommendations, with conflicts being ameliorated by the practical reality of commission homogenisation and the desire for repeat business and referrals.

And if commissions went…

If commissions went, brokers would have to be paid by borrowers.

Many borrowers would baulk at the fees, and would go to banks instead. This would increase banks’ costs, which could be passed on through additional borrowing fees. It would also increase the time borrowers must devote to sorting through potential lenders.

Some borrowers who lack financial expertise would then have to rely on banks’ advice, rather than brokers’; and, banks are hardly less independent about their products than are brokers.

It would be the smaller brokers that would suffer the most, some going out of business. Larger brokers would also be affected, but less so, due to economies of scale. The end result would be fewer brokers, and less access to advice.

It’d be an unintended consequence of what Hayne recommended, and perhaps an unnecessary one.

While there are always bad apples in every industry, removing commissions would be a blunt – and potentially unnecessary – instrument with plenty of downsides.

The Conversation

– ref. Honest brokers. Why mortgage broker commissions aren’t the problem – http://theconversation.com/honest-brokers-why-mortgage-broker-commissions-arent-the-problem-111631

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Latty, Senior Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

Most school kids can describe in detail the life cycle of butterflies: eggs hatch into caterpillars, caterpillars turn into cocoons and cocoons hatch. This seemingly basic bit of biology was once hotly debated. It was a pioneering naturalist, Maria Sibylla Merian, whose meticulous observations conclusively linked caterpillars to butterflies, laying the groundwork for the fields of entomology, animal behaviour and ecology.

Maria Sibylla Merian was born in 1647 in Frankfurt at a time when the scientific study of life was in its infancy. Although she was trained as an artist, Merian is arguably one of the first true field ecologists. She studied the behaviour and interactions of living things at a time when taxonomy and systematics (naming and cataloguing) were the main pursuit of naturalists.

Like most modern entomologists, Merian’s passion for insects started early. At 13, she began collecting and raising caterpillars as subjects for her paintings. She often painted by candlelight, awaiting the moment when a caterpillar formed its cocoon or a newly formed butterfly later emerged from it.

An image from Merian’s book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. Wikimedia Commons

Merian painted caterpillars feeding on their host plants and predatory animals feeding on their prey. She was intent on capturing not only the anatomy of her subjects, but also their life cycles and interactions with other living things. Rather than working from preserved specimens (as was the convention of the time), she captured the ecology of species, centuries before the term even existed.

The fact that Merian found the time to conduct her studies is a testament to the power of a curious mind. Unlike many male naturalists of her day, Merian did not have the freedom to devote all of her time to the study of insects.

In 1665, at the age of 18, Merian married her stepfather’s apprentice, painter Johann Andreas Graff. Her first daughter, Johanna, was born in 1688 and in 1670 the family moved to Nuremburg. Her second daughter, Dorothea, was born in 1678.

Merian’s marriage appears to have been an unhappy one. In 1685, she left Graff to live in a religious community, taking both daughters with her. In 1692, Graff formally divorced Merian.

As a mother of two, Merian was responsible for home-care and child-rearing. She secured her family’s finances by teaching painting to the daughters of wealthy families. In many ways, she was one of the first “science moms”, trying to balance the challenges of her research against a demanding family life.

All of this at a time when women were still being burned as witches – being a curious, intelligent woman was very hazardous indeed.

In Surinam with her daughter

A 17th-century portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian by an unknown artist. Wikimedia Commons

Merian’s work on caterpillars was a key contribution to an ongoing debate of her day. On one side were those who believed that life arose from inanimate matter; flies, for example, arose from rotting meat; other insects formed from mud; raindrops produced frogs. On the other side were those who believed that life arose only from pre-existing life.

By breeding butterflies from egg to adult for several generations, Merian showed definitively that eggs hatched into caterpillars, which eventually turned into butterflies.

Merian’s books on caterpillars (published in 1679 and 1683) would have been enough on their own to earn her a place in science history.

But in 1669, at the age of 52 and with her youngest daughter (then aged 20) in tow, she embarked on one of the first purely scientific expeditions in history. Her goal was to illustrate new species of insects in Surinam, a South American country (now known as Suriname) only recently colonised by the Dutch. After two months of dangerous travel, the two women arrived in an entomologists’ paradise.

Surrounded by new species, Merian was itching to collect and paint everything she could get her hands on. She immediately ran into problems, however, as the Dutch planters of the island were unwilling to help two unaccompanied women collect insects from the forest, a mission they believed to be frivolous.

So Merian forged relationships with enslaved Africans and Indigenous people who agreed to bring her specimens and who shared with her the medicinal and culinary uses of many plants. For example, Merian writes that enslaved Amerindian women used the seeds from particular plants to abort fetuses in order to spare them from the cruelty of slavery. It is a stark reminder of the unmitigated horrors of 1600s colonialism.

Maria Sibylla Merian, illuminated copper-engraving from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XXIII. Solanum mammosum 1705. Wikimedia Commons

Merian and her daughter worked in Surinam for two years before Merian’s failing health forced her to return home. The book that resulted from her time in Surinam, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, was well known in both artistic and scientific circles.

Merian’s eldest daughter, Joanna, eventually made the journey to Surinam and would send her mother new specimens and paintings until Merian’s death in 1717.

Sceptical men

I am an insect ecologist and a field biologist; Merian’s work forms the very foundations of my discipline. Yet I am ashamed to confess that until relatively recently I was unaware of the magnitude of Merian’s contribution to biology. It has only been in the last few decades that recognition for her scientific contributions has had a resurgence.

How did such a scientific superhero all but disappear from science history?

Merian was well known in her time. Karl Linnaeus, famous for developing a system for classifying life, referred heavily to her illustrations in his species descriptions. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, cites Merian’s work in his book The Botanic Garden.

But, after her death, inaccuracies began to creep into the hand-painted copies of Merian’s books. New plates with imaginary insects were added. Others were recoloured to be more aesthetically pleasing. The careful attention to detail that made Merian’s work so incredible was gradually eroded.

In the 1830s, naturalist Lansdowne Guilding – who had never visited Surinam – wrote a scathing critique of Merian’s work in a book entitled Observations on the work of Maria Sibylla Merian on the Insects, of Surinam. He uses words like “careless”, “worthless” and “vile and useless” to describe Merian’s engravings, which he felt were riddled with inaccuracies. Many of the errors Guilding attacks were added after Merian’s death and were not faithful to her original work.

There is also a strong undercurrent of sexism in Guilding’s critiques; in one place he accuses Merian of ignoring facts “every boy entomologist would know”. Guilding attacks Merian for relying too heavily on the knowledge of African slaves and Amerindians, people he regarded as unreliable.

The fact that Merian was an artist who had no formal scientific training also played a role in the efforts to discredit her. By the 1800s, biology was practised by university-trained academics and self-trained naturalists like Merian were now treated with an air of disdain. Never mind the fact that women of Merian’s day were barred from university educations.

Colored copper engraving from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate XLIII. ‘Spiders, ants and hummingbird on a branch of a guava’. Wikimedia Commons

It didn’t help that some of Merian’s observations sounded fantastical – she claimed that in Surinam there lived tarantulas that ate birds, and ants that formed bridges with their bodies. These claims seemed too odd to be true and so began to attract considerable scepticism.

Other authors began to see Merian’s observations as the flights of fancy of an old woman far outside her depth. And so Merian ceased to be remembered as a pioneering naturalist. She was instead dismissed as an old woman who painted beautiful – but entirely unscientific – pictures of butterflies. Although her work continued to inspire and influence generations of artists, her contributions as a scientist were largely forgotten.

Modern scientists have since confirmed the “bird-eating” tarantula’s habit of occasionally consuming small birds and we now know that army ants do indeed build bridges out of their living bodies.

Merian’s “flights of fancy” were not fanciful after all.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Maria Sibylla Merian, 17th-century entomologist and scientific adventurer – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-maria-sibylla-merian-17th-century-entomologist-and-scientific-adventurer-112057

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Vatsikopoulos, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Technology Sydney

This week, Department of Communications and Arts secretary Mike Mrdak told a Senate hearing our Pacific neighbours will soon experience “the full suite of programs available on Australian networks”. This means the region will see some of our most highly rated reality shows such as Married at First Sight and The Bachelor.

This is all part of the government’s Pacific pivot and the A$17 million package to broadcast commercial television throughout the region announced by the prime minister last year. It’s also part of Australia’s “soft power” strategy, a branding that enables it to influence other countries and have its voice heard.

Australia’s soft power attraction in the Asia Pacific has been in free fall for the past few years. The government is sitting on two major reviews. First is the Soft Power Review – a strong recommendation of the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper – for which the consultation period ended in October 2018. Second is the Review of Australian Broadcasting in the Asia-Pacific, the consultation period for which ended in August 2018.

The second review was established in 2017. This was the first time the government addressed the issue of soft power in the Pacific since axing the ABC’s Australia Network in 2014. The Australia Network broadcast to the region with redistribution partnerships to 30 countries.

The ABC charter states it has responsibility “to transmit to countries outside Australia broadcasting programs of news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural enrichment” that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs”.

In other words, the ABC is already enabled as Australia’s soft power tool. Despite this, the government is giving money to commercial televisions to do the work. At the Senate hearing this week, Mrdak denied this was in breach of the ABC charter because it did not involve broadcasting but purchasing content made by Australia’s commercial broadcasters for distribution to regional broadcasters.

Read more: Lost in transmission: the Australia Network, soft power and diplomacy

The government must move quickly with its reviews and their recommendations, and articulate its policy responses before the next election, if Australia’s standing in the region is to be restored. Because other powers, especially China, are fast filling the gap we’re leaving behind.

The importance of soft power

Soft power is a term coined by Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye in the late 1980s. He referred to soft power as the ability of a country to gain influence and power through attraction and without coercion. Soft power leads to nation branding or the reputation a nation enjoys in the world.

This is what business academic Yin Fang defines as:

… the total sum of all perceptions of a nation in the minds of international stakeholders, which may contain some of the following elements: people, place, culture/language, history, food, fashion, famous faces (celebrities), global brands and so on.

The 2018 Soft Power 30 Report showed Australia had fallen four places in four years. The report is a measure of the influence of international nations. We are 10th in the overall soft power index but are marked as moving downward: 7th in culture, 6th in education, 9th in government and completely absent from the top ten in the areas of digital, enterprise and engagement.

Read more: Soft power and the institutionalisation of influence

In the alternative, and hipper, Monocle Soft Power Index, Australia sits at number 8. But the report also warns it “… is in need of a shakeup if it is to remain an attractive proposition”.

It praises the country for committing to an official review of its soft power but adds “it’s unclear if that will now be a priority”.

In addressing a seminar on the future of Australia’s broadcasting and soft power in the region, veteran broadcaster and former head of the Australia Network Bruce Dover said:

Where once Australia was a brand in Asia, people knew what the Australia Network was, they knew what Radio Australia was, it’s lost – it’s gone…

He then added that the axing of the Australia Network by the Coalition government “… was for more political reasons about whacking the ABC than a considered view on the worth of soft diplomacy or having a voice in the region”.

The ABC isn’t entirely free from blame. It abandoned the most needy of its audience in Asia and the Pacific by switching off its shortwave radio service in 2017. Citing outdated technology, the ABC was trying to make the most of its severe funding cutbacks by prioritising digital services. And that’s when China moved in and took over the shortwave frequencies.

So, what’s China doing?

The government’s Pacific pivot is about waking up and finding China has expanded into the region, and not just in infrastructure projects but in broadcasting. A recent ABC investigation reported China’s Central Global Television Network (CGTN) is broadcasting to 1.2 billion people in Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic and is expanding to create 200 international bureaus by 2020.

Read more: Soft power goes hard: China’s economic interest in the Pacific comes with strings attached

This may be, as the ABC suggests, “informational warfare”, where the soldiers may actually be Westerners working for the other side. This year alone, more than 2,200 people lost their jobs in the Australian media.

Edwin Maher was one of the first Australians to work for CCTV, as CGTN was then called. He was a weatherman when I worked in the ABC’s Melbourne newsroom in the late ’80s, but for over a decade he has been a presenter on China’s television. There will be more like him in future.

China is actively recruiting Westerners to front its programs. Australian faces will likely present news on on CGTN, while Australian voices broadcast in English to Pacific Islanders on shortwave.

In the competitive world of nation-branding and soft power, who will know the difference? The new Edwin Mahers will be telling the same stories as Australia, but with a China focus. In 2016 President Xi Jinping announced that the media must serve the party and directed them to tell China’s stories that reflect well on the ruling party and its policies.

This is the reality of informational warfare. The Morrison government must release its two crucial soft power reports and announce a policy framework that will determine our standing, influence and power in the region.

Vanuatu’s Daily Post has welcomed the news Australia will provide entertaining programs to the Pacific. But the opinion piece also says:

Pacific islanders aren’t likely to be very fussy about how that comes about. But if the goal is helping Pacific islanders know more about Australia — and helping Australians know more about the Pacific – then a different approach is needed.

Australia’s soft power is too important to be determined by vengeful payback to the ABC, or by currying favour with commercial television barons. It is about statecraft.

– ref. As Australia’s soft power in the Pacific fades, China’s voice gets louder – http://theconversation.com/as-australias-soft-power-in-the-pacific-fades-chinas-voice-gets-louder-111841

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Dunn, Associate Lecturer in Anatomy and Cell Biology, Western Sydney University

Some men may shudder at the thought of “the snip”. But vasectomies are a safe and effective form of contraception for men who have completed their family, or don’t wish to have children.

Medicare data shows more than 25,000 Australian men have had a vasectomy in the last financial year. The relatively simple surgical procedure involves disrupting the sperm-carrying tubes in the scrotum to prevent sperm from getting into the seminal fluid when a man ejaculates.

Typically, sperm only make up around 2-5% of total ejaculate volume. That means following a successful vasectomy, at least 95% of the end product will still remain, while eliminating the risk of pregnancy.

The procedure

Generally, vasectomies are carried out under local anaesthetic. The surgery can usually be completed within 15-30 minutes.

In the “no-scalpel” method, a single puncture is made through the scrotum using specialised equipment. The tubes can then be accessed without having to make an incision. This method is considered best practice as it is minimally invasive, does not require stitches and results in very little scarring.

There is also the more traditional incision method where a scalpel is used to make one or two small access points through which the doctor performs the procedure.

Read more: Few Australian women use long-acting contraceptives, despite their advantages

For anyone worried about the function of the penis after the procedure, the penis actually has very little to do with a vasectomy. An incision, or a puncture, is made into the scrotum, and the focus of the procedure is the small internal tubes which connect the testes to the penis, called the vas deferens. The vas deferens carry sperm from the testicles to the prostate where it’s mixed with semen for ejaculation.

This process of a vasectomy involves severing the vas deferens. From shutterstock.com

In most procedures, around 1-2cms of the vas deferens will be removed to minimise the chance of the tubes rejoining later on.

Techniques to close the ends of the vas deferens include cauterisation (electrical or thermal burning to create scar tissue) and ligation (tying the tubes).

Some of the highest success rates involve an “open ended” technique (successful at least 99.5% of the time). This is where the upper portion of the tube is either cauterised or ligated while the end closer to the testes remains open. This has a lower risk of complications than other methods and appears to be a popular choice among Australian doctors.

How successful are vasectomies?

Generally vasectomies are very effective, with success rates well above 99% and with minimal long-term complications.

Potential complications immediately after surgery include infection and haematoma (internal bleeding), but the risks of such complications are small (1-2%). The risk is even less when the “no-scalpel” method is used.

After a vasectomy, the chance of a couple becoming pregnant again is well under 1%. From shutterstock.com

The most common long-term complication of a vasectomy is pain in the scrotum, yet this only affects about 2% of men. It is believed the “open-ended” method minimises the chance of this happening.

Importantly, vasectomies are only fully effective after around three months as it takes time for sperm to clear completely from the vas deferens. So it’s sensible to continue to use an alternative form of contraception immediately following the procedure, until given the all-clear by a doctor.

Reversals

Someone who has had a vasectomy may wish to have the procedure reversed, for a variety of reasons.

Not every service that offers a vasectomy will offer a vasectomy reversal, called a vasovasostomy. But it can be done. The procedure essentially involves reconnecting the previously disconnected vas deferens.

Read more: Here’s what’s on the horizon for a male contraceptive pill – but don’t hold your breath

Of vasectomised men, around 3-6% opt to have a vasectomy reversal, after which successful pregnancy may be achieved in up to 80% of cases.

There are many factors that could affect this chance. The age of the female partner is among the most significant.

It’s also important to note that the longer the duration since the vasectomy, the lower the odds of a successful reversal and future pregnancy.

In some cases, if a couple want more children following a vasectomy, a more realistic and time-efficient option may be IVF. Sperm can still be extracted directly from the testes of a man who has had a vasectomy.

– ref. Explainer: how does a vasectomy work and can it be reversed? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-a-vasectomy-work-and-can-it-be-reversed-110780

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leila Mahmoudi Farahani, Research Fellow in Urban Studies, RMIT University

Recent studies show Melbourne’s and Sydney’s fast-growing outer suburbs lag behind other parts of the city in access to urban design, employment and amenities and services that foster liveability. The National Growth Areas Alliance of local councils launched a national campaign, “Catch up with the outer suburbs”, on Monday. But what is it really like to live in these areas?

Living Liveable is a short documentary film produced by RMIT University researchers showcasing the lived experiences of residents in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. The film includes interviews with 11 residents that highlight their perceptions and experiences of liveability in their suburbs. This article explores their reasons for living where they do and recounts their experiences of life in the outer suburbs.

Living Liveable, a documentary produced by RMIT researchers.

Why all the fuss about liveability?

Liveability and its underlying indicators have been the subject of substantial research. Most well-known liveability indices produced by the private sector — such as the Mercer Quality of Living Ranking and the Economist Intelligent Unit’s Liveability Index — rank cities against each other. And most Australian capital cities are ranked relatively high in such global liveability indices.

Read more: The world’s ‘most liveable city’ title isn’t a measure of the things most of us actually care about

These measures overlook inequities within cities between established inner areas and newer outer suburban areas. Many of these urban fringe suburbs are experiencing rapid population growth. RMIT researchers have developed spatial liveability indicators, showing that residents in outer suburbs lack access to basic amenities that inner-city residents take for granted.

Read more: Some suburbs are being short-changed on services and liveability – which ones and what’s the solution?

Yet residents’ perceptions of their neighbourhoods and their lived experiences are often unheard in such measures. The interviews show that a combination of factors shapes decisions to live in an outer suburb. These include perceived affordability, people’s aspirations for a good life, and access to public transport. As one resident said:

I was looking for an affordable area where I can, you know, buy a decent-size house within a decent budget and all those things. So, this area probably suits me, which is nearest for public transport, but yeah, it’s a bit far from the CBD area, which is alright. – male resident of Wyndham

Access to green spaces and a sense of community were among the things residents loved most about living in their suburb:

We live opposite a beautiful park … it’s right at our doorstep. We feel very, very lucky to live opposite this beautiful park, it’s very well maintained by the local council and it’s highly utilised. So even just out there walking, I’ve got to know people in my neighbourhood. – female resident of Wyndham

Residents value access to green spaces.

Read more: City-by-city analysis shows our capitals aren’t liveable for many residents

Traffic makes life worse

However, traffic volumes and poor access to daily living destinations and public transport had negative impacts on residents’ lived experiences. While current liveability indices usually consider access to daily living destinations – such as food outlets, schools, hospitals, and public transport – traffic is often overlooked. Yet, 10 out of 11 people mentioned traffic, in 30 separate instances, as something that makes their neighbourhoods less liveable.

A painter living in the City of Casey described how increasing traffic in recent years was forcing him to wake up half an hour earlier and get back home half an hour later in the afternoon.

I’m a painter, so I work anywhere from here to the city. The Monash [freeway] … I call it my driveway. So I’m on that every day, and it just depends which exit I’m taking for the day.

So, I get up at the moment at 4.50am. I get up to beat the traffic, which starts at about 5.20, and then I get to the job, and then I might have a bit of a snooze in my car or eat breakfast. And that’s just all just to beat traffic. And I can stay there for an hour before I have to, you know, knock on the client’s door, and say, “Oh I’m here to start.”

And, yeah, then at the end of the working day, which is 4pm, after I’ve done my eight hours, I just have to grind with the traffic on the way home… I might get home at about 6.10pm.

For some, the traffic has affected their mental health and increased stress levels.

We’ve lived in this house for 16 years and just the buildup of traffic … I was used to getting from A to B very quickly. I now have to plan, embed in my day, more time to get from A to B. I think that’s the biggest negative.

And it’s certainly one that impacts my husband. He doesn’t work locally. He works in the eastern suburbs and he also has to travel around a lot for his work. And that’s becoming a bit of a nightmare for him and actually creating a bit of stress. – female resident of Wyndham

Lack of access to daily living destinations, including employment and supermarkets, means residents depend on their cars. This adds to their cost of living and reduces neighbourhood liveability.

Read more: Designing suburbs to cut car use closes gaps in health and wealth

Lack of public transport or infrequent services also has negative impacts on residents’ quality of life and well-being.

I take my hubby to work in Derrimut and so that normally takes me … about two hours easy; just over two hours. … he doesn’t drive. He can’t use the train simply because the train doesn’t go anywhere near where he works. There’s nothing. No public transport to take my husband to work.

S0 … we’ve got no choice. So, if something happens to me, uh, we’re in a load of trouble. That’s where it’s difficult. We need more public transport. We really do. – female resident of Wyndham

Planners need to hear what residents say

The film highlights the gaps in current measures of liveability. For example, future liveability indices should consider including traffic and car-dependency indicators. Increasing traffic, the time spent travelling, and the financial burden of car dependency can detract from some of the key reasons residents choose to live in Melbourne’s outer suburbs – namely, affordability and sense of community.

We need to engage with communities and hear from them about their lived experience to better understand and measure their quality of life, their health and their neighbourhoods’ liveability. Objective measures of the quality of access should be accompanied by insights from residents about their lives in the suburbs. The voice of residents needs to be included in the planning of our cities as they grow, as well as the metrics of how successful we are in delivering equitable cities that foster healthy, affordable and prosperous lives for all.

Read more: Melbourne or Sydney? This is how our two biggest cities compare for liveability

– ref. Living ‘liveable’: this is what residents have to say about life on the urban fringe – http://theconversation.com/living-liveable-this-is-what-residents-have-to-say-about-life-on-the-urban-fringe-111339

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Belgrave, Lecturer in Politics and Citizenship, Massey University

Until recently, New Zealand’s relationship with China has been easy and at little cost to Wellington. But those days are probably over. New Zealand’s decision to block Huawei from its 5G cellular networks due to security concerns is the first in what could be many hard choices New Zealand will need to make that challenge Wellington’s relationship with Beijing.

For over a decade New Zealand has reaped the benefits of a free-trade agreement with China and seen a boom of Chinese tourists. China is New Zealand’s largest export destination and, apart from concerns about the influence of Chinese capital on the housing market, there have been few negatives for New Zealand.

Long-held fears that New Zealand would eventually have to “choose” between Chinese economic opportunities and American military security had not eventuated.

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

But now New Zealand business people in China have warned of souring relations and the tourism industry is worried about a downturn due to backlash following the Huawei controversy.

China’s growing might

During Labour’s government under Helen Clark (1999-2008) and under the National government with John Key as prime minister (2008-2016), New Zealand could be all things to all people, building closer relationships with China while finally calming the last of the lingering American resentment over New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policies. But now, there are difficult decisions to be made.

As China becomes more assertive on the world stage, it is becoming increasingly difficult for New Zealand to keep up this balancing act. Two forces are pushing a more demanding line from Beijing. One is China’s move to assert more control over waters well off its coast.

For decades, Beijing was happy to let the US Navy maintain order over the Western Pacific to facilitate global trade with China. As China’s own economic and military abilities have grown, it has begun to show that it is willing to protect what it sees as its own patch. Its mammoth island building in the South China Sea is a testament to its new-found desire to push its territorial claims after decades of patience.

Read more: Despite strong words, the US has few options left to reverse China’s gains in the South China Sea

China’s stronger foreign policy is testing what is known as the “rules-based order”, essentially a set of agreed rules that facilitate diplomacy, global trade, and resolve disputes between nations. This is very concerning for New Zealand as it needs stable rules to allow it to trade with the world. New Zealand doesn’t have the size to bully other countries into getting what we want.

Trump-style posturing would get New Zealand nowhere. A more powerful China doesn’t need to threaten the rules-based system, but the transition could create uncertainty for business and higher risks of trade disruption. It is vital for New Zealand that an Asia-Pacific dominated by China is as orderly as one dominated by the US.

Tech made in China

The other force challenging the relationship is China’s emergence as a source of technology rather than simply a manufacturer of other countries’ goods. Many Chinese firms like Huawei are now direct competitors of Western tech companies. Huawei’s success makes it strategically important for Beijing and a point of pride for ordinary Chinese citizens.

Yet, unlike Western countries, China actively monitors its population through a wide variety of mass surveillance technology. Therefore, there is a trust problem when Chinese firms claim that their devices are secure from Beijing’s spies. New Zealand’s decision to effectively ban Huawei components from 5G cellular networks could be the first in many decisions needed to ensure national security.

Chinese designed goods are becoming more common and issues around privacy and national security will get stronger as everyday household goods become connected to the internet. Restrictions on Chinese-made goods will further frustrate Beijing and will invite greater retaliation to New Zealand exporters and tourist operators.

In more extreme cases, foreign nationals have been detained in China in response to overseas arrests of prominent Chinese individuals. As many as 13 Canadians were detained recently in China following the arrest of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the request of US prosecutors.

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

Declaring the limits of the relationship

If New Zealand is to maintain a healthy relationship with China, it needs to be clear on what it is not willing to accept. It is easy to say individual privacy, national security and freedom of speech are vital interests of New Zealand, but Wellington needs to be clear to its citizens and to China what exactly those concepts mean in detail. All relationships require compromise, so Wellington needs to be direct about what it won’t compromise.

New Zealand spent decades during the Cold War debating how much public criticism of the US the government could allow itself before it risked its alliance with the Americans. New Zealanders wondered if they really had an independent foreign policy if they couldn’t stand up to their friends. Eventually nationalist sentiment spilled over in the form of the anti-nuclear policy.

New Zealand is now heading for the same debate as Kiwis worry about how much they can push back against Beijing’s interests before it starts to hurt the economy. Now that the relationship with China is beginning to have significant costs as well as benefits, it’s probably time New Zealanders figured out how much they are prepared to pay for an easy trading relationship with China.

– ref. Huawei or the highway? The rising costs of New Zealand’s relationship with China – http://theconversation.com/huawei-or-the-highway-the-rising-costs-of-new-zealands-relationship-with-china-111909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Roy, Lecturer in Education, University of Newcastle

On Monday, the federal parliament agreed on a motion to support a royal commission into the abuse of disabled people. This is a good thing, but we still need a timeline, terms of reference and a whole lot more detail.

This commission has been a long time coming. The stories we’ve heard over the last few years in the media have been devastating, such as a child with a disability being stripped naked and locked in a closet. We can expect the stories that will be revealed over the course of this royal commission to be similarly hard to hear.

Any of us can be or become disabled. At least a half of us will become disabled as we age. This is not an issue just for “others”, this is an issue for all of us.

Read more: What you need to know if your child with a disability is starting school soon

Why a royal commission?

Royal commissions deal with systemic and endemic issues. People with a disability need societal support to overcome the barriers their ability presents in a society where able-bodied people are seen as “normal”. This leads to a systemic power structure that allows those who seek out targets to abuse the ability to do so with very little accountability.

Families are unlikely to complain about the services they rely on for everyday life, in case of retribution or the removal of these services. Such issues were also apparent in the the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This means it’s very likely many incidents go unreported.

Without this royal commission, we won’t know the full scope of abuse perpetrated against students with disabilities. from www.shutterstock.com

Some 20% of Australians have a disability. A royal commission into the violence, abuse and neglect perpetrated against people with disability has the potential to be huge. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse cost upwards of A$500 million dollars. So the appropriate cost of the proposed royal commission into disability abuse may be well above the A$26 million floated in parliament this week.

Is there really an issue?

Looking at school education alone in the latest ABS statistics, 336,000 students with a disability are enrolled in mainstream schools. This does not include thousands of children with a disability who are home schooled, often because of the abuse or discrimination they experience in mainstream settings.

Statistics on how common the abuse of children with a disability in schools is can be hard to find. But in 2018, NSW revealed there were 657 complaints about staff members in one year alone. Some 438 of these complaints were allegations of sexual or physical abuse against staff working in public schools.

Read more: NSW could lead the way in educating students with a disability

In 2017, shocking allegations were revealed through Freedom of Information requests: 246 reports of abuse were made about staff in the NSW Department of Education.

In 2015 reports revealed that a child with autism was being placed in a “blue cage” in a school. And in Victoria a coffin-like box was being used as a form of restraint.

Inquiries in SA, NSW and reports from Queensland reveal widespread denial of enrolment, denial of supports and funding, denial of learning, children being beaten, hit and isolated.

Even if the abuse is reported, children with a disability are too often seen as unreliable witnesses. A disability is wrongly (and offensively) assumed to mean an intellectual disability. It is assumed they simply don’t have the mental capacity.

Education systems often investigate themselves, which presents difficulties with conflict of interest. Most abusers tend to abuse in private, so the findings are either not proven, or a quick confidentiality settlement is made to silence the alleged victims. A royal commission would mean an independent authority would do the investigating.

Making it work

For this royal commission to work, the terms of reference must be broad. It must include all institutions where people with a disability go about their lives – especially schools where children spend most of their time when not in the family home.

The terms of reference for this royal commission must be broad enough to make sure everyone gets heard. from www.shutterstock.com

It must have power to compel all witnesses, including those at the highest level of state and federal politics, to give evidence.

It must allow those with confidentiality agreements to be able to share their stories without prejudice.

It must be well funded, to allow millions of voices across education, aged care and all institutions and settings to be heard and have access.

It must deal with both historic abuse as well as current systemic, discriminatory and abusive practices. A royal commission can’t change the past, but it can help heal the wounds, shine a light on the present and create a more equal future. This was demonstrated by the royal commission into child sexual abuse.

Read more: Happy birthday, Braille: how writing you can touch is still helping blind people to read and learn

Given how potentially widespread this issue may be, A$500 million dollars and four years as a time-line may be a good starting point for resourcing this royal commission. It needs to be established now, before the election, so it has bipartisan support.

The leadership must also involve those with a disability. Any investigation that seeks to redress the exclusion and abuse of people with a disability should not further disenfranchise them by excluding them from leadership on this issue.

– ref. Why schools desperately need a royal commission into the abuse of disabled people – http://theconversation.com/why-schools-desperately-need-a-royal-commission-into-the-abuse-of-disabled-people-112058

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Beer, Dean, Research and Innovation, University of South Australia

Governments change priorities all the time. Some argue governments will focus on developing regional areas at one point in time and then refocus on major cities at another.

Our research shows that there are cycles in how much priority governments attach to regional issues. But these fluctuations are overshadowed by a larger, long-term trend towards greater involvement with regional communities.

Our findings show that regional Australia matters more today than it has at any other time since the 1940s.

Cycles of regional commitment

Inattention to particular constituencies can be costly. Victoria’s Kennett government lost office in 1999, when regional communities such as Ballarat and Bendigo became disillusioned with what they saw as a Melbourne-centric government.

This was a time when governments in other states, and nationally, were paying more attention to regional voters, with the Howard Coalition government nervously watching One Nation as a growing political force. In Queensland, the pressure was more acute, with a few regionally focused conservative politicians claiming seats in parliament.

Read more: How big ideas for regional Australia were given short shrift

Appointing a minister with regional responsibilities is one clear marker of intent in the government of the day. John Sharp, the Howard government’s first minister for transport and regional development, released a budget statement with 19 major investments in regional areas. These included money for drought assistance, rural roads, and counselling and support services for young people and families.

Sharp said:

The Coalition government has not simply sat idly as regional Australia continued to suffer from neglect.

There are now six ministers and one parliamentary secretary for regional development in Australian parliaments. Bridget McKenzie (federal), Michael McCormack (federal), Tim Whetstone (South Australia), Jaclyn Symes (Victoria), John Barilaro (New South Wales), Alannah MacTiernan (Western Australia) and Mark Shelton (Tasmania) are the most recent expression of a trend that started almost 30 years ago.

Our research

We examined all state and Australian government gazettes from 1939 to 2015 to find out how many “regional” ministers were in place over time. Our criteria were for the term “regional” to be in the title and for the representative to have responsibilities associated with improving the well-being of rural and remote communities.

We then used our data to develop an index, in which we gave a score of 1 for each month in the year where an identifiable regional minister held office.

For each jurisdiction the maximum possible score in any year was 12. For Australia, with six states and one federal government, the maximum possible score was 84.

Our results, in the table above, came as a surprise. It is clear that political engagement with the regions has grown rapidly since the late 1980s.

Previous research has suggested the 1940-1960s period was one of strong governmental commitment to the regions. This was reflected in announcements on the need to “decentralise” the population.

But our data suggest the notion of a “golden era” of regional policy and government support prior to the 1970s is misplaced.

Nation-wide policies in support of agriculture, mining or infrastructure development supported regional communities. But the well-being of these places was not the primary goal.

From 1972 to 1975, the Whitlam government was committed to addressing inequalities associated with where people live. This brought fresh enthusiasm for regional portfolios in state governments, but that tide quickly waned as the political climate changed.

Read more: Election 2016: how well are the major parties meeting the needs of rural and regional Australia?

Australian governments did not begin to appoint regional ministers as a matter of course until the late 1980s. This was a period linked to the end of old-fashioned, class-based politics and the rise of our more complex political landscape.

The trend has continued since and the presence of the six regional ministers and one parliamentary secretary in the halls of political power means there has never been a better time for regions to lobby governments.

There are now more ministers than ever before ready, able and willing to receive delegations and advocate for country towns, rural industries and remote Australia.
This means regional leaders have an opportunity to be heard in the run-up to the NSW and federal elections. The challenge is to determine the key messages and how they should be delivered.

– ref. Regional Australia is calling the shots now more than ever – http://theconversation.com/regional-australia-is-calling-the-shots-now-more-than-ever-110432

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas T. Van Dam, Senior Lecturer in Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne

Last night’s episode of ABC’s Catalyst, “The Mindfulness Experiment”, offered a unique glimpse into what happens to people during Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, an eight-week structured training program in mindfulness meditation.

The program followed 15 ordinary Australians who were seeking to deal with conditions including chronic pain, stress and anxiety. At the end of the experiment, many of the participants had shown improvement.

But if you’re considering dipping a toe into practising mindfulness, or taking the full plunge, there are several things you should consider first.

Read more: What is mindfulness? Nobody really knows, and that’s a problem

Mindfulness is not relaxation

The origins of mindfulness can be found in Eastern traditions. One definition suggests it’s a way of orienting attention and awareness to the present, reminding oneself to stay present when the mind wanders, and carefully discerning those behaviours that are helpful from those that are not.

Contrary to popular belief, mindfulness is not a way to relax or manage emotions. During practice, you will most likely experience unrest, have unpleasant thoughts and feelings, and learn unexpected and unsettling things about yourself.

While relaxation can and does occur, it’s not always as expected and it’s not really the goal.

Mindfulness is not a quick fix

Problems that have developed over weeks, months, or years cannot be fixed overnight. Behaviour change is hard. The patterns we most want to change (such as addictive behaviours, dysfunctional relationships, anxious thinking) require the investment of serious time and effort.

Instructor Timothea Goddard championed the practice of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction in Australia and facilitated the Catalyst participants’ mindfulness journey. She acknowledges doing up to an hour of practice a day can seem demanding. But if the challenges a person is dealing with are significant, this may be what’s required.

She adds that just like physical fitness, courses offering sustained daily practice may be more likely to offer greater transformation experiences.

While we have little data on the frequency or length of practice necessary, decades of research in psychotherapy and behaviour change suggest there is no such thing as a quick fix.

Participants in the Catalyst episode took part in eight weeks of mindfulness training. ABC

Mindfulness is not an escape

You may imagine mindfulness to be like a beach holiday where you leave all the stress, pressure, and deadlines behind. It’s not.

Mindfulness practice creates awareness around the issues that most need our attention. Often we’re drawn to emotional and physical pain we’ve been avoiding.

One participant in The Mindfulness Experiment, Sam, found this difficult. “I want to forget about the areas that are painful, not concentrate on them,” she said.

Mindfulness provides a method, not to escape, but to explore pain or hardship with acceptance, curiosity, and emotional balance.

Mindfulness is not a panacea

Despite suggestions it will fix everything, there are many circumstances and conditions for which mindfulness is simply not effective or appropriate.

If your main reason for seeking out mindfulness is for mental illness or another medical condition, speak first to a medical professional. Meditation is not meant as a replacement for traditional medicine.

Read more: Mindfulness can improve living with a disability

Is mindfulness for you?

An individual session with a skilled instructor can help you work out whether mindfulness is going to be right for you generally, and which approach specifically might help you.

Mindfulness is not one size fits all. Personal attention before and during practice can make a huge difference, especially in a group. We know from psychotherapy research individual adjustments must be made.

Who created the program?

Perhaps this seems like a strange question; few therapy clients or surgery patients know who created the method being used and they often get better. But unlike therapy or medical procedures, meditation is not overseen by any regulatory agency.

Consider what you want to get from the program and whether there is evidence the program and instructor can help you to achieve those goals.

This advice is especially important when considering apps. Few have been examined scientifically.

Read more: Can an app help us find mindfulness in today’s busy high-tech world?

Does the instructor have a personal practice?

Those who do not have a regular mindfulness practice themselves may struggle to teach others to cultivate a practice effectively.

Programs that train people to provide structured meditation programs (such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) require professional training, supervision, and extensive personal practice. While we don’t know if personal practice is necessary, it seems likely it is helpful in guiding others.

– ref. We don’t yet fully understand what mindfulness is, but this is what it’s not – http://theconversation.com/we-dont-yet-fully-understand-what-mindfulness-is-but-this-is-what-its-not-110698