Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Lee, Professor at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

Drug-related offences take up a lot of the resources within Australia’s criminal justice system. In 2016–17 law enforcement made 113,533 illicit drug seizures and 154,650 drug-related arrests.

Harm-reduction advocates are calling for the legalisation of some drugs, and the removal of criminal penalties on others. And there’s public support for both.

But how did some drugs become illegal in the first place? And what drives our current drug laws?

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

Legal status isn’t based on risk or harm

Most people assume drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. But the reasons aren’t related to their relative risk or harm.

In a 2010 study, experts ranked 20 legal and illegal drugs on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society. This includes health damage, economic costs, and crime.

Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug. MDMA (ecstasy), LSD and mushrooms were among the least harmful.

At various times around the world, coffee has been illegal and cocaine has been widely available.

Many drugs that currently carry criminal penalties began life as useful medicinal therapies, such as opiates, cocaine, MDMA, and amphetamines. They were often available over the counter at pharmacies or through licensed sellers.

These special tax stamps were issued by the IRS in the United States to sellers of various drugs including opium, cocaine and tobacco. To show that the appropriate tax had been paid, stamps were purchased and either affixed to the taxed goods or displayed in the taxed place of business.

History of drug laws in Australia

Australia, like the rest of the world, has had a patchy approach to criminalising substances, driven mostly by a desire to maintain international relations – particularly with the United States – rather than by concern for the public’s health or welfare.

Before federation in 1901, very few laws regulated the use of drugs in Australia. The first Australian drug laws in the early 20th century imposed restrictions on opium, primarily as a means to discourage the entry of Chinese people to Australia.

The temperance movement, mostly known today for the prohibition of alcohol in the 19th and early 20th centuries, played a key role in shaping global drug policy. Influenced by temperance activists, US President Theodore Roosevelt convened an international opium conference in 1909, which eventually resulted in the International Opium Convention.

Australia signed up in 1913, and by 1925 the convention had expanded to include the prohibition of opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and cannabis.

These drugs were prohibited in Australia well before their use became widespread or problematic. It wasn’t until the 1960s that recreational drug use became a social concern. That’s when cannabis, heroin, and new psychedelic substances such as LSD became more commonly used for pleasure or in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.

Read more: Weekly Dose: LSD – dangerous, mystical or therapeutic?

In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs updated all existing international conventions and moved toward a strictly prohibitionist approach to recreational drug use (except alcohol and tobacco).

LSD only became a social concern in the 1960s. Alexander_P/Shutterstock

One of the key contributing factors of drug consumption in Australia was the Vietnam War, during which soldiers provided viable markets for heroin, cannabis, and other illicit drugs.

By 1970 all Australian states had enacted laws that made drug supply a separate offence to drug use or possession, rather than merely a regulatory offence for misusing a medicine.

Drug use and related harms increased exponentially in Australia by the mid-1980s. The emergence of HIV/AIDS, as well as a dramatic increase in heroin-related deaths, led to calls for a more comprehensive approach to illicit drugs.

At that time, Australia led the world in a new way of thinking about drug policy. The National Drug Strategy came into effect in 1985, expanding from strict prohibition to explicitly include harm reduction, in addition to demand reduction (prevention and treatment) and supply reduction (customs and policing). In theory, that is. A recent study found just 2% of drug funding goes to harm reduction, while 66% goes to law enforcement.

Read more: Spending down on harm reduction for illicit drugs: report

Cannabis possession and use is currently illegal in Australia.

But starting around 30 years ago, several states and territories (South Australia, ACT and Northern Territory) removed the criminal penalties for personal use of cannabis. That means it’s illegal, but not a criminal offence.

In all other jurisdictions charges of possession can be subject to “diversion” by police or court, allowing offenders to avoid a criminal penalty.

Some Australian states have removed the criminal penalties for possession of cannabis. Thought Catalog

How are drugs currently classified as illegal?

To be criminalised, a drug needs to be specifically scheduled under the relevant Poison Standards as well as having separate criminal drug legislation.

Until recently, drugs needed to be specifically listed to be considered illegal, meaning legislation was constantly playing catch-up as new drugs were developed to circumvent the laws. Nearly 700 new psychoactive substances have been identified globally in the past decade. These synthetic drugs are designed to mimic the effects of common illicit drugs such as cannabis or cocaine.

Most Australian states and territories now ban the possession or sale any substance that has a “psychoactive effect” other than alcohol, tobacco and food. However, evidence from the United Kingdom indicates such broad bans are unlikely to be effective.

Read more: We predicted banning legal highs wouldn’t work – and a new review shows it’s as bad as we feared

Selective bans have resulted in some drugs that are relatively safe in their pure form becoming much more dangerous. Bans on MDMA, for example, have led to the manufacture of illegal preparations with unknown potency and ingredients.

Cannabis criminalisation has encouraged the production of more potent cannabis and, more recently, synthetic cannabinoids.

The effect has also been implicated in the rise of fentanyl use in the United States as authorities crack down on heroin and pharmaceutical opioids.

Why regulate illicit drugs?

The focus on reducing drug use doesn’t translate to reducing harms. In fact, harms continue to increase despite a decrease in alcohol and other drug use in Australia.

There is no evidence a prohibitionist approach to drug law has reduced the supply of illicit drugs. Instead, it has increased organised crime and acted as a barrier for people seeking help.

Given the failures of prohibition, jurisdictions around the world are starting to look at the issue differently. Several have brought cannabis under regulatory control, much like alcohol and tobacco, and others have removed criminal penalties associated with other drug use.

Canada recently legalised and started to regulate cannabis. Doug McLean/Shutterstock

Most of the arguments to maintain current prohibitionist drug laws continue the moral objection to drug use that began in Australia with our early race-driven opium laws.

Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been taking mind-altering substances. Around 43% of Australians have tried an illicit drug at least once in their lifetime.

Read more: Australia’s recreational drug policies aren’t working, so what are the options for reform?

Whether you morally agree with drug use or not, the current drug laws are neither reducing harm nor stopping use. It’s time for a different approach.

– ref. History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren’t – http://theconversation.com/history-not-harm-dictates-why-some-drugs-are-legal-and-others-arent-110564

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bradley J. Moggridge, Indigenous Water Research, University of Canberra

The Murray-Darling crisis has led to drinking water shortages, drying rivers, and fish kills in the Darling, Macintyre and Murrumbidgee Rivers. This has been the catalyst for recommendations for a Royal Commission and creation of two independent scientific expert panels.

The federal Labor party has sought advice from an independent panel through the Australian Academy of Science, while the Coalition government has asked former Bureau of Meteorology chief Rob Vertessy to convene a second panel. Crucially, the first panel contains no Indigenous representatives, and there is little indication that the second panel will either.

Read more: The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought

Indigenous meaning

Water for Aboriginal people is an important part of survival in the driest inhabited landscape on Earth. Protecting water is both a cultural obligation and a necessary practice in the sustainability of everyday life.

The Aboriginal peoples’ worldview sees water as inseparably connected to the land and sky, bound by traditional lore and customs in a system of sustainable management that ensures healthy water for future generations.

Without ongoing connection between these aspects, there is no culture or survival. For a people in a dry landscape, traditional knowledge of finding, re-finding and protecting water sites was integral to survival. Today this knowledge may well serve a broader vision of sustainability for all Australia.

While different Aboriginal Nations describe this in local ways and language, the underlying message is fundamentally the same: look after the water and the water will look after you.

Native title

In the current crisis in the Darling River and Menindee Lakes, the focus should be on the Barkandji people of western New South Wales. In 2015, the native title rights for 128,000 square kilometres of Barkandji land were recognised after an 18-year legal case. This legal recognition represented a significant outcome for the Barkandji People because water – and specifically the Darling River or Barka – is central to their existence.

Under the NSW Water Management Act, Native Title rights are defined as Basic Landholder Rights. However, the Barwon-Darling Water Sharing Plan provides a zero allocation for Native Title. The Barkandji confront ongoing struggles to have their common law rights recognised and accommodated by Australian water governance regimes.

The failure to involve them directly in talks convened by the Murray Darling Basin Authority and Basin States, and their exclusion from the independent panels, are further examples of these struggles.

Over the past two decades, Aboriginal people have been lobbying for an environmental, social, economic and cultural share in the water market, but with little success.

Read more: It’s time to restore public trust in the governing of the Murray Darling Basin

The modern history of Aboriginal peoples’ water is a litany of “unfinished business”, in the words of a 2017 Productivity Commission report.

In 2010 the First Peoples Water Engagement Council was established to advise the National Water Commission, but was abolished prior to the National Water Commission’s legislative sunset in 2014.

The NSW Aboriginal Water Initiative, tasked with re-engaging NSW Aboriginal people in water management and planning, ran from 2012 until the Department of Industry water disbanded the unit in early 2017. In a 2018 progress report the Murray-Darling Basin Authority described NSW as “well behind” on water sharing plans.

Even after a damning ABC 4Corners report shed light on alleged water theft and mismanagement, the voices of the Aboriginal people of the Murray-Darling Basin were absent.

In May 2018 the federal Labor party agreed to a federal government policy package of amendments to the Basin Plan, including a cut of 70 billion litres to the water recovery target in the northern basin, and further bipartisan agreement for better water outcomes for Indigenous people of the basin.

Read more: Explainer: what causes algal blooms, and how we can stop them

While the measures also included A$40 million for Aboriginal communities to invest in water entitlements, a A$20 million economic development fund to benefit Aboriginal groups most affected by the basin plan, and A$1.5 million to support Aboriginal waterway assessments, how worthwhile are they in a river with no water?

The recent crisis emphasises the perpetual sidelining of Aboriginal voices in water management in NSW and beyond. Indigenous voices need to be heard at all levels, with mechanisms that empower that involvement. Indigenous communities continue to fight for rights to water and for the protection of its spirit.

– ref. Aboriginal voices are missing from the Murray-Darling Basin crisis – http://theconversation.com/aboriginal-voices-are-missing-from-the-murray-darling-basin-crisis-110769

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Dickson, Associate Professor of Psychology, Edith Cowan University

The final year of high school is one of the most significant transition periods in a young person’s life. One of the least enjoyable by-products is the stress associated with year 12 – the daunting sense that it’s all come down to this.

Anxiety is already one of the most common disorders among young people, but it can be particularly bad in year 12. Even moderate levels of anxiety can negatively impact a young person’s social functioning, relationships, performance at school and social adjustment.

Read more: Know the curriculum and research your career: preparing for Year 12

Emerging research increasingly shows personal goal setting and motivation is tied to well-being and anxiety. But while there is substantial evidence to show pursuing goals is associated with well-being, setting goals itself is not a cure-all. How you set goals, think about them and pursue them can either promote well-being or worsen anxiety.

Focus on a positive target

Research shows our goals are set as either “approach-oriented” or “avoidance-oriented”. Approach-oriented goals focus on a positive target and involve trying to move toward this desirable outcome. For example, “I want to strive to get over 80% in biology.” Avoidance goals focus on avoiding negative outcomes. For example, “I want to avoid getting below 80% for biology.”

The final year of school can be daunting, but setting achievable goals will help keep you on track. from www.shutterstock.com

These two goals are essentially the same in content, but evidence shows people who set approach-oriented goals report better well-being. The tendency to predominantly set avoidance-oriented goals is associated with anxiety. Focusing on avoidance goals is more taxing and stressful. You typically have to monitor and prevent all the possible ways the negative outcome might happen.

Goals need to be meaningful and freely chosen

It’s important to think about why you set and pursue certain goals. Goals that are genuinely meaningful, rewarding, aim to fulfil your personal hopes/desires and are freely chosen represent internalised self-motivated goals and promote well-being.

Read more: HSC exam guide: how to use music to prepare for exams

On the other hand, goals that are a product of external or situation-specific pressures (such as perceived expectations of parents or society) have been linked with stress and anxiety. Research also indicates people who pursue goals for controlled or external reasons tend not to experience increases in well-being, even when they make progress.

Make sure your goals aren’t too general

Compared to overly generalised goals (such as “to try hard”), specific goals (for example, “to set aside four hours each week to try and achieve a 70% grade in maths by the end of term three”) are more likely to be achieved. Specific goals provide more mental cues to keep you on track and help monitor personal progress towards a goal.

If one of your goals isn’t achievable, you should consider dropping it and setting a new goal. from www.shutterstock.com

Similarly, the more specific a person’s goal plans are, the better. Goal plans should include smaller goals to help reach a particular goal. So, for example, successful study plans might include “to set aside two hours each night”, “to study in the library” and “to reward weekly tasks with some Netflix time”.

Flexibility is key

Inflexible goal-setting or having no “give” within a set of goals can set up a path to failure and is thought to maintain psychological difficulties. Sensible goal-making ensures you set realistic goals, which may mean adjusting your goals at times so they’re achievable.

A goal may serve to enhance the pursuit of other goals, such as “to keep fit” and “to eat healthily”. But at other times a goal may conflict with the pursuit of other goals – a goal to “spend more quality time with my friends” may conflict with a goal to “spend more time studying”. People typically have a limited set of personal resources such as time and energy, so it may be necessary to prioritise particular goals so they are achievable.

Read more: Study habits for success: tips for students

Alternatively, if a goal is unattainable, research indicates giving up is beneficial if it leads to the pursuit of a new, meaningful goal. This can reduce psychological distress and increase your sense of well-being.

Flexibility in goal-setting means even if you don’t meet a particular goal, you can still work towards those more important, overarching goals such as developing a sense of self-worth and self-esteem. It’s not all or nothing.

Set goals outside of academic achievement too

For the final year of schooling, it’s important to set goals that aren’t only linked to academic aspirations. Emotional well-being doesn’t happen by accident. Having goals in other life domains such as leisure and recreation, health and relationships will help enhance your sense of well-being. These goals will help you navigate year 12 and beyond.

It’s important to also set goals that involve leisure and spending time with family and friends. from www.shutterstock.com

Research shows the pursuit of goals itself is good for you, whether or not you achieve your goal. It helps you develop a sense of identity, make positive adjustments in life and promotes psychological well-being and resilience.

Resources for students

Sometimes life can also get in the way of our goals. If you’re experiencing severe stress and anxiety, there are support contacts and resources available. For example:

• talking with a student welfare or pastoral care co-ordinator, school counsellor, a trusted adult or friend

• phone support such as Lifeline (13 11 14)

• online support services such as Beyond Blue and Headspace.

– ref. Five tips to help year 12 students set better goals in the final year of school – http://theconversation.com/five-tips-to-help-year-12-students-set-better-goals-in-the-final-year-of-school-109954

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Walters, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, The University of Queensland

One of the stark differences between neighbourhoods in the inner city and outer suburbs in Australia is the quality and type of retail offerings. Gentrifying inner-city suburbs – places like West End in Brisbane, Fitzroy in Melbourne and Newtown in Sydney – are characterised by independent owner-operated retail businesses. Busy “third places” such as cafes, bars and restaurants – where people spend time between home (“first” place) and work (“second” place) – are common.

These are the favoured haunts of the hipster. Hipsters have an uneasy place in our cultural landscape, not least of which is their role in gentrification. However, their role in the inner city is important in showing the rest of the city how to create contemporary, accessible and successful third places with low, non-gendered barriers to entry.

Third places provide residents and visitors with a variety of what Ray Oldenburg calls “the core settings of informal public life”. Cafes, bars, pubs, clubs or chess rooms (in some places) are places where people can meet informally or be “together alone”. They allow for planned and accidental encounters across different times of the day and are essential for a healthy neighbourhood social life or “sense” of community.

Cafes and bars provide a ‘third place’ where people can meet informally or be ‘together alone’, as seen here in St Kilda, Melbourne. Peter Walters, Author provided

Read more: Many people feel lonely in the city, but perhaps ‘third places’ can help with that

What’s missing from outer suburbs?

As we travel out of the inner city towards the outer suburbs, residents become increasingly deprived of these places. Suburban retail centres become less “local” – shopping centres are isolated from the surrounding neighbourhood, controlled by a single corporate landlord, marooned in a sea of parking and offer a predictable range of franchised outlets and national brands, often anchored by a large supermarket. At the district level are huge impersonal shopping malls.

None of this enables residents to take advantage of local third places or feel any sense of authorship over them, which is so important for creating place and community.

History has an obvious role to play. Inner-city suburbs were planned and built before widespread car ownership. Streets are laid out in grids, which make for easy and direct pedestrian or bicycle travel.

These areas were built before the introduction of strict “single use” zoning regimes, so have a good mix of land uses. Retail, residential and even industrial properties exist side by side. Property ownership has evolved so one landlord rarely controls an entire retail strip.

Read more: Reinventing density: bridging the live-work divide

Businesses open on to wide, protected footpaths which are thoroughfares for more than just the businesses located there. The built form is varied, interesting and vernacular and suited to small independent businesses.

Buildings are varied, interesting and vernacular and suited to small independent businesses in West End, Brisbane. Peter Walters, Author provided

Gentrification and the hipster

Inner-city neighbourhoods in recent decades have been gentrified as more affluent residents and businesses colonise formerly working class, migrant or Indigenous areas of inner cities. Gentrification takes place over a long time and in particular phases.

The first to colonise an area are “renter gentrifiers”. They are responsible for making the place hip or edgy through alternative music and art, underground fashion and an embryonic start-up business culture.

Despite the mockery they inspire, the hipsters’ pursuits create ‘third places’ that foster a sense of community. g-stockstudio/Shutterstock

This in turn attracts better-resourced gentrifiers who share the same cultural tastes as the renter gentrifiers but have money. This creates demand for a range of retail outlets, such as artisanal bakers, micro-breweries, tattoo artists, vintage fashions, vinyl record stores, independent bookstores and, most importantly, abundant bars, cafes and coffee shops.

These businesses are stereotypically run by hipsters, a subculture easily recognisable by their carefully curated full beards (male), artistic or ironic tattoos, skinny jeans and other vintage accessories. Hipsters are often disparaged for their lack of originality, for championing a look that mimics a historical period they never experienced. As Jake Kinsey writes sarcastically in a whole book that derides hipsters:

… creativity, genius, eternal value and mystery are inseparable from the hipster.

The quest for authenticity

Authenticity is a contested word, but if we think in terms of “authorship”, the independently owned and operated third place where both owner and customer feel a sense of ownership and reciprocal obligation provides much more authenticity than just another outlet in a chain of franchises.

While some hipster businesses that work in the gentrified inner city might not work so well in the outer suburbs, people who live in these suburbs are not a different species. The desire to get out of your house, to socialise, to see your neighbours out in the community or to be “together alone” is not limited to the inner city. There is no reason people in the suburbs would not respond to independently owned businesses, rather than the remotely controlled, rationalised franchises – see “McDonaldization” – that populate so many suburban shopping centres.

Quality third places are just as important in the outer suburbs, which are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of life stage, ethnicity, culture and employment type.

Keeping ‘McDonaldization’ at bay in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Peter Walters, Author provided

Read more: Can our cities’ thriving creative precincts be saved from ‘renewal’?

So what’s the solution?

Property developers are often quick to point out that local retail is not economically viable in new suburbs unless it consists of supermarkets and fast-food outlets and is surrounded by tarmac. Local (walkable) retail is invariably compared on price to the large impersonal shopping malls that draw shoppers in from the suburbs. However, the lure of a small local shopping precinct, where “third place” businesses such bars, cafes and restaurants and community hubs can operate at survivable rents, is a different proposition.

This is not a new suggestion. Various models have been proposed to subsidise retail rents, provide independent freehold of individual retail premises, or rent control.

Developers have been reluctant to help with this as it not profitable (for them). Local authorities have also been reluctant to engage developers on this front.

There are, however, some encouraging exceptions to this. Some more enlightened developers see the sustained benefit of creating community hubs. The argument is for a social good rather than a purely economic one.

The outer suburbs are spatially different to the inner city – history and late capitalism have taken care of that. Local authorities need to think about current inflexible zoning regimes and about how small socially beneficial businesses can be encouraged.

Suburbs do not empty out during the day. In a post-work and ageing society, suburbs will become socially barren places to live unless there are lively hubs where people can leave the private realm of the home and see each other in a welcoming environment in which they feel some authorship.

There’s more to the experience than just savouring the coffee in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Peter Walters, Author provided

– ref. Why outer suburbs lack inner city’s ‘third places’: a partial defence of the hipster – http://theconversation.com/why-outer-suburbs-lack-inner-citys-third-places-a-partial-defence-of-the-hipster-110177

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hopkins, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Australian National University

In its interim report published four months ago, the Banking Royal Commission chalks up shocking misconduct in the finance industry to greed – “the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty”.

“How else,” it asks, “is charging continuing advice fees to the dead to be explained?”

It is seductively easy to explain misconduct in terms of this base human motive, one of the seven deadly sins. But moral failure does not satisfactorily explain why humans misbehave in organisations. There are also organisational reasons.

The royal commission is, of course, aware this. Its interim report points to greed stimulated by incentive payments or bonuses: “From the executive suite to the front line, staff were measured and rewarded by reference to profit and sales.”

Is the solution, then, to simply get rid of incentive payments?

Read more: We’ll wait an eternity for the banks to fix themselves. Here’s what we can do now

My view, based on many years looking at the causes of catastrophes such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster, is that there is no easy way to do this.

The uncomfortable reality is that incentive payments are an inherent aspect of modern capitalism.

The only effective way to detoxify the incentive individuals have to do the wrong thing in pursuit of bigger profits is to counterbalance them with equally compelling incentives to not act dishonestly.

The principal/agent problem

The interim report does not explicitly say incentive payments should be done away with, but it is the implication of much of the commentary.

It states (on page 317) the premise that staff and intermediaries will not do their jobs properly without incentive payments “must be challenged”.

It suggests there is too much conflict of interest in “customer-facing staff” being paid according to what they sell or advise customers: “And if customer-facing staff should not be paid incentives, why should their managers, or those who manage the managers?”

But it also acknowledges that attempts to change the incentive culture would most certainly be resisted: “Changing culture in the Australian banks may not be easy and may take time. It cannot be assumed that entities will embrace change willingly or immediately.”

Commissioner Ken Hayne at the initial public hearing, in February 2018, of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Eddie Jim/AAP

It’s important to understand why the banks would be so hostile to such a change.

Incentive payments are a way to address a fundamental problem in modern capitalism, particularly in large publicly listed companies with multiple layers of managers.

In business literature it is called the “principal/agent problem” – the principal being the owner (or shareholder) and the agent being the manager (or executive) hired to run the business on behalf of the owner (or, in the case of a large company, many thousands of owners).

Agents have legal duty to put shareholder interests above all others. The “problem” is that, if left to themselves, they may in act in their own interest, putting their own wealth, power and prestige before the interest of the owners.

Tying executive remuneration to company financial performance has developed as a way to mitigate this problem. Remuneration consultants have developed very finely tuned schemes with huge incentives for top executives enrich themselves only by enriching their principals, through maximising total shareholder returns.

Read more: Will Hayne blink? The problems with banks demand tough measures that neither they nor their regulators want

Irresistable incentives

The downside, as the royal commission has exposed, is that such incentives also encourage executives to consider customers as sheep to be fleeced.

Key to this is how long-term incentive schemes are structured.

Short-term incentives are bonuses paid to top executives annually. In addition to these, each year a large bonus equal to or greater than their base salary is provisionally awarded. The payment is deferred for a period, often three years. The executive gets this long-term incentive only if certain conditions are met.

Those conditions largely concern the company’s financial performance in the intervening years. In most schemes the company’s performance must also be better than most of its competitors. Typically this is determined by comparing it with a select group of companies. If it achieves less than the median, the executive loses all or most of the long-term bonus.

It is hard to imagine a system better designed to pressure a chief executive to put profit ahead of all else.

Long-term bonuses operate in this way in many sectors of the economy, not just banking. They lie behind many of the major accidents in the oil and gas industry that I have written about.

Penalty counterbalance

So the problem with the banking and financial services sector is a whole system designed to maximise shareholder returns. It is the greed of shareholders that drives the system.

How can we mitigate the antisocial aspects?

One way is to ensure the huge incentives to do the wrong thing in pursuit of maximum profit are counterbalanced by the penalties. Right now that’s just not the case. The penalty for corporate malfeasance is often a fine, imposed on the company, not individuals.

We should hold top executives and even directors personally and criminally liable when companies fail to take proper account of the interests of consumers, customers and employees. This will ensures it will not always be in their interests to align their morality with the interests of shareholders.

Read more: Confiscate their super. If it works for sports stars, it could work for bankers

Health, safety and environment laws impose such criminal liabilities on senior office holders when they fail to protect their employees and the environment. Acute awareness of this liability has resulted in a much greater concern for the lives of workers and the environment than would be dictated by shareholder interests alone.

In my own research I have found the influence of corporate safety risk managers is enhanced when they can highlight the legal liability of their bosses. One might expect the influence of chief risk officers in financial institutions to be similarly strengthened.

It will be interesting to see how far the royal commission ventures down this path in its final report.

– ref. What banking regulators can learn from Deepwater Horizon and other industrial catastrophes – http://theconversation.com/what-banking-regulators-can-learn-from-deepwater-horizon-and-other-industrial-catastrophes-108989

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Davis, Deputy Dean Research, Education and the Arts, CQUniversity Australia

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

This year marks 50 years since the launch of one of Australia’s first major conservation battles, waged against Queensland’s ultra-conservative, pro-development premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was for a location few had ever heard of – Cooloola, an area that stretches from Noosa to Rainbow Beach, around 70 km north.

Portrait of Kathleen McArthur by Lina Bryans (1960). Courtesy Alexandra Moreno

The unlikely leader of this campaign was a wildflower painter named Kathleen McArthur, who led the Caloundra branch of an environmental group the Australian newspaper called “the most militant of conservation cells”.

Kathleen, together with colleagues such as poet Judith Wright, pioneered and honed activist strategies that are still instructive today. She understood art’s ability to prompt human emotion and marshal the public support required to bring about change.

From her homebase at Caloundra in Queensland, Kathleen created nation-wide awareness of the existence of the Cooloola region, which incorporates internationally significant high dunes, coloured sands, rainforest and wallum heathland habitats. It is now part of Great Sandy National Park, but at the time was under threat from sand mining and development.

A highlight of the Cooloola campaign was the distribution of 100,000 protest cards across Australia, with at least 15,000 of them sent to Queensland’s then Premier. Conservationist Arthur Harrold described Kathleen as the “cunning mind” behind the cards.

The Cooloola campaign postcard, 1969. Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland

Abandoning convention

Kathleen McArthur was born in 1915 into one of Brisbane’s leading families. Her parents were Daniel Evans of Queensland engineering company Evans Deakin, and Kathleen (Kit) Durack, of the Irish pastoralist family made famous via the books of cousin Mary Durack.

Christmas Bells by Kathleen McArthur. Courtesy Hugh McArthur and the Fryer Library, University of Queensland

Kathleen had an early life of considerable privilege. However, she turned away from the conventional life of the society matron. After a well-publicised marriage to military man Malcolm McArthur, and three children, Kathleen eschewed life on military bases or the city. The family bought a modest home at Caloundra that she later named Midyim.

Discovering her husband’s unfaithful ways, Kathleen initiated divorce proceedings in 1947. By the 1950s, she was a single mother of three. She lost her parents to illness in 1951.

From then on, Kathleen forged a new life for herself, writing about and illustrating Queensland wildflowers. She began painting in part to help identify the wildflowers in her local environment, there being a limited range of books to assist with their identification.

The Bush in Bloom by Kathleen McArthur (1982).

In 1953, Kathleen set herself the task of recording all the native plants in bloom across key locations of the Sunshine Coast region. This project fed into numerous publications including weekly newspaper columns and books. This year was also notable for a wildflowering expedition Kathleen took with her friend Judith Wright to the peak of Mt Tinbeerwah, which provided the spark of the idea for a national park at Cooloola.

Judith and Kathleen were among the founders of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, established in 1962, along with naturalist David Fleay and Jacaranda Press founder Brian Clouston. Brian offered to help their cause by publishing an educational wildlife magazine, which still exists today.

The ‘Mistress of Midyim’

A crisis point was reached for Cooloola in 1969, with mining applications pending for much of the region. Kathleen’s idea to use wildflower postcards activated the public campaign. She had been inspired by a US campaign utlising such cards and though others were sceptical, set about creating a postcard, a letter and a brochure that could be distributed far and wide. She also created wildflower cards and prints featuring her artwork, sold to help raise funds.

Just a few of the flood of letters Kathleen received during the Cooloola campaign, from the WPSQ collection held at the State Library of Queensland. Courtesy Susan Davis

After the postcard distribution, hundreds of letters of support flowed back to the “Mistress of Midyim”. The campaign was further promoted through feature articles and letters to editors, talks, a documentary and capitalising on a web of allegiances. From early on, the Wildlife society formed relationships with scientists such as Dr Len Webb, from the CSIRO, who played a central role.

Vanilla Lillies by Kathleen McArthur. Courtesy Hugh McArthur

Kathleen and the society communicated regularly with politicians from all sides of the house. Her local MP Mike Ahern was a Country Party member but sympathetic to the conservation agenda.

On 1 December 1969, Bjelke-Peterson issued a press release stating that “substantial areas” of the Cooloola sand mass would be set aside as a National Park. But this was by no means the end of the campaign. Six weeks later, it was revealed that applications had been lodged for sand mining leases within some areas of Cooloola. This delayed formal action on the declaration of a national park and required the campaigners to change tactics.

In the meantime, the newly formed South Queensland Conservation Council, the Cooloola Committee and Dr Arthur Harrold took on the next phase of the battle. While Kathleen gave up leadership of the campaign, she did not leave the fray entirely. As key hurdles were encountered she would return to letter writing and other forms of maintaining the rage.

Eventually, 22 years after Kathleen and Judith first stood on the peak of Mt Tinbeerwah, the Queensland parliament gazetted the Cooloola National Park in December, 1975. However Kathleen’s role is rarely mentioned in most accounts of the Cooloola campaign.

After Cooloola

Kathleen McArthur in the early 1960s. Author supplied

Kathleen refocussed on her art, wrote a suite of books and established a series of monthly presentations called “lunch-hour theatre”. She remained involved with her local branch of the wildlife preservation society, prepared the submission to have Pumicestone Passage added to the register of the National Estate, and campaigned to protect beach dunes. She also identified areas that should be protected as reserves, including one posthumously named Kathleen McArthur Conservation Reserve just north of Lake Currimundi. After a period of illness she died in 2000, the same year as her friend Judith Wright.

Because of the likes of Kathleen McArthur, today there are national parks, beaches protected by dunes rather than rock walls, and birds calling from humble heathlands where gentle wildflowers bloom. She is but one of a number of women from the period who could be “wild”, radical and difficult, but who was passionate about wildflowers and protecting our natural environments.

A ‘Wild/flower Women’ exhibition will be on display at the Fryer Library, University of Queensland throughout 2019, with an online exhibition to be available via their website. A public lecture and performance will be staged in late March as a part of the Fryer Fellowship program.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Kathleen McArthur, the wildflower woman who took on Joh Bjelke-Petersen – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-kathleen-mcarthur-the-wildflower-woman-who-took-on-joh-bjelke-petersen-110269

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Burton, Lecturer in Media Arts, University of Wollongong

SBS’s suite of slow TV programs, “Slow Summer”, arrived at a fortuitous time in our annual media trajectory, when we were briefly relieved of the busyness plaguing our lives.

On the back of last year’s successful trip on The Ghan, SBS commissioned Sydney-based Mint Pictures to produce two more journeys, The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train, and The Kimberley Cruise: Australia’s Last Great Wilderness. The programs were each three hours long on SBS. Longer versions (17 and 14 hours respectively) screened on SBS’s Viceland channel.

Others airing are BBC Four’s All Aboard! The Canal Trip (a mere two hours), and North to South, a three-hour, Tolkien inspired, multiple vehicle journey through New Zealand’s Middle-earth.

Ratings have fallen somewhat compared to last year’s efforts. (The three-hour versions of the Indian Pacific and Kimberley Cruise programs had reached around 1-1.3 million viewers a week after the broadcast, compared with last year’s 1.7 million for The Ghan.) Still, slow TV is actually the perfect genre for today’s viewing habits.

What is slow TV?

In its purest, Norwegian-inspired form, slow TV is characterised by minute-by-minute footage of a culturally significant journey, event, or activity, edited together chronologically from numerous camera angles, resulting in an unconventionally long viewing experience.

While The Ghan: The Full Journey might sound long (16 and a half hours), this pales in comparison to Norwegian public broadcaster NRK’s 134-hour live broadcast aboard the cruise ship Hurtigruten in 2011.

SBS first screened The Ghan in 2018.

Multiple cameras are often fixed onto the moving subject, notably the classic “phantom ride” perspective from the front of a train, but aerial shots, drones, and subtle tripod movements are also used. The editing pace is slow: most shots last at least 30 seconds, but a single perspective can linger for over an hour.

Apart from a few notable exceptions, such as an isolated cow or the Queen of Norway as she sails by, the journey tends not to single out particular characters. Noticeably absent is the voice of a narrator, nor is there a host, nor even music. Instead, sound emanates from the environments we see (that’s “diegetic sound” in cinema speak).

In short, slow TV is “slow” because it lacks the rollercoaster of emotional cues, narrative guides, and breathless editing pace we have come to expect from television.

Our multitasking age

The long duration is the first obvious challenge slow TV has when attracting viewers. But if you consider our fondness for sport, we’re experts at that. A single day of test cricket usually runs longer than six hours. The 1.5 million of us who tuned in to the men’s Australian Open final on Sunday were disappointed Nadal and Djokovic couldn’t reignite their five hour and 53-minute battle of 2012.

Apart from sport, and whatever happened to Big Brother, most of us are now binge-watching our favorite shows. According to Deloitte’s most recent media consumer surveys, around two thirds of us are bingeing, defined as watching three or more consecutive TV episodes in one go, with almost half of us paying for a subscription video on demand service such as Netflix or Stan. Deloitte’s 2017 survey of over 2000 consumers suggests we are spending around 17 hours per week watching movies or TV across our devices.

The promotional video for SBS’s Slow Summer.

Despite our appetite for prolonged screen exposure, slow TV is so unconventional that SBS has pitched it as a dare for us to watch. Embracing divided responses from last year’s foray with The Ghan, this year’s Slow Summer promo video features a series of rival tweets: “Literally as exciting as watching paint dry”; “This is f-ing ART!”; “Yawn… I’m Ghan to bed” ; “#TheGhan a goddam masterpiece”.

This promo captures one of the secrets to the genre’s success: online participation and interaction through social media makes it a collective viewing experience. Travelling across the Nullarbor on The Indian Pacific by yourself would be as lonely as midnight infomercials, but #SlowSummer fills the carriages with discussion, commentary, and comraderie.

While reality television and talk shows have been capitalising on social media interaction for some time, slow TV opens up an entirely new approach to producing content for audiences to provide their own commentary.

The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train aired as part of SBS’s Slow Summer programming. SBS

Perhaps the most striking finding from Deloitte’s 2018 survey is that 91% of us are now multi-tasking while watching TV (up from 79% in 2014): in other words, we might be “passively” consuming what we’re watching.

So the real brilliance of slow TV is its ability to meet the needs of both passive and active consumption. It works on two levels: as a beautiful view in the living room, kitchen, and wherever else your flat-screens might be, and on the other hand if you give it the attention it deserves, you might find yourself embarking on an intellectually stimulating and imaginative journey.

It is precisely the lack of narration and character driven narrative that opens up the space for interpretation and opinion.

While the Slow Summer programs are only available online temporarily, as with as regular programs, their unique capacity to inspire audiences means they should remain of interest for decades to come.

Our politicians and media consistently chase short-term achievements. As we all rush back to work, perhaps revising our KPIs and considering the value of “slow ratings” might make our collective journey more enjoyable.

– ref. Why slow TV deserves our (divided) attention – http://theconversation.com/why-slow-tv-deserves-our-divided-attention-110695

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Usman W. Chohan, Economist, UNSW

The seat of World Bank president is becoming vacant. Its president, Jim Yong Kim, will step down on January 31, three years earlier than his term formally ends.

His move – described as “sudden” and a “shock,” particularly since the World Bank has been going through significant internal restructuring – gives US president Donald Trump the chance to appoint a replacement more aligned with his outlook.

Read more: World Bank president: list of reforms African states should be demanding

This is because, since the World Bank’s establishment in 1945, the United States has had outsized influence as its largest shareholder. Its president has always been an American citizen nominated by the US government. Kim was chosen by the Obama administration in 2012.

Rumours circulated early on that Trump was considering his daughter Ivanka for the job. Even though that has since been denied, it’s likely he will choose a candidate sympathetic to his worldview.

This may mean a substantial change in the World Bank’s priorities. In particular, in two areas the bank has played an important and positive role: funding sustainable projects to deal with climate change (“climate resilience”); and encouraging robust international connectivity through trade.

Focus on climate resilience

The World Bank has put substantial emphasis on funding projects in developing countries that address climate change. Last financial year 32% of its financing – a total of US$20.5 billion – was climate-related.

Recently approved World Bank projects included climate resilient transport in the Oceania region (such as in Tonga and Samoa), and solar projects across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is all part of a detailed five-year Climate Change Action Plan underway since 2016.

This concern about the consequences of climate change stands in marked contrast to the Trump administration’s record.

Trump’s disregard of climate science is reflected in the defunding or reorganisation of climate-related research projects and institutions. His appointee to head the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, played a key role in the US withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and energetically worked to gut pollution protection regulations.

So there’s good reason to believe the Trump administration’s pick for the World Bank will reflect its hostility to climate security, and that the bank’s priority towards funding climate resilience will change as a result.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim with fashion designer, author, reality television personality, businesswoman and trusted presidential advisor Ivanka Trump in July 2017. Michael Kappeler/DPA

Antipathy towards multilateralism

The Trump administration has already sought to curb salary growth among World Bank staff. More severely, Trump’s National Security advisor, John Bolton, has argued the World Bank should be privatised or simply shut down.

This is part of a wider “antipathy towards multilateralism” that includes institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation.

Read more: Australia has to prepare for life after the World Trade Organisation

Trump’s belief that free trade has hurt the US is at odds with the World Bank’s long history of facilitating reforms designed to promote international trade.

Part of the original logic for the World Bank was that trade was seen as a means to create interdependence, and thus reduce economic conflict that might lead to war.

The Trump administration has shown it is more than willing to revert to an old-fashioned trade war.

Its tariff contest with China (which joined the WTO in 2001 with the World Bank’s help) is already hurting global manufacturing, with the International Monetary Fund downgrading its global economic growth forecasts as a result.

Though a Trump appointee might not upend the World Bank’s commitment to free trade in principle, the result might be an organisation less active in promoting multilateralism in practice.

Playing to China’s strengths

Ironically a Trump-compliant World Bank might result in promoting its sidelining to the advantage of China.

In its first six decades of existence the World Bank was an immensely powerful international institution. But its relevance to international development and finance is now being overshadowed by alternative funding mechanisms such as private-sector lending and particularly institutions related to Chinese international development initiatives.

China is planning through its Belt and Road Initiative to spend US$1 trillion on international infrastructure projects over the coming decade. Much of these are focused on Eurasian and African regions where the World Bank has struggled most to promote sustainable prosperity.

China has also has built a rival to the World Bank in the form of the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank (AIIB), which has a sizeable balance sheet and a proactive approach to funding projects, including those in sustainable development.

Read more: US sparks new development race with China – but can it win?

But in climate resilience and global economic integration, the World Bank still retains the mantle of global leader. Thus far it has welcomed cooperation with the AIIB, signing a memorandum of understanding in 2017.

Blunt its work in these two areas and the World Bank becomes more irrelevant. Combined with the organisation’s serious governance problems, which are most unlikely to be addressed by a Trump appointee, the future for the World Bank is not bright.

– ref. A Trump-aligned World Bank may be bad for climate action and trade, but good for Chinese ambitions – http://theconversation.com/a-trump-aligned-world-bank-may-be-bad-for-climate-action-and-trade-but-good-for-chinese-ambitions-110265

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

This week’s Newspoll, conducted January 24-27 from a sample of 1,630, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, a two-point gain for the Coalition since the last Newspoll in early December. Primary votes were 38% Labor (down three), 37% Coalition (up two), 9% Greens (steady) and 6% One Nation (down one). This is the equal closest Newspoll result since Scott Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull as PM.

Despite the Coalition’s improvement on voting intentions, Morrison’s ratings went backwards. 40% were satisfied with him (down two), and 47% were dissatisfied (up two), for a net rating of -7, Morrison’s second worst. Bill Shorten’s net approval was up two points to -13. While still poor, this is Shorten’s equal best Newspoll net approval since May 2016. Morrison led Shorten by 43-36 as better PM (44-36 in December).

Since replacing Turnbull in August 2018, Morrison’s ratings have been better than we would expect given voting intentions, as voters gave him a personal “honeymoon”. In this Newspoll, Morrison’s net approval of -7 is very close to the Coalition’s voting intentions deficit of six points. In the future, Morrison’s ratings are likely to be more correlated with voting intentions.

The last Newspoll was taken after the final parliamentary week of 2018, when there was much media focus on politics. The lack of media attention on politics since mid-December may have assisted the Coalition. Analyst Kevin Bonham says Newspolls taken in December and January tend to be better for governments.

As the graph above shows, the incumbent government’s polling has tanked in February, when the media refocuses on politics. With the election due in May, the Coalition will need to avoid this February slump.

Housing prices have continued to fall. The NAB business survey had business conditions falling from +13 in November to +2 in December. The Westpac consumer survey had sentiment slumping from 104.4 in December to 99.6 in January.

Somewhat countering these gloomy economic reports, the ABS reported on January 24 that almost 22,000 jobs were added in December, and the unemployment rate fell 0.1% to 5.0%. The Australian stock market has gained in January, reversing much of December’s falls.

To make up for the likely loss of voters with a high level of educational attainment (see the seat polls below), the Coalition needs a strong economy to attract working class voters. A weaker economy is likely to help Labor.

Seat polls of Higgins, Flinders and Herbert

The Poll Bludger has details of recent ReachTEL polls of the Victorian federal seats of Higgins and Flinders, and a Newspoll of the Queensland seat of Herbert. All three polls were conducted January 24 from samples of 500-700. The Higgins poll was conducted for supporters of Peter Costello and the Flinders poll for the CFMMEU.

In Flinders, held by Greg Hunt, Labor led by 51-49, an eight-point swing to Labor since the 2016 election. In Higgins, held by the retiring Kelly O’Dwyer, Labor led by 52-48, a 13-point swing to Labor. In Herbert, which Labor barely won in 2016, they led by 51-49, a one-point swing to Labor.

In 2016, the Greens finished second in Higgins, ahead of Labor. In the Higgins poll, after excluding 8.4% undecided, the Liberals have 40.3% of the primary vote, Labor 27.1% and the Greens 19.3%. Full primary votes in Flinders were not reported.

In Herbert, primary votes were 32% Labor (30.5% in 2016), 32% LNP (35.5%), 9% One Nation (13.5%), 8% Katter’s Australian Party (6.9%), 8% for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and 7% Greens (6.3%). Palmer’s advertising campaign appears to have had an impact in Herbert. However, respondents expressed a negative, rather than a positive, view of Palmer by 65-24.

Seat polls are notoriously unreliable, but the big swings in Flinders and Higgins could reflect voters with high levels of educational attainment turning against the federal Coalition. I wrote on my personal website in August that these voters likely far preferred Turnbull to Morrison.

NSW Newspoll: 50-50 tie

The New South Wales election will be held on March 23. A Newspoll, conducted January 25-29 from a sample of 1,010, had a 50-50 tie, unchanged from the last NSW Newspoll in March 2018. Primary votes were 39% Coalition (up one), 36% Labor (up two), 10% Greens (down one) and 6% One Nation (down two).

This poll suggests movement back to the Coalition after a YouGov Galaxy poll and a ReachTEL poll in late November gave Labor leads of 52-48 and 51-49 respectively. YouGov Galaxy is the pollster that conducts Newspoll.

Read more: Historical fall of Liberal seats in Victoria; micros likely to win ten seats in upper house; Labor leads in NSW

41% were satisfied with Premier Gladys Berejiklian (down four since March 2018) and 43% were dissatisfied (up eight), for a net approval of -2, down 12 points. Michael Daley’s debut ratings as opposition leader were 41% dissatisfied, 33% satisfied. Berejiklian led Daley by 44-31 as better Premier.

Tuesday’s Brexit votes make a “no deal” Brexit more likely

On Tuesday, the UK House of Commons voted on several amendments that could have either delayed the Brexit date beyond March 29, or led to a second referendum on Brexit. All these amendments were defeated by at least 20 votes. The Commons rejected a “no deal” Brexit by eight votes, but this is only a motion that has no legislative force.

To appease her Conservative party’s right wing, PM Theresa May supported an amendment that requires alternative arrangements for the contentious Northern Ireland “backstop”. The Commons agreed to this amendment by a 16-vote margin, but it is very unlikely to be acceptable to the European Union.

Tuesday’s votes make it more likely that the UK will leave the European Union on March 29, with or without a deal. You can read about why I think a “no deal” Brexit is a plausible outcome on my personal website.

– ref. Poll wrap: Coalition gains in first Newspoll of 2019, but big swings to Labor in Victorian seats; NSW is tied – http://theconversation.com/poll-wrap-coalition-gains-in-first-newspoll-of-2019-but-big-swings-to-labor-in-victorian-seats-nsw-is-tied-110684

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorraine Finlay, Lecturer in Law, Murdoch University

The arrest and detention of former Bahraini national, footballer Hakeem Al-Araibi, has gained international attention. Al-Araibi fled Bahrain in 2014 and was subsequently granted refugee status in Australia. He was arrested after travelling to Thailand on his honeymoon late last year, and has now spent over 60 days inside Bangkok’s Remand Prison.

Thai authorities arrested Al-Araibi on the basis of an Interpol red notice that Bahrain had requested. Despite the red notice now being withdrawn, Al-Araibi remains in jail and Bahrain has formally filed extradition documents. There are fears Al-Araibi may be jailed and tortured if extradited to Bahrain. This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has written to his Thai counterpart, urging him to prevent Al-Araibi’s extradition and release him.

The footballer’s case raises important questions about how this arrest was able to take place. The case has also highlighted concerns about some states’ misuse of Interpol red notices to pursue refugees.

Read more: Explainer: how Australia decides who is a genuine refugee

What an Interpol red notice is (and is not)

The most common misconception about Interpol red notices is that they are international arrest warrants. They are not. Interpol is an international organisation of 194 member states (including Australia) created to enhance worldwide police cooperation. It does not have the power itself to arrest or detain anybody.

Interpol does, however, coordinate an international notice system that allows police in member states to share critical information. Interpol issues (or publishes) red notices as part of this system.

A red notice is effectively a request by a member state for other states to help locate and arrest a person wanted in a criminal matter, so that person can be extradited. Red notices are an increasingly significant law enforcement tool, with 13,048 issued in 2017.

While Interpol publishes and disseminates red notices, it is the requesting country that’s actually seeking help to find a wanted person. It is also important to note that this is a voluntary system. No state is legally obliged to arrest somebody based on a red notice. Interpol recognises that “each member country decides for itself what legal value to give a red notice within their borders”.

Read more: FactCheck: are Interpol red notices often wrong?

Certain criteria govern whether a red notice is published. Importantly, Interpol is strictly forbidden under its constitution from undertaking “any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character”, and is meant to act in “the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

In terms of the red notice system, this means Interpol should not publish notices that are politically motivated or violate obligations imposed under international human rights law.

How about refugees?

There has been growing concern about the potential misuse of red notices to target refugees. The case of Hakeem Al-Araibi is unfortunately not an isolated incident.

Recent high profile examples include the arrest and detention of Russian activist Petr Silaev in Spain, Indian refugee Paramjeet Singh Saini in Portugal and Algerian human rights lawyer Rachid Mesli in Italy.

Reforms have been introduced to address these concerns, including a new Interpol refugee policy in 2015. In essence, this says that a red notice should not be issued against a refugee when it has been requested by the country from which the refugee initially fled.

Given this, Al-Araibi’s confirmed refugee status meant Interpol should have rejected Bahrain’s request for a red notice.

Read more: A triple execution in Bahrain has provoked national outrage – and international silence

Clearly, the red notice against Al-Araibi did not comply with Interpol rules. This is reinforced by the fact that it was so quickly withdrawn. Of course, by then the damage had already been done, as Al-Araibi had already been arrested and detained.

The difficulty lies in how this refugee policy is applied. Interpol examines red notice requests for compliance before publication. But it does not automatically have access to refugee status decisions by member states, nor should it, given the sensitivity of that information.

There is also too often a disconnect at the national level between law enforcement and immigration agencies. What this means is that information about refugee status may not automatically or necessarily be shared with the national law enforcement officers dealing with red notices.

What does this mean for Hakeem Al-Araibi and other refugees?

Hakeem Al-Araibi’s case highlights significant flaws in this system. A red notice should never have been issued. But it is easy to see how this could occur.

Interpol would not necessarily have been aware of Al-Araibi’s refugee status. However, questions have been raised about the involvement of Australian authorities, with confirmation that the Australian Federal Police advised Thai authorities of Al-Araibi’s scheduled arrival in Thailand. This type of information is routinely shared under red notices and it is entirely possible that the relevant Australian officers did so without being alerted to Al-Araibi’s refugee status.

While it is easy to see how this could occur, it is critical to ensure it never happens again. At the very least, Australia should make sure someone’s refugee status is routinely checked before it shares any information related to a red notice. We should also be conducting proactive screening to make sure no-one who is granted refugee status in Australia is subject to a red notice.

An important tool

The red notice system is an important tool for facilitating international police cooperation. Similarly, Australia has a strong national interest in maintaining cooperative relationships with neighbouring law enforcement agencies.

However, Al-Araibi’s case highlights the life-threatening consequences that can result from the misuse of cooperative mechanisms like red notices.

Australia needs to do everything it can to bring Hakeem Al-Araibi home. And we must also immediately put in place safeguards to ensure it never happens again.

– ref. Explainer: what is an Interpol red notice and how does it work? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-an-interpol-red-notice-and-how-does-it-work-110688

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ana-Maria Bliuc, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, Western Sydney University

Living in a networked world has many advantages. We get our news online almost as soon as it happens, we stay in touch with friends via social media, and we advance our careers through online professional networks.

But there is a darker side to the internet that sees far-right groups exploit these unique features to spread divisive ideas, racial hate and mistrust. Scholars of racism refer to this type of racist communication online as “cyber-racism”.

Even the creators of the internet are aware they may have unleashed a technology that is causing a lot of harm. Since 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has focused many of his comments about the dangers of manipulation of the internet around the spread of hate speech, saying that:

Humanity connected by technology on the web is functioning in a dystopian way. We have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarisation, fake news, there are lots of ways in which it is broken.

Our team conducted a systematic review of ten years of cyber-racism research to learn how different types of communicators use the internet to spread their views.

Read more: How the use of emoji on Islamophobic Facebook pages amplifies racism

Racists groups behave differently to individuals

We found that the internet is indeed a powerful tool used to influence and reinforce divisive ideas. And it’s not only organised racist groups that take advantage of online communication; unaffiliated individuals do it too.

But the way groups and individuals use the internet differs in several important ways. Racist groups are active on different communication channels to individuals, and they have different goals and strategies they use to achieve them. The effects of their communication are also distinctive.

Individuals mostly engage in cyber-racism to hurt others, and to confirm their racist views by connecting with like-minded people (seeking “confirmation bias”). Their preferred communication channels tend to be blogs, forums, news commentary websites, gaming environments and chat rooms.

Channels, goals and strategies used by unaffiliated people when communicating cyber-racism.

Strategies they use include denying or minimising the issue of racism, denigrating “non-whites”, and reframing the meaning of current news stories to support their views.

Groups, on the other hand, prefer to communicate via their own websites. They are also more strategic in what they seek to achieve through online communication. They use websites to gather support for their group and their views through racist propaganda.

Racist groups manipulate information and use clever rhetoric to help build a sense of a broader “white” identity, which often goes beyond national borders. They argue that conflict between different ethnicities is unavoidable, and that what most would view as racism is in fact a natural response to the “oppression of white people”.

Channels, goals and strategies used by groups when communicating cyber-racism.

Read more: How the alt-right uses milk to promote white supremacy

Collective cyber-racism has the main effect of undermining the social cohesion of modern multicultural societies. It creates division, mistrust and intergroup conflict.

Meanwhile, individual cyber-racism seems to have a more direct effect by negatively affecting the well being of targets. It also contributes to maintaining a hostile racial climate, which may further (indirectly) affect the well being of targets.

What they have in common

Despite their differences, groups and individuals both share a high level of sophistication in how they communicate racism online. Our review uncovered the disturbingly creative ways in that new technologies are exploited.

For example, racist groups make themselves attractive to young people by providing interactive games and links to music videos on their websites. And both groups and individuals are highly skilled at manipulating their public image via various narrative strategies, such as humour and the interpretation of current news to fit with their arguments.

Read more: Race, cyberbullying and intimate partner violence

A worrying trend

Our findings suggest that if these online strategies are effective, we could see even sharper divisions in society as the mobilisation of support for racism and far-right movements spreads online.

There is also evidence that currently unaffiliated supporters of racism could derive strength through online communication. These individuals might use online channels to validate their beliefs and achieve a sense of belonging in virtual spaces where racist hosts provide an uncontested and hate-supporting community.

This is a worrying trend. We have now seen several examples of violent action perpetrated offline by isolated individuals who radicalise into white supremacist movements – for example, in the case of Anders Breivik in Norway, and more recently of Robert Gregory Bowers, who was the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

In Australia, unlike most other liberal democracies, there are effectively no government strategies that seek to reduce this avenue for the spread of racism, despite many Australians expressing a desire that this be done.

– ref. Racism in a networked world: how groups and individuals spread racist hate online – http://theconversation.com/racism-in-a-networked-world-how-groups-and-individuals-spread-racist-hate-online-109072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sky Croeser, Lecturer, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

Online petitions are often seen as a form of “slacktivism” – small acts that don’t require much commitment and are more about helping us feel good than effective activism. But the impacts of online petitions can stretch beyond immediate results.

Whether they work to create legislative change, or just raise awareness of an issue, there’s some merit to signing them. Even if nothing happens immediately, petitions are one of many ways we can help build long-term change.

A history of petitions

Petitions have a long history in Western politics. They developed centuries ago as a way for people to have their voices heard in government or ask for legislative change. But they’ve also been seen as largely ineffective in this respect. One study found only three out of 2,589 petitions submitted to the Australian House of Representatives between 1999 and 2007 even received a ministerial response.

Before the end of the second world war, fewer than 16 petitions a year were presented to Australia’s House of Representatives. The new political landscape of the early 1970s saw that number leap into the thousands.

In the 2000s, the House received around 300 petitions per year, and even with online tools, it’s still nowhere near what it was in the 70s. According to the parliamentary website, an average of 121 petitions have been presented each year since 2008.

Read more: Changing the world one online petition at a time: how social activism went mainstream

Although petitions rarely achieve direct change, they are an important part of the democratic process. Many governments have attempted to facilitate petitioning online. For example, the Australian parliamentary website helps citizens through the process of developing and submitting petitions. This is one way the internet has made creating and submitting petitions easier.

There are also independent sites that campaigners can use, such as Change.org and Avaaz. It can take under an hour to go from an idea to an online petition that’s ready to share on social media.

As well as petitions being a way for citizens to make requests of their governments, they are now used more broadly. Many petitions reach a global audience – they might call for change from companies, international institutions, or even society as a whole.

What makes for an effective petition?

The simplest way to gauge if a petition has been successful is to look at whether the requests made were granted. The front page of Change.org displays recent “victories”. These including a call to axe the so-called “tampon tax” (the GST on menstrual products) which states and territories agreed to remove come January 2019.

Change.org also boasts the petition for gender equality on cereal boxes as a victory, after Kelloggs sent a statement they would be updating their packaging in 2019 to include images of males and females. This petition only had 600 signatures, in comparison to the 75,000 against the tampon tax.

In 2012, a coalition of organisations mobilised a campaign against two proposed US laws that many saw as likely to restrict internet freedom. A circulating petition gathered 4.5 million signatures, which helped put pressure on US representatives not to vote for the bills.

However, all of these petitions were part of larger efforts. There have been campaigns to remove the tax on menstrual products since it was first imposed, there’s a broad movement for more equal gender representation, and there’s significant global activism against online censorship. None of these petitions can claim sole victory. But they may have pushed it over the line, or just added some weight to the groundswell of existing support.

Online petitions can have the obvious impact of changing the very thing they’re campaigning for. However, the type of petition also makes a difference to what change it can achieve.

Choosing a petition worth signing

Knowing a few characteristics of successful petitions can be useful when you’re deciding whether it’s worth your time to sign and share something. Firstly, there should be a target and specific call for action.

These can take many forms: petitions might request a politician vote “yes” on a specific law, demand changes to working conditions at a company, or even ask an advocacy organisation to begin campaigning around a new issue. Vague targets and unclear goals aren’t well suited to petitions. Calls for “more gender equality in society” or “better rights for pets”, for example, are unlikely to achieve success.

Secondly, the goal needs to be realistic. This is so it’s possible to succeed and so supporters feel a sense of optimism. Petitioning for a significant change in a foreign government’s policy – for example, a call from world citizens for better gun control in the US – is unlikely to lead to results.

Read more: Why #metoo is an impoverished form of feminist activism, unlikely to spark social change

It’s easier to get politicians to change their vote on a single, relatively minor issue than to achieve sweeping legal changes. It’s also more likely a company will change its packaging than completely overhaul its approach to production.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a petition’s chance of success depends largely on the strength of community supporting it. Petitions rarely work on their own. In her book Twitter and Teargas, Turkish writer Zeynep Tufekci argues the internet allows us to organise action far more quickly than in the past, outpacing the hard but essential work of community organising.

We can get thousands of people signing a petition and shouting in the streets well before we build coalitions and think about long-term strategies. But the most effective petitions will work in combination with other forms of activism.

Change happens gradually

Even petitions that don’t achieve their stated aims or minor goals can play a role in activist efforts. Sharing petitions is one way to bring attention to issues that might otherwise remain off the agenda.

Most online petitions include the option of allowing further updates and contact. Organisations often use a petition to build momentum around an ongoing campaign. Creating, or even signing, online petitions can be a form of micro-activism that helps people start thinking of themselves as capable of creating change.

Signing petitions – and seeing that others have also done so – can help us feel we are part of a collective, working with others to shape our world.

It’s reasonable to think carefully about what we put our names to online, but we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss online petitions as ineffective, or “slack”. Instead, we should think of them as one example of the diverse tactics that help build change over time.

– ref. Not another online petition! But here’s why you should think before deleting it – http://theconversation.com/not-another-online-petition-but-heres-why-you-should-think-before-deleting-it-110029

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Robert, Lecturer in Law, La Trobe University

The family courts have historically treated legal parentage as a question of who has “begotten or borne” a child. But increasingly complex family situations created as a result of donor conception, surrogacy, IVF and DNA testing are sorely testing this biblical-sounding definition.

In 2019, the Australian High Court will be hearing the appeal concerning the legal parentage of a child born via sperm donation. This is a crucial opportunity for the court to reconsider the “begotten or borne” definition, and the emphasis currently placed on biology and how someone was conceived.

Some time this year, the High Court will be telling an 11-year-old girl (let’s call her Billie) who her legal parents are. By the age of 11, most of us have a pretty clear picture of who our parents are, and chances are, Billie does too. She and her younger sister live most of the time with their two mums (Susan and Margaret Parsons), and have regular time with their dad (Robert Masson) and his partner Greg.*

Read more: Mum, dad and two kids no longer the norm in the changing Australian family

Why is this case significant?

Billie’s family is in the High Court because her mums want to re-locate to New Zealand, and her dad objects. Whether the Parsons family should be allowed to relocate is a parenting order decision, in which the best interests of Billie and her little sister must, under the Family Law Act, be paramount.

But because Australian family law puts a big emphasis on “the benefit to the child of a meaningful relationship with both parents” when deciding the best interests of the child, whether Robert is considered Billie’s legal parent will influence the outcome.

Billie’s case is significant because at its heart is a curly question: what does it mean to be a legal parent? Pull at this thread, and it unravels many other questions. What counts when judges are deciding a child’s legal parentage? Should the court consider the circumstances of the child’s conception, birth and genetic relatedness? Are the intentions of the people who helped bring the child into the world relevant? What about whether they have functioned as the child’s parents so far? And is the child’s perspective relevant?

Read more: Connecting ‘diblings’: how the law is failing to keep up with modern families

Family law has struggled to keep up with developments in assisted reproduction, paternity testing and the increasing diversity of Australian families. Parentage issues arise not just as a result of assisted conception, such as in cases donor conception or surrogacy. Issues also arise when children are raised by a non-genetic parent for cultural reasons (such as in some Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander families), or where a man has been raising a child who he later discovers is not his biological offspring.

Why is Australian parentage law so messy?

Australian parentage law is particularly complex because of uncertainty surrounding the way the federal Family Law Act interacts with state or territory laws.

There is, as one senior judge points out, “serious divergence of judicial opinion in this area” and the Family Law Act does not provide any clear answers.

The overall lack of flexibility for diverse families has led the Family Law Council to conclude the present framework does not “reflect the reality of parenting and family life for many children in Australia” and that comprehensive federal legislation that defines legal parentage across all circumstances is needed.

How can we clarify the law?

With such statutory complexity, the High Court may be limited in what it can do to clarify the law in Billie’s case. For decades, the Family Court has debated whether the provisions in the Family Law Act regulating legal parentage for children conceived via assisted reproduction exclusively define legal parentage for these children, or merely enlarge the category of people who can be determined a parent. Neither of these approaches, however, adequately respond to the bigger issue of how “parent” is defined.

When interpreting the term “parent” within the Family Law Act, judges have assumed the use of the term “both parents” means a child may have a maximum of two parents, each of whom has “begotten or borne” the child (unless an adoption order is in place, or a statutory exception applies).

Read more: Victoria’s world-first change to share sperm or egg donors’ names with children

This biological interpretation is at odds with understandings of the meaning of “parent” in other areas of law. For example, in migration law, the Full Federal Court held in 2010 that the word “parent” is not limited to biological parents. Rather, it “is used today to signify a social relationship to another person” often characterised by “intense commitment to another, expressed by acknowledging that other person as one’s own and treating him or her as one’s own”.

In a number of other jurisdictions, including Canada’s British Columbia, children can have more than two legal parents, where that reflects the intentions of all the adults before conception.

Should children have a voice?

But something important is missing from this debate. At 11 and ten, Billie and her younger sister could probably tell the court a lot about who they regard and rely on as their parents. Their legal parentage forms a crucial part of their legal kinship identity, and therefore part of their personal identity. It affects their legal relationships not just with their legal parents, but with one another as siblings and with extended family.

Yet amendments to the Family Law Act in 2012 explicitly removed decisions surrounding legal parentage from “parenting orders” (ie, orders that state the parenting arrangements for a child, including matters such as who they live with and when). This means that when making decisions about a child’s parentage, the best interests of the child are not paramount and there is subsequently no requirement that the child’s views be considered.

When the trial judge first heard Billie’s case in the Family Court, she discussed the children’s understanding of their family in the basic sense of who the children called “mummy” and “daddy”.

Ultimately, however, the judge emphasised Robert’s genetic contribution, and his intention to be a father in deciding that he was a legal parent (and that Margaret, who had been present at Billie’s conception, and has been one of her primary care-giving parents from birth, was not).

Achieving a more child-centred model of legal parentage is likely to be a long process, requiring significant changes to legislation. How the High Court responds to this case, and the curly problems of legal parentage it raises, may help shape reform.

* This article uses the same pseudonyms used by the Family Court

– ref. Sperm donation is testing what it means to be a legal parent, all the way to the High Court – http://theconversation.com/sperm-donation-is-testing-what-it-means-to-be-a-legal-parent-all-the-way-to-the-high-court-109140

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By April Reside, Researcher, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland

Nearly 20 years ago, Australia adopted national environmental legislation that was celebrated widely as a balanced response to Australia’s threatened species crisis. In the same year, Queensland introduced its Vegetation Management Act. Together, these laws were meant to help prevent further extinctions.

But have they worked?

A famous finch

We investigated whether these laws had successfully protected the habitat of the endangered southern black-throated finch.

Our study found that, despite being nominally protected under federal environmental law, habitat for the species has continued to be cleared. Just three out of 775 development applications that potentially impacted the endangered southern black-throated finch were knocked back, according to our new research.

Read more: Queensland coal mines will push threatened finch closer to extinction

Defining exactly what is habitat for the black-throated finch is tricky – we don’t have oodles of data on their habitat use over time, and the extent of their sightings has declined substantially. But Queensland has excellent vegetation mapping, and we recorded all of the vegetation types in which the southern black-throated finch has been seen.

We then mapped the extent of this habitat in three different time periods: historically; at the advent of the environmental laws (2000); and current day.

Clear danger

We found that most of the black-throated finch’s habitat had been cleared before 2000, mainly for agriculture before the mid-1970s. The black-throated finch hasn’t been reliably seen in New South Wales since 1994 and is listed there as “presumed extinct”.

We looked at all the development proposals since 2000 that were referred to the federal government due to their potential impact on threatened species. 775 of these development proposals overlapped areas of potential habitat for the black-throated finch.

Only one of these projects – a housing development near Townsville – was refused approval because it was deemed to have a “clearly unacceptable” impact to the black-throated finch.

In addition to these projects, over half a million hectares of the cleared habitat were not even assessed under federal environmental laws.

We estimate that the species remains in just 12% of its original range. Yet despite this, our study shows that the habitat clearing is still being approved within the little that is left.

So in theory, Australia’s and Queensland’s laws protect endangered species habitat. But in practice, a lot has been lost.

Critical habitat

The highest-profile development proposal to impinge on black-throated finch habitat loss is Adani’s Carmichael coalmine and rail project. Adani has been given approval to clear or otherwise impact more than 16,000 hectares of black-throated finch habitat, a third of which Adani deemed “critical habitat” But there are four other mines in the Galilee Basin that have approved the clearing of more than 29,000 ha in total of black-throated finch habitat.

But it’s not just the mines. In 2018 the federal government approved clearing of black-throated finch habitat for a housing estate and a sugar cane farm, both near Townsville. Several solar farms have also been proposed that would clear black-throated finch habitat around Townsville.

To further complicate matters, the black-throated finch’s habitat is also threatened with degradation by cattle grazing. The finch needs year-round access to certain grass seeds, so where grazing has removed the seeding part of the grasses, made the ground too hard, or caused the proliferation of introduced grasses such as buffel, the habitat suitability can decrease until it is no longer able to support black-throated finches.

So while they are losing their high-quality habitat to development, a lot of their habitat is being degraded elsewhere.

Heavy cattle grazing degrades habitat for the southern black-throated finch by removing edible grass seeds. April Reside

The federal government has placed conditions on approved clearing of black-throated finch habitat, often including “offsetting” of any habitat loss. But securing one part of the black-throated finch’s habitat in exchange for losing another still means there is less habitat. This is particularly problematic when the lost habitat is of very high quality, as is the case for Adani’s Carmichael coalmine lease.

Little by little

Our research suggests there is a real danger of the black-throated finch suffering extinction by a thousand cuts – or perhaps 775 cuts, in this case. Each new development approval may have a relatively modest impact in isolation, but the cumulative effect can be devastating. This may explain why a stronger environmental response has not occurred so far.

Read more: Does ‘offsetting’ work to make up for habitat lost to mining?

So how can we prevent the black-throated finch from going extinct? The finch is endangered because its habitat continues to be lost. So its recovery relies upon halting the ongoing loss of habitat – and ultimately, increasing it. Achieving this would require a political willingness to prioritise endangered species protection.

Australia has already lost hundreds of its unique plants and animals forever. In just the last few years, we have seen more mammals and reptiles disappear to extinction. If we continue on our current path, the southern black-throated finch could be among the next to go.

– ref. Death by 775 cuts: how conservation law is failing the black-throated finch – http://theconversation.com/death-by-775-cuts-how-conservation-law-is-failing-the-black-throated-finch-110704

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Monique Retamal, Research Principal, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

Last year many Australians were surprised to learn that around half of our plastic waste collected for recycling is exported, and up to 70% was going to China. So much of the world’s plastic was being sent to China that China imposed strict conditions on further imports. The decision sent ripples around the globe, leaving most advanced economies struggling to manage vast quantities of mixed plastics and mixed paper.

Read more: China’s recycling ‘ban’ throws Australia into a very messy waste crisis

By July 2018, which is when the most recent data was available, plastic waste exports from Australia to China and Hong Kong reduced by 90%. Since then Southeast Asia has become the new destination for Australia’s recycled plastics, with 80-87% going to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Other countries have also begun to accept Australia’s plastics, including the Philippines and Myanmar.

Destination of plastic exports from Australia between January 2017 and July 2018. Click image to zoom. Source: UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, based on Comtrade data

But it looks like these countries may no longer deal with Australia’s detritus.

In the middle of last year Thailand and Vietnam announced restrictions on imports. Vietnam announced it would stop issuing import licences for plastic imports, as well as paper and metals, and Thailand plans to stop all imports by 2021. Malaysia has revoked some import permits and Indonesia has begun inspecting 100% of scrap import shipments.

Why are these countries restricting plastic imports?

The reason these countries are restricting plastic imports is because of serious environmental and labour issues with the way the majority of plastics are recycled. For example, in Vietnam more than half of the plastic imported into the country is sold on to “craft villages”, where it is processed informally, mainly at a household scale.

Informal processing involves washing and melting the plastic, which uses a lot of water and energy and produces a lot of smoke. The untreated water is discharged to waterways and around 20% of the plastic is unusable so it is dumped and usually burnt, creating further litter and air quality problems. Burning plastic can produce harmful air pollutants such as dioxins, furans and polychlorinated biphenyls and the wash water contains a cocktail of chemical residues, in addition to detergents used for washing.

Working conditions at these informal processors are also hazardous, with burners operating at 260-400℃. Workers have little or no protective equipment. The discharge from a whole village of household processors concentrates the air and water pollution in the local area.

Before Vietnam’s ban on imports, craft villages such as Minh Khai, outside Hanoi, had more than 900 households recycling plastic scraps, processing 650 tonnes of plastics per day. Of this, 25-30% was discarded, and 7 million litres of wastewater from washing was discharged each day without proper treatment.

Author provided

These plastic recycling villages existed before the China ban, but during 2018 the flow of plastics increased so much that households started running their operations 24 hours a day.

The rapid increase in household-level plastic recycling has been a great concern to local authorities, due to the hazardous nature of emissions to air and water. In addition, this new industry contributes to an already significant plastic litter problem in Vietnam.

Green growth or self-preservation?

A debate is now being waged in Vietnam, over whether a “green” recycling industry can be developed with better technology and regulations, or whether they must simply protect themselves from this flow of “waste”. Creating environmentally friendly plastic recycling in Vietnam will mean investment in new processing technology, enhancing supply chains, and improving the skills and training for workers in this industry.

Engineers at the Vietnam Cleaner Production Centre (which one of us, Thinh, is the director of) have been working on improving plastic processing systems to recycle water in the process, improve energy efficiency, switch to bio-based detergents and reduce impacts on workers. However, there is a long way to go to improve the vast number of these informal treatment systems.

What can we do in Australia?

While Australia’s contribution to the flow of plastics in Southeast Asia is small compared to that arriving from the United States, Japan and Europe, we estimate it still represents 50-60% of plastics collected for recycling in Australia.

Should we be sending our recyclables to countries that lack capacity to safely process it, and are already struggling to manage their own domestic waste? Should we participate in improving their industrial capacity? Or should we increase our own domestic capacity for recycling?

Read more: A crisis too big to waste: China’s recycling ban calls for a long-term rethink in Australia

While there may be times it makes sense to export our plastics overseas where they are used for manufacturing, the plastics should be clean and uncontaminated. Processes should be in place to make sure they are recycled without causing added harm to communities and local environments.

Australia and other advanced economies need to think seriously about the future of exports, our own collection systems and our “waste” relationships with our neighbours.

– ref. Here’s what happens to our plastic recycling when it goes offshore – http://theconversation.com/heres-what-happens-to-our-plastic-recycling-when-it-goes-offshore-110356

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trivess Moore, Lecturer, RMIT University

Summer in Australia seems to bite harder each year. Adelaide set a record maximum temperature for the nation’s capital cities of 46.6°C last week and there have been extreme heatwaves around Australia. The challenge to remain at a comfortable temperature in our homes is unprecedented.

Early European design influence used shade and ventilation strategies. The wrap-around veranda and classical Queenslander are examples that respond to the harsh Australian summer. This design response was typically paired with behaviour like children playing under the lawn sprinkler, or sleeping under the veranda to catch the evening breeze.

The rise of air conditioning has moved us away from climatically and culturally sensitive ways to deliver comfort during extremes. For many, the press of a button provides superior and controllable comfort. This has led to high energy and energy infrastructure costs, especially when used in peak heatwave periods. It also increases carbon dioxide emissions, which are driving climate change.

Read more: Buildings produce 25% of Australia’s emissions. What will it take to make them ‘green’ – and who’ll pay?

Design for climate

Low-energy and zero-energy homes can reduce energy demand and environmental impact. They can also improve liveability, affordability and the health of occupants.

These homes represent a modern reinterpretation of design for climate, based on the science of energy and materials. Such homes are a marriage of passive solar design, building material characteristics and technologies to reduce energy use and provide energy on site.

In this context, recently published research conducted in South Australia asks: are we unlearning coping strategies used to actively manage our thermal comfort? We interviewed householders of the Lochiel Park green village in Adelaide to explore individuals’ housing histories to understand the changing relationship between the occupant, the building and the resultant energy use.

Lochiel Park was Australia’s first large-scale attempt to create homes that use near net zero energy in a net zero-carbon precinct. The homes are rated a minimum 7.5 NatHERS stars. They have double glazing, ceiling fans, solar water heaters, solar PV, energy-efficient appliances and energy-feedback displays. All of these features were, and remain, well above the requirements of building regulations.

Read more: Getting practical with push for zero-carbon homes

Read more: Sustainable housing’s expensive, right? Not when you look at the whole equation

Solar PV and water heating are standard on Lochiel Park houses, but like many features of low-energy homes are not required by Australian building regulations. University of South Australia, Author provided

The research revealed occupants had used a wide range of practices to adapt to extremes in their previous houses. They discussed strategies like sleeping downstairs, in well-vented hallways, or outside under the veranda where it cooled down more quickly at night. Typical behavioural responses included active management of homes like closing curtains and blinds to shut out the sun, fixing temporary shade-screens or opening the house to gully breezes each evening.

The introduction of the air conditioner changed buildings and lifestyles. Single-room air conditioners redefined strategies: instead of sleeping outdoors, residents might drag mattresses into the lounge room. No longer did the local swimming pool look as inviting. As one resident put it: “… I’m not going to go outside in the heat to get in the pool.”

External shading or heavy drapes were no longer seen as necessary. Venetian blinds and other lightweight window furnishings became popular. Active operation by opening and closing windows, doors and curtains became less important.

Relearning almost-forgotten strategies

New generations of families grew up in an environment where they did not need to learn those previously essential active coping strategies. The move to a purpose-built low-energy home, designed to include active participation by occupants, has reintroduced some of these almost-forgotten coping strategies.

However, they have been placed in the contemporary context of societal perceptions of public safety. For example, one householder noted:

You’d sleep outside of a night. Do that now, you might not wake up in the morning.

Read more: How safe is Australia? The numbers show public attacks are rare and on the decline

New research on Lochiel Park looked at what households are doing to cope with heatwaves. Stephen Berry, Author provided

For some, the homes held the promise of “perfect comfort” without the need for cooling. The research finds that moving to a “low-energy” home has reduced, rather than eliminated, their active involvement.

Data from monitoring temperature and energy use show that Lochiel Park homes perform significantly better than most other dwellings. The houses are only 7.5 stars out of a 10-star NatHERS scale, however, so their investment has not afforded occupants year-round “perfect comfort” without the need for adaptation or active heating or cooling.

Tracing the housing histories of residents has revealed an ongoing dynamic of coping with extremes and trying to create a comfortable indoor environment. Comfort has been transformed from being mostly an achievement of the householder to an outcome of technology and, more recently, to an attribute that occupants expect their building to provide.

It remains to be seen if and when net-zero-energy homes will replace the current housing stock. What is clear is that even in high-performance housing residents still have a role in creating a comfortable temperature and coping with extremes of climate.

A key concern is the high risk that “unlearning” traditional comfort practices increases our vulnerability and reduces adaptive capacity to heatwaves. As we saw last week with rolling blackouts hitting more than 200,000 homes in Victoria, relying on air-conditioning creates challenges for our energy networks during extreme weather. The impact on emissions makes this reliance doubly problematic.

– ref. When the heat hits: how to make our homes comfortable without cranking up the aircon – http://theconversation.com/when-the-heat-hits-how-to-make-our-homes-comfortable-without-cranking-up-the-aircon-110496

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University

She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”

“Perhaps there isn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.

“Tut tut child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

~ Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland, 1865.

We’re all familiar with the word empathy. We may not be as familiar with the name of the radical woman who brought the word into the English language.

Violet Paget (1856 – 1935) was a Victorian writer who published under the more gender-ambiguous Vernon Lee. Known as one of the cleverest women in Europe, as well as for her preference for dressing a la garconne, Lee coined the term “empathy” after noticing the physical absorption of her partner, Clementina Anstruther-Thompson, while viewing a painting.

John Singer Sargent, portrait of Vernon Lee, 1881. Wikimedia Commons

According to Lee, Clementina (or Kit, as she was known) was “in feeling” with the painting. To describe this embodied process of appreciating the arts, Lee translated the German term einfuhlung into “empathy”.

Lee’s ideas resonate powerfully with the increasing interest today in how empathy is connected to creativity. Experiencing and enhancing creativity is one of the ways we can understand ourselves and others – body and mind. The poetic 19th century term for this process, with which Vernon Lee would have been familiar, is “moral imagination”.

To imagine is to form a mental image, to think, to believe, to dream, to picture. It is both idea and ideal. Our dreams can take us from small acts of empathy to noble visions of equality and justice. Imagination charges the flame: it puts us in touch with our creativity, our life force. In a world of increasing global conflict, imagination has never been more important.

“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” wrote the poet Shelley in his Defence of Poetry (1840).

The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. To be greatly good, we must imagine.

Read more: Friday essay: can looking at art make for better doctors?

Moral imagination is creative. It helps us to find better ways of being. It’s a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and each other. “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know,” declared the poet Keats. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination.”

Our moral imagination can put us in touch with all that is truthful and beautiful in the world, in ourselves, and in each other. “All worthy things, all worthy deeds, all worthy thoughts, are works of art or of imagination”, wrote W. B. Yeats in his preface to the poetry of William Blake.

Shelley believed that we can exercise our moral imagination “in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb”.

A moral workout

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint, 1819. Wikimedia Commons

We can all engage in some moral exercise.

Pick up some poetry. You don’t have to lift a heavy-weight tome. Whether you read it online or in a dusty old volume, Shelley argued that poetry is capable of “awakening and enlarging the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.” It is “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution.”

Rep your reading. Doing your reps has never been so easy. Just read it again. Vernon Lee suggested in her book Hortus Vitae (1903):

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading. Sometimes almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed into one’s mind or heart, as the case may be.

Alternatively, a more energetic “close reading” might engender critical empathy, a deliberate method of thinking, aimed at being value-neutral.

Build your movie muscle. Tap into the big magic of creativity via the movies. Take regular visits to a relaxing moral realm to build up some strength, and don’t fear becoming a couch potato. Writer Ursula Le Guin suggests that while viewing a story on screen is a passive exercise, it still engages us in another world, where, for a while, we can imagine ourselves to be.

Ursula K. Le Guin in 2008. Wikimedia Commons

Let art energise you. View and display inspiring and thought-provoking artworks. Vernon Lee claimed that spectators empathise with works of art when they call up memories and associations. This can cause bodily changes in posture, such as standing still or slowing our breathing.

Let music move you. To en-chant means “to infuse with song”. While music can be wordless, it infuses us with empathy. According to recent (2018) research published in Frontiers journal, “music is a portal into the interior lives of others”. Dance can also contribute to what has been conceptualised as “kinesthetic empathy”. Spectators can internally mimic or simulate the movement of dancers.

Give your own creativity a work-out. It doesn’t matter how out of shape you are. Whether it’s painting, writing, music making, singing, dancing, crafting – “the Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson.

The arts are alchemical, transformative processes. Being creative helps us to find new, true, better ways of being. “We may behave imaginatively; envisioning and eventually creating what is not yet present,” wrote Mary Richards, author of Opening our Moral Eye.

Today’s current populiser of empathy, Brene Brown, has argued that creativity is vital in order to “dare greatly”. Whether it’s a painting, or a patchwork quilt, when we create something, we step into the future, we trust in the destiny of our own creations. We learn to trust that we can create our own reality.

Imagine.

– ref. How creativity can help us cultivate moral imagination – http://theconversation.com/how-creativity-can-help-us-cultivate-moral-imagination-101968

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Barron, Associate Professor, Macquarie University

We’ve known for a while that honey bees are smart cookies. They have excellent navigation skills, they communicate symbolically through dance, and they’re the only insects that have been shown to learn abstract concepts.

Honey bees might also add the title of art connoisseur to their box of tricks. In part one of ABC Catalyst’s The Great Australian Bee Challenge, we see honey bees learning to tell the difference between European and Australian Indigenous art in just one afternoon.

Does this mean honey bees are more cultured than we are?

Perhaps not, but the experiment certainly shows just how quickly honey bees can learn to process very complex information.

Read more: Bees join an elite group of species that understands the concept of zero as a number

How the experiment worked

Lightning in the Rock by Noŋgirrŋa Marawili won the Bark Painting Award at the 2015 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. AAP/PR Handout Image

Bees were shown four different paintings by the French impressionist artist Claude Monet, and four paintings by Australian Indigenous artist Noŋgirrŋa Marawili.

At the centre of each of the paintings was placed a small blue dot. To make the difference between the artists meaningful to the honey bees, every time they landed on the blue dot on a Marawili painting they found a minute drop of sugar water. Every time they visited the blue dot on a Monet painting, however, they found a drop of dilute quinine. The quinine isn’t harmful, but it does taste bitter.

Having experienced each of the Monet and Marawili paintings the bees were given a test. They were shown paintings by the two artists that they had never seen before. Could they tell the difference between a Marawili and a Monet?

All the trained bees clearly directed their attention to the Marawili paintings.

This experiment was a recreation of a study first conducted by Dr Judith Reinhard’s team at the University of Queensland. In the original study, Reinhard was able to train bees to tell the difference between paintings by Monet and Picasso.

Read more: Are they watching you? The tiny brains of bees and wasps can recognise faces

Bees are quick to learn

This kind of work does not show bees have a sense of artistic style, but it does show how good they are at learning and classifying visual information.

Different artists – be they Marawili, Monet or Picasso – tend to prefer different forms of composition and structure, different tones and different pallets in their art. We describe this as their distinctive style. These styles are recognisable to us, even if most of us would be hard pressed to describe exactly what makes a Marawili different from a Monet.

When the honey bees were trained on the paintings, every Monet they visited was a bitter experience, while every Marawili was sweet. This motivated the bees to learn whatever differences best distinguished the set of Marawili paintings from the set of Monets.

Bee colour vision is excellent, if different from ours. Bees can see ultraviolet wavelengths of light, but not red. Bees can pick up structure and edges in paintings by zipping quickly back and forth in front of them to detect abrupt changes in the brightness of an image.

In our experiment, bees could detect enough differences between the Marawili and Monet paintings to learn to tell them apart. The bees were not memorising the paintings; instead they were learning whatever information best distinguished a Monet from a Marawili. They could then maximise their collection of sugar, and avoid any bitter surprises.

Learning the visual differences between one set of Monet and Marawili paintings was enough for the bees to correctly choose between Monet and Marawili paintings they had never seen before.

Read more: Bees get stressed at work too (and it might be causing colony collapse)

Similarities between art and flowers

This experiment taps into a highly evolved honey bee skill. Bees did not evolve to differentiate between artists, but their survival depends on learning to tell which flowers are most likely to offer the best pollen and nectar they need to feed their hive.

Because of this, bees have evolved the ability to very quickly process complex and subtle visual information. These learning skills are on display when bees forage on flowers. Bees quickly learn to pick up on the subtlest distinction between fresh and older flowers, be it colour, odour or texture, which can betray the blooms that are most likely to contain a drop of nectar.

A bee lands on a daisy flower.

Honey bees break any stereotypes we may have that insects are dumb, instinct-driven animals. They have an intelligence that is very different from ours, but one that has evolved to be fit for the task of a bee doing what a bee has to do.

It is hard not to admire such clever and discriminating creatures.

Part two of the ABC’s The Great Australian Bee Challenge airs on the 5th February.

– ref. Bees can learn the difference between European and Australian Indigenous art styles in a single afternoon – http://theconversation.com/bees-can-learn-the-difference-between-european-and-australian-indigenous-art-styles-in-a-single-afternoon-110494

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

Your trousers fit when you put them on in the morning. But come mid-afternoon, they’re uncomfortably tight – and you didn’t even overdo it at lunchtime. Sound familiar?

Around one in six people without a health problem and three in four people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) report problems with bloating. In fact, for people with IBS and constipation, bloating is their most troublesome symptom.

Read more: Explainer: what is irritable bowel syndrome and what can I do about it?

Bloating is, of course, a feeling of increased abdominal pressure, usually related to gas. It may or may not be accompanied by visible enlargement of the waist (known as abdominal distension).

But contrary to popular belief, bloating and abdominal distention isn’t caused by an excessive production of gas in the intestines.

What causes intestinal gas?

Gas in the upper gut can come from swallowed air, chemical reactions (from neutralising acids and alkali) triggered by food, and dissolved gas moving from the bloodstream into the gut.

Food products that are poorly absorbed in the small intestine can travel lower down to the large intestine where they’re fermented by bacteria. This process can produce carbon dioxide, hydrogen or methane gas.

Gas from the gut can come out through belching or passing wind, or by being absorbed into the blood or consumed by bacteria.

How much wind is normal?

Back in 1991, researchers in the UK tracked the farts of ten healthy volunteers. The volume of gas they expelled in a day varied from 214 mls (on a low-fibre diet) to 705 mls (on a high fibre diet).

Read more: Health Check: what happens when you hold in a fart?

The participants passed wind an average of 14 to 18 times per day, and it was comprised mainly of carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

In the fasting state, the healthy gastrointestinal tract contains around 100 mls of gas which is distributed almost equally among six segments of the gut: the stomach, small intestine, ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon and lower (pelvic) colon.

Tefi/Shutterstock

After eating, the volume of gas in the gut can increase by about 65% and tends to be located around the pelvic colon.

As the stomach stretches and small bowel is stimulated, the passage of gas accelerates and you might feel the urge to fart.

But for people with a high-fat diet, fats inside the small bowel can delay this passage and make you retain the gas.

Bloaters don’t produce more gas

A 1975 study compared the amount of intestinal gas between people who reported being bloated and those who said they were not.

The researchers pumped (inert) gas through a tube directly into the participants’ intestines at a relatively high flow of 45 mls per minute. Then they recovered the gas via a plastic tube from their rectum.

The researchers found no difference in the levels of gas collected between the bloating and healthy subjects.

Not everyone who feels bloated will have a distended stomach. siam.pukkato/Shutterstock

More recent research using abdominal CT scans has shown that people with bloating have similar volumes of intestinal gas as those who don’t feel bloated.

Likewise, although people with IBS experience more abdominal distention, they do not produce more intestinal gas than other people.

This leads us to believe the volume of gas in the gut itself isn’t the main mechanism for bloating.

When gas gets trapped

Most people tolerate intestinal gas really well because they can propel and evacuate gas very efficiently. As a result, only a relatively small amount of gas remains inside the gut at a given time.

In one study, researchers pumped just over 1.4 litres of gas in two hours into the mid-small bowel of healthy volunteers. This led to only a very small change in waist circumference: no more than 4mm.

On the other hand, people with abdominal conditions such as IBS or functional dyspepsia (indigestion), show impaired gas transit – in other words, the gas ends up being trapped in different parts of the bowel rather than moving along easily.

Read more: What’s the best way to go to the toilet – squatting or sitting?

Studies show people with abdominal conditions tend to retain a relatively large proportion of gas pumped into the mid small bowel. They may even have notable increases in waist circumference without any gas being pumped in.

This impairment was confirmed in a study comparing 20 participants with IBS to a control group of 20 healthy participants. All received gas pumped directly into the mid-small bowel.

Some 90% of IBS participants retained the gas in their intestines compared to only 20% of control subjects. The researchers found abdominal distension was directly correlated with gas retention.

Some people also have problems evacuating this gas, or farting. People with IBS and chronic constipation, for instance, may have difficulty relaxing and opening their anal sphincter to release farts.

This can lead to intestinal gas retention and symptoms of bloating, abdominal pain and distension.

Pain without looking bloated

Despite feeling extremely bloated, some people have minimal or no distension of their stomach.

Research among people with IBS suggests this pain and discomfort may be due to a heightened sensitivity in the gut when a section of the abdomen stretches.

In fact, one study found those with bloating alone had more abdominal pain than those with who had symptoms of bloating and abdominal distension.

If you’re sensitive to this stretching, are unable to move gas throughout your gut, and can’t get rid of it, you’re likely to have bloating and pain, whether or not there’s any visual sign.

Read more: Nervous tummy: why you might get the runs before a first date

– ref. Health Check: what causes bloating and gassiness? – http://theconversation.com/health-check-what-causes-bloating-and-gassiness-107605

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University

The nation whose anthem lauds “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and whose constitution was drafted “in order to form a more perfect union … and secure the blessings of liberty” continues to flirt with the prospect of authoritarian rule.

In the aftermath of his decision to temporarily reopen the federal government, President Trump is once again threatening to declare a state of emergency to allow him to spend public money on the construction of a wall on the United States-Mexico border without congressional approval.

The weakened position Trump finds himself in now makes such drastic action unlikely. But one of the lessons to be taken from Trump’s presidency is to expect the unexpected.

Read more: Separation of powers: An invitation to struggle

Should he do so, it would not, of course, be the first time an American president has asserted this prerogative.

Current crisis not about policy

Generally, there can be compelling reasons for declaring a state of emergency, but Trump would have been perhaps the first to invoke this prerogative in order to fulfil a (subtly altered) campaign promise.

While there is a legitimate debate about whether or not there actually is an emergency at the border, the crisis that would be created should Trump declare an emergency in order to secure public funding for his “big, beautiful wall” would not primarily be about policy. It would concern more fundamental matters, such as the efficacy of America’s much-vaunted constitutional system of checks and balances.

The US constitution established three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. It apportions power to each branch so none can dominate the others. But the American constitution pays relatively little attention to the presidency. There are only four short sections concerning the office, only one of which contains much detail about presidential powers.

This means the powers of the president remain under-articulated. The constitution is also silent on how states of emergency should be managed. Taken together, this means it’s not entirely clear that legislative and judicial institutions can rein in a president who declares a state of emergency on spurious grounds.

In effect, by declaring a state of emergency a president assumes additional powers by essentially creating exceptions to rules and laws that normally constrain them. The courts can and likely would review the legality of any such action. But rulings against presidents are the exception.

Battle for the GOP

More prosaically, if the “Trump shutdown” strained relations within the Republican Party imagine what a “Trump state of national emergency” might do. The party’s establishment has proved willing to accept various affronts to presidential conventions of conduct.

This includes Trump’s propensity to play fast and loose with the truth, his lack of appetite for work and limited grasp of policy detail as well as his inability to serve as a president for all Americans.

But it is clear the partial shut-down has significantly ratcheted up tensions within the party and added to speculation Trump will face a primary challenge some time before the 2020 presidential election.

In that context, it is conceivable that a presidential declaration of a state of emergency for wall funding might at last be the moment when Republicans – or at least enough of them to give Trump pause for thought – act in the long-term interests of the country.

More likely, there will be a point at which political self-interest trumps Trump. Republicans seeking to hold onto seats in 2020 in districts won by Hilary Clinton in 2016, or in which the Democratic Party was resurgent in last year’s midterms, may well peel away from Trump if his already soft approval rating continues to slide. There are already signs that some establishment figures are putting daylight between themselves and the president, and as the Republican convention and the 2020 presidential election move into view, more may choose to follow suit.

Road to tyranny

Under these scenarios, Republicans may take a closer interest in restraining Trump than they have done so far. Seriously spooked Republicans may prove more amenable to the notion of impeaching the president. And because a president cannot dissolve Congress, Trump would be unable to get in a preemptive strike should the House move to impeach him.

None of this may come to pass. Trump may well be on the defensive right now but his chances of being re-elected in 2020 will be seriously (and perhaps fatally) compromised if he backs down on the wall issue again when congressional negotiations on immigration and border security wrap up on February 15. During the two years of his administration he has proved perfectly happy to plough on regardless of public or political sentiment for far less significant issues. It is conceivable that he will do so again.

He has also demonstrated that he chafes against constraints on presidential agency, wishes to expand the reach of the executive branch and responds badly to criticism. In short, he is a poor fit for a liberal democracy but potentially a rather good one for an autocracy.

– ref. Why Trump’s wall rhetoric is about power rather than policy – http://theconversation.com/why-trumps-wall-rhetoric-is-about-power-rather-than-policy-110499

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jim Salinger, Honorary Associate, Tasmanian Institute for Agriculture, University of Tasmania

As the Australian heatwave is spilling across the Tasman and pushing up temperatures in New Zealand, we take a look at the conditions that caused a similar event last year and the impacts it had.

Last summer’s heatwave gave New Zealand its warmest summer and the warmest January on record. It covered an area of four million square kilometres (comparable to the Indian subcontinent), including the land, the eastern Tasman Sea and the Pacific east of New Zealand to the Chatham Islands.

In our research, we looked at what happened and why, and found that the heatwave affected many sectors, leading to early grape harvests and killing farmed fish in parts of the country.

Read more: Coastal seas around New Zealand are heading into a marine heatwave, again

Drivers of warmer than average conditions

We used a combination of land and ocean temperature observations, large-scale analyses of the atmospheric circulation, and ocean modelling to understand the drivers of the 2017/18 summer heatwave. It was memorable for a number of extreme events and statistics.

The average air temperature was 2.2°C above the 1981-2010 normal of 16.7°C, and it was the warmest summer ever recorded in more than 150 years. The number of extreme warm days and warm nights was also the highest recorded, going back several decades.

The peak month was January 2018, 3.2°C above normal and the warmest month recorded in observations as far back as 1867. Ocean surface temperatures were similarly extreme, with a marine heatwave that lasted about five months, at 2.0°C above normal at its peak.

The combined New Zealand annual land and sea surface temperature record, in °C, from 1867 to 2018, compared with the 1981-2010 average. The blue bars represent individual years, and the red line trends over groups of years. Jim Salinger, CC BY-ND

The warming was mostly the result of very settled conditions over the country, especially to the east, bringing light winds, plenty of sun, and warm air from the subtropics. Such conditions in summer are associated with the positive phase of a polar ring of climate variability known as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), which brings high pressures (anticyclones) to New Zealand and parts of other southern hemisphere countries in the mid-latitudes, including southern Australia and Tasmania, southern Chile and Argentina.

The SAM was strongly positive throughout last summer, especially in January, and weak La Niña conditions were prevalent in the tropics. The light winds in the New Zealand region allowed the ocean surface to warm rapidly, without the usual turbulent mixing to transport the heat away. The warmest waters in the Tasman Sea formed an unusually thin layer near the surface.

Impacts and repercussions

New Zealand was affected by more than its normal share of ex-tropical cyclones, notably Fehi and Gita. They brought strong winds, storm surges and heavy rainfalls that caused flooding as they passed through. The warm ocean waters around New Zealand would have helped maintain the intensity of the storms and supply moisture to drive the heavy downpours.

The warm conditions caused massive ice loss in South Island glaciers, estimated to be the largest annual loss of glacier ice in nearly 60 years of records for the Southern Alps. Satellite data from end-of-summer snowline measurements at the Tasman Glacier suggest that the Southern Alps lost 9% of glacier ice during last summer alone.

The Franz Josef glacier on New Zealand’s West Coast advanced during the 1980s and 1990s but is now retreating. Andrew Lorrey/NIWA, CC BY-ND

Read more: A bird’s eye view of New Zealand’s changing glaciers

Warm air temperatures had a marked effect on managed and natural ecosystems. The Marlborough grape harvest was unusually early in 2018, two to three weeks ahead of the normal maturation time. Marine ecosystems were significantly disrupted. Coastal kelp forests struggled to grow in the warm sea. In southern New Zealand, the temperature threshold was breached three times, resulting in substantial losses of kelp canopies.

Read more: A marine heatwave has wiped out a swathe of WA’s undersea kelp forest

For the first time, Atlantic salmon had to be imported as farmed fish died in salmon farms in the Marlborough Sounds. Commercial fishers reported that snapper was spawning approximately six weeks early off the South Island coast, and Queensland groper was reported in northern New Zealand, 3000km out of range.

Past and future

The summer of 2017/18 shared some characteristics with another hot summer, way back in 1934/35. That season was so warm that it prompted a special report by the New Zealand Meteorological Service. Conditions were similar: persistent high-pressure systems in the New Zealand region, positive SAM conditions, light winds over and around New Zealand, warm ocean surface and air temperatures. While those two summers shared some natural variations in the local climate, the recent summer was warmer for two reasons.

First, climate in the region is now more than half a degree warmer now than in the 1930s. Second, the SAM has been trending towards its positive phase over the last few decades, making settled conditions over New Zealand more frequent now than in the 1930s. That trend is mostly related to the ozone hole that occurs in spring and early summer, cooling the polar atmosphere and driving the strongest winds farther south towards Antarctica, leaving lighter winds and higher pressures over New Zealand.

Looking to the future, we can compare the conditions experienced in 2017/18 with what climate models predict for the future. We estimate that the extreme warm conditions of New Zealand’s last summer would be typical summer conditions by the end of the century, for an emissions scenario associated with a couple of degrees of global warming above pre-industrial temperatures. If emissions keep increasing as they have done in recent years, last summer will seem cool by the standards of 2100.

– ref. Farmed fish dying, grape harvest weeks early – just some of the effects of last summer’s heatwave in NZ – http://theconversation.com/farmed-fish-dying-grape-harvest-weeks-early-just-some-of-the-effects-of-last-summers-heatwave-in-nz-110577

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Ellison, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Australian National University

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

I want to know how did language in words start? – Finn, age 10, Melbourne.

This is a great question for a curious kid. But it is such a hard question that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris got sick of people writing about it with nothing more than guesses, and banned articles on the topic.

Fortunately, scientific progress in the past 150 years has changed this situation. We don’t have all the answers, but we can make better guesses than people could in 1866.

Read more: Curious Kids: how is water made?

In the beginning

The first thing to think about is that at one time there was no spoken language.

We’re confident language as we know it did not exist around 6 million years ago because our ancestors then were also the ancestors of chimpanzees, who do not have language.

And our best guess (from this article) is that we had language at least 500,000 years ago, because it seems Neanderthals may have had language like ours, and our last common ancestor with them was half a million years before today.

So what happened between no-language and language?

Because change is generally gradual – an idea that scientists call the “principle of uniformity” – many people who study language origins believe there was an intermediary stage, called “proto-language”. It’s hard to find out what happened in language so long ago, because words don’t have bones, and so don’t leave fossils.

One of the ways we work out what proto-language might have been like is by looking at languages that have developed from nothing in recent times. One of the best examples is Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN).

Through repeated interaction inside our small community groups and between those groups over thousands of years, better ways of communicating with sound arose by either chance or by people being creative. Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash, CC BY

Read more: Curious Kids: Why does English have so many different spelling rules?

The children who created their own language

Before 1977, deaf children in Nicaragua lived with their families and were often very isolated, as there were no special schools for them. Generally, they created their own gestures for communicating with their families. But by 1983, more than 400 of them were attending a school in the capital city. The students there really wanted to speak to each other, but did not have a common language.

They started to create one together, transforming their separate home signing systems into the beginnings of a new language. Younger children learned from older children, and changed the hand gestures to make them more fluent.

So before spoken language might have got started, just like before LSN got started, we probably communicated in a proto-language with a small range of sounds and signs local to our own group.

Language changes constantly. Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash, CC BY

Through repeated interaction inside our small community groups and between those groups over thousands of years, better ways of communicating with sound arose, either by chance or by people being creative.

We know from experiments (like this one) that people like to adopt new ways of representing things if they seem better, or more efficient.

Over many thousands of years, there would have been lots of opportunities to create new ways of talking, try them out, adapt them, keep the good ones, and steal better ones from your neighbours.

In the space of a few short years, deaf Nicaraguan school children created their own language. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the same process created the thousands of spoken languages that exist in the world today.

Read more: Curious Kids: Who made the alphabet song?

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

CC BY-ND

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

– ref. Curious Kids: how did spoken language start? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-did-spoken-language-start-109190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Middleton, Emeritus Professor, School of Aviation, UNSW

When the American aerospace company Bell Nexus unveiled an air taxi at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this month it breathed new life into conversations about a future where ride sharing happens in the air rather than on the ground.

Recent comments to the ABC by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) lent credence to the idea that we may see flying taxis operating in Australia within five years.

CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said:

It’s a bit like you can just go and charter a helicopter at Brisbane to go to the Sunshine Coast. That’s all they’re doing, but they’re doing it in an electric aircraft controlled by a traffic management system and they’re doing it a price point cheaper than you could hire a helicopter.

It sounds easy, right? But there’s a big difference between a helicopter-style charter service and a fully operational fleet of flying taxis – whether they’re automated or piloted by humans. Five years is very optimistic.

Here are seven questions we need to answer before we can turn that vision into a reality.

Read more: Why aren’t there electric airplanes yet?

1. Where will we put all the landing pads?

Concepts for air taxis come in many shapes and sizes. They might hold four passengers, or just one. They might have a single rotor or multiple. In any case, the size of the landing pad is likely to be similar to that required for a small helicopter. A small two-seater Hughes R22 requires a landing pad of at least 15 metres in diameter.

It’s difficult to imagine large numbers of 15 metre diameter landing pads in an urban environment, in close proximity to power lines and buildings. The cost of urban land area is already prohibitive. Presumably, the only available options in an urban landscape, if parks are exempt, are on the tops of buildings.

Even then, unless the building is very large, construction of more than one or two taxi pads on any building seems unlikely, as well as costly. That means more than 50 to 100 landing pads in, for example, the Sydney CBD might not be feasible.

The most likely location for landing pads is on the tops of buildings. Bell/Cover Images

2. Who will get landing priority?

Drone pads would need to be used sequentially. Even with a very efficient five minute turn around, a pad could only cope with, at most, 12 landings and takeoffs in an hour.

So who decides which taxis get landing priority and controls usage? If the first to arrive has priority, how will popular destinations be served? For example, how will a large number of people all get to and from the cricket?

3. How can we ensure they’re safe?

Existing helicopters fly safely enough, but they require the power of turbine or piston engines to lift the aircraft, pilot, fuel and payload. The cost of helicopters is currently prohibitive for the average user.

So perhaps the tilt-rotor, quad-copter concept would be utilised, but even Bell Boeing has struggled to get high reliability for its V22 Osprey. Electric motors may be the solution. Developers are well on the way to creating suitable electric motors for rotary power to carry one person, as shown by the French Volta electric helicopter, but battery technology is a limiting factor.

Ensuring the the engine power system, electrical system and navigation system is reliable is crucial. The Washington Post identified 418 major drone accidents in US Military operations worldwide in the 12 years up to 2013. Drones were destroyed or caused damage in around half these cases, with a total cost of more than US$2 million.

The civil aircraft approval system requires extensive testing to facilitate reliability and, in many cases, they require dual systems to cater for system failures. This will be a huge challenge for the manufacturers of flying taxis – and for CASA.

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

4. Where should air taxis be able to fly?

According to CASA, piloted air taxis would be subject to existing CASA regulations, but automated air taxis, or drones, are a different story.

Drones are currently limited to flying in airspace that is separate to that of manned aircraft. That means they can’t fly higher than 400 feet (122 metres) above ground level, and they’re not permitted to operate near airports. These regulations are designed to reduce risks to airliners – some of which carry more than 500 people.

But Sydney tower is approximately 1,000 feet high (305 metres), and many urban buildings exceed 400 feet (122 metres) in height. That means a set of modified height limitations will need to apply. Who will set these parameters? And how will drone taxis respond when emergency services require sole use of airspace?

The Bell Nexus at CES.

5. How will we avoid mid air collisions?

Manned general aviation aircraft rely on “see and be seen” when flying at lower levels using visual flight rules. If we change the height restriction for drone taxis, how would they comply with “see and avoid”?

Many drones now have obstacle collision avoidance, including airborne vehicle avoidance. The challenge will be to set protocols that will be consistently and safety applied by a number of drones all in close proximity.

We need to establish a protocol for cases where drones taxis are on converging tracks with each other, or other light aircraft. For instance, should aircraft give way to the right, or to a climbing aircraft?

If the risks of mid-air collision were to be mitigated by keeping drones away from major airports, that could mean limiting their use over the Sydney CBD, for example.

6. When should air taxis be grounded due to weather?

Urban environments not only create physical obstructions for air taxis, but buildings can cause unpredictable wakes and eddies in any amount of wind. Convective clouds can also create thermal turbulence, along with hail, heavy rain, and downdrafts (microbursts).

Air taxis will need to be able to fly in bad weather conditions, otherwise their use will be severely limited. Who will decide if drones need to be grounded due to bad weather? Over what area and time periods should the grounding occur?

7. How should air taxis be regulated?

Air taxis will need extensive regulatory oversight. Australia has a propensity for inventing new rules, so a large bureaucracy is likely to arise around this nascent industry.

With a small number of potential users, it’s difficult to see costs of the bureaucracy being levied solely on the users and developers. Will tax payers foot some of the bill?

Read more: It’s time to wake up to the devastating impact flying has on the environment

These questions – and many others – will need to be satisfactorily answered before a fully automated, safe and reliable fleet of air taxis become a reality.

Whether or not we can overcome these hurdles, it’s likely that any system will be strongly limited in number. They will therefore likely be very expensive to operate to cover developmental and operational costs.

In my view, the combination of safety, operational, commercial and regulatory constraints renders the practicality of air taxis highly improbable for the next few decades.

– ref. Flying taxis within five years? Not likely – http://theconversation.com/flying-taxis-within-five-years-not-likely-110025

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

In both the United Kingdom and Australia there is speculation that controversial bills may be passed against the will of the government. If so, could the government advise that the bill be refused royal assent – the last formal step in turning a bill into a law?

This raises questions about whose advice the Queen or governor-general acts upon when giving royal assent, and whether it is constitutionally permissible or wise for ministers to advise that assent not be given to a bill that has validly passed both houses of parliament.

Could it happen with Brexit and Nauru?

In the UK, internal parliamentary dissent about the management of Brexit has led some cross-party parliamentarians to suggest they might support a bill that would require the deferral of Brexit, rather than allow Britain to crash out of the European Union without an agreement.

This has given rise to speculation in both the British popular press and academic blogs about whether the Queen could refuse assent to such a bill, acting on the advice of government ministers.

Read more: Explainer: what is a hung parliament and how would it affect the passage of legislation?

In Australia, the issue has arisen because the Morrison government has slipped into a parliamentary minority. This creates the potential for a bill, such as one concerning the transfer of asylum seekers from Nauru to Australia for medical care, to pass the House of Representatives and the Senate without government support.

In both the UK and Australia, the standing orders of the relevant houses of parliament impose impediments to the passage of bills without government support. This is done by giving the government effective control over parliamentary business. Other parliamentary tactics, such as filibustering, may also be used to prevent the passage of such bills.

But if such impediments are overcome and a bill passes both houses against the wishes of the government, can it advise the Queen or the governor-general (described here collectively as the “head of state”) to refuse royal assent, and what should the head of state do if so advised?

Royal assent

In both the UK and Australia, parliament is defined as having three constituent parts – the lower house, the upper house and the Queen. A bill does not become a law until it has been passed by both houses (subject to special procedures for certain bills that may not need to be passed by the upper house) and has received royal assent. Royal assent is therefore a critical part of the legislative process. It has not been refused in the United Kingdom since 1707.

Royal assent is a critical part of the legislative process. AAP/EPA/Neil Hall

In practice, in neither country is the head of state given ministerial advice to assent to bills. While there is a common belief that assent is advised in meetings of the Privy Council or the Federal Executive Council as the case may be, this is not so. It is done separately by the head of state as part of his or her normal paperwork, once the houses have passed the bills.

Indeed, in the UK, the formal words of enactment of a bill state that it is:

enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same.

In Australia the more succinct phrase is: “The Parliament of Australia enacts”.

The position is nicely illustrated by the controversy concerning Britain’s entry in 1972 into what later became the European Union. A British subject, Alan McWhirter, argued that the Queen should refuse assent to the European Communities Bill as it would fetter the powers of parliament.

The first draft reply prepared by the British government explained it was a constitutional convention that the Queen cannot refuse assent to bills passed by both houses, and which ministers advise should receive assent.

After legal advice from the Lord Chancellor’s Office that ministerial advice is not tendered in relation to royal assent, the draft letter was corrected to say that it is an established constitutional convention that:

the Royal Assent is not withheld from Bills which have been passed by both Houses of Parliament.

The relevant principles

If ministers were to advise the head of state to refuse assent to a bill that both houses had validly passed, it would potentially raise a clash between the principles of representative and responsible government. The principle of representative government requires the head of state to act in accordance with the will of the democratically elected parliament by giving assent to bills the houses have validly passed.

The principle of responsible government ordinarily requires the head of state to act on the advice of ministers who are responsible to parliament because they hold the confidence of the lower house. The corollary of this principle is that the head of state is not obliged to act on the advice of ministers who have ceased to hold the confidence of the house.

The principle of responsible government serves that of representative government by ensuring that the executive government is responsible to, and derived from, the representatives of the people in parliament. Both principles require that parliament prevails over the executive, and the executive can only function as long as it holds the support of the lower (representative) house.

As Nick Barber has argued, it would therefore be inappropriate to rely on the principle of responsible government to undermine parliamentary representative government by allowing ministers to defeat the will of the houses of parliament.

The consequences of advising refusal of assent

The defeat of a government on a bill, whether it be defeat of a bill proposed by the government or the passage of a bill opposed by the government, will not necessarily indicate a loss of confidence and require the government to resign or seek an election. But it will do so when the bill is one of major importance to the government.

There is therefore a strong argument that if a government regards a bill to be of such critical importance that it is prepared to advise the head of state to refuse assent to it, then the government’s defeat indicated by the passage of that bill amounts to a loss of confidence in the government.

Read more: Dual citizenship debacle claims five more MPs – and sounds a stern warning for future parliamentarians

This is why it would be madness for a government to advise the head of state to refuse assent to a bill that has been passed against its wishes. Such action would not only raise a serious question about whether it can continue governing, but it would place the head of state in an invidious position by forcing him or her to reject either the advice of the houses of parliament or of ministers.

Added to this would be enormous public controversy about the constitutional propriety of the government’s action. This would undoubtedly be damaging for a government in a subsequent election.

There is a reason why there is no precedent of a government in the UK or Australia advising the refusal of assent in such circumstances. It would not only be a constitutionally dubious thing to do, but would also be politically stupid.

– ref. Why a government would be mad to advise the refusal of royal assent to a bill passed against its will – http://theconversation.com/why-a-government-would-be-mad-to-advise-the-refusal-of-royal-assent-to-a-bill-passed-against-its-will-110501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Webb, Clinical Lecturer and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney

A new school year, and another battle between bloodsucking parasites and the kids they love to live on.

But the real casualties are the stressed-out parents and carers trying to keep their kids free of lice.

Here are some tips for delaying the inevitably tricky task of lice treatment for as long as possible.

Remind me, what are head lice?

Head lice (Pediculus capitis) are insects found almost exclusively in the hair on human heads. These parasites aren’t found anywhere else on the planet.

They’re perfectly designed to scuttle up and down strands of hair, feeding on blood from the scalp of those infested. They typically feed about three times a day, spending up to 15 minutes on each occasion.

While their bites may cause some mild irritation, lice don’t spread bugs that make us sick.

Head lice don’t live long – not much more than a month. The adults lay eggs (commonly known as nits), which typically hatch in around a week or so. This life cycle is simple, but crucial for identifying and eradicating infestations.

You want to remove the adult lice, then treat again two weeks later to get rid of the newly hatched lice before they have a chance to lay more eggs. By Blamb/Shutterstock It’s worth investing in a lice comb. By Jiri Hera

The eggs are immovably cemented to shafts of hair. These eggs, even when the lice have hatched, will remain and grow out with the hair strands.

This means that spotting nits more than a centimetre or so from the scalp may not require treatment at all.

Instead, look for the live lice moving about. This is the most reliable way to confirm an infestation. Use a special lice comb from the local pharmacy to make the search easier.

How do children become infested?

Head lice don’t jump or fly or swim. They move from head to head through direct contact as the strands of hair from two people make contact, creating a bridge for adventurous lice to a new world.

But lice can be fussy, with one study showing hairs need to be specifically aligned to allow the parasites to skip from one strand to another.

This is why transmission of lice from one person to another doesn’t happen as readily as urban myths suggest.

Sharing hats, towels, or pillows won’t dramatically increase the chance of picking up head lice. They’re not going to crawl across the classroom floor either.

Direct head-to-head contact is the best way to share an infestation, so keep an eye out for kids crowded around smartphones and tablets!

Head lice may be small but they can cause big worries for parents and carers of school aged children! Eran Finkle/Flickr

Lice don’t necessarily have a particular predilection for clean or dirty hair. Short hair isn’t immune from infestation, but long hair means the chances of picking up lice are greater.

Ensuring hair is neatly pulled back will dramatically reduce the risk of picking up head lice.

Are head lice really a problem in Australia?

Head lice are a problem the world over. But they are more of a nuisance than a health risk in most instances.

Research suggests around one-third of Australian primary school-aged children could currently have head lice. With more than 2.1 million primary school students in Australia, that’s about 700,000 potentially infested children.

The thought of head lice may be actually worse than the itchiness resulting from an actual infestation. The Australian Academy of Science provides an entertaining breakdown of why this maligned parasites cause so much stress.

It’s more difficult to control head lice than in the past. International studies indicate lice are becoming resistant to commonly used insecticide treatments. This is also likely to be a problem in Australia but more research is needed to better understand the situation here.

Alternatives to traditional insecticides, such as botanical extracts, may be more useful in the future.

Read more: Here’s how you beat ‘indestructible’ head lice

Most health authorities in Australia recommend avoiding insecticides, and instead suggest wetting the hair (or using conditioner) and then combing the lice out.

Essential to eradicating head lice infestations is two treatments, each about a week apart. This ensures adult lice are killed, then any eggs remaining are allowed to hatch but those newly hatched lice are killed by the second treatment before they have an opportunity to lay more eggs.

I’m itchy already!

Perhaps the biggest health issue associated with head lice is the stress and anxiety for parents and carers of infested children.

Even before a single louse is even spotted, finding a note from the school warning of a “lice outbreak” could be enough to trigger frantic head scratching! There is even a term for this: psychosomatic itching.

Don’t worry – head lice are annoying but they’re not harmful. By DGLimages

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes for getting rid of lice. And no matter what social media claims, using mayonnaise, hair straighteners or household cleaning products) is a bad idea.

The most important thing to remember is lice aren’t going to cause health problems, nor are they indicators of poor household hygiene or quality of care.

Read more: How to keep school lunches safe in the heat

– ref. Back at school? Here’s how to keep kids free of head lice – http://theconversation.com/back-at-school-heres-how-to-keep-kids-free-of-head-lice-110344

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siyuan Tian, Postdoctoral fellow, Australian National University

Another summer, another drought. Sydney’s water storages are running on empty, and desalinisation plants are being dusted off. Elsewhere, shrunken rivers, lakes and dams are swollen with rotting fish. Governments, irrigators and environmentalists blame each other for the drought, or just blame it on nature.

To be sure, Australia is large enough to usually leave some part of our country waiting for rain. So what exactly is a drought, and how do we know when we are in it?

This question matters, because declaring drought has practical implications. For example, it may entitle those affected to government assistance or insurance pay-outs.

But it is also a surprisingly difficult question. Droughts are not like other natural hazards. They are not a single extreme weather event, but the persistent lack of a quite common event: rain. What’s more, it’s not the lack of rain per se that ultimately affects us. The desert is a dry place but it cannot always be called in drought.

Ultimately, what matters are the impacts of drought: the damage to crops, pastures and environment; the uncontrollable fires that can take hold in dried-up forests and grasslands; the lack of water in dams and rivers that stops them from functioning. Each of these impacts is affected by more than just the amount of rain over an arbitrary number of months, and that makes defining drought difficult.

Read more: Is Australia’s current drought caused by climate change? It’s complicated

Scientists and governments alike have been looking for ways to measure drought in a way that relates more closely to its impacts. Any farmer or gardener can tell you that you don’t need much rain, but you do need it at the right time. This is where the soil becomes really important, because it is where plants get their water.

Too much rain at once, and most of it is lost to runoff or disappears deep into the soil. That does not mean it is lost. Runoff helps fill our rivers and waterways. Water sinking deep into the soil can still be available to some plants. While our lawn withers, trees carry on as if there is nothing wrong. That’s because their roots dig further, reaching soil moisture that is buried deep.

A good start in defining and measuring drought would be to know how much soil moisture the vegetation can still get out of the soil. That is a very hard thing to do, because each crop, grass and tree has a different root system and grows in a different soil type, and the distribution of moisture below the surface is not easy to predict. Many dryland and irrigation farmers use soil sensors to measure how well their crops are doing, but this does not tell us much about the rest of the landscape, about the flammability of forests, or the condition of pastures.

Not knowing how drought conditions will develop, graziers face a difficult choice: sell their livestock or buy in feed? Shutterstock

Soils and satellites

As it turns out, you need to move further away to get closer to this problem – into space, to be precise. In our new research, published in Nature Communications, we show just how much satellite instruments can tell us about drought.

The satellite instruments have prosaic names such as SMOS and GRACE, but the way they measure water is mind-boggling. For example, the SMOS satellite unfurled a huge radio antenna in space to measure very specific radio waves emitted by the ground, and from it scientists can determine how much moisture is available in the topsoil.

Even more amazingly, GRACE (now replaced by GRACE Follow-On) was a pair of laser-guided satellites in a continuous high-speed chase around the Earth. By measuring the distance between each other with barely imaginable accuracy, they could measure miniscule changes in the Earth’s gravitational field caused by local increases or decreases in the amount of water below the surface.

By combining these data with a computer model that simulates the water cycle and plant growth, we created a detailed picture of the distribution of water below the surface.

It is a great example showing that space science is not just about galaxies and astronauts, but offers real insights and solutions by looking down at Earth. It also shows why having a strong Australian Space Agency is so important.

Read more: The lessons we need to learn to deal with the ‘creeping disaster’ of drought

Taking it a step further, we discovered that the satellite measurements even allowed us to predict how much longer the vegetation in a given region could continue growing before the soils run dry. In this way, we can predict drought impacts before they happen, sometimes more than four months in advance.

Map showing how many months ahead, on average, drought impacts can be predicted with good accuracy. author provided

This offers us a new way to look at drought prediction. Traditionally, we have looked up at the sky to predict droughts, but the weather has a short memory. Thanks to the influence of ocean currents, the Bureau of Meteorology can sometimes give us better-than-evens odds for the months ahead (for example, the next three months are not looking promising), but these predictions are often very uncertain.

Our results show there is at least as much value in knowing how much water is left for plants to use as there is in guessing how much rain is on the way. By combining the two information sources we should be able to improve our predictions still further.

Many practical decisions hinge on an accurate assessment of drought risk. How many firefighters should be on call? Should I sow a crop in this paddock? Should we prepare for water restrictions? Should we budget for drought assistance? In future years, satellites keeping an eye on Earth will help us make these decisions with much more confidence.

– ref. To predict droughts, don’t look at the skies. Look in the soil… from space – http://theconversation.com/to-predict-droughts-dont-look-at-the-skies-look-in-the-soil-from-space-110493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Smith, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University

Going to school is one of the few life experiences almost everyone shares. From the time children began to be educated in small groups in Britain, there were school stories in popular culture, beginning with what many consider the first novel for children, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1749).

The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (first published 1749; this edition 2005). Goodreads

The emphasis in early school stories was on moral and intellectual learning, which the reader was supposed to absorb. However, as school became a universal experience, stories about school elevated peer acceptance, sporting success, and friendships to the main sources of drama.

This has remained true from the crucial cricket match of Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) to the quidditch tournaments of the Harry Potter series.

School stories appeal to children and adolescents because they represent a world comprised largely of other young people, with adult teachers relegated to the periphery. However, they also mark changes in the kinds of ideals and goals we want young people to aspire towards.

Conformity and obedience were measures of a protagonist’s success in early school stories. However, as the genre has evolved in film and television, school stories have celebrated characters who transgress adult expectations, emphasising the importance of individuality.

Nerds, jocks and popular kids

North American film and television from the 1980s embraced stories about high school in particular, with earnest considerations of the dilemmas faced by teenagers forced into almost familial relationships with each other.

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) was among the first films to treat the experience of high school with seriousness and empathy. In what became a template for the genre, it explores the unique forms of social stratification found in schools between the popular kids, the nerds, the jocks, and outcasts who sprinkle dandruff on their artworks.

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High. IMDB

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High (1987-89) and Degrassi High (1989-1991) were pioneering in their focus on teenagers and willingness to confront mature topics including drug use, teen pregnancy, racism, and sexuality. The ultimate dark and vindictive side of school friendships were most memorably fictionalised in 1988’s Heathers, which darkly satirised teen suicide. Reflecting a significant transformation in real-world schools, the recent television reboot of Heathers had its premiere delayed for almost a year because of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.

Some of the longest-running American TV series set in schools in the 1990s nevertheless idealised beautiful, popular, and often wealthy students. Both the Saturday-morning comedy Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) and the prime-time drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000) were largely told from the perspective of fashionably dressed and perfectly coiffed characters at the zenith of the social hierarchy.

Outsiders and underdogs

Australian school stories have differed from their British and American counterparts from the outset. Henry Handel Richardson’s classic novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910), which was adapted into a film in 1977, is the story of poor country girl, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, who is sent to an exclusive Melbourne boarding school.

While the usual arc of the school story was to teach the outsider appropriate lessons about how to conform and contribute to school spirit and sporting success, Laura lies in an ill-fated attempt to be liked, cheats to pass her final exams, and finishes school without having found peer acceptance. It is her very inability to change herself to fit stifling gender and class expectations that has made her an enduring and beloved character for the past century.

Read more: The case for Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom

Such irreverence toward authority figures is a frequent attribute of Australian stories about school. In its early years, teen soap Home and Away (1988-present) built many dramas around conflict with high-school principal Donald Fisher, who the students privately referred to as “Flathead”.

Students in Home and Away (1988-present) have often questioned authority.

With conscious efforts to present a grittier and more realistic depiction of school life, Heartbreak High (1994-1999) not only included a cast that aimed to represent Australia’s increasingly multicultural society but depicted teachers as less authoritarian, and heavily invested in their student’s welfare.

Heartbreak High (1994-1999).

In a reworking of the opposition between student and teacher, it has become common for Australian stories about school life to retain a focus on the underdog but to draw out its comedic potential. Hating Alison Ashley (2005), based on the novel by Robin Klein, cast pop darling Delta Goodrem as the beautiful, superficially perfect student, but presents the story from the perspective of friendless hypochondriac Erica Yurken.

Rather than a disciplinarian setting in which the teachers and principal have ultimate control, Barringa East high school exhibits a loss of adult order, with graffiti and rubbish covering the campus.

The film opens with the explanation that three teachers have retired due to the trauma of teaching at the school, with two institutionalised and one escaping to join the Hare Krishnas. While the overall culture of underachieving students allows Erica to shine academically, she does not feel comfortable in herself until she makes an unlikely friend in her imagined rival, Alison. A happy ending for Erica is found not in changing herself and achieving popularity, but in finding a supportive friend to join her outside the mainstream.

The trailer for 2005 film Hating Alison Ashley.

Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High (2007) at once adopted the perspective of an underdog in the form of Jonah Takalua (a Tongan character controversially played by Lilley), and a queen bee in the form of Ja’mie King, a private school girl “slumming” at a state school.

Read more: Jonah From Tonga and the essence of cringe

Rather than glamorising the wealthy, image-obsessed Ja’mie, the series positions viewers to laugh at the shallowness of her manipulations to gain the approval of teachers and the few students she deems worthy of her attention. While many of the teachers at the school do care for student welfare, the infamous Mr G is the ultimate demonstration of the way teachers and authority figures are often depicted as flawed and ineffectual.

Chris Lilley as Ja’mie in Summer Heights High (2007). IMDB

Across time, Australian stories about school have more in common with the narratives of outsiders like Napoleon Dynamite than those of inspirational teachers as in Dead Poets Society or the beautiful students of Riverdale.

Attributes such as wealth, attractiveness, and family connections and status often distinguish the protagonists of American and British stories. Similarly, working hard and behaving correctly often brings success and popularity to these characters.

In contrast, Australian stories about school days are more likely to question structures of authority and social status. And anyone who wants to suck up to the popular kids or teachers can just, in the words of the students of Heartbreak High, “Rack off!”

– ref. From The Getting of Wisdom to Heartbreak High: Australian school stories on screen – http://theconversation.com/from-the-getting-of-wisdom-to-heartbreak-high-australian-school-stories-on-screen-109941

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

A high profile independent candidate, Oliver Yates, is expected to run against Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the heartland Liberal seat of Kooyong in Melbourne.

Yates, who lives in the electorate, is a member of the Liberal party and a former international banker and former CEO of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. At present he works for several firms on renewable energy projects.

Son of Bill Yates, a colourful character who held the Victorian seat of Holt in 1975-80 and was earlier a member of the House of Commons, Yates has made swingeing attacks on the Liberals, saying in a recent Guardian article that the “party is in need of desperate cultural reform”.

Challenger Oliver Yates. Clean Energy Finance Corporation

On climate change, which would be central to his campaign, he wrote in an earlier Guardian piece: “Refusing to reduce emissions as cheaply as possible is irrational, immoral and economically reckless.”

Frydenberg had a very solid 58% of the primary vote in 2016, and would not be at risk unless his primary vote was pushed well under 50%. But Liberals were shocked when at the Victorian election the seat of Hawthorn, which is within Kooyong, was lost to Labor.

Yates’ expected challenge and an anticipated announcement by former Liberal Julia Banks that she will run against Health Minister Greg Hunt in Flinders follow the unveiling of Zali Steggall’s bid to oust former prime minister Tony Abbott in Warringah.

The political crows have been circling Abbott, but until the appearance of Steggall – a Liberal-leaning born-and-bred local – the political odds were on him.

Now the Liberal disruptor is himself target of a major disruption, with the outcome uncertain.

The House of Representatives voting system makes it hard for independents to break through, so they are still a relatively rare breed in the lower house. However they are more common than previously and now the times are more auspicious for them than ever before.

Once established, they are hard to shift. So we can expect independents Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo and Andrew Wilkie in Denison to be back after the May election.

Banks’ prospects in Flinders would not seem high, although union-commissioned polling has been bad for Hunt, who backed Peter Dutton’s challenge to Malcolm Turnbull.

Banks presently holds the seat of Chisholm. Last year she deserted the Liberals to go to the crossbench citing the leadership change and bullying.

Hunt had 51.6% of the primary vote last election; ABC election analyst Antony Greens says that post-redistribution he is on about 50.5%. But the ALP vote is around 27% and Hunt seems in more danger from Labor than from an independent.

Two of the most interesting contests involving independents will Indi in north eastern Victoria, and Wentworth in Sydney.

Cathy McGowan famously tipped out Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella from Indi in 2013. McGowan, with a long background in the area, and backed by the grassroots “Voices For Indi” forum, was completely dug in by 2016. She would have won again this year.

But she had set in place a process for a community selection for a successor and earlier this month that produced Helen Haines, 57, from Wangaratta , a public health researcher. McGowan then confirmed she would not stand.

Indi will test whether can one independent pass on the “community candidate” heritage to another.

All the McGowan infrastructure is in place for Haines. On the other hand, by definition an independent candidate must establish themselves as an individual.

Haines will have to demonstrate her personal credentials, and convince voters that the local area will have a stronger “voice” in the next parliament if it has an independent than if its member comes from the Coalition (Labor can’t win the seat).

McGowan’s “voice” has been enhanced in this parliament because of the tight numbers. The crossbench has the crucial balance of power in these last months because the parliament is now “hung”.

The numbers in the next parliament are unlikely to be as close which would reduce the clout of a crossbencher.

In Wentworth, Kerryn Phelps was greatly helped to her 2018 byelection win by voter at the treatment of the seat’s former member Malcolm Turnbull. She was also assisted by the Liberal candidate Dave Sharma, a former diplomat, not being a local.

By the time the election comes in May Phelps – who won by just 1850 votes – will enjoy the advantage of incumbency but have had less than a year to establish herself as member.

In this contest there are two interesting questions. Will a sizeable number of the locals have got over their rage about Turnbull, and reassess their vote? And will some people, in a seat where voters like to have a high flier, decide to switch to a candidate with prospects of rising through the Liberal ranks in the next few years?

Some might say the Wentworth contest as one in which the voters are spoilt for choice.

Wentworth voters reacted against the loss of a former prime minister – in Warringah, many voters just want their ex-PM to shuffle off. Steggall, an former Olympian (in winter sports) and a barrister, will run hard on climate change, and attack Abbott’s views in general as out of touch with his constituents. She says Warringah is conservative economically and financially but progressive socially (as shown by a 75% yes vote on same-sex marriage).

As with Indi – although in a much less developed form – there is a community group backing Steggall – and she says she wants to give people in Warringah “a real choice for a voice”.

– ref. View from The Hill: Independent push against Frydenberg – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-independent-push-against-frydenberg-110600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Greenwood-Nimmo, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Melbourne

Australian banks have been under enormous scrutiny during the financial services royal commission, which reports on Friday. But one thing that hasn’t dominated the headlines is their relationships with their subsidiaries in New Zealand.

Each of Australia’s big four banks owns one of the New Zealand big four.

This has important practical implications, a fact acknowledged by New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand when they completed their own review into the conduct and culture of New Zealand’s banks in November.

Too big to fail?

If a systemically important bank gets into difficulties, the host country government usually intervenes with a rescue package and looks after depositors.

This (implicit) guarantee gives those banks a “too big to fail” status. It allows them to borrow funds more cheaply than their smaller competitors because lenders believe the government will come to their rescue if they get into trouble. It also allows them to take greater risks, knowing that, thanks to taxpayers, they will survive regardless.

New Zealand is trying to end that guarantee.

Not in New Zealand

Simply put, if a New Zealand bank fails, the Open Banking Resolution states that the cost will be faced primarily by the bank’s shareholders and creditors rather than by taxpayers.

Households that deposit with it could lose some of their savings.

Suppose that a financial crisis hits both countries at the same time – a plausible scenario given that the economies of Australia and New Zealand are exposed to similar risks.

The New Zealand bank at risk of failure would not receive a taxpayer-funded bailout. It would turn to its financially-stretched Australian parent for help.

If that help placed the Australian parent at risk, Australian taxpayers might have to come to the rescue.

Australian taxpayers might find themselves supporting the New Zealand banking system.

Each of New Zealand’s big four banks is owned by one of Australia’s big four banks.

No easy way out

There are problems with each of the obvious solutions.

One would be for New Zealand to legislate deposit insurance and rescind its declaration that its banks will not be bailed out.

From New Zealand’s perspective, it would be unfair: the Australian owners would collect profits from their New Zealand subsidiaries in good times, while relying on New Zealand taxpayers to foot the bill in the bad.

New Zealand regulators would also wear the burden of having to making sure the Australian owners didn’t take excessive risks in New Zealand.

Another solution would be for Australia to follow New Zealand’s lead and declare that it too would stand firm and not bail out important Australian banks.

Such a policy might not be credible. The political cost of allowing households to lose their savings would be hard for elected officials to bear. The government would face considerable pressure to renege on its commitment.

Read more: Bank deposit insurance: Is your money safe and at what price?

A third, intriguing, possibility is that governments around the world could act together and formalise the “too big to fail” guarantee, knowing that other governments would do the same. To offset the burden facing taxpayers, governments could charge those important banks for being too big to fail.

The imminent report of the royal commission would be a good time for us to work out what to do.

– ref. Too big to fail. The risks to Australian taxpayers from New Zealand banks – http://theconversation.com/too-big-to-fail-the-risks-to-australian-taxpayers-from-new-zealand-banks-110286