Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature, Popular Entertainment Studies and Science in Fiction Studies, Australian National University
Dr Frank-N-furter, the snappy alpha-alien who stars in The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, is one of the most memorable characters to grace the stage and screen in recent decades.
In his castle-spaceship from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, Frankie creates a carnal athlete named Rocky and makes a phallic incursion into the innocent lives of Brad and Janet, before being finally killed in an insurrection by his servants.
Frankie is an unusual creature, in equal parts funny and terrifying. My research into the character suggests this is because he is a hybrid of two types of comic entertainers – violent clowns and panto dames.
The Rocky Horror Show debuted on stage in 1973 in at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was followed in 1975 by a film adaptation. Both were directed by Jim Sharman, who grew up in Australia.
In his autobiographical writings, Sharman vividly recalls being taken to the circus as a small child, to vaudeville and other touring shows. These included his family’s boxing troupe and Sorlie’s travelling tent theatre, a popular attraction which between the 1920s and 1961 (with interruptions) took pantomime, musical comedy, and vaudeville around New South Wales and Queensland.
Panto dames
The Frank-N-furter character, Sharman writes, was derived from childhood memories of Bobby le Brun. Bobby le Brun (born Eric Marshall, 1910–1985) was a well-known, versatile entertainer with blithe natural charm, as his own personal collection in the National Library reveals. He was highly acclaimed for his dancing skills and especially renowned for his comic performances in women’s dress.
In fact, Bobby was Sorlie’s famous panto dame. The role of dame seizes on the early theatre custom of female characters played by boys and men. In pantomimes, traditionally she is an old woman or witch-like character, but can also take on the shape of a young seductive lady, androgynously doll-like and bewilderingly elegant.
The panto dame’s male identity is not concealed, and s/he is never effeminate. Australia has produced many such performers including, for example, Bland Holt, Harry Phydora, Jim Gerald and George Wallace, whose performances inspired Bobby le Brun and, later, Sharman.
Over the last few decades, Australia’s most (in)famous dame-luminary has been Barry Humphries’s Dame Edna Everage, called “a clown in the form of an Australian housewife” by her creator. It is hardly surprising that Humphries occupies a first-class seat in Sharman’s pantheon.
Dame Edma is Australia’s most famous panto dame.TRACEY NEARMY
Defined by scrubby leg hair and outlandish female attire, and engaging in physical comedy strongly reminiscent of the eccentric, hard-hitting (but never vulgar) activities of Bobby le Brun’s dames, Frank-N-furter in Rocky Horror is a blend of these comic traditions.
Frankie has been linked to the panto dame by both Tim Curry (acting in the role of Frank-N-furter in the original musical production and the movie) and Reg Livermore (who in 1974 performed Frankie in the original Australian musical production of Rocky Horror).
In the movie, Frankie exaggeratedly kicks his servant Riff-Raff, rides on his shoulders as if he were an animal, and chases him (and later Rocky) around his lab, pushing everyone out of his way and falling down a number of times. These comic interludes retain the dame role’s funny innocence.
Violent clowns
However, sundry wicked traits and his unceasing libidinous intent also align Frank-N-furter with another tradition: the violent clown. This character starred in many macabre clown plays popular throughout the 19th century (and since), featuring eccentrically performed manslaughter and comically staged immorality.
One example are the pantomimes by the Hanlon-Lees, a group of acrobats celebrated between the 1850s and early 1900s. Their performances featured funny decapitated heads, and bodies that were used as comic weapons. They staged a coffin maker who, following his own radical business logic, kills his potential clients himself, and a dentist curing a patient by means of a grenade fixed to his tooth.
Contemporary spectators admired their make-up – their “cannibalistic” smiles in particular – and called their shows the apotheosis of comedy. As research into popular art forms shows, this type of performance plot and aesthetics reemerge in clown narratives of the 20th century – including Rocky Horror.
In one scene of Sharman’s film, for instance, Frankie, armed with an ice pick, chases a party-crasher, Eddie, into a refrigerator, where he hacks him to pieces. This is problem-solving à la bad clown: schlock horror rather than panto dame pillow punches. Along with this ice-pick murder, his favourite R-rated pastime activities are forced brain surgery, sexual licentiousness, and cannibalism (he later invites his guests to eat Eddie’s remains).
As well as being a hybrid – an amalgam of identifications and confrontations – of two types of comic entertainers, the dame and the clown, Frankie is an example of the way the pantomime and clown tradition travelled between Europe and Australia.
International leaders and policymakers gathering in Katowice, Poland, for the 24th annual round of UN climate talks know that they have plenty of work to do.
They are hoping to make progress on the Paris Agreement Work Programme, otherwise known as the Paris Rulebook – the guidelines needed to guide implementation of the Paris Agreement. That agreement was struck three years ago, but it is still not clear how the treaty’s goals to curb global warming will actually be achieved.
The Paris Agreement was a diplomatic landmark, under which nations pledged to hold global temperature rises to “well below 2℃”, and ideally to no more than 1.5℃.
This requires all countries not only to slash global greenhouse emissions, but also to help the world adapt to the impacts of climate change. The agreement requires countries to develop national climate plans, to report back on their progress, and to ramp up their efforts in the coming years.
The ‘what’ and the ‘how’
Whereas the Paris Agreement talks about what needs to be done, the Paris Rulebook to be agreed at Katowice is about how nations can set about achieving it. Unlike the previous, more prescriptive Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement allows countries to choose their own approach to climate change. But it is important that actions taken by countries are done within an agreed, transparent framework of rules.
Rules need to be agreed about nations’ emissions targets, climate finance (including climate aid for developing countries), transparency, capacity building and carbon trading. Bringing all of this together is a huge challenge for negotiators. They need to establish a common set of rules applicable to all countries, while also maintaining the crucial principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” that underpins the UN climate process.
Already lagging behind
As well as being difficult, the task is also urgent. There is already evidence that countries are struggling to live up to their Paris commitments.
Although much of the focus has been on the challenge of bringing emissions targets into line with the Paris goals, our research suggests that climate adaptation efforts are also lagging behind.
Climate adaptation involves managing climate-related risks and deciding on how to manage and prepare for unavoidable impacts, such as increases in intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves and extreme storms, along with slow-onset impacts from sea level rise.
Many countries have developed climate adaptation policies as part of their climate change response. Our recent research analysed 54 of these national adaptation plans to understand how they match up to the intent of the Paris Agreement (as outlined in Article 7 of the Agreement).
We found that most adaptation plans only partially align with the Paris Agreement. Plans were largely focused on the social and economic aspects of adaptation, and were broadly aligned to countries’ existing policy priorities, especially around disaster management and economic development. For developing countries, there was a strong focus on linking adaptation and development.
However, countries are struggling to include environmental considerations into their planning. While the Paris Agreement clearly emphasises the important role that ecosystems play for climate adaptation, most plans are silent on this point.
What’s more, developed countries tended to take a less participatory approach to adaptation planning. Planning in developing countries was hampered by limited access to scientific knowledge but they made more use of local and traditional knowledge. The issue of resourcing and support for developing countries remains a challenge for climate change adaptation.
More work needed
Our results suggest that countries need to build on their existing adaptation plans to meet the ambitions in the Paris Agreement. There are good opportunities to better balance social and economic aspects with environmental and ecological considerations to improve planning.
Many countries, including Australia, have ratified the Paris Agreement, but few are delivering the ambitious action it requires. Besides pursuing deeper cuts to greenhouse emissions, countries need to revisit and update their adaptation strategies. Australia is well positioned to do so, given its economic wealth, its technical abilities, and the extensive climate adaptation research it has already undertaken.
Increasingly, we know what needs to be done to combat climate change. The Katowice summit will hopefully advance an agreement on how countries can do it. But actually doing it on a globally coordinated scale will be the biggest challenge, and there is some way to go to catch up.
A protest action by the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP) in Indonesia’s East Java provincial capital of Surabaya yesterday demanding self-determination for West Papua has been attacked by a group of ormas (social or mass organisations).
Police later raided Papuan student dormitories in the evening and detained 233 students in a day of human rights violations as Indonesian authorities cracked down on demonstrations marking December 1 – “independence day”, according to protesters.
The group, who came from a number of different ormas, including the Community Forum for Sons and Daughters of the Police and Armed Forces (FKPPI), the Association of Sons and Daughters of Army Families (Hipakad) and the Pancasila Youth (PP), were calling for the Papuan student demonstration to be forcibly broken up.
“This city is a city of [national] heroes. Please leave, the [state ideology of] Pancasila is non-negotiable, the NKRI [Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia] is non-negotiable”, shouted one of the speakers from the PP.
At 8.33am, a number of PP members on the eastern side of Jl. Pemuda began attacking the AMP by throwing rocks and beating them with clubs. Police quickly moved in to block the PP members then dragged them back.
The AMP protesters had began gathering at the Submarine Monument at 6am before moving off to the Grahadi building where the East Java governor’s office is located.
However they were only able to get as far as the Surabaya Radio Republic Indonesia (RRI) building before they were intercepted by police from the Surabaya metropolitan district police (Polrestabes) and the East Java district police (Polda).
‘Independence’ day
The AMP demonstration was held to mark December 1, 1961, as the day West Papua became “independent” from the Dutch. For the Papuan people, December 1 is an important date on the calendar in the Papuan struggle which is commemorated every year.
The historical moment in 1961 was when, for the first time, the West Papuan parliament, under the administration of the Dutch, flew the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag, symbolising the establishment of the state of West Papua.
Since then the Bintang Kejora was flown alongside the Dutch flag throughout West Papua until the Dutch handed administrative authority of West Papua over to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) on October 1, 1962, then to the Indonesian government on May 1, 1963.
The UNTEA was an international mechanism involving the UN to prepare a referendum on whether or not the Papuan people wanted to separate or integrate with Indonesia.
The referendum, referred to as the Act of Free Choice (Pepera), resulted in the Papuan people choosing to be integrated into Indonesia.
Since then, the administration of West Papua has been controlled by the Indonesian government and the flying of the Bintang Kejora illegal – as it is deemed an act of subversion (maker) – and have responded to protests with violence and arrests.
Police arrest 99 Papuan activists at pro-independence rally in Ternate Arnold Belau of Suara Papua reports from Jayapura that at least 96 activists from the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) were arrested by police in Ternate, North Maluku, after they forcibly broke up a rally in front of the Barito Market.
A Suara Papua source from Ternate said that the FRI-WP action was closed down by police and intel (intelligence) officers and the demonstrators forced into trucks as they were about to begin protesting in front of the Barito Market.
The source said that several activists were dragged and assaulted as they were forced into the truck.
“Several comrades who were at the action were dragged and forced to get into a truck by police and intel in Ternate,” they said.
The source said that as many as 99 people were arrested, 12 of them from West Papua and the rest activists from FRI-WP. One of the protesters had to be rushed home because because of breathing difficulties.
“One of the people had difficulty breathing and was rushed home. Twelve people were from Papua and the rest from Ternate. Currently they are being taken to Polres [district police station]”, they said.
Ternate district police Tactical Police Unit head (kasat sabhara) Aninab was quoted by semarak.news.com as saying that the protesters would be taken to the Ternate district police station.
‘Given guidance’
“We will take them to Polres, question them. If in the process of delving into the matter it is discovered that they committed a violation then they will be charged, but we will bear in mind that are still young and [they should be] given guidance,” he said.
Earlier, the protesters sent a written notification of the action to the Ternate district police but it was rejected with police saying that the planned action was subversive (maker).
Upon arriving at the Ternate district police station they will be registered and those who originate from Papua will be separated from those from North Maluku.
FRI-WP is demanding that the Indonesian government must resolve human rights violations in Papua and that the Papuan people be given the freedom to hold a referendum to determine their own future.
Background Although it is widely held that West Papua declared independence from Indonesia on December 1, 1961, this actually marks the date when the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag was first raised alongside the Dutch flag in an officially sanctioned ceremony in Jayapura, then called Hollandia.
The first declaration of independence actually took place on July 1, 1971 at the Victoria Headquarters in Waris Village, Jayapura.
Known as the “Act of Free Choice”, in 1969 a referendum was held to decide whether West Papua, a former Dutch colony annexed by Indonesia in 1963, would be become independent or join Indonesia.
The UN sanction plebiscite, in which 1,025 handpicked tribal leaders allegedly expressed their desire for integration, has been widely dismissed as a sham.
Critics claim that that the selected voters were coerced, threatened and closely scrutinised by the military to unanimously vote for integration.
A protest action by the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP) in Indonesia’s East Java provincial capital of Surabaya yesterday demanding self-determination for West Papua has been attacked by a group of ormas (social or mass organisations).
Police later raided Papuan student dormitories in the evening and detained 233 students in a day of human rights violations as Indonesian authorities cracked down on demonstrations marking December 1 – “independence day”, according to protesters.
The group, who came from a number of different ormas, including the Community Forum for Sons and Daughters of the Police and Armed Forces (FKPPI), the Association of Sons and Daughters of Army Families (Hipakad) and the Pancasila Youth (PP), were calling for the Papuan student demonstration to be forcibly broken up.
“This city is a city of [national] heroes. Please leave, the [state ideology of] Pancasila is non-negotiable, the NKRI [Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia] is non-negotiable”, shouted one of the speakers from the PP.
At 8.33am, a number of PP members on the eastern side of Jl. Pemuda began attacking the AMP by throwing rocks and beating them with clubs. Police quickly moved in to block the PP members then dragged them back.
-Partners-
The AMP protesters had began gathering at the Submarine Monument at 6am before moving off to the Grahadi building where the East Java governor’s office is located.
However they were only able to get as far as the Surabaya Radio Republic Indonesia (RRI) building before they were intercepted by police from the Surabaya metropolitan district police (Polrestabes) and the East Java district police (Polda).
‘Independence’ day The AMP demonstration was held to mark December 1, 1961, as the day West Papua became “independent” from the Dutch. For the Papuan people, December 1 is an important date on the calendar in the Papuan struggle which is commemorated every year.
The historical moment in 1961 was when, for the first time, the West Papuan parliament, under the administration of the Dutch, flew the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag, symbolising the establishment of the state of West Papua.
Since then the Bintang Kejora was flown alongside the Dutch flag throughout West Papua until the Dutch handed administrative authority of West Papua over to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) on October 1, 1962, then to the Indonesian government on May 1, 1963.
The UNTEA was an international mechanism involving the UN to prepare a referendum on whether or not the Papuan people wanted to separate or integrate with Indonesia.
The referendum, referred to as the Act of Free Choice (Pepera), resulted in the Papuan people choosing to be integrated into Indonesia.
Since then, the administration of West Papua has been controlled by the Indonesian government and the flying of the Bintang Kejora illegal – as it is deemed an act of subversion (maker) – and have responded to protests with violence and arrests.
Police arrest 99 Papuan activists at pro-independence rally in Ternate Arnold Belau of Suara Papua reports from Jayapura that at least 96 activists from the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) were arrested by police in Ternate, North Maluku, after they forcibly broke up a rally in front of the Barito Market.
A Suara Papua source from Ternate said that the FRI-WP action was closed down by police and intel (intelligence) officers and the demonstrators forced into trucks as they were about to begin protesting in front of the Barito Market.
The source said that several activists were dragged and assaulted as they were forced into the truck.
“Several comrades who were at the action were dragged and forced to get into a truck by police and intel in Ternate,” they said.
The source said that as many as 99 people were arrested, 12 of them from West Papua and the rest activists from FRI-WP. One of the protesters had to be rushed home because because of breathing difficulties.
“One of the people had difficulty breathing and was rushed home. Twelve people were from Papua and the rest from Ternate. Currently they are being taken to Polres [district police station]”, they said.
Ternate district police Tactical Police Unit head (kasat sabhara) Aninab was quoted by semarak.news.com as saying that the protesters would be taken to the Ternate district police station.
‘Given guidance’ “We will take them to Polres, question them. If in the process of delving into the matter it is discovered that they committed a violation then they will be charged, but we will bear in mind that are still young and [they should be] given guidance,” he said.
Earlier, the protesters sent a written notification of the action to the Ternate district police but it was rejected with police saying that the planned action was subversive (maker).
Upon arriving at the Ternate district police station they will be registered and those who originate from Papua will be separated from those from North Maluku.
FRI-WP is demanding that the Indonesian government must resolve human rights violations in Papua and that the Papuan people be given the freedom to hold a referendum to determine their own future.
Background Although it is widely held that West Papua declared independence from Indonesia on December 1, 1961, this actually marks the date when the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag was first raised alongside the Dutch flag in an officially sanctioned ceremony in Jayapura, then called Hollandia.
The first declaration of independence actually took place on July 1, 1971 at the Victoria Headquarters in Waris Village, Jayapura.
Known as the “Act of Free Choice”, in 1969 a referendum was held to decide whether West Papua, a former Dutch colony annexed by Indonesia in 1963, would be become independent or join Indonesia. The UN sanction plebiscite, in which 1,025 handpicked tribal leaders allegedly expressed their desire for integration, has been widely dismissed as a sham.
Critics claim that that the selected voters were coerced, threatened and closely scrutinised by the military to unanimously vote for integration.
An unnamed Papuan student beaten during the December 1 West Papuan flag demonstration in Surabaya, Indonesia. Human rights sources report more than 300 arrests by Indonesian authorities. Image: Humam rights sources
Hundreds of Papuan students faced off with counterprotesters in Indonesia’s second largest city of Surabaya today in a rally calling for the Melanesian region’s independence while pro-independence sources reported more than 300 people arrested in West Papua.
The Surabaya rally was organised by the Papua Students Alliance. The demonstrators chanted “Freedom Papua” in Surabaya city to mark December 1, which many West Papuans consider as the 57th anniversary of what should have been their independence, report news agencies.
The crowd, many of whom wearing headbands of the Morning Star flag – banned by Indonesian authorities, was blocked from marching to the city center by scores of counterprotesters from several youth organisations waving the Indonesian flag.
A screenshot from a secret video report of the mobilised Indonesian police about to raid the Papuan dormitories in Surabaya tonight. Image: Human rights sources
They confronted the pro-independence protesters with sharpened bamboos.
Several hundred members of anti-riot police prevented the two rival groups from clashing.
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The protest ended after about two hours.
However, human rights sources reported tonight that Indonesian police and military had surrounded Papuan student dormitories in Surabaya and arrested 223 people. They were being detained at the Surabaya City sector police station.
Peaceful demonstrations In several regions of West Papua, peaceful demonstrations took place. Protests were reported in Jakarta, Surabaya, Palu, Kupang, Ternate, Makassar, Manado, Ambon, Poso, Sula, Timika, Meruake, Waropen, and Tobelo.
In addition to police intervention during public gatherings, the London-based campaign’s website said it had received reports that Indonesian security forces had also raided several student dormitories, and the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) headquarters was vandalised.
From the monitoring team, below is the interim report of arrests throughout West Papua and other parts of Indonesia:
Philipus Robaha is among students still detained in Polsek KP3, Naval Base, Jayapura. Image: FWPC
1. Kupang – 18 people arrested. 2. Ambon – 43 arrested. 3. Ternate – 99 arrested. One of the activists was rushed to hospital due to suffocation 4. Jayapura around 85 people from 4 different locations: Dok IX, Abe, Jayapura and Sentani. 5. Jakarta – 140 arrested 6. Surabaya – hundreds involved in a long march towards Kamasan III student dormitary were confronted by tni-polri and some students were bruised from confrontation. 7. Manado – 29 arrested 8 Waropen – 7 arrested. Names: Jhon Wenggi, Yulianus Kowela, Monika Imbiri and Fiktor Daimboa 9. Sorong and Merauke, including KNPB HQ in Waena, Perumnas III: in lock down and an urgent need for advocacy at these places.
Today marks the 57th anniversary of the first time West Papua’s flag of independence, the Morning Star, was raised.
The banned West Papuan Morning Star flag on display at Auckland’s Pacific Media Centre today. Image: PMC
In commemoration of the historic event numerous non-violent peaceful demonstrations and prayer vigils were organised around the country.
Worldwide flag raisings of international solidarity increase each year as the support for West Papuan independence gains momentum. In New Zealand, flagraising events were held in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
This protests comes at a time of increased violence in West Papua, including suspected extrajudicial killings in the region.
Urgent issues of concern also include increased military presence, the killing of civilians caught in crossfire in the mountain regions, and armed civilian movements of Papuans protecting their villages.
The International Coalition for Papua (ICP) compiles data on political arrests and violence in West Papua. This information has been made public through quarterly reports. The latest ICP reports are at www.humanrightspapua.org
A scene from the Surabaya rally today with the crowd chanting “Freedom Papua”. The men in the front of the image appear to be undercover police filming and recording events. A short distance away there was a counterprotest with Indonesian flags. Police kept the two groups apart. Image: Still from a West Papuan sourced video
Keynote speakers Associate Professor Kabini Sanga from Victoria University and Dr Alisi Holani (right), deputy CEO of the Ministry of Commerce, Consumer, Trade, Innovation and Labour (MCCTIL) in Tonga. They spoke about a “rich gap” and other issues affecting Pacific media reportage. Image: Tom Blessen/PMC
By Sri Krishnamurthi
The NZ Institute for Pacific Research will cease to exist in its current form, Emeritus Professor Richard Bedford said in a bombshell announcement to the Oceans and Islands conference today.
Rumours of NZIPR’s demise were doing the rounds after a review of the organisation earlier this year by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).
“I do want to finish with expressing the gratitude that the institute has for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the investment they have put in to the establishment of a NZ Institute for Pacific Research,” said the acting director in his conference closing address.
“We are in a rather ambiguous situation at the moment and quite a lot of speakers were informed of this in advance. I wrote to alert them to the fact we were in yet another ‘Pacific reset’ around the institute.
“Pacific reset are the words that the ministry has used for the rethinking of aspects of our policy in the Pacific,” said Professor Bedford.
He admitted that he had yet to see the review report which is said to be confidential to the institute’s board. They knew the recommendations that the decision to cease the current arrangement was based on.
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“Just for those of you who might be bewildered by this, it’s not about getting rid of the NZ Institute of Pacific Research,” he said.
Review of investment “Basically, what the ministry has done is have a review of what its investment has achieved. “I think they’ve been impressed with a number of things that have happened. They have been impressed with some of the research that has been done,” he said.
“But the model and the way it’s worked has not given them the return on investment with regard to research that informs policy.
“I can sympathise a little bit with MFAT here because academic research doesn’t always and should never always fit perfectly some policy objective or goal,” he said in attempting to cushion the blow.
“The drivers of academic research are different from policy orientated research,” he said highlighting the difference in what the ministry had expected from NZIPR.
“This applied especially to discovery-led research, and a great deal of research we’ve heard about in this conference is discovery-led research.
“It’s about understanding and learning ways of doing things, testing models, testing ideas. It’s not about necessarily just producing something to enable a solution. The research may contribute to a solution long-term but that isn’t what drives it initially.”
MFAT-owned brand He made it clear that the brand name was owned by MFAT and not the three universities (Auckland, Otago and Auckland University of Technology) that have been involved in the initial conglomerate that formed the NZIPR.
It was envisioned initially that long-term the NZIPR would become something like Australia’s think tank Lowy Institute.
When NZIPR was formed, MFAT invested $5 million for a set number of years, but the arrangement was that the NZIPR would look to possible external sources of funding to top up MFAT’s investment but that never eventuated.
“The label NZ Institute for Pacific Research belongs to MFAT, it’s not a label that belongs to the consortium of universities that has worked with MFAT to deliver on the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that led to the formation of the current NZ Institute for Pacific Research,” he clarified.
“The NZ Institute for Pacific will continue to exist, operating under a different but as yet unspecified model.
“Whatever actually happens, in my view they’d be mad if they got rid of the opportunity that we’ve had to have this kind of conference,” he said voicing his opinion.
He said the support from MFAT needed to be acknowledged and he aimed to work with the ministry constructively to try and ensure that all the many good things that have emanated from their investment continue in whatever form they chose to implement the institute in the future.
Transition period “That’s just to clarify that it won’t be the same next year, the current arrangement finishes on March 14,” Professor Bedford said.
“Between now and March 14 Evelyn [Dr Evelyn Marsters – research programme manager] and I, along with others in the University of Auckland, AUT and the University of Otago which are partners in the consortium, will work with MFAT to ensure that the transition from the first generation, the Fresh Off the Boat version of NZIPR moves along to the next generation version under MFAT control.”
Day two of the conference, apart from this sensational announcement, featured keynote speakers Associate Professor Kabini Sanga from Victoria University (Wellington), who spoke about “Pacific research frontiering” and Dr Alisi Holani, Deputy CEO of the Ministry of Commerce, Consumer, Trade, Innovation and Labour (MCCTIL) in Tonga, who spoke about “Bridging the policy-research gap in the Pacific – Insights from labour mobility negotiations in PACER Plus”.
The third keynote speaker, Dr Tapugao Falefou Permanent Secretary Government of Tuvalu, could not attend the conference due to not having his visa processed in time, something which was lamented by Professor Bedford.
EMTV journalist Scott Waide … “Papua New Guinea is a democracy and the media is free to hold those in authority to account.” Image: PMC
By Blessen Tom
Pacific media freedom and ignorance of Pacific issues by mainstream media in New Zealand are growing challenges for the region, says a journalism academic
“There are so many issues in the Pacific that are simply ignored by the mainstream media,” Pacific Media Centre director Professor Robie bluntly told the two-day Oceans and Islands conference for Pacific researchers that ended in the Fale Pasifika at Auckland University today.
He cited the ongoing human rights situation in West Papua – which will be marked tomorrow with flag raising ceremonies across New Zealand – and the recent New Caledonian independence referendum as examples of poorly covered issues.
The conference was hosted by the NZ Institute for Pacific Research, a NZ government-funded consortium of Auckland University, Otago University and Auckland University of Technology (AUT).
A Maserati luxury sedan as portrayed in the controversial news item shown in EMTV. Image: EMTV screenshot
Addressing the centre’s research and public strategy, Dr Robie also shared his concerns about media freedom in the Pacific region and highlighted this week’s dramatic developments in Papua New Guinea in the wake of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference.
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Scott Waide, one of the country’s most high profile and influential journalists, was secretly suspended over broadcasting a New Zealand television news item that criticised government spending on 40 Maserati luxury sedans.
Waide, deputy regional news editor of EMTV and who blogs on social issues in his My Land, My Country website, was reinstated a day after news of his suspension was leaked through social media networks, sparking a flurry of protests in international media.
“This outrageous meddling by the state-owned Telikom company’s board was kept quiet for a week until it finally went viral last Sunday.
‘Blatant censorship’ “This blatant act of censorship – publicly defended by Prime Minister Peter O’Neill – rebounded heavily on the government.”
Dr Robie, who is also the convenor of the PMC’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project in collaboration with international press watchdogs such as the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, criticised corporate and political inference in PNG’s news and current affairs media.
He said what had happened was salutary for Pacific press freedoms. While he described the reinstatement for Waide as a victory for media freedom in the region, he said the journalists’ own reflective comments were “lessons for the rest of the Pacific”.
AUT’s Professor David Robie … critical of political and corporate “meddling” with Pacific media freedom. Image: Blessen Tom/PMC
“Papua New Guinea is a democracy and the media is free to hold those in authority to account,” Waide had said on his blog. “This means highlighting flaws in policy and making sure mistakes are pointed out and corrected. It is an essential part of our democracy.”
Dr Robie cited the Waide suspension as an example of some of the research, publication and storytelling provided by the PMC.
“We try to give lot more storytelling with Pacific voices and Pacific context,” he said.
“We try to provide an outlet for Pacific views and also information right across the region.”
Professional development AUT’s PMC in the School of Communication Studies operated as independent university-based educational media by providing space for postgraduate students to have their stories published and broadcast for professional development.
This had contributed a lot to Pacific storytelling, he said.
“If we do things independently media-wise, there are a lot of stories that we can tell that much of the mainstream just ignores.”
PMC publishes the following media:
• An online general news and current affairs website called Asia-Pacific Report and PMC Online which focuses on media issues and research.
• Its own YouTube (more than 200,000 viewers) and Soundcloud channels.
• Pacific Journalism Review, a peer reviewed journal, the only New Zealand-based publication specialising in journalism, media issues, communication and diversity in the South Pacific, Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.
PJR is ranked on the SCOPUS metrics database and is in its 25th year of publication and is hosted on the open access indigenous research platform Tuwhera at Auckland University of Technology.
• Pacific Journalism Monographs, a peer-reviewed research companion to Pacific Journalism Review, which publishes longer research projects in an online and booklet format.
• Southern Cross, a weekly radio programme on Pacific affairs run by the PMC on Radio 95bfm at the University of Auckland.
Professor Robie also mentioned PMC’s three-year-old Bearing Witness climate change project and talked about its “outstanding results” by award-winning postgraduate students reporting environmental issues.
He screened the trailer of Banabans of Rabi – A Story of Survival, a short documentary by Hele Ikimotu and Blessen Tom that was premiered at the Nuku’alofa International Film festival last week.
The inaugural Oceans and Islands conference concluded today.
Sri Krishnamurthi and Blessen Tom of the Pacific Media Centre are working as part of a PMC partnership with the NZ Institute for Pacific Research.
AUT’s Professor David Robie with two colleagues at the NZIPR Oceans and Islands conference. Image: NZIPR
Low energy efficiency is already a major problem for petrol and diesel vehicles. Typically, only 20% of the overall well-to-wheel energy is actually used to power these vehicles. The other 80% is lost through oil extraction, refinement, transport, evaporation, and engine heat. This low energy efficiency is the primary reason why fossil fuel vehicles are emissions-intensive, and relatively expensive to run.
Based on a wide scan of studies globally, we found that battery electric vehicles have significantly lower energy losses compared to other vehicle technologies. Interestingly, however, the well-to-wheel losses of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were found to be almost as high as fossil fuel vehicles.
Average well-to-wheel energy losses from different vehicle drivetrain technologies, showing typical values and ranges. Note: these figures account for production, transport and propulsion, but do not capture manufacturing energy requirements, which are currently marginally higher for electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles compared to fossil fuel vehicles.
At first, this significant efficiency difference may seem surprising, given the recent attention on using hydrogen for transport.
Herein lies one of the significant challenges in harnessing hydrogen for transport: there are many more steps in the energy life cycle process, compared with the simpler, direct use of electricity in battery electric vehicles.
Each step in the process incurs an energy penalty, and therefore an efficiency loss. The sum of these losses ultimately explains why hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, on average, require three to four times more energy than battery electric vehicles, per kilometre travelled.
Electricity grid impacts
The future significance of low energy efficiency is made clearer upon examination of the potential electricity grid impacts. If Australia’s existing 14 million light vehicles were electric, they would need about 37 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year — a 15% increase in national electricity generation (roughly equivalent to Australia’s existing annual renewable generation).
But if this same fleet was converted to run on hydrogen, it would need more than four times the electricity: roughly 157 TWh a year. This would entail a 63% increase in national electricity generation.
A recent Infrastructure Victoria report reached a similar conclusion. It calculated that a full transition to hydrogen in 2046 – for both light and heavy vehicles – would require 64 TWh of electricity, the equivalent of a 147% increase in Victoria’s annual electricity consumption. Battery electric vehicles, meanwhile, would require roughly one third the amount (22 TWh).
Some may argue that energy efficiency will no longer be important in the future given some forecasts suggest Australia could reach 100% renewable energy as soon as the 2030s. While the current political climate suggests this will challenging, even as the transition occurs, there will be competing demands for renewable energy between sectors, stressing the continuing importance of energy efficiency.
It should also be recognised that higher energy requirements translate to higher energy prices. Even if hydrogen reached price parity with petrol or diesel in the future, electric vehicles would remain 70-90% cheaper to run, because of their higher energy efficiency. This would save the average Australian household more than A$2,000 per year.
Pragmatic plan for the future
Despite the clear energy efficiency advantages of electric vehicles over hydrogen vehicles, the truth is there is no silver bullet. Both technologies face differing challenges in terms of infrastructure, consumer acceptance, grid impacts, technology maturity and reliability, and driving range (the volume needed for sufficient hydrogen compared with the battery energy density for electric vehicles).
Battery electric vehicles are not yet a suitable replacement for every vehicle on our roads. But based on the technology available today, it is clear that a significant proportion of the current fleet could transition to be battery electric, including many cars, buses, and short-haul trucks.
Such a transition represents a sensible, robust and cost-efficient approach for delivering the significant transport emission reductions required within the short time frames outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on restraining global warming to 1.5℃, while also reducing transport costs.
Together with other energy-efficient technologies, such as the direct export of renewable electricity overseas, battery electric vehicles will ensure that the renewable energy we generate over the coming decades is used to reduce the greatest amount of emissions, as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, research should continue into energy efficient options for long-distance trucks, shipping and aircraft, as well as the broader role for both hydrogen and electrification in reducing emissions across other sectors of the economy.
The story of Knickers the giant steer has gone viral on social media over the past week. Admittedly, the pictures show him towering over a herd of young Wagyu steers, with Wagyu being one of the smaller cattle breeds, which even enhances his size.
Nevertheless, Knickers is undeniably an impressive beast, standing 194cm tall and weighing a whopping 1.4 tonnes. He is a Holstein-Friesian, which is a large dairy breed. Even Holstein-Friesian cows can grow up to 160cm tall and weigh up to 900kg, and the boys are typically taller and heavier still.
However, Knickers stands literally head and shoulders above the rest, and as an agricultural geneticist I am thrilled that the limelight has been shone in a fun way on our beautiful livestock.
The story of Knickers has probably encouraged a lot of people to think about the size of cattle for the first time, and to appreciate how much they can vary.
There is an astonishing amount of variation in size between cattle breeds, from the diminutive Dexter breed, the smallest European breed standing at around 100cm, all the way up to the gargantuan Chianina, the world’s largest cattle breed which features the current all-time record-holder, an Italian ox called Bellino who measures a stunning 202cm. All shapes and sizes of cattle breeds are represented in between these two extemes.
Is there an ideal cattle size?
The question as to why there are such vast differences in size goes back to the time when cattle were first domesticated around 11,000 years ago. One of cattle’s wild ancestors, called Aurochs, were even taller than Knickers, with many bulls standing more than 200cm tall.
Since domestication, cattle have been bred for different purposes, including pulling a plough, or producing milk or meat. These understandably require different body characteristics. The “ideal” size is also influenced by the amount and quality of forage available. Put simply, larger cattle need more food than smaller ones, so if food is scarce, smaller cattle provide a more productive option.
The ideal size of the animals might also be influenced by the availability and size of handling and housing facilities. These days, beef cattle’s size is very strongly influenced by the ideal market size (which saved Knickers, he was too big to go to slaughter).
Is Knickers a freak?
On first observation, some of the most common beef breeds, such as Angus and Hereford, might be described as “all the same size”. Yet there is a surprising amount of variation even within each of these breeds.
Typically, the size distribution within a herd of breed follows a bell-shaped curve, with a few small cattle, a few large cattle, and the majority somewhere in between.
So where does Knickers sit on this curve? The answer is: a long way towards the big end, but not quite into genuine freak territory. Within the Holstein-Friesian breed he is exceptional, but within the extreme end of the existing known range for males.
How did he reach such mammoth proportions? Basically, all the cards fell his way. Males are bigger on average than females, and castrated males (steers) are bigger than entire males (bulls). Castration influences hormones, which delays the completion of bone growth, particularly in the limbs. And on top of all that, Knickers is seven years old – far beyond the age at which cattle are typically taken for slaughter.
So unlike most cattle, Knickers has been allowed to grow old – with the emphasis on grow.
So yes, as you may have gathered from browsing literally any part of the Internet this week, Knickers is a big unit – maybe the biggest steer in Australia. But his size is nevertheless very much within the biological parameters of his breed.
Yet while he is not quite a genetic one-off, to me he is still a superstar, because he has triggered a curious conversation on cattle. Next time you go past a paddock of calmly grazing cows, pay attention to differences you observe and marvel at these magnificent animals.
Political Roundup: Huawei decision is the price of being in Five Eyes
by Dr Bryce Edwards
Waihopai – a Five Eyes network SIGINT base near Blenheim in the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Image courtesy of Converge.org.nz.
John Key was once very candid in explaining the realpolitik reason New Zealand had to send troops to assist the US war on terror: it was simply “the price of the club”. He was speaking of the intelligence alliance known as Five Eyes involving the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
The Labour-led Government is unlikely to be equally upfront that this week’s decision to ban the Chinese company Huawei from supplying the infrastructure for the new telecommunications 5G network is also due to New Zealand’s membership of the Western allies’ club.
That reality is clear to political journalist Richard Harman, who says the Huawei ban “was the only one it could have come to. To have let Huawei in would have placed New Zealand at odds with its traditional friends – Australia, the United States and Britain – and offside with the Five Eyes alliance” – see: How the Huawei decision saw the old friends prevail.
This article points out that the Huawei decision “came coincidentally with the presence in the capital of a top-level delegation from the British Foreign office and also a senior FBI official from the US. The FBI official was here to open a new FBI liaison office in Police Headquarters.” And although it’s not clear that there was any recent pressure on the GCSB to ban Huawei, Harman points out that the signals from Five Eyes partners were very clear on the matter – especially with a British Government report in July, and then in “August Australia barred Huawei from participating in its 5G network.”
There is certainly going to be a cost for the ban. First, it seems that there will be consequences in terms of inferior and more expensive communications for consumers. Second, this country’s economic and diplomatic ties with the superpower of China will now be strained as a result.
Such costs could end up being significant, and will affect every New Zealander. In terms of Spark’s planned new telecommunications network, Barry Soper explains today: “they’ll probably have to settle for a more expensive and less efficient option. Huawei points out that in a trial for 5G in March they achieved a world record of more than 18 gigabytes a second while their competitors could only manage one gig. With data transfer rates at that speed perhaps that’s what spooked the GCSB” – see: Spy agency’s Huawei ban conveniences Government.
Soper says that essentially New Zealand has “finally picked sides” in the geopolitical rivalry between China and the US. He also stresses the economic and diplomatic prices that New Zealand will have to pay, saying “This decision has wide-reaching implications for this country with our biggest trading partner” and the “renegotiation of our Free Trade Agreement will now be on the back burner”.
In terms of diplomatic reaction, Soper says: “Now this is all out in the open it can come as no surprise the Chinese couldn’t find the time to see Jacinda Ardern in Beijing before Christmas, she was ready to go at the drop of a hat.”
Leftwing commentator Gordon Campbell seems to agree, saying “the Huawei ban is a hostile act”, and the “indefinite postponing of PM Jacinda Ardern’s trip to China is probably the first symptom of the cooling in our relationship” – see: On how banning Huawei fits into our new hostility towards China.
Campbell also suggests that the Huawei ban on involvement in the 5G project will be costly. He points to the fact that “In Australia, the Huawei bid was reportedly 30% lower than competing tenders”, and concludes that it “is reasonable to assume there will be extra costs for consumers as a consequence”.
As to why the Government is suddenly so sensitive about this new telecommunications network, when they haven’t been so worried in the past, Gordon provides a good explanation: “5G will be the key piece of architecture in the so-called ‘Internet of things’ that’s envisaged to connect our electricity and water systems, medical and driverless technologies, systems in homes and hospitals, factories and farms. The security concerns about China being central to the provision, installation and maintenance of such a massively interlinked system is not hard to imagine”.
Campbell argues that the Huawei ban is part of “a trifecta of measures via which the 5 Eyes allies have been beefing up their stance towards China” – the other two components being “(a) the increased defence spending in Australia and New Zealand for which countering China expansionism is the only conceivable rationale and (b) the massive increase in Australasia’s aid and diplomatic profile in the Pacific, in order to counter China’s ‘cheque book’ diplomacy”.
New Zealand really had no choice but to ban Huawei according to intelligence expert Paul Buchanan: “Diplomatically, it would be very difficult for the GCSB to green light Huawei’s involvement in the 5G upgrade in the face of the US request to withhold approval” – see: Huawei vs Five Eyes: NZ diplomatic ties at centre of dilemma.
Furthermore, “The fallout from such a decision could open a rift within the Five Eyes partnership because New Zealand is already seen as the Achilles Heel of the network given its past record of poor cyber security awareness (say, in the overlap between professional and personal communications). It is therefore prudent for the GCSB to side with the US on the matter.”
Siding with Western allies over China is evidence of New Zealand’s shifting orientation towards its biggest trading partner, according to Victoria University of Wellington’s strategic studies professor, Robert Ayson – see his Newstalk ZB interview: NZ’s relationship with China could suffer after GCSB decision – academic.
On the Huawei decision, Ayson says: “I think it’s an important sign that New Zealand’s approach to China is becoming more cautious. I think the special friendship between New Zealand and China is now a little less special in some ways”.
Ayson believes the reasons behind the ban would have been both genuine concerns for national security and about New Zealand’s alignment with the Five Eyes countries. He concludes: “I guess one of the question is, does New Zealand want to be seen as a weaker link?”
The cost of the Huawei ban is also well canvassed by Jamie Ensor in his article, NZ could see major fallout from Huawei 5G decision – expert. In this, Richard Harman is quoted on its impact on diplomatic relations with China: “The frequency of contact between New Zealand and China, and the intimacy of that contact, might slow down for a while”.
In terms of economic ties, Harman points to tourism and education as being the most likely hit. In terms of “worst case scenarios”, he says the Chinese Government “might try and restrain Chinese students who come here for education” and they might “take New Zealand off the preferred list of tourist destinations”.
Condemnation of the Huawei ban has been coming from both left and right. The former general secretary of the Labour Party, Mike Smith, has been highly critical of his own government: “The GCSB ban on Spark’s use of Huawei technology means this government has gone from ‘honest broker’ to poodle in a very short time” – see: Spooked!
He also suggests that it might be time for New Zealand to withdraw from Five Eyes, and says we shouldn’t believe much of what is being said about Huawei: “Maybe it’s time we got out of that too – it was designed for war. GCSB Minister Andrew Little argues that the GCSB decision is about the technology not the country. Nobody else believes that, certainly not the lobbyists and commentators including security analyst Adam Boileau, who said that argument didn’t make a lot of sense. He says Huawei’s engineering is pretty good.”
Rightwing blogger David Farrar appears to be in agreement on much of that, saying “the reality is that no one anywhere has ever been able to point to an actual security problem with Huawei. It is basically scaremongering” – see: We join the nonsense ban on Huawei.
Farrar elaborates: “Basically New Zealand has succumbed to peer pressure from our five eyes partners, primarily the US. Their motivations are protecting US companies from competition. They have never ever been able to say what exactly is it that Huawei has done wrong or could do wrong. They’ve been banned purely because of the country they are based in. This will increase the costs of telecommunications in New Zealand, by removing a preferred supplier. It will also be seen as a deeply offensive move by the Chinese Government and our exporters will probably end up paying the cost.”
Finally, for a fictional conversation about how the politics of the Huawei decision might be explained, see Chris Trotter’s From a table by the window.
Orchids are famed for their beautiful and alluring flowers – and the great lengths to which people will go to experience them in the wild. Among Australian orchids, evocative names such as The Butterfly Orchid, The Queen of Sheeba, and Cleopatra’s Needles conjure up images of rare and beautiful flowers.
Yet there is a rich diversity of our orchids. Some are diminutive, warty, and unpleasant-smelling, bearing little resemblance to a typical flower.
While many orchid enthusiasts have a soft spot for these quirky members of the Australian flora, what has brought them international recognition is their flair for using some of the most bizarre reproductive strategies on Earth.
From the very beginnings of pollination research in Australia there were signs that something unusual was going on in the Australian orchid flora.
In the 1920s Edith Coleman from Victoria made the sensational discovery that the Australian tongue and bonnet orchids (Cryptostylis) were pollinated by males of a particular species of ichneumonid wasp attempting to mate with the flower.
But this was just the beginning.
The King-in-his-carriage, Drakaea glyptodon, is the most common species of hammer orchid. Here the flower is pictured next to the female of its pollinating thynnine wasp, Zaspilothynnus trilobatus.Rod Peakall, Author provided
We now know that while the insect species involved may vary, many of our orchid species use this strategy. Australia is the world centre for sexual deception in plants.
Perhaps the most sophisticated flower of all sexually deceptive plants is seen in the hammer orchids, a diminutive genus that only grows in southwestern Australia. Their solitary stem reaches a height of around 40cm, and each stem produces a single flower no more than 4cm in length.
Even among sexually deceptive orchids, hammer orchids stand out from the crowd. They have a single heart-shaped leaf that sits flush with the soil surface, and grow in areas of dry inhospitable sand – an unusual choice for an orchid.
The thynnine wasp Zaspilothynnus nigripes is a sexually deceived. pollinator of the Warty hammer orchid. Here they are pictured in copula, with the flightless female having been carried to a food source by the male.Keith Smith, Author provided
And then there is the flower. Not only does the lip of the flower more closely resemble an insect than a petal, but it is hinged partway along. All of which starts to makes sense once you see the pollinators in action.
Like many other Australian sexually deceptive orchids, they are pollinated by thynnine wasps – a unique group in which the male picks up the flightless female and they mate in flight.
In the case of hammer orchids, the male grasps the insect-like lip and attempts to fly off with “her”. The combination of his momentum and the hinge mechanism swings him upside down and onto the orchid’s reproductive structures.
It’s not me, it’s you (you’re a flower)
So, how do you trick a wasp?
Accurate visual mimicry of the female insect does not appear to be essential, as there are some sexually deceptive orchids that are brightly coloured like a regular flower.
Instead, the key ingredient for attracting pollinators to the flower is mimicking the sex pheromone of the female insect. And boy, is this pheromone potent.
Indeed, one of the strangest fieldwork experiences I’ve had was wasps flying through my open car window while stopped at traffic lights, irresistibly drawn to make love to the hammer orchids sitting on the passenger seat!
Pollination of the Warty hammer orchid by a male of the thynnine wasp Zaspilothynnus nigripes.Suzi Bond, Author provided
While determining the chemicals responsible for attraction of sexually deceived pollinators is a laborious process, we now know that multiple classes of chemicals are involved, several of which were new to science or had no previously known function in plants.
What’s more, we are still discovering new and unexpected cases of sexual deception in orchids that don’t conform to the insect-like appearance of many sexually deceptive orchids.
A classic example is the case of the Warty hammer orchid and the Kings spider orchid – these two species have totally different-looking flowers, yet both are pollinated by the same wasp species through sexual deception.
While the ability to attract sexually excited males without closely resembling a female insect may partly explain the evolution of sexual deception, it does not explain the benefit of evolving this strategy in the first place.
A leading hypothesis for the evolution of sexual deception is that mate-seeking males be more efficient at finding orchid flowers than food-foraging pollinators – but this remains a work in progress.
The life cycle of the Warty hammer orchid and its pollinator species, highlighting the complex ecological requirements needed to support a population of. the orchid.Martin Thompson, Author provided
From a conservation point of view, pollination by sexual deception has some interesting challenges. Female animals produce sex pheromones that only attract males of their own species. This means an orchid that mimics a sex pheromone typically relies on a single pollinator species. As such, conservation of any given orchid species requires the presence of a viable population of a particular pollinator.
Further, an interesting quirk of these sexually deceptive systems is the potential for cryptic forms of the orchid: where populations of orchids that appear identical to human observers actually attract different pollinator species through shifts in pheromone chemistry. Indeed, of the ten known species of hammer orchid, three contain cryptic forms.
Not only does this create a major challenge for managing rare species, it raises the possibility that – should these forms prove to be separate species – the true diversity of sexually deceptive orchids could be greatly underestimated.
How did you sleep last night? If you had anything other than eight interrupted hours of peaceful, restful sleep then guess what? It’s not that bad – it’s actually pretty normal.
We recently asked five sleep researchers if everyone needs eight hours of sleep a night and they all said no, you don’t.
In fact, only about one quarter of us report getting eight or more hours of sleep. That’s according to the huge annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey which now tracks more than 17,500 people in 9500 households.
We’ll hear today from Roger Wilkins, who runs the HILDA survey at University of Melbourne, on what exactly the survey found about how much and how well Australians sleep.
But first, you’ll hear from sleep expert Melinda Jackson, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University, about what the evidence shows about how we used to sleep in pre-industrial times, and what promising research is on the horizon. Here’s a taste:
Trust Me, I’m An Expert is a podcast where we ask academics to surprise, delight and inform us with their research. You can download previous episodes here.
And please, do check out other podcasts from The Conversation – including The Conversation US’ Heat and Light, about 1968 in the US, and The Anthill from The Conversation UK, as well as Media Files, a podcast all about the media. You can find all our podcasts over here.
The two segments in today’s podcast were recorded and edited by Dilpreet Kaur Taggar. Additional editing by Sunanda Creagh.
Michelle Grattan speaks to Canberra University Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini about the week in Australian politics. They discuss the Coalition’s shift into minority government, the Liberal party troubles in the wake of the defeat at the Victorian election, Victorian MP Julia Banks defection to the cross bench, and Scott Morrison’s announcement of the budget and election timetable.
This piece is part of a series on race and racism in Australia. The series examines this complex and incendiary topic, and the role it plays in contemporary Australia. You can read the rest of the series here.
Nearly 30 years ago, Australians made a decision to start implementing anti-vilification laws. They now exist federally, in every state, and in the ACT.
But unlike many countries around the world, the focus here is on civil laws. Although many states have criminal laws prohibiting serious vilification (such as NSW and Queensland), there are no criminal “hate speech” laws at the federal level. In practice, the vast majority of vilification complaints in Australia are dealt with under the civil law.
The basic idea is pretty simple. In a society that aspires to embrace diversity and support the human rights of all, it is not OK to vilify someone (that is, denigrate or defame them) because of who they are, as opposed to something they might have done.
We have been researching anti-vilification laws for more than two decades. So, how well do these kinds of laws work? Do they provide redress and remedies to targets of hate speech? Do they stifle free speech? And, perhaps most importantly, do they reduce the incidence of hate speech?
First, let’s look at whether hate speech laws provide redress and remedies to targets of hate speech. If a person feels that an incident of unlawful vilification has occurred, they can lodge a complaint by contacting the relevant state authority (for example, the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board) or the Australian Human Rights Commission.
There are procedural difficulties in lodging a complaint. For example, the person complaining needs to be from the group that was targeted and has to be able to identify the person about whom they are complaining (which is difficult when vilification happens in public places and the perpetrator is a stranger). The process can also take a long time. This can discourage people from lodging complaints or cause them to give up before the matter is resolved.
After a person lodges a complaint, the authority will assess whether the allegation falls within the definition of unlawful vilification. If so, the authority will investigate and attempt to mediate a resolution.
Our research has found that in about a third of complaints, a successful resolution is reached. This usually means that the person who made the comments agrees to stop making them or agrees to apologise, or the workplace where the comments occurred agrees to hold workshops to educate their staff about appropriate behaviour. These are all good outcomes.
The whole mediation process is confidential, so the public rarely gets to hear about these success stories. But they do show that the laws can provide redress and remedies to targets of hate speech.
The same research project showed that communities targeted by hate speech support the existence of the laws. Even if they never make a formal complaint, people appreciate that the government has legislated to tell everyone that racist, homophobic or other vilification is unacceptable. These laws help people to feel valued and supported.
Unfortunately, there are some gaps in current anti-vilification laws. Most laws don’t cover religious vilification and so, for example, little protection is offered to Muslims, even though we know they are one of the most vilified groups in Australia.
Do hate speech laws stifle free speech?
One of the most common arguments made by opponents of hate speech laws is that they stifle free speech. But our research does not support this claim.
Only a small number of complaints are lodged around the country each year (about 200), and less than 2% of those complaints end up in a court or tribunal. Of those that do, only half succeed. The most commonly ordered remedy is an apology or correction, or removal of the material from public view.
There is little evidence that people feel some topics are “off limits”. On the contrary – political debate in Australia is robust and wide open.
In fact, some of those who complain most vociferously about being silenced – like Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Tony Abbott – are amongst the loudest and most influential voices in Australia. They are prominent public commentators who enjoy wide media exposure.
Do hate speech laws reduce the incidence of hate speech?
This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer.
Our research has shown that there have been some changes in how controversial topics are discussed in outlets like newspapers. Overt racial and other vilification is less common now. Anti-vilification laws have played a part in effecting this change, but lots of other factors have been important, too, including changing social attitudes.
Unfortunately, as our research confirms, there has been little to no change in the incidence of vilification in public places – on the street, on trains and buses, or in shopping centres, for example. The only shift that has occurred is in who is targeted, with more recent waves of migrants newly targeted. There has been a shift, for example, towards people of African heritage and from the Middle East.
On this level, anti-vilification laws do not seem to have reduced the overall incidence of hate speech.
Another way of measuring the success of anti-vilification laws is in public attitudes. Opinion polls show strong public support for the idea that governments should draw a line in the sand – one that says that racist hate speech and other forms of group vilification are unacceptable.
This is perhaps the most important legacy of 30 years of anti-vilification laws in Australia.
When did early humans first arrive in the Mediterranean area? New archaeological evidence published today online by the journal Science (as a First Release) indicates their presence in North Africa at least 2.4 million years ago.
This is about 600,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The results, from the Ain Boucherit site in north eastern Algeria, provide new information on a time window involving the earliest representative of the Homo genus.
These discoveries are the result of excavations and intensive investigations performed under the umbrella of the Ain Hanech project since 1992.
Location of Ain Boucherit and other prehistoric sites mentioned in the text. Right: Zoom on the vicinity of El Eulma city.Maps from Google map
Located north of El Eulma city, the area was previously well known for providing stone tools and cut-marked bones dated to about 1.8 million years ago (Ain Hanech and El Kherba sites, see map above), which have been until now the oldest occurrences in North Africa.
In 2006 and 2009, new artefacts were found at Ain Boucherit, a few hundred metres from the other sites. They were distributed in two layers below the previous archaeological findings, suggesting an even older human presence in the area.
The new archaeological finds
Excavations of the lower (known as AB-Lw) and upper (AB-Up) archaeological levels yielded more than 250 stone tools and almost 600 fossil remains.
A wide range of animals was identified, including elephants, horses, rhinos, hippos, wild antelopes, pigs, hyenas, and crocodiles. These animals currently occupy a relatively open savanna type habitat with permanent water nearby, suggesting similar conditions in the past.
The stone tool find includes mostly chopping tools and sharp-edged cutting tools used for processing animal carcasses. Those tools are made of limestone and flint that were most likely collected nearby from ancient stream beds.
They are typical of the Oldowan stone tool technology known from East African sites and dated to between 2.6 million and 1.9 million years ago. But the Ain Boucherit find also shows some subtle variations, in particular with the presence of very peculiar tools of spheroidal shape whose function remains unknown.
Two examples of stone tools from Ain Boucherit. An Oldowan core from which sharp-edged cutting flakes were removed (left). Sharp-edged cutting flake that may be used for butchery activities on the bones (right).Mohamed Sahnouni
Some of the fossil bones show very specific marks that could not be of natural origin, but rather the result of an intentional activity.
Two types were identified. The first were cutmarks made from sharp-edged flakes, suggesting skinning, evisceration and defleshing activities (pictured below). The second include percussion marks made from a hammerstone, suggesting marrow extractions.
These show the use by early hominins of meat and marrow from animals. This is consistent with other studies from broadly contemporaneous East African sites.
A small bovid bone with stone tool cutmarks.Isabel Caceres
Dating the site was quite challenging, but the relative positions of AB-Up (within Olduvai event) and AB-Lw (a few metres below Olduvai) allowed us to derive an age of about 1.9 million and 2.4 million years ago, respectively.
The significance of the discovery
This new discovery modifies our understanding of the timing and diffusion of the Oldowan stone tool technology throughout Africa and outside the continent.
By pushing back by about 600,000 years the earliest occurrence of Oldowan tools in North Africa, the age difference with the oldest East African evidence suddenly becomes relatively small.
This indicates at least a somewhat rapid (or, more rapid than previously thought) expansion of this technology from East Africa, although a multiple origin scenario of stone tool manufacture in both East and North Africa might even be possible.
As a consequence, the first settlements of the southern margin of the Mediterranean area now appear to be much older than their northern counterparts.
The oldest evidence from southern Europe does not exceed about 1.4 million years ago (Atapuerca and Orce sites, in Spain), while the hominin fossils found at Dmanisi in Georgia, at the gates of Europe, are dated to 1.8 million years ago.
Who made these tools?
Since no hominin fossils were found at Ain Boucherit, we can only speculate about the possible makers of these Oldowan stone tools.
The hominin fossil record in North Africa is extremely poor, and there is currently no fossil reported in the age range of Ain Boucherit.
The oldest fossils found in Algeria are dated to about 700,000 years ago. They were found at Tighennif (formerly known as Ternifine, map above). If their attribution has changed over time (initially Athlantropus mauritanicus and nowadays Homo erectus or early Homo heidelbergensis depending on the authors), these fossils are too young compared with the Ain Boucherit discoveries to support any kind of connection between the sites.
All the early hominin fossil remains found in the Mediterranean area in association with Oldowan stone tools are significantly younger than Ain Boucherit, by at least 1 million years. The oldest Western European evidence such as the partial mandible found at Atapuerca Sima del Elefante, Spain, and the isolated deciduous tooth from Barranco León, southern Spain, are dated to about 1.2 million and 1.4 million years ago, respectively.
Consequently, the best candidates are most likely to be found in East Africa, despite their geographical distance from North Africa. Several hominins are broadly contemporaneous with Ain Boucherit (a good overview may be found here), including australopithecines and different members of the genus Homo such as Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis or the undefined early Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia.
That said, we cannot rule out the possibility that the stone tools at Ain Boucherit come from another hominin species, belonging or not to the genus Homo, that has not been found yet.
We hope our future excavation at Ain Boucherit will give us the opportunity to identify these stone toolmakers.
Compared to other international organisations, the G20 would seem to be one of the weakest.
It has no formal mandate like the United Nations. It has no permanent staff or buildings like the World Bank. It certainly has no funds like the International Monetary Fund. It has no power to make formal rules that members must follow, nor to take action against states that fail to comply, like the World Trade Organisation.
So how does the G20 get anything done?
What has made it influential in tackling problems like the global financial crisis? Why is it tasked with addressing some of the most pressing global problems, such as climate change?
A big part of the answer is the sheer power of its members. But also vital is the G20’s informal structure, which provides members with significant flexibility, and its close working relationship with other international organisations that also have a seat at the G20 table.
Economic muscle
The members of G20 pack enormous punch.
The group comprises 18 of the 21 nations with the biggest economies by gross domestic product, plus South Africa and the European Union.
This means there are effectively 43 countries with a stake in the G20. Together they account for about 85% of global gross domestic product, and about 65% of the world’s people.
So when they agree to coordinate their national policies in a particular policy domain they can transform the global landscape.
In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, for example, G20 leaders agreed to co-ordinate their economic policies to ameliorate the worst impacts of the crash. Compared to previous crises of similar magnitude, the global economy recovered much more quickly than many anticipated. This is credited in large part to the G20’s role in expediting a co-ordinated response.
Seats at the table
Although the G20 does not have its own permanent staff and resources, it is adept at enlisting the commitment and resources of other international organisations when it needs to.
Bodies such the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development are well-integrated into the G20’s negotiation processes.
These organisations often prove willing partners because they depend, to varying degrees, on the material and political support of G20 member states for their existence.
Take, for example, the Financial Stability Board, established by the G20 at its 2009 London summit in London.
The board works to promote the stability of the global financial markets by co-ordinating the work of national and international financial authorities. The G20 has relied on the board to take the lead on making large financial institutions less vulnerable to collapse, such as by forcing them to hold more capital, implementing tougher transparency standards, and monitoring their progress.
As a result, accelerated G20 co-operation could dramatically improve the prospects for a clean energy transition
Should they wish to do so, G20’s leaders have the capacity to achieve much more than talking. At their best they have the power to transform the rules that govern the globe.
Political Roundup: Suffrage reality check – prisoners still can’t vote
by Dr Bryce Edwards.
Dr Bryce Edwards.
Yesterday marked 125 years to the day since women first voted in a New Zealand General Election. However, celebrations received a reality check when an inconvenient truth resurfaced in a new campaign – the fact that not all New Zealand women have suffrage, because prisoners are still denied the right to participate in elections.
The campaign to give the vote to prisoners has been launched by the justice reform campaign group, JustSpeak, which has started a new petition: Right to Vote for All. The petition, which includes an open letter to Minister of Justice, Andrew Little, currently has around 200 signatories.
Here’s the key message: “We believe that in a fair and democratic society all members should have the right to vote, and people living in prisons are part of our society. They are valued members of communities and families. To take away their right to vote is an unfair disenfranchisement.”
In conjunction with this new campaign, two very compelling videos have been released that deal with suffrage issues and voting. Yesterday, the first video about women in prison not being able to vote was launched: Can’t: the NZ women still unable to vote, 125 years after suffrage.
To accompany these videos, the Spinoff website is also running a series of articles on prisoners’ suffrage. The most important one for explaining the arguments in favour of prisoners being able to enrol and vote is by JustSpeak’s Tania Sawicki Mead and Ashelsha Sawant – see: To call ourselves a truly representative democracy, this voting law must change.
Looking at the current law that bans prisoners from voting, they say: “It’s the worst kind of anti-democratic law – harsh, disproportionate and fundamentally at odds with the idea that human rights belong to all of us.” And they also point out that New Zealand is an outlier in this regard: “Most democracies around the world either allow prisoners to vote or have recently reinstated their right to do so. New Zealand lags behind in comparison as one of the handful of countries who still have a blanket ban.”
For a poignant argument in favour of prisoner voting, it’s worth reading a very personal account from Awatea Mita, who has spent time in prison – see: A society that denies the incarcerated a vote is a society stamping on human rights. She argues: “Rehabilitation as a safe, responsible, and productive member of an egalitarian society must include the most basic right of the democratic process — the right to participate in choosing who governs, the right to vote. There is research that shows an association between civic engagement, such as being able to vote, and the reduction of offending.”
The role of the Supreme court in suffrage rights
The campaign for reform has been given a massive boost by the landmark New Zealand Supreme Court declaration earlier this month that the ban on prisoners voting – passed in 2010 as the Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Act – is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. This is best covered by Sam Hurley in his news report, Supreme Court upholds decision saying ban on prisoner voting inconsistent with Bill of Rights.
This report quotes Justice Paul Heath, who made the decision in order to “draw to the attention of the New Zealand public that Parliament has enacted legislation inconsistent with a fundamental right”.
The article provides some history of the ban on prisoner voting in New Zealand. It also, interestingly, cites Jacinda Ardern’s strong opposition to the current voting ban, quoting her statements from when she was Labour’s spokesperson on Justice. For example, Ardern said, “This was an arbitrary law and one that is full of contradictions and inconsistencies” and “Parliament has a responsibility to respect fundamental rights for all. The Government now has a responsibility to assure all New Zealanders it understands that”.
For more on the process of the case being brought to the Supreme Court by current prisoner Arthur Taylor, see Alex Baird’s Kiwi prisoners’ right to vote upheld Supreme Court rules. Taylor appeared in the Supreme Court case via audio-video link from prison, and when he won the case, he says there was celebration from his fellow inmates. Taylor says: “Some of them have made me a cake out of biscuits and things they can buy on their purchases, so that was quite nice, the thought’s there anyway”.
Will the Government extend suffrage to prisoners?
The above article also quotes Justice Minister Andrew Little explaining that although the courts had ruled against the ban, he didn’t see it as a priority to correct the error. Instead, he explained that his priority was to fix the judicial-legislative constitution problems caused by the landmark ruling: “The priority is to get in place a process that requires parliament to respond to any declaration made by the courts on inconsistency with the Bill of Rights.”
Elsewhere, Andrew Little has said that, although he personally opposed the ban on prisoner voting rights, he didn’t see it as a “priority” for the current government, and he’s been reported as believing that “Ministers were unlikely to consider the issue for at least a year” – see RNZ’s Youth advocacy group disappointed in govt’s stance on prisoner votes.
This article also reports JustSpeak’s Tania Sawicki Mead’s response that Little’s stance “was hypocritical because in opposition Labour MPs opposed the law change banning voting”. Mead is quoted: “I think it’s a question of how much this basic issue of access to democracy and your fundamental right to participate is a priority to this government or not… I hope that they seriously consider making it a part of their legislative agenda next year.”
Leftwing blogger Martyn Bradbury has reacted with incredulity that the Labour-led Government would essentially oppose returning votes to prisoners, and argues that this decision is based on political pragmatism trumping principles: “Little’s kicked for touch so as to not infuriate NZs easily angered sensible sentencing lynch mob” – see: In just 7 words did Andrew Little demolish real prison reform?
Bradbury explains how the complete ban on prisoner voting came out of the National Party opportunistically playing to a conservative audience, but Labour is now doing the same: “So smart politics to play to the angriest and most easily upset elements off society, but to also shrug off the crucial point that prisoners do have human rights regardless of imprisonment actually cuts to the very heart of the issues Little is attempting to force change on.”
Another blogger, No Right Turn, is also outraged that Labour have decided not to advance a remedy for the problem with urgency: “This is simply not acceptable. When the Supreme Court makes a ruling like this, it should automatically become a priority for Parliament, and should be formally drawn to its attention for a response. The government has already signalled that that is what it wants to do in future, so why won’t it do it in this case? And there’s a pressing need: we’re having an election in 2020, and it would simply be unacceptable given the ruling for prisoners to be unable to vote in it” – see: “Not a priority”.
Furthermore, see his update from yesterday: “in Parliament today the government said that they hadn’t even considered the issue and that it wasn’t a priority for them. Which tells us everything we need to know. This government is not committed to fundamental human rights, and is quite willing to violate them for political profit” – see: Still not their priority.
For the best analysis on the Government’s reluctance to enact universal suffrage, see Gordon Campbell’s On prisoner voting. He points to New Zealand First as the primary barrier to reform.
Here’s Campbell’s main explanation: “Not for the first time, prisoners are being treated as political footballs. Just as the Key government played to the redneck vote back in 2010, Little seems OK about Labour becoming captive to the hardline ‘lock ’em up’ faction that exists within New Zealand First. Earlier this year, Little had been blindsided by NZF leader Winston Peters when Labour tried to scrap the “Three Strikes” legislation. Rather than risk losing a similar fight, Little now seems gun-shy about fighting at all on this issue.”
On the question of whether fixing the problem should be a priority, Campbell says this should be obvious: “Centre-left governments used to think that the rights of prisoners shouldn’t be sacrificed to indulge the desire for societal revenge. I’d also have thought that – when you’re the Justice Minister – defending section 12 of our Bill of Rights should be a priority.”
According to this, the Green Party’s Justice spokeswoman Golriz Ghahraman “is asking Justice Minister Andrew Little to prioritise the change, but legislation would be needed, so NZ First would need to get onboard. The party has not ruled out attempting the change as a members’ bill.”
Finally, when we think about extending the electoral franchise, perhaps we need to think about lowering the qualifying age as well. Today, Azaria Howell has made the case for it being two years lower – see: Make it 16: a teenager on why we should lower the voting age.
Op-Ed: Seeking Peace Needs an Enterprising Foreign Policy
by H.E. Mr Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Minister of Foreign Affairsof the Republic of Turkey
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Turkey.
This week Istanbul will host two separate but related international conferences on mediation. One will be devoted to the state of play in the conflict map and capacity for mediation within the membership of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The second one will adopt a broad scope and discuss the connections between sustainable development, peace and mediation; the ways to increase gender and youth inclusion in mediation processes; and a thought provoking session on the role of big data and artificial intelligence in conflict and mediation analysis. It may be thought that conferences are conferences but the Istanbul Mediation Conferences have proven rather influential in cultivating a shared understanding of issues and an agenda for action in the field of mediation and peaceful conflict resolution. As the host of these conferences and the only country that co-chairs the Friends of Mediation Groups in three distinct important international organizations, namely the United Nations, the OIC and the OSCE, Turkey has the ability to share the findings of these conferences in these international organizations.
The fact of the matter is that humanity is facing a distinct challenge in the 21st century. Just when many people thought that the glass is half full in terms of the achievements in international law, institutions, democracy and the rule of law, accountability, free trade, gender equality and others, the empty half of the glass has begun to reassert itself. The symptoms are known to all of us and need no reminding. Trade wars, new forms of international exploitation, geopolitical competitions, great power proxy wars, disintegrating nation states, terrorism, xenophobia, animosity against Islam, raging inequalities and injustice count among the contemporary trends that make up the glass half empty. The challenges of humanity are eating away the achievements and opportunities of humanity. Which side will prevail? The answer depends on how we respond to challenges, including on how much we humans can work together towards positive outcomes. One point is clear: unless we take initiative and be enterprising and humanitarian, the bad will prevail. Wait-and-see attitude is no longer tenable. Policy options differ from mediation to actual use of force against terrorists.
Take the situation in Syria. Turkey’s enterprising and humanitarian approach cleared a total of 4000 square kilometers from two terrorist organizations, DEASH and PKK/PYD/YPG. Had we not intervened, our people would have been under continued assault from these terrorists and a political solution to the Syrian tragedy would have been unreachable. Turkey is doing utmost to relieve humanitarian suffering, hosting the greatest number of refugees worldwide, spending more than the biggest economy in the world as the world’s top humanitarian spender. Turkey is also brokering agreements that save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives and promoting a political solution based on the territorial integrity of the neighboring Syria.
I gave the example of Syria for a reason. Syria demonstrates to us once again that prevention is important because once the fire of conflict engulfs a nation, then the only thing that remains predictable is that there will be unpredictable consequences on that state. One generation of citizens will be wasted in one way or the other; the future will also be bleak. Everyone, including those who are thousands of kilometers away will come to suffer, either in the form of terrorist threat, economic shock, irregular migration, or wounded human conscience.
If prevention and peaceful resolution of conflicts are of paramount importance, then we must take it seriously. This appreciation is driving Turkey’s efforts in the field of mediation as the co-chair of the UN, OSCE and OIC friends of mediation groups and the host to a capacity building mediation training program and the two mediation conferences that we will organize in Istanbul this week.
New X-ray technologies reveal some of the incredible processes that took place in Earth’s geological history – and should help us identify new high value ores.
We see that some of the most valuable accumulations of metals ever mined by humans formed from molten rocks, and particularly from molten sulfide minerals (those that feature sulfur as a major compenent).
These metal accumulations, called ore deposits, contain nickel, copper and cobalt – metals that are critical components of lithium-ion batteries.
Even at present prices, large examples of such once-molten orebodies contain hundreds of billions of dollars worth of nickel, usually with valuable by-products copper, cobalt, platinum and palladium.
We need to keep finding new, high-grade deposits – like the recently discovered Nova-Bollinger orebody east of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia – to keep up with the inevitable increase in demand. On current projections, a new one of these is needed every year to keep up with demand for nickel in lithium-ion batteries.
A better understanding of how these deposits formed, deep in the Earth’s crust millions of year ago, will help us improve our exploration success rate.
Plumbing system in ancient volcanoes
The geological process that formed ores from molten sulfides have a lot in common with smelting (the procedure used by people for millennia to extract pure metals from sulfur-bearing minerals).
Millions of years ago, molten iron sulfide minerals reacted with magma in the plumbing system of ancient volcanoes – in effect scavenging the essential metals nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum. These minerals accumulated in sufficient concentrations such that they could be mined once erosion had exposed the ore at the surface.
Over the past few years, we have greatly improved our understanding of how these remarkable ore deposits formed. This understanding has been built up using new techniques in imaging the ores in two and three dimensions, using X-ray technologies at CSIRO and the Australian Synchrotron .
We have been using a technique called microbeam X-ray element mapping to make detailed 2D images of the ores and the rocks they sit in.
Some of these images – such as the one at the top of this story – are created on the X-ray fluorescence microscopy beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, applying the Maia detector system. This enables gigapixel images to be collected in a matter of minutes.
Like turning on the light
Complementing this technique, we’ve also applied high-resolution 3D X-ray tomography – the equivalent of a hospital CT scan – to reveal in 3D details on the shape and size of the droplets of sulfide liquid that formed the ores.
The effect has been to turn on a light in a dark room: we have seen features inside solid rocks that have not previously been revealed.
An X-ray tomography image (CT scan) of an ore sample showing frozen droplets of sulfide liquid as red blobs.Steve Barnes, Author provided
Sulfide liquids, it turns out, have remarkable physical properties. They behave like a hot knife through butter: so corrosive that they can melt their way through solid rocks, ending up in some cases tens of metres away from their original host rocks.
We now know that orebodies form in very particular parts of the ancient “plumbing systems” that fed magmas to the volcanoes above. The ores formed where the flowing magma was so hot that it melted the rocks around it.
The “hot knife” sulfide liquid then continued to melt its way into the floor, such that the ores are now found injected into the underlying non-igneous rocks.
In the case of the supergiant nickel ores of the Norilsk region in Siberia, the rocks that melted also supplied the sulfur to form the orebodies.
In fact, so much sulfur was released by this process that much of it, along with vast amounts of nickel, was actually erupted into the atmosphere, contributing to the greatest mass extinction in Earth history.
This type of work helps us improve geological models the exploration industry uses to explore for new deposits.
Nickel sulfide ores are notoriously difficult “needle in haystack” targets, and we need to bring our best combination of geophysical detection techniques and predictive geological models.
So where next?
Research is ongoing: both into the fundamental processes of ore formation and into the implications of this understanding for where and how to look for new deposits.
Some of the minerals that form along with the sulfide ores can be dispersed by erosion, and rivers transport them long distances from the deposits themselves.
We are learning how to recognise these chemically distinctive grains, in the same way diamond explorers use “indicator minerals” to find fertile kimberlites (the source rock for diamonds).
We’re also doing more fundamental research, such as using analogue material (salt water and olive oil work very well, it turns out) and computational fluid dynamic models on supercomputers to look into the physics of how magmatic ores come to look the way they do.
This piece is part of a series on race and racism in Australia. The series examines this complex and incendiary topic, and the role it plays in contemporary Australia.
In October, the ABC’s Background Briefing outlined how the NSW Young Nationals Party had been the target of an organised infiltration attempt by members with neo-Nazi or “alt-right” views. Once this infiltration was exposed, 22 members were banned for life and individuals in other extremist groups were barred from becoming future members.
The group’s aim was to influence party policy in the area of immigration, as shown in motions they proposed at the Young Nationals’ annual conference. Controversially, they wanted immigration to be curtailed to only “culturally compatible peoples” and for white South African farmers to be granted refugee status on the basis of racial oppression.
These views have been gaining support in Australia. Senator Fraser Anning and MP Andrew Laming have both spoken publicly about the plight of white South Africans, and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton floated (then discounted) the idea of special visa attention for the farmers.
Senator Pauline Hanson’s most recent maiden speech in 2016 also called for an end to multiculturalism and the granting of visas for “incompatible” people, specifically Muslims.
Anning’s defence of Western civilisation on Facebook.Senator Fraser Anning/Facebook
These views are based – perhaps unknowingly – on a core belief of neo-Nazis: so-called “white genocide”.
The defence of Western civilisation and pride in “white” achievements – on the rise both here and abroad – have become racist dog whistles for this call for action to prevent the “disappearance” of the white race.
This fear of white genocide is also leading to violence. The shooter who killed 11 people in the recent Pittsburgh synagogue attack justified his actions by claiming that Jews were committing “genocide” against his people.
So, what is ‘white genocide’?
The recent manifestation of white genocide has its origins in the American neo-Nazi movement. The Turner Diaries, a very influential 1970s novel by William Luther Pierce, posited a dystopian world in which white Americans were oppressed by non-white minorities at the behest of Jewish politicians. A righteous, armed resistance then takes back control of the world after a bloody nuclear war.
Pierce’s work inspired a spate of violent crimes, including the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. It also led to the formation of secret groups, including the infamous and ultra-violent white supremacist group The Order. It was an influential member of the Order, David Lane, who coined the white nationalist mantra:
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
White genocide adherents want a return to a so-called traditional way of life defined by the nuclear family and prescribed gender roles. They divide humans into separate races and see multiculturalism and migration as a threat because each race should be contained to their perceived homeland.
Imagined racial homelands posted in the Australia’s Future Exposed Facebook group.Facebook
The idea of a homeland is important. Following the second world war, American neo-Nazis drew on notions of place and race that took root in Germany in the 19th century and were later adopted under Adolf Hitler as the slogan “blood and soil”.
“Blood and soil” is the cry of the nativist, asserting the belonging of a people to a place to the exclusion of outsiders. The slogan reappeared as one of the chants at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
‘Blood and soil’ was among the many racist chants of protesters in Charlottesville.
For white nationalists, this idea forms the “solution” to the threat of white genocide. Neo-Nazi groups like Identity Evropa advocate for ceasing immigration from “non-compatible” nations and encouraging population growth amongst whites.
The most important goal of white nationalists, however, is the creation of a white “ethno-state”.
Another recent manifestation of this white supremacist ideology is the meme “It’s OK to be white.” Worn on a T-shirt by Canadian racist provocateur Lauren Southern during her recent visit to Australia, then raised as a motion in the Senate by Hanson, the slogan aims to portray whites as victims who are not protected by anti-racism legislation or social practices.
It is this belief that whites are being targeted that underpins the resignation letter of the leader of the NSW Young Nationals infiltration attempt. Clifford Jennings claimed that young white Australians face a grim future in which they are at risk of becoming a “harried, persecuted minority” due to an “oppressive multicultural regime” supported by the “treasonous” leaders of the major parties.
This is a clarion call to the believers in white genocide.
Why this theory is flawed and dangerous
Jennings is harking back to the long-abandoned Immigration Restriction Act (1901) and other racially targeted pieces of legislation known colloquially as the White Australia Policy. These privileged certain Europeans in migration programs with the aim of “keeping Australia white”.
But how do Australia’s white supremacists side-step Australia’s 60,000 years of Indigenous history? For the believers in white genocide, the term “genocide” does not refer to the impact of European colonisation on Indigenous peoples because they claim Australia only came into being as a nation with the arrival of white Europeans.
Visiting alt-right speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have openly denigrated Aboriginal culture. This has supported a belief that there is no place for Aboriginal people in the white ethno-state.
Of course, the idea of whiteness itself in Australia has changed dramatically over time. And despite the claims of DNA testing companies, there is no scientific basis for “race” itself and, therefore, for racial superiority claims.
Are white Australians at risk of becoming a persecuted minority? Hardly.
Regardless, the white genocide theory is based on a flawed premise – that only white people can be authentic Australians (or residents of other perceived “ethno-states”). And in multicultural Australia, the facts tell a different story.
Four in ten Australians (42%) think sexual assault accusations are a way of getting back at men, according to the fourth National Community Attitudes Survey (NCAS) on violence against women, released today.
Almost the same proportion (43%) believe women “make up” claims of abuse when going through child custody battles in court.
Yet research shows false allegations are rare. In fact, sexual assault, harassment and domestic violence are _under-reported to police.
Violence against women is common, with two out of every five Australian women experiencing some form of physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, and much of it from a male partner or ex-partner.
NCAS is a federally funded survey conducted by the independent research organisation ANROWS in 2017. It involved 17,500 phone interviews with a representative sample of Australians aged 16 years and older. It’s the third such national survey, allowing us to compare responses with those in 2009 and 2013.
It’s not all bad news. The results show a majority of Australians understand that physical assault, emotional abuse and controlling behaviour are forms of violence against women, and are common in our community.
Consistent investment in programs and campaigns has had a positive impact on reducing attitudes that support violence such as minimising and excusing. Out of a score of 100, the average score has reduced from 36 in 2013 to 33 in 2017.
ANROWS
Blaming the victim
The survey found one in three Australians believe women are partly responsible for relationship violence if they do not leave a violent partner (32%).
Another third (30%) believe if a woman sends a nude image to her partner, she is partly responsible if he shares it without her permission.
When questions are asked about the role of alcohol in relation to violence, 8% attribute responsibility and blame to women who were raped while alcohol- or drug-affected. Some 12% of Australians absolve men of blame if they are alcohol- or drug-affected at the time they perpetrate rape.
Two out of ten Australians (21%) believe because women express themselves sexually in public it’s not surprising men think they can touch them without permission.
When victim-blaming attitudes are held by a substantial proportion of people, or influential people such as police, judges and health professionals, they can present barriers to victims seeking support or reporting the abuse.
Such attitudes also shift responsibility away from the perpetrators of violence, contributing to a culture in which perpetrator behaviour is at best not clearly condemned, or at worst, is actively condoned.
Disregard for consent
One in ten Australians believe if a woman is drunk and starts having sex with a man, but then falls asleep, it is understandable if he continues to have sex with her.
The survey also asked Australians to respond to a scenario where a woman takes her husband into the bedroom, starts kissing him, then pushes him away, not wanting to continue with sex. More than one in ten (15%) believed her husband would have been justified in having sex with her anyway.
Many Australians seem unclear of what constitutes consent.Nicolas Thomas
Disregarding consent for touching women, sending nude photos or persisting with sex when a woman does not, or cannot give consent, are criminal offences in Australia.
These findings are significant because they indicate a concerning proportion of Australians are unclear about what constitutes consent, and the line between consensual sex and coercion.
Mistrusting women’s reports
As well as thinking women make up claims of abuse, one quarter (23%) of Australians believe women exaggerate the problem of male violence.
Almost a third (31%) believe that a lot of times women who say they were raped had “led the man on” and then had regrets.
Attitudes that suggest women lie to “get back at men” are particularly concerning in light of the high levels of violence against women, as well as under-reporting of these crimes. The fear of not being believed or taken seriously presents a barrier for women seeking help and support.
Attitudes are a barometer of socially acceptable behaviour – and changing attitudes is often the first step toward changing behaviour. Attitudes can mean a perpetrator being held to account, instead of his behaviour being ignored. Or a bystander taking action, rather than turning a blind eye.
The NCAS survey shows there has been an increase in the understanding of violence against women, moving from an average score of 64 to 70, and improvement in support for gender equality moving from an average score of 64 to 66.
Knowledge of violence against women.ANROWSSupport for gender equality.ANROWS
Exploring the detail of the survey questions shows an improvement on 27 of the 36 individual questions asked in both 2013 and 2017.
While there are specific areas of concern, Australians’ knowledge of, and attitudes towards, violence against women and gender equality are gradually improving. Most Australians do not endorse this violence.
Australian governments have invested heavily in campaigns and programs to reduce men’s violence against women over the past ten years and the current NCAS results show that there have been some rewards.
Changing attitudes and improving knowledge takes time, as well as continued policy and program efforts. It’s vital that governments, organisations and communities across Australia keep up the momentum if we are to ultimately see the end of attitudes that allow violence against women to occur. http://ncas.anrows.org.au
This article was co-authored by Violeta Politoff, Senior Researcher for ANROWS on the National Community Attitudes Survey on Violence against Women.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
A year ago today, Tesla’s big battery in South Australia began dispatching power to the state’s grid, one day ahead of schedule. By most accounts, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery has been a remarkable success. But there are some concerns that have so far escaped scrutiny.
The big battery (or the Hornsdale Power Reserve, to use its official name) was born of a Twitter wager between entrepreneurs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Elon Musk, with the latter offering to build a functioning battery in “100 days or it’s free”.
Musk succeeded, and so too has the battery in smoothing the daily operation of South Australia’s energy grid and helping to avert blackouts.
The battery has also been a financial success. It earned A$23.8 million in the first half of 2018, by selling stored electricity and other grid-stabilising services.
But not every aspect of Tesla’s big battery earns a big tick. The battery’s own credentials aren’t particularly “green”, and by making people feel good about the energy they consume over summer, it arguably sustains an unhealthy appetite for energy consumption.
The problem of lithium-ion batteries
The Hornsdale Power Reserve is made up of hundreds of Tesla Powerpacks, each containing 16 “battery pods” similar to the ones in Tesla’s Model S vehicle. Each battery pod houses thousands of small lithium-ion cells – the same ones that you might find in a hand-held device like a torch.
The growing demand for lithium-ion batteries has a range of environmental impacts. Not least of these is the issue of how best to recycle them, which presents significant opportunities and challenges.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve claims that when the batteries stop working (in about 15 years), Tesla will recycle all of them at its Gigafactory in Nevada, recovering up to 60% of the materials.
It’s important that Tesla is held account to the above claim. A CSIRO report found that in 2016, only 2% of lithium-ion batteries were collected in Australia to be recycled offshore.
However, lithium-ion batteries aren’t the only option. Australia is leading the way in developing more sustainable alternative batteries. There are also other innovative ways to store energy, such as by harnessing the gravitational energy stored in giant hanging bricks.
Tesla’s big battery was introduced at a time when the energy debate was fixated on South Australia’s energy “crisis” and a need for “energy security”. After a succession of severe weather events and blackouts, the state’s renewable energy agenda was under fire and there was pressure on the government to take action.
On February 8, 2017, high temperatures contributed to high electricity demand and South Australia experienced yet another widespread blackout. But this time it was caused by the common practice of “load-shedding”, in which power is deliberately cut to sections of the grid to prevent it being overwhelmed.
A month later, Cannon-Brookes (who recently reclaimed the term “fair dinkum power” from Prime Minister Scott Morrison) coordinated “policy by tweet” and helped prompt Tesla’s battery-building partnership with the SA government.
Since the battery’s inception the theme of “summer” (a euphemism for high electricity demand) has followed its reports in media.
The combination of extreme heat and high demand is very challenging for an electricity distribution system. Big batteries can undoubtedly help smooth this peak demand. But that’s only solving a symptom of the deeper problem – namely, excessive electricity demand.
Time to talk about energy demand
These concerns are most likely not addressed in the national conversation because of the urgency to move away from fossil fuels and, as such, a desire to keep big batteries in a positive light.
But as we continue to adopt renewable energy technologies, we need to embrace a new relationship with energy. By avoiding these concerns we only prolong the very problems that have led us to a changed climate and arguably, make us ill-prepared for our renewable energy future.
The good news is that the big battery industry is just kicking off. That means now is the time to talk about what type of big batteries we want in the future, to review our expectations of energy supply, and to embrace more sustainable demand.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristelle Hudry, Senior Research Fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology, La Trobe University
Much of the research about including children with autism in mainstream classrooms is focused on school-aged children. Growing numbers of children with autism are diagnosed in toddlerhood, so there is increasing relevance for the early-childhood sector. Our new research shows, with support, educators can effectively include and teach children on the spectrum in mainstream childcare, alongside their non-autistic peers.
Programs to support learning in key areas – language, cognition and independence skills – have been found to be effective for many children with autism. But we need options that are also affordable and accessible within children’s local communities. Many families ferry children around to appointments with different professionals, employ therapists to come into the home, or travel long distances to specialist centres.
Building capacity for evidence-based intervention to occur within children’s local childcare settings is a good option. This could be more affordable and accessible for families.
Best-practice guidelines for early childhood support
Young children with autism have difficulty learning communication and independence skills that come more easily to others. Early intervention can help by targeting their unique developmental needs.
A minimum of 15-25 hours per week of early intervention is recommended to support communication and independence skills in young autistic children. This is usually achieved through specialist centre- or home-based services. But this level of intensity is expensive, and unaffordable for many families.
The evidence shows there were no negative impacts on the learning environment for non-autistic peers in mainstream settings.from www.shutterstock.com
Some children on the spectrum may attend mainstream childcare, which is more affordable. But if staff don’t know how to meet their particular learning needs, the child may simply be present but missing out on learning and interacting with other children.
The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) advocates choice and control and that young children should be supported in their local communities. But currently, options may be either attending local care with peers or receiving intensive early intervention.
Our team wondered whether we could successfully integrate evidence-based intervention within mainstream care. In 2015, with NDIA and Department of Social Services (DSS) support, we began a study to test this idea.
Quality early intervention in mainstream settings
Our study engaged 44 young children, each for one year. Half were placed in specialised care and half in mainstream care.
Specialised playrooms included only autistic children, at the Victorian Autism Specific Early Learning and Care Center (ASELCC). Mainstream playrooms – at the La Trobe University Community Children’s Centre and Gowrie Victoria – included mostly children without autism.
Children received the Group-Early Start Denver Model (G-ESDM). This is an intervention developed and evaluated by the Victorian ASELCC team. Each child’s personalised learning goals are targeted within natural routines and activities across the childcare day. For example, at snack time staff may help a child develop interest in what peers are doing, practice communication skills such as requesting food, and practice independence skills such as using a spoon and waiting their turn.
We found this specialised intervention could be delivered in mainstream childcare. Educators learned the G-ESDM strategies and used these in everyday playroom activities. On average, the children’s social interaction, imitation, language and independence skills improved across the year. Encouragingly, gains were similar in both settings.
Other researchers – separate from our team, and unaware of what our study was about – rated the educational environment. They reported high quality teaching and learning practices across all playrooms. This suggests our program had no negative impact on the mainstream environments.
Rigorous research in the real world
Other studies on this topic have recruited children who are already enrolled in a particular setting and/or compared mainstream and specialised settings offering different intervention programs. So, we can’t be sure whether the results are about the type of intervention program, the specific setting, or some other factor.
Support for children on the spectrum delivered in mainstream settings could be more accessible for families.from www.shutterstock.com
We wanted a rigorous test of the setting, so we used the gold-standard randomised trial approach. For families keen to be involved, we more-or-less used a coin-toss to decide which children would be in the mainstream or specialised settings.
Implementing evidence-based practice into real-world settings is challenging. This research occurred through genuine collaboration with early childhood educators, G-ESDM specialists, centre managers and researchers as equal partners.
Continuous improvement
This is a first step toward showing that quality early-intervention can occur within mainstream settings – without compromising child outcomes or the learning environment for peers.
The ultimate goal is for autistic children to access quality supports in their local communities including within mainstream settings, if that’s the best choice. But, just as no two children on the spectrum are alike, what works best for one will not be the solution for another.
Across both settings, we saw stronger gains for some children than others. Research with a larger sample would inform which individual children might be best supported within mainstream or specialised settings.
Delivering G-ESDM in mainstream settings also requires substantial resources such as time for initial training and ongoing support for staff. From 2019, we will begin to investigate whether a more streamlined approach might be more affordable but similarly beneficial for children and families.
The authors would like to acknowledge the two childcare centres, La Trobe University Community Children’s Centre and Gowrie Victoria, involved in the study this article is based on.
The environmental movement is shifting away from focusing solely on raising awareness about environmental issues. Many environmental agencies and organisations now also aim to connect people with nature, and our new research suggests daily doses of urban nature may be the key to this for the majority who live in cities.
This shift in focus is starting to appear in environmental policy. For example, the UK’s recent 25-year environment plan identifies connecting people with the environment as one of its six key areas. Similarly, in Australia, the state of Victoria’s Biodiversity 2037 plan aims to connect all Victorians to nature as one of two overarching objectives.
The thinking behind such efforts is simple: connecting people to nature will motivate them to act in ways that protect and care for nature. Evidence does suggest that people who have a high nature connection are likely to display pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours.
Our new study may offer some answers. A survey of Brisbane residents showed that people who experienced nature during childhood or had regular contact with nature in their home and suburb were more likely to report feeling connected with nature.
The study used a broad definition of urban nature to include all the plants and animals that live in a city. When looking to connect urban residents with local nature we need to take a broad view and look “beyond the park”. All aspects of nature in the city offer a potential opportunity for people to experience nature and develop their sense of connection to it.
Raffles Place, Singapore – all urban nature should be seen as an opportunity for nature connection.Anne Cleary, Author provided
The study also looked at the relationship between childhood and adult nature experiences. Results suggest that people who lack childhood experience of nature can still come to have a high sense of nature connection by experiencing nature as an adult.
There have been focused efforts on connecting children to nature, such as the Forest Schools and Nature Play programs. Equal effort should be given to promoting adult nature experiences and nature connection, particularly for people who lack such experiences.
The benefits of nature experience
We still have much to discover about how an individual’s nature connection is shaped. We need a better understanding of how people from diverse cultural and social contexts experience and connect to different types of nature. That said, we are starting to understand the important role that frequent local experiences of nature may play.
Robert Dunn and colleagues have already advocated for the importance of urban nature experiences as a way to bolster city residents’ support for conservation. They described the “pigeon paradox” whereby experiencing urban nature, which is often of low ecological value – such as interactions with non-native species – may have wider environmental benefits through people behaving in more environmentally conscious ways. They proposed that the future of conservation depended on city residents’ ability to experience urban nature.
As new evidence emerges we need to build on this thinking. It would seem that the future of our very connection to nature, our wellbeing and conservation depend on urban people’s ability to experience urban nature.
The pigeon paradox: interactions with urban nature – here in London’s Hyde Park – may help make city dwellers more environmentally conscious.Anne Cleary, Author provided
When I wrote a report for the McKell Institute about negative gearing, Switching Gears, in 2015, Australia had a housing affordability crisis and negative gearing was costing the budget A$4 billion per year.
Three years on, Australia still has a housing affordability crisis, and negative gearing is costing the budget A$5.5 billion per year.
Bank then, more than half of the money lent for housing (an unprecedented 55%) went to investors rather than people buying homes to live in. Only one in seven loans went to first home borrowers, down from one in five a few years earlier.
Since then the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has leaned on the banks to wind back investment loans (they are down to a still-high 42%), and loans to first home buyers are back up to nearer one in five.
It’s not yet clear how the changes will stick. Loans to investors have just started to creep back.
But negative gearing is still costing the budget billions, and its worst effects are being contained only by threatening the banks and by the (possibly temporary) easing in house prices.
How to clamp down
My report put forward five different options, ranging from doing nothing to abolishing negative gearing forthwith.
My preferred option (scenario 4) would have outlawed negative gearing except for “grandfathered” existing negatively-geared properties, and for newly constructed dwellings.
Even where outlawed, people could continue to claim a investment losses against investment income, just not against their salary.
The exemption for newly constructed dwellings would boost construction jobs and housing supply, helping affordability and economic growth.
It would also deliver a boost to the budget bottom line of more than A$30 billion over ten years, and assist financial stability by cutting the proportion of the housing market in the hands of footloose investors.
The Treasury found the sort of changes Labor and I were proposing would have only a “relatively modest” effect on home prices, instead of the “sledgehammer” alleged by Morrision and the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
What negative gearing is
Negative gearing property involves two steps.
First, you invest in a property and get less income from it in rent than the cost of the investment (such as the interest on the loan and the cost of maintaining the property).
Second, you use that loss on the property to offset your income from unrelated streams such as wages or salary, thereby cutting your tax bill.
It’s this second part that is peculiar, and where Australia is out of step with most countries, including the United States, Canada and the UK.
Other countries will allow you to use investment losses to offset investment profits, but not to offset income from wages and salaries.
The tax deductions impose a big hit on the federal budget, now costing more than A$5.5 billion per year. The Treasury says that more than half of that A$5.5 billion goes to families in the top 20% of the income distribution.
It hurts intending owner occupiers
Here’s how it locks genuine (residential) buyers out of the market.
An investor who fronts up at a typical Saturday auction faces the prospect of the federal government paying roughly half of his or her interest bill, given the top marginal tax rate and medicare levy.
An owner occupier, in contrast, gets no help. Even if they have the same deposit saved and earn the same income as the investor, they can afford to borrow much less – perhaps just half as much.
They get outbid. Sometimes they end up renting from negatively gearing investors who elbowed residential buyers such as themselves out of the way.
Crimping it would level the playing field
My McKell plan levels the playing field right away. The day after the policy is enacted, owner occupiers and investors have the same firepower at auction.
But existing investors – those who already have negatively geared properties – would be able to keep those tax breaks until their loans were paid off.
It would mean a smooth transition away from negative gearing, rather than an abrupt change. It would also respect the investment choices that had been made in good faith under existing policy settings.
Few think otherwise
It’s hard to find a credible economist – or even a non-credible one – who doesn’t think that negative gearing should be reformed.
There has been a consistent call for reforms from leading voices like Saul Eslake and Chris Richardson.
Even the then-sensible Malcolm Turnbull said in 2005 tht Australia’s rules on negative gearing were “very generous” compared to those of other countries. He said it was a form of tax avoidance. Quite so.
Of course, with another federal election coming up, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has run a the same predictable scare campaign about Labor’s negative-gearing policy as last time.
This time he says “Labor’s policy will make sure people who own their home will see the value of their home be less and fall, and if they rent their home, their rent will go up.”
House prices have fallen 12% in Darwin in the past year, but risen 19% in Hobart, none of it due to negative gearing.
Because negative gearing would still be available for new construction under Labor’s plan (and mine), it would add to the supply of new homes and push down rents.
Also, as existing renters who want to purchase find they are able to, they will be move from being renters to owners, cutting the demand for places to rent and also putting downward pressure on rents.
Now is the time
Negative gearing is a costly and peculiar provision of the Australian tax code – one that creates both intergenerational inequality and financial instability.
It was long overdue for reform in 2015, and the case has strengthened since.
The best time to crimp it is when the heat has already been taken out of housing prices and relatively few investors are rushing in anyway.
Opponents of reform need to explain why they would want to continue to spend A$5.5 billion per year encouraging yet another wave of negatively geared property speculation which would lock still more young people out of the dream when the market picks up.
Garish (adjective) Extravagantly bright or showy, typically so as to be tasteless.
-Oxford English Dictionary
Stevie Nicks once wrote in her celebrated song Dreams, “Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?” As a lyricist, she gathered up stories and told them back to us so that we might all contemplate (“In the stillness of remembering what you had/And what you lost”) who we really are. If secrets were spilt, and terror ensued, it was for the greater good of better knowing ourselves: as Nicks sings, “You will know, you will know”.
But that was Fleetwood Mac, that was the 1970s, and today the ethics of “story spilling” is another matter entirely. To be a writer of the confessional genres has unique risks that can routinely include, for example, excommunication and love lost in all quarters.
So why do it? This is also the key question for the confessional impulse fuelling the #MeToo narrative spill: what kind of good is being done, and for whom?
For some women writers it is the core business of our work as a feminist artists and activists working to restore women’s sanity (in my case, with the secular metaphysics of poetry). It was Philip Larkin who claimed that poetry was an affair of sanity, and that the object of writing is to “show life as it is, and if you don’t see it like that, you’re in trouble, not life”.
Telling stories from the contemplative trauma pad, engineering them with the alchemy of poetry, and launching them into the world of what Nicks calls “You will know” is a garish business. For some of us, showing life in its full monstrosity — no matter what costume we must assume and even if it involves a loudspeaker and a hashtag — is the only business in town. It is also the only way to turn trouble away from its ruinous attachment to our lives, which are otherwise sometimes too horrible to bear.
On horror
Abjection is something we can understand as a horrible state that results from our reaction to a breakdown in meaning — in this place we are lost. While we are abject, crimes are committed on our watch — psychoanlayst and critic Julia Kristeva talks about Auschwitz, but we can imagine, for example, human conduct that results in the #MeToo movement.
Kristeva argues that art can purify our abjection, because it offers a cathartic opportunity. Confessional poetry — with all its small apocalypses — helps us to play with both language and its meaning, and offers us what Kristeva calls “a language of want” so that we can both write and run with our fears. Can poetry be so bibliotherapeutic? And is it always best to confess?
Telling stories against yourself invariably involves revelations that frighten or shock others. For life-writers, developing professional resilience to people’s reaction to your work is essential to building a career in this field.
In the 1990s, at the premiere of my first play on the Sydney stage, during interval and after the show, I was surrounded by well-intentioned guests, pressing their business cards into my hand, promising to put me in touch with their lawyer, or their therapist, or even their “man who takes care of things” (sometimes I wish I still had that business card). The play was about domestic violence; the story was not autobiographical in impulse. The writer risks being misunderstood whether writing fiction or nonfiction, and learning this was freeing.
Fast forward to another decade. “Why are you so drunk?” I’d asked my husband, who had been ploughed with drinks by sympathetic audience members at a festival poetry reading, feeling sorry for him having to put up with me writing and reading “such horrible” poems about him. But they weren’t. The poems were about a different husband.
Another time: a verse novel I’d written, The Screaming Middle, about the daily grind and glory of being a mother (incidentally referencing children with mental ill-health) was at one stage celebrated by said children but subsequently used by them in daily family life as evidence against me and formed part of the plea to never write about them again.
Likewise, retrospectively my first memoir, Friday Forever, about postnatal depression (written before any of my three children could read or I had the emotional intelligence to comprehend that they would one day acquire this skill) made my children’s taboo list of things never to be read from at public readings. Why didn’t you ever apologise to me for being so violent? my current husband once asked, forgetting I had. Part of my apology had been outing myself in that memoir.
A writing colleague at a recent reading asked me if I’d pull a book or stop a reprint if my children, for example, asked me to. No. I would not. I did not, however, have the courage to voice that at the time, in front of an audience of academic writers who are well-versed in “capital E” ethics, because my ethical relationship to the confession is of a guerrilla warfare kind.
My honest answer is “capital N” no. I’d reprint the memoir, for example, and the verse novel, and include the letters and messages of thanks I’ve received from readers, all of which I’ve read to my children.
They’ve been sent to me from mothers “spelling” in psychiatric hospitals, from prisons, from ex-students, from absolute strangers, from family with whom I never speak — Thank you for talking about this on the page, we will never manage it in the flesh — all with the theme of, “If not for your book…”
A form of disobedience
My writerly acts of confession are garish, they are vulgar and dazzling both, but they are the only form of disobedience at many a woman writer’s legal disposal.
A poem about sexual assault may sound like this:
You ran into me bodysurfing. You were made of thunder and mirrors. You marshalled me to safety, the shark alarms sympathetic to your cause. You smelt faintly of salt and horror movies, lurking there beside the lifeguard, who declared me unharmed. You knew everyone on the beach. Your message transferred into me as if by gravity, like ink from a punctuating cartridge. You said you had a spare beachside apartment to rent (you owned the building) and a wife at home you’d like me to meet. You lied. You stood blocking your door, nagging for my number. You grew taller than your chandelier’s talons, rounder than your cellar’s aged barrels. You forced a pen upon me, I only want your number, a beautiful combination of physics and chemistry and engineering. I began to write on your grocery list which included garlic and nappies. Your hands were too soon filthy with rape and seed to fend off the nib and knob and mouth and thrust tube that prefaced your shroud. You were every woman’s uncle, the hand over our primary mouths, you were the bastard at every barbecue in history, the flasher in the church, the man in every dark. You were a poem I wrote with a cheap hotel pen instead of re-enacting your sad opera for the police. I liked the sounds of you both, your click, your clack, your leak of Chartres-blue blood. Your fatal snap.
-Anatomy of a tragedy
shutterstock
I wrote about an act of sexual abuse, (condensing a history of such), fictionalised as per this until now unpublished prose poem, although I had posted other poems about this incident on Facebook and Instagram. I felt healed in many ways from the show of support on those platforms.
I’ve told my husband, but not my children: we had other more important family stuff to deal with at the time, including one of my children being in hospital for an extended and frightening stay, and the arrival of a stepdaughter to live with us.
The poem above is my final response, for now, to sexual abuse. I did not go to the police because the man in question is a well-known local dignitary, and I had willingly gone back to his apartment (albeit having believed his trickery).
Plus, I was absolutely, utterly exhausted, and had what felt like a million essays to grade — if one surrendered every time one was sexually assaulted, I said to myself in my best 1950s movie star voice, who’d be alive to write about it? Something I also did not do was murder him. It’s a poem, not a pogrom.
Garish feminist poetics: two snapshots
Confessional poetry as a genre emerged in the 1950s and is famously associated with poet Robert Lowell, and (his pupils) Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Writers had suddenly become urgently interested in discussing personal subject matter that modernism had previously dismissed as less important — the private realm.
But the confessional poets were as interested in craft as they were their embrace of topics, pioneering new relationships to the patterns and sounds used in poetry: confessional poetry wrote a new kind of music to accompany those bold (fresh hell) interrogations of the self. Women writers and their self-revelation became the hallmark of confessionalism, developing as they did a personal style, which in turn exploded many a fixed idea about women and their usually mythological place in contemporary culture.
Then …
We could discuss Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds, but they didn’t also start their own band, so let’s talk about Anne Sexton, who did (Anne Sexton and Her Kind)
You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel …
-from Anne Sexton’s You, Doctor Martin
Sexton once told her students at Boston University “I do not want to be known as the mad-suicide poet, the live Sylvia Plath,” but as her contemporary Adrienne Rich commented she nevertheless “auditioned for the role and rehearsed it in book after book until she wrapped herself in her mother’s fur coat and gassed herself in October 1974”. Should Sexton be best read “madly”?
Here we have a woman who was most violent against herself: Sexton threw her poetry — begun and nurtured through her therapeutic relationship with her first psychiatrist Martin T Orne — around like missile-sized deadly darts, but only after it had already done its ravaging work on her own self. But it is the other side of her personal bedlam that is most interesting: the garish declaration of herself against all social-contracts that constituted good taste for womanhood of that era.
Something happened in America in the 1950s, and something particularly peculiar happened in Boston, where Sexton lived. Afterwards — let’s for now borrow from poet Robert Lowell and call it Mayflower Screwballism Unhinged — afterwards, there was a profound caesura in contemporary literary history. On the shoulders of this mood rode the confessional poets, and there to catch them when they fell were their Bostonian doctors.
The society that flourished within and around this co-dependent relationship changed the cultural aesthetics of a nation, and invented a new breed of feminism. It included a lot of sex, and suicide. To read that embrace as accidental, somehow defective, would be a lowering experience, and not one mindful of the spirit that funded the mood. Sexton is an important exemplar of this caesura. Confession is costly. But you can’t argue against the shift in literary time that Sexton caused with her poetry.
Now ….
There are so many women poets being garish in their own cultural and transnational ways that to single out one seems churlish. It is easy, for example, to name Pussy Riot as the collective this-century version of Stevie Nicks, turing her “the personal is political” into their “the political is personal”.
Or easier still to name instapoet phenomenon Rupi Kaur with her more than 3 million followers on Instagram, her impeccable credentials in artistic activism on behalf of women and the oppressed and her poetry collections that sell upwards of 2.5 million copies.
But a shiny, extravagant example of the new feminist poetics where it can be seen to be read as tasteless in the most beguiling and political manner is the young British poet, filmmaker, actress, library activist, and model Greta Bellamacina. By “tasteless” I mean garish in the sense where garishness re-defines taste, is beyond established taste. By “tasteless”, I deliberately denigrate taste as a middle-class opiate that oppresses.
Bellamacina’s feminist negotiations under capitalism are spectacular. In the same way that Sexton slept with her (later) psychiatrist, Bellamacina metaphorically sleeps with her enemies, converting capitalism to her end.
While developing her signature poetic style, she also founded a successful London poetry press (with her husband, the conceptual artist Robert Montgomery). She has modelled in major fashion campaigns from Burberry to Mulberry having first negotiated a feminist incorporation into those campaigns (such as including poetry, or promoting women as muses). Bellamacina’s engagement with consumption insists on a peculiar post-capitalist embrace: yes, she models for major international labels, but while doing so re-configures their ethical relationship to the personal. Via a garish methodology, the client is freshly recognised as a consumer of poetry as well as conventional fashion products.
Not to mention the films, or her community work in this same domain, or the edited collection Smear, an anthology of contemporary feminist poets that sells at point-of-sale alongside the latest fashion offerings in Urban Outfitters. All this and more in the first quarter of a century of her life: garish is the new sublime.
The bed remains ancient in its ritual of worship a personal attack against strangers made up of all its own Trojan wars hung in literature, undebated.
-From In the morning Penelope, Greta Bellamacina, commissioned by the National Poetry Library to respond to Homer’s Odyssey
On amplification (#WhyIDidntReport)
Fear, shame, even ignorance (“isn’t this just what happens?”), contribute to women’s being complicit in their own silence. Sometimes the loud voice of poetry married with a bit of garish confessionalism is much needed to recall women to themselves, to restore sanity, to relocate a self that is far away from trouble that has too often defined them.
Are we obedient, or disobedient, to the social order? I am both: we most of us are. But the time has come to be bolder, more courageous, more garish.
Greta Bellamacina.Shutterstock
Confessional poetry for the garish feminist is a method to manufacture some quality dissent, to not take our intellectual freedoms for granted, or allow them to be muted by our too-often abstract observations of unfairness, or our complicated relationships to exploitation. I have some other ideas, but for now, all I can manage is poetry.
Poetry, because when garish feminists write they develop a radical poetics that rise to and meet and imagine above and beyond women’s current #MeToo realities. Because to do so remains an avant-garde act, and we need that more than ever.
Garish feminism, because it grows out of and further contributes to the women’s movement (and we need that too). Because it inspires us to speak in new ways, with a transformative impact. Because Anne Sexton did not “moan” enough before she killed herself, and because Bellamacina and her kind have, as her New River Press logo says, “New Language for Sad Times”.
And because there is no other way I can fasten my gaze.
Many voters mightn’t thank Scott Morrison for confirming he plans to run the election date out to May. Given Canberra politics is so dysfunctional, it feels like prolonging the agony.
With a widespread assumption that the government can’t recover, the early months of 2019 will be something of a hiatus, with various stakeholders putting decisions on hold because they expect a change of government.
Morrison’s strategy is clear. Play on the best thing he has going for him – a strong economy, which is flowing through to government revenue. Release a budget update on December 17 that shows a healthy bottom line, and probably contains some substantive decisions. Then the April 2 budget can be loaded with voter bait, and contain the long-awaited surplus, opening the way for the poll on May 11 or 18.
The budget update will come out during the ALP’s national conference. Usually the Coalition would have avoided a clash, expecting that conference, which determines a supposedly-binding platform, would see Labor divisions on display.
But while issues like refugees, Palestine, industrial relations and trade may stir vigorous debate, the Liberals know they won’t get much grist for their purposes. As one Labor man says, the “government” faction at the conference will be large – those with eyes firmly on seeing Bill Shorten reach The Lodge.
By setting out his timetable this week, Morrison has given away the option of a March poll. Unwise to abandon the flexibility, one might say. But March had always been unpopular with the Feds because they didn’t want to be the first government on whom NSW voters vent their rage (the state election is late March).
Morrison is no doubt also operating on the basis that the longer he waits the greater the possibility of something turning up.
The government hopes that with maximum time it can turn the political debate onto the economic argument, as well as looking to its fear campaign against Labor to have more impact.
But governments can’t rely on being rewarded for favourable numbers. Voters expect them to deliver on the economy. Even with a bright macro picture, they are out of sorts because of low wage growth, cost of living pressures and the general disgruntlement that permeates the modern electorate.
Making the budget the election launch pad has its risks. The 2016 precedent is not encouraging, even if Turnbull’s bad campaigning has to take a good deal of blame. A budget can contain unanticipated land mines, and it is awkward if they explode during the campaign – which of course next time will be much shorter than Turnbull’s marathon.
Now in minority government, the Coalition is minimising its parliamentary exposure, with only some 10 days of sitting next year before the election. When the houses aren’t in session the Senate can’t cause trouble and the newly-empowered lower house crossbenchers lose their clout.
But the Senate this week made sure that it will have time for estimate committees to scrutinise (albeit briefly) budget measures, by voting to alter the sitting timetable. Labor recalls that just before the 2016 election it extracted, via the estimates process, the costing for the government’s company tax cut plan.
With the arrival of Kerryn Phelps in parliament on Monday, and then Tuesday’s defection of Julia Banks, the House of Representatives crossbench has become the centre of attention in the hung parliament. We’re yet to see just what tangible results this will produce for Labor or for the crossbenchers themselves.
Labor is trying to muster the numbers to refer Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s eligibility to the High Court but hasn’t locked them in so far. Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie on Thursday suggested he’d like to see several referrals together.
The crossbenchers have agendas, including the push for an anti-corruption body and Phelps’ bill facilitating medical transfers from Nauru and Manus Island. It’s a matter of what they can “land” with the opportunities and time available.
Government legislation such as that giving itself the power to break up recalcitrant energy companies (to be introduced next week) will both test the House crossbenchers and give them openings to pursue their issues.
When on Thursday Labor tried to suspend standing orders to move a motion condemning the government on multiple fronts, the crossbenchers went in all directions.
Wilkie and the Greens’ Adam Bandt supported Labor; Bob Katter voted with the government; the women – Cathy McGowan, Rebekha Sharkie, Phelps and Banks abstained. The vote was lost 66-68.
Within the expanded crossbench, the four women have formed a defacto mutually-supportive subgroup. Phelps has confirmed she counselled Banks before she defected. “Julia reached out to me for some consultation about what that process might look and feel like, and I indicated that I would be there to support her in that transition,” Phelps said.
While the Liberals are losing out politically because of their low female representation and their inability to properly address that problem, on the House crossbench the women are now standouts (and a majority).
On Thursday they came to Morrison’s rescue. If three of the four had voted with the opposition, the Labor motion would have received a simple majority.
It would not have achieved the absolute majority needed to suspend standing orders, but losing on the straight numbers would have been very embarrassing for the Prime Minister, a symbol of his government’s new, diminished status.
Sharkie later explained that “we abstain on what we see as party political games”, though adding that she wasn’t disputing there were facts in some of the points in the motion.
Labor believed the four had missed an opportunity to deliver a soft blow to the government. Looked at another way, the women may have banked some credit with the government for other things.
As he left for his weekend at the G20 in Argentina, the action – or inaction – of the four female crossbenchers gave Morrison a small salve to apply to the black eye he received earlier in the week from one of their number.
In a bold and innovative move for researchers, the two-day inaugural Oceans and Islands conference today brought together the brightest minds of the Pacific to demonstrate what they do.
Oceans and Islands – a showcase for the region hosted by the NZ Institute for Pacific Research (NZIPR) – was opened by the Minister for Pacific Peoples, Carmel Sepuloni, this morning.
“I really do have the privilege of being able to witness the great contribution that Pacific leaders, academics and communities make to Aotearoa and globally,” the minister said.
Pacific Peoples Minister Carmel Sepuloni … “critical that Pacific people are meaningfully included in thought leadership and decision making”. Images: Blessen Tom/PMC
She acknowledged the excellence of Pacific research in New Zealand and welcomed the establishment of research agencies such as Moana Research and commended the leadership of Dr Teuila Percival, Jcinta Fa’alili-Fidow and Dudley Gentles.
The minister also shared some of the research initiatives that she is directly involved with such as the extended funding to the growing up in New Zealand study and Treasury’s Pasifika Economic Report.
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“It is critical that Pacific people are meaningfully included in thought leadership and decision making. We must be the authors of our own solutions, and conferences like this support us towards that end,” she added.
Toeolesulusulu Associate Professor Damon Salesa … struggles faced by Pacific researchers. Image: David Robie/PMC
Many struggles Toeolesulusulu Associate Professor Damon Salesa, who was recently appointed pro vice-chancellor (Pacific) of the University of Auckland, said: “Pacific research and Pacific knowledge matters.”
“It’s not simply research about the Pacific, by the Pacific that makes it Pacific research. It’s much more than that…and it has faced many struggles,” he added.
He talked about the struggles that researchers faced, such as not being properly resourced, the lack of opportunities to succeed, and the lack of proper recognition.
“These are the struggles NZIPR embarked on,” he said in a tribute to the institute that he was the founding director of. The achievements of NZIPR were:
• Creating a formal research programme – “five research programmes will be signed off completed or published by the end of this year.”
• Disseminating research through both online and offline platforms, and establishing a research repository to make visible the different kinds of knowledge.
• Building research capability and the research recognition of a diverse range of researchers that includes 12 scholarships and sponsorship for individual researchers and research projects.
He also remarked that NZIPR had “achieved so much so quickly”.
Indigenous principles Dr David Welchman Gegeo led the third keynote session when he gave full recognition to indigenous ethical principles that guide the social construction of knowledge in Pacific island communities.
“Why do we keep doing research on Pacific communities?” and “Are we alone?” asked David Gegeo.
“Pacific Island’s epistemic communities are not alone in the quest for the indigenisation or oceanisation of research and knowledge construction in the Pacific,” he said.
“I think we have a better chance of answering some of our lingering questions in research when we work together as this team.”
He advocated the working together of university epistemic community, metro-centrist epistemic community and Pacific village epistemic community for research and construction of pacific knowledge.
Dr Gegeo holds a research position in the Office of Research and Postgraduate Studies at the Solomon Islands National University.
Professor Kapua’ala Sproat … proactive indigenous responses to “pernicious impacts of global warming”. Image: Blessen Tom/PMC
Dr Kapua’ala Sproat is a professor of law at the University of Hawai’i’s Richardson School of Law and the director of Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawai’ian Law.
Her keynote explored indigenous people’s proactive responses to the pernicious impacts of global warming.
‘Sense of culture’ “I’m incredibly grateful that I grew up with a strong sense of self and culture because I think that really has rooted both myself and but also my work,” she said.
Professor Sprout examined Native Hawai’ians’ potential deployment of local laws that embody restorative justice principles to fashion meaningful remedies for the environmental and cultural damage as a result of the global climate crisis.
“Our identity as indigenous people is inextricably tied to these islands and our natural and cultural resources” said Professor Sprout and “Global Warming threatens our island home and our identity as a people”.
The final keynote session of the day was addressed by Leina Tucker-Masters, Eliza Puna and by Dr Jamaima Tiataia- Seath.
Their presentation canvassed the journeys of three Pacific women researchers throughout their academic careers.
“Engaging in research as an undergraduate student helped me connect with my Pacific culture while at university,” said Leina Tucker-Masters, a medical student at the University of Auckland.
Research methodologies Tucker-Masters talked about her experience with Pacific research methodologies and how they influenced literature.
“I learned about Pacific health initiatives that use Pacific ways of thinking to heal Pacific people”.
“Postgraduate research gives you an opportunity to carry out very ethnic specific research and it allows for in depth engagement and helps to bridge academia and our communities,” said Eliza Puna, a doctoral candidate in Pacific Studies at Auckland University.
Dr Jemaima Tiatia-Seath is currently co-head of school and head of Pacific studies, Te Wananga o Waipapa, School of Māori and Pacific Studies, University of Auckland.
She talked about her experience as one of six panelists on the government’s Mental Health and Addiction Enquiry.
The Oceans and Islands conference will conclude tomorrow evening.
Sri Krishnamurthi and Blessen Tom of the Pacific Media Centre are working as part of a PMC partnership with the NZ Institute for Pacific Research.
NZIPR research manager Dr Evelyn Marsters and one of the keynote speakers, Professor David Gegeo of the Solomon Islands, at the Oceans and Islands conference in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/PMC
T-shirts worn by family and supporters of the 19 Nauruans who were prosecuted by government for staging a protest outside of Parliament in 2015. Image: RNZP/Nauru 19/ Facebook
The group known as the Nauru 19 will go back to court next week in what will be the first sitting of the Nauru Court of Appeal.
The Nauru 19 were charged over an anti-government protest more than three years ago and are facing an appeal from the Nauru government.
The group, which includes a former Nauru president, had sought a permanent stay on legal proceedings against them, arguing the trial process dragged on too long and that the government had not met a court directed order to pay some of the expenses of the group’s Australian lawyers.
Justice Geoff Muecke, who was brought in by the Nauru government to hear the case, granted a permanent stay on the proceedings, saying the government’s conduct throughout had been a “shameful affront to the rule of law”.
Now the government is appealing this decision.
The Nauru Court of Appeal was set up after the government secretly ended its use of the Australian High Court as Nauru’s appellate court earlier this year.
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The Nauru 19 believe this move was another attempt to deny them a fair trial.
The judges hearing the appeal are high ranking members of Pacific judiciaries – Tonga’s Chief Justice Michael Scott, Kiribati Chief Justice John Muria and PNG Supreme Court judge Nicholas Kirriwom.
This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
New Caledonia’s international airline, AirCalin, has been given tax rebates by France to buy two new Airbus airliners.
The French High Commission in Noumea announced the Economics and Finance Ministry had approved the concession for the purchase of two Airbus A330-900neo planes, which are expected to be delivered in May next year.
The statement did not say how much the airline had saved.
It said this support would help AirCalin develop its activities, be it for tourism or medical evacuations.
The statement said this was also a sign of the French state’s support for the airline and for New Caledonia.
AirCalin flies to destinations in the Pacific, including Auckland in New Zealand, and also provides a service to Japan to link passengers from and to France.
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This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eddie Synot, Academic, Learning Assistance Officer, GUMURRII Student Support Unit, Griffith Law School, Griffith University
The Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples handed down its final report today. It follows the committee’s interim report, which noted significant community support for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations voice and asked for further submissions relating to the nature and design of a voice. The report is also the eighth of its kind in the past eight years.
The committee’s report will be cautiously received by many in the Indigenous community. Rather than recommend a referendum to enshrine a First Nations voice, the committee has instead insisted on a further design process, ignoring the submissions and wishes of many community members.
It also emphasised a lack of clarity that’s prevented movement toward a referendum due to the multiple design models it’s received. This is a disappointing conclusion that misrepresents the sentiments of the Indigenous community and what a First Nations voice would be.
Rather than represent disagreement, the multiple design submissions are better understood as a normal result of a law reform process. Far from representing disunity, the many submissions are remarkably consistent in their support for a First Nations voice to be enshrined in the constitution.
It is also disappointing that the committee has not considered in greater detail the Uluru Statement from the Heart or Submission 479, which was authored by Indigenous members of the Referendum Council and the key technical advisers who assisted delegates at the regional dialogues and national convention prior to the Uluru Statement.
Both documents are the only ones that are representative of the authoritative will of the Indigenous community.
It is correct to say that some members of the Indigenous community disagree about the way forward. But that does not mean we should not proceed. In what other section of the Australian community do we demand absolute unity and bipartisanship? This demand misrepresents the challenge of law reform as being insurmountable and further misrepresents what a First Nations voice would be.
The First Nations voice would not be singular; it would belong to no individual member or organisation. Rather, the voice is comprised of many, as Indigenous voices always have been. The enshrinement of that voice in the Constitution does not limit or divide, but rather provides the necessary foundation from which to renew, correct and negotiate a fundamental relationship at the nation’s core.
What the committee has achieved is another opportunity for the voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to be heard. It is this voice that resounds more than any limitation.
Our ability to speak, and of non-Indigenous people to hear us – to actually hear us – has long been at the centre of problems in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This process will provide the necessary structural change to that relationship to enable our voice be heard on matters that affect us.
Others have pointed to what they believe are limitations of a First Nations voice. This position too narrowly understands the importance of constitutional recognition in being able to affect the culture of the country. From abstract theories of how we should be governed, to everyday realities of our lives, a First Nations voice will finally enable the changes that Indigenous Australians have been demanding and those the nation so desperately needs.
More promising for the Indigenous community than the committee’s final report has been Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s media release this past Tuesday.
Labor has reiterated its commitment to “establish a voice for First Nations people” and enshrine it in the constitution. This announcement was significant.
The Indigenous community had been concerned that Labor would give priority to a referendum on a republic, if elected into power, instead of addressing the question of a First Nations voice. Labor’s renewed commitment to this issue is promising. It’s also demonstrative of the national political leadership needed to achieve this momentous reform. It is a commitment that the Indigenous community is ready to organise around, ensuring Labor keeps its word.
Political bi-partisanship aside, what is clear is that there is an authoritative will within the Indigenous community to achieve a First Nations voice in the constitution. The proposal also has broad public support, with polling in the Constitutional Values Survey in 2017 showing that a majority of Australians back the enshrinement of a First Nations voice.
The question remains, will we be finally heard? Many of us are hopeful that time has finally come.
Large parts of Australia are facing a hotter and drier summer than average, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s summer outlook.
Drier than average conditions are likely for much of northern Australia. Most of the country has at least an 80% chance of experiencing warmer than average day and night-time temperatures.
The threat of bushfire will remain high, with few signs of the sustained rain needed to reduce fire risk or make a significant dent in the ongoing drought.
Expect extreme heat
Large parts of Western Australia, most of Queensland and the Top End of the Northern Territory are expected to be drier than usual. Further south, the rest of the country shows no strong push towards a wetter or drier than average summer, which is a change for parts of the southeast compared to recent months.
Bureau of Meteorology
Queensland has already seen some extraordinary record-breaking heat in recent days, with summer yet to truly begin. With the summer outlook predicting warmer days and nights, combined with recent dry conditions and our long-term trend of increasing temperatures, some extreme highs are likely this summer.
Bureau of Meteorology
All of this means above-normal bushfire potential in eastern Australia, across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. The bushfire outlook, also released today, notes that rain in areas of eastern Australia during spring, while welcome, was not enough to recover from the long-term dry conditions. The current wet conditions across parts of coastal New South Wales will help, but it will not take long once hot and dry conditions return for vegetation to dry out.
However, not all the ducks are lined up. While ocean temperatures have already warmed to El Niño levels, to declare a proper “event” there must also be a corresponding response in the atmosphere to reinforce the ocean – this hasn’t happened yet.
That said, climate models expect this event to arrive in the coming months. The outlook has factored in that chance, and the conditions predicted are largely consistent with what we would expect during El Niño. In summer, this includes drier weather in parts of northern Australia, and warmer summer days.
Once an El Niño is in place, weather systems across southern Australia tend to be more mobile. This can mean shorter but more intense heatwaves in Victoria and southern South Australia. However, in New South Wales and Queensland, El Niño is associated with both longer and more intense heat waves.
The exact reason why the states are affected differently is complicated, but relates to the fast-moving cold fronts and troughs that sweep through Victoria and South Australia in the summertime, creating cool changes. These weather systems don’t influence areas further north so when hot air arrives, it takes longer to clear.
The heavy rains seen in parts of eastern Australia in October and November have provided some welcome short-term relief to drought-stricken farmers, but longer-term rainfall relief has not arrived yet. If El Niño arrives, this widespread relief may only be on the cards in autumn.
As AusMusic month closes, it’s a good opportunity to consider an instrument that has made quite a contribution to the musical life of Australia. The notorious recorder has been feared by parents and called an “instrument of torture”. But what has this instrument given us that we might not realise?
This month, the ABC has aired a docuseries Don’t Stop the Music, highlighting the importance of music education. The series featured the research of Dr Anita Collins, which shows that learning a musical instrument improves memory, language learning, teamwork and brain function. Visual, aural and fine motor skills also develop, and strengthen with repeated practice. This isn’t specific to any one instrument.
The recorder has been played in Australian primary schools since the 1930s. Many students have had the chance to learn music because of its availability and reasonable price. One early study revealed the benefits of using the recorder as a tool for music education, including reading music notation, breath and finger control, and musical expression.
Additionally, the recorder family has different sizes – descant, treble, tenor, bass, and more. When played together, harmony, timing, and verbal and non-verbal communication are developed. Students learn to listen actively and react to the sounds around them.
So why the bad reputation? One reason is that many school music teachers aren’t trained recorder players. They can play some notes, but they might lack proper technique. Like any instrument, the intricacy of fingering, breath pressure and tonguing to perfect intonation and sound quality needs to be learnt. If a teacher is unaware of these, how can the recorder be taught well?
Also, cheap and badly made recorders are often sold in discount and retail stores. A good instrument from a reputable company will make a big difference to sound and tuning. Professional recorder players who now teach in schools are aiming to improve these two areas.
The benefits don’t stop after school. Australia is home to a number of adult amateur recorder players, who have formed societies in most capital cities. These societies hold social occasions where members can rehearse and perform together. This is an opportunity to give the brain a full workout (assisting with information processing and fine motor skills). Research has shown that music helps with self-identity, maintaining wellbeing, and associating memories in older people.
The increase in professional recorder players in Australia has not only made a mark on recorder teaching and music education, but also on Australian culture.
The recorder is a very old instrument. The oldest surviving one dates back to the 13th century. It was one of the most popular instruments in the Baroque period with music composed by Bach, Handel, and Purcell. The rise of historical performance practice in Australia, which attempts to recreate the sounds of these Baroque composers, has presented more authentic early music to audiences.
Many conservatories offer the recorder as a major area of study, and graduates are finding performance opportunities with small baroque groups and larger ensembles. Opportunities exist for recorder players in Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Orchestra of the Antipodes. It has also featured as a solo instrument with some major Australian symphony orchestras.
The Australian Music Centre has over 200 modern works written for the recorder. The earliest piece is Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s 1938 Sonatina, and at least 24 new works have been listed in the past ten years.
Australian composers use the instrument’s full range of sounds and sizes, creating new works based on baroque styles such as Elena Kats-Chernin’s Re-inventions performed by Genevieve Lacey and the Flinders Quartet.
Australian recorder players have won ARIA awards (Genevieve Lacey for Best Classical Album in 2011 with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Best Original Show with Paul Kelly, James Ledger and ANAM Musicians in 2013), represented Australia through cultural exchanges, and received Australia Council Fellowships. They are certainly ambassadors for Australian music culture.
Despite its bad rap, the recorder has made a significant contribution to Australia’s music education and cultural life.
This piece is part of a series on race and racism in Australia. The series examines this complex and incendiary topic, and the role it plays in contemporary Australia. You can read the rest of the series here.
During a family holiday in the United States this year, I took my children to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. I tried to explain that Rosa Parks broke the laws of the day to protest Black oppression and segregation, and this was a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
As we stood there, a Black American woman walked by with her husband and smiled at my daughter’s awestruck silence. She said:
We love Rosa Parks too, honey! If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be able to sit next to you on a bus.
Bewildered, my daughter turned to me and asked why people who had darker skin couldn’t sit next to people who had lighter skin. Why were the people who made those rules so “mean and rude”? Why indeed.
Try explaining to a seven-year-old that racism and segregation go beyond individuals being “mean” and “rude”? That it is a social, structural and systemic issue that has largely been normalised and individualised under premises of colour-blindness, formal equality and justice for all, with whiteness at the helm as a privileged site of moral neutrality.
How would I explain that while we don’t have official segregation or slavery – Jim Crow Laws – in the present day, racism and racial segregation thrive in other complex ways? This is especially so in the criminal justice system, as Michelle Alexander tells us.
Australian society certainly has its own version of racial segregation. This can be seen in the Australian government’s treatment of Aboriginal peoples, immigrants and asylum seekers. As Frantz Fanon argues, in societies built on colonial violence, race and economic infrastructures are co-constitutive:
You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.
Aside from this, Australians are telling non-white people that they can’t live in “our country” and intercepting asylum seekers at the border to be sent to uninhabitable offshore detention centres. Tellingly, US President Donald Trump applauds this as a good idea.
Dark-skinned immigrants who do manage to come here, such as the Sudanese communities in Melbourne, are constructed as threatening. Some have committed crimes. But then they are all seen as complicit in the crimes of a few.
Now, apparently all dark-skinned immigrants instil fear in white Melburnians. Even if the crime statistics show otherwise. There are plans under way to deport any Sudanese person who has committed a crime, even children. Luckily, however, the majority of Melbournians repudiate such views, as the recent Victorian election results show.
Yet the fact remains that the bodies of all Sudanese people have been implicated in the armed robberies of a handful of Sudanese youth.
You feel like you’re representing your skin colour for everyone that’s just like you. So you have to be an extra nice person, extra smart … You just have to have a smile on, because if you don’t, you look scary.
This is something white people never have to experience because they are, after all, the morally neutral norm. Race is the burden of racial subjects.
Sheer luck has made you white and middle class, I tell my daughter. Part of the privileged class. You know life could be different for you. Even though she has more than “a drop” of immigrant blood from her maternal grandparents.
Whose justice? Colour-blindness and the myth of white neutrality
A trickier thing to explain to a child was why norms and rules enshrined by the law were sometimes unfair or unjust, and why Rosa Parks’ resistance to Jim Crow laws was the right thing to do.
In societies built on colonial invasion, such as the USA and Australia, being white is a privilege, because those societies were built on the premise that whiteness is superior and therefore white people are entitled to have access to a better life.
In those societies, Black American women such as Rosa Parks, because of who they are and how the rest of society sees them, have to fight for equality rather than take it for granted. Fighting for equality means sometimes breaking the law in protest.
My daughter and I walked on and saw summaries of American civil rights legal cases. One struck me in particular, pertaining to the Louisiana case of Plessy v Ferguson (1896). Homer A. Plessy, who was one-eighth black, was arrested for sitting in a white-only coach on a train. Eventually, the Supreme Court held that laws requiring “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks and whites were not unconstitutional, that prejudicial social customs could not be overcome by law but by the voluntary consent of individuals. Only Justice Harlan of the Supreme Court dissented by maintaining:
Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.
While Justice Harlan dissented, he premised his dissent on the argument of colour-blindness, which leaves unquestioned the normative white baseline – the site of privilege and moral neutrality from which “coloured” people are judged.
The rest of the Supreme Court subscribed to the idea of racism as the preserve of individuals, rather than as a systemic issue perpetuated, reproduced and protected by the law.
Unfortunately, not enough has changed since the Plessey case. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues, colour-blindness reinforces the perpetuation of racism through denial in a “post-race” era. He argues that colour-blind racism is more insidious than overt racism, because most white people insist they “don’t see any colour, just people”.
These myths of colour-blind neutrality sit in apparent tension with the racially inequitable markers of the criminal justice system. White people and their institutions don’t “see colour” and they certainly don’t see their own privilege. We all have a social responsibility to own our white privilege as the authors and beneficiaries of a colonial system built on racist violence.
There have been Australian legal examples acknowledging Aboriginal disadvantage (for example, Bugmy 2013), but our criminal justice systems do not go far enough in acknowledging the normative colonial frameworks on which they were built. Hence we are complicit in the enduring shame of racial inequality.
In the end we are all answerable. And we need to be able to answer a seven-year-old’s mystified question: Why were people separated based on colour when they are people, just like you and me? Why, despite the subjugation and violence embedded in their colonial histories, do white people see themselves as better and as more entitled to social privilege? Why indeed.
Your home digital assistant is always listening. But is it always offering you the best content, the cheapest deals, and the right search results?
Digital assistant devices such as Alexa, Google Home, Siri and Cortana are increasingly prevalent. These devices listen for every command, their platforms know where you are, and they have a deep and evolving understanding of your preferences.
But there’s a catch. The device can only provide one answer to each question, and that answer will almost certainly be the one that keeps you in the device’s ecosystem.
Each of the major platforms, known as FAANG (for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), has its own ecosystem, and advertising revenue is maximised for the platform when a user stays within it. So while personal digital assistants might be helpful, that help is likely to be limited.
So what happens when you request a price for a particular product? It probably won’t come as a surprise to learn that if you’re asking Alexa, the assistant will usually offer the price that’s available on Amazon. After all, Alexa is an Amazon product, and Amazon promotes this feature.
Apple’s assistant Siri, on the other hand, will use two pieces of information: the product that you requested, and websites that have pricing. So Siri might suggest Amazon, but it’s unlikely that Alexa will suggest Apple, unless you ask for an Apple product. That means, depending on your device, Siri may offer more options.
At the moment, a Google Home Hub doesn’t allow you to shop, even though Google Shopping, which is accessible online, does.
Smart home devices aren’t always compatible
Digital assistants can also help you automate smart devices in your home, which can help minimise energy bills. But here too, you might be restricted by your chosen assistant.
At the moment, most Wi-Fi light globes can be controlled by any of the ecosystems. But as these smart devices become more prevalent, there is a risk that they will be controllable only by one type of assistant.
The smart home manufacturing company Nest, which is owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet, has some devices that can be managed by Alexa and Siri. For example, Nest thermostats and cameras can be controlled by Alexa. The Nest alarm system, however, is linked to Google Home.
This is an area where there is a risk of “tipping”. That is, where a market leader becomes the preferred provider. Once that happens, products like smart globes no longer need to be compatible with multiple ecosystems, and can be designed to work only with the dominant player. That choice is made by the smart globe manufacturer, not by consumers. `
While compatibility and getting a good deal are both important, so is your privacy.
All digital assistants listen all of the time. They are listening out for the words that trigger an activity (such as “Hey, Google”). It’s important to recognise that the assistants don’t actually understand the questions that they are asked. Instead, they capture audio and provide the best response to their representation of that audio. This means that assistants are not really listening to your every word. The Alexa app will tell you what Alexa has heard and responded to.
It’s also worth noting that the assistant probably knows when you’re not home. This awareness might flow from you actually telling the assistant that you are off to work, but it’s also available from other parts of the ecosystem.
For example, if you provide your location to use Google maps, your Google Home device will know you’re not at home and that it doesn’t need to listen for your instructions. It may also mean that the advertisements that you are served reflect the fact that you’re on the move.
Once you’ve figured out what each assistant might know about you via related products, the next step is deciding on the ecosystem.
As we’ve seen, each personal assistant reinforces a specific infrastructure. For example, Alexa has aligned with Sonos for playback hardware, and you cannot currently control Sonos through Google Home.
As a consumer, you get to decide whether the limitations that leave you in a single ecosystem are worthwhile for the convenience offered. The most important question here is whether anyone is informed enough to be able to make that call.
If you really want to know the limitations of your digital assistant, one logical way of learning that might be to ask it. But if you ask a range of assistants what their terms and conditions of service are, you get answers like:
I’m sorry, I’m not sure about that.
I can’t help you with that right now, but my team is working on it.
I don’t really like talking about myself.
Choosing whether to use a home personal assistant means making a choice about privacy. It also means deciding which ecosystem will best meet your needs. Unfortunately, the assistant itself will not help you much in discovering the limitations of the service that you have chosen.
Malcolm Turnbull has struck back angrily at a report that he has been helping independent Kerryn Phelps, his successor in Wentworth, as chaos continues to fracture the Liberals.
Responding to a front page-lead story in The Australian headed “Turnbull plays invisible hand”, the former prime minister tweeted, “Attribution bias – blaming others for the consequences of your own actions is a common symptom of paranoia.
“Imagining “invisible” people are out to get you is also a classic symptom. Not often on the front page of course…“
The report said Turnbull had been in regular contact with Phelps and had had a former electorate office staffer work for the new member for three days to help in the transition.
It also said Phelps had counselled MP Julia Banks before the Victorian MP’s defection from the Liberal party to the crossbench this week.
The story was another manifestion of the deep bitterness still consuming the Liberals from the leadership coup, which has been reactivated by the Banks’ defection. Banks made a stinging attack on those who ousted Turnbull in her speech to parliament.
Phelps said on Thursday that Turnbull had had no contact with her during the Wentworth campaign. Afterwards he had offered assistance for a smooth transition. She said she and Turnbull had not discussed Banks.
She told Sky that “Mr Turnbull enabled a couple of his staff members to come in to instruct my staff members on the changeover.”
Phelps confirmed that Banks had approached her before defecting.
“Julia reached out to me for some consultation about what that process might look and feel like, and I indicated that I would be there to support her in that transition and the three female crossbenchers were there to support her when she gave her statement,” she said.
Meanwhile embattled right wing Liberal Craig Kelly, who faces losing preselection, has changed tactics in his fight to survive.
After earlier repeatedly refusing to rule out defecting to the crossbench, Kelly – wearing a T-shirt with the face of Robert Menzies on it – told the ABC he would not do so.
He said he had a contract with the people of his Hughes electorate to serve through the terms as a Liberal member.
He did not rule out running as an independent if he lost preselection, saying “I haven’t considered that”. He claimed to be confident of being re-endorsed – although the numbers are against him.
Posing with the T-shirt wearing Kelly, Tony Abbott tweeted, “Always good to be with a real Liberal!”.
The Senate on Thursday voted to alter the government’s sitting timetable for next year to ensure Senate estimates hearings will he held on the April 2 budget before the election is called. The timetable released earlier this week would not have had estimates hearing before the poll.
Labor is also introducing in the Senate its own bill to protect LGBTI students against discrimination, after negotiations between the government and the opposition on a bill reached an impasse.
In an Auckland first, the aid mapping tool was put on show last night by the NZ Institute for Pacific Research as a curtainraiser to the two-day inaugural Oceans and Islands conference which opened at Auckland University’s Fale Pasifika today.
The guest demonstrator and speaker at Auckland University’s Owen Glenn Business School last night was Jonathan Pryke, director of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Programme.
He was introduced by senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Auckland University Dr Lisa Uperesa.
“This is a part of the seminar series that has been part of the mandate for the NZIPR which is about growing capacity and disseminating research,” Dr Uperesa said.
Jonathan Pryke, director of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Programme, introducing the Pacific Aid Map at Auckland University last night. Image: Sri Krishnamurthi/PMC
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Jonathan Pryke traced the beginnings of the mapping tool to Dr Penelope Brant and her PhD project which was charting every aid project that Papua New Guinea was engaged in, in the Pacific, subsequently the project turned into the Chinese aid in the Pacific map that the Lowy Institute released in 2015.
“This map made quite a splash, first because it was in interactive form that they haven’t seen before in the Pacific, Pryke said.
China’s spread “It also made a splash because people hadn’t fully come to grips with just how far China had spread into the Asia-Pacific Island countries that support the one-China policy.”
“We had two major pieces of feedback from this tool. The first was from the Chinese government saying, ‘thanks guys, we had no idea how much we were doing’ and second piece of feedback was this is fantastic but why don’t we do this for every donor because it is very hard to find out what Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all these guys are doing?”
Transparency leads to good governance and that was needed around the world, he said.
“There is one good reason to enhance transparency around aid, not just in the Pacific but globally, there is global mandate to improve transparency which was agreed upon by all traditional donors in 2005 in the Paris accord,” said Pryke.
“It revolves around three main reasons why transparency in aid is important.
“In theory the first is, it should improve and make it easier for donors to co-ordinate with one another in the aid space,” he outlined.
“In the Pacific Island region there is more than 62 donors operating, that is countries or multinational agencies operating in the Pacific at any given time.
“So it’s really critical in all contexts that donors are able to co-ordinate with one another to prevent overlap, to reduce the drag on recipient governments and just to be more efficient,” he said.
‘Enhancing transparency’ “The second reason for enhancing transparency is to help align what donors are doing with receiving government priorities,” Pryke said.
Toeolesulusulu Associate Professor Damon Salesa speaking at the opening of the NZIPR Islands and Oceans conference at the Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland today. Image: David Robie/PMC
“We spent a lot of time on this project talking to Pacific Island governments about how they go about keeping track what donors are doing in the Pacific and pretty much all of them told us they couldn’t help us because they didn’t have sophisticated data telling them what the donors were doing
“It is a very messy thing to get hold of, and so having a tool like this just helps them to see what is happening in their own countries.
“So, they can better steer what donors are doing with their own development priorities.
“Having more information, and easier access to it should help Pacific countries better align aid to the priorities,” Pryke said.
The third reason for enhanced transparency was that it improves accountability of aid in the region for the media, civil society for academics, he pointed out.
“There is a lot of money going into the Pacific every year with very little oversight on how it is done outside of those giving it and those receiving it and so it is pretty more out there in the public domain.
‘Improving accountability’ “It should improve accountability and put the pressure on both sides of the equation, sender and receiver to improve the way that aid is delivered,” he summed up the third reason.
“We really were keen to do this project and so we started conversations with the Australian government to fund it.
“How we did it, from 2011 until today we requested data on 13,000 aid projects from 62 donors. We have a data from most donors be it an NGO or private sector contractor so there is a huge wealth of information.
“We had to take this huge database and put into a user-friendly, publicly available, interactive, visually-appealing interface that anyone that anyone in the world can access and actually make sense of, and so we put together this tool,” he said.
The Oceans and Islands conference was opened this morning by the Minister for Social Development and Disabilities Carmel Sepuloni and founding NZIPR director Associate-Professor Damon Salesa, who is now pro vice-chancellor (Pacific) of Auckland University.
Keynote speakers today were Dr David Welchman Gegeo of the Solomon Islands and Professor Kapua Sproat of Hawai’i.
Emeritus Professor Richard Bedford, acting director of NZIPR, will close the conference tomorrow afternoon. About 120 people are taking part in the showcase of Pacific research.
Sri Krishnamurthi and Blessen Tom of the Pacific Media Centre are working as part of a PMC partnership with the NZ Institute for Pacific Research.
The Pacific Media Centre’s team at the NZ Institute for Pacific Research conference … Sri Krishnamurthi (left) and Blessen Tom. Image: David Robie/PMC
Josh Frydenberg, who became treasurer and deputy Liberal leader in the tumultuous events of August, said the party has “big challenges”.
While the government is “disappointed” by this week’s defection of Julia Banks to the crossbench they “remain as a group focused on the challenges ahead. And we have big challenges, there’s no doubt about that.” He said he “absolutely” will be keeping in touch with Banks.
Frydenberg reiterates that the Liberal party is still a “broad church” and says he isn’t concerned about other MPs like Craig Kelly following Banks’ suit. “I know that Craig is a strong Liberal and that Craig will continue to put the government’s case.”
A screenshot from a secret video report of the mobilised Indonesian police about to raid the Papuan dormitories in Surabaya tonight. Image: Human rights sources
Philipus Robaha is among students still detained in Polsek KP3, Naval Base, Jayapura. Image: FWPC
The banned West Papuan Morning Star flag on display at Auckland’s Pacific Media Centre today. Image: PMC
A scene from the Surabaya rally today with the crowd chanting “Freedom Papua”. The men in the front of the image appear to be undercover police filming and recording events. A short distance away there was a counterprotest with Indonesian flags. Police kept the two groups apart. Image: Still from a West Papuan sourced video
A Maserati luxury sedan as portrayed in the controversial news item shown in EMTV. Image: EMTV screenshot
AUT’s Professor David Robie … critical of political and corporate “meddling” with Pacific media freedom. Image: Blessen Tom/PMC
AUT’s Professor David Robie with two colleagues at the NZIPR Oceans and Islands conference. Image: NZIPR
Pacific Peoples Minister Carmel Sepuloni … “critical that Pacific people are meaningfully included in thought leadership and decision making”. Images: Blessen Tom/PMC
Toeolesulusulu Associate Professor Damon Salesa … struggles faced by Pacific researchers. Image: David Robie/PMC
Professor Kapua’ala Sproat … proactive indigenous responses to “pernicious impacts of global warming”. Image: Blessen Tom/PMC
NZIPR research manager Dr Evelyn Marsters and one of the keynote speakers, Professor David Gegeo of the Solomon Islands, at the Oceans and Islands conference in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/PMC
Jonathan Pryke, director of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Programme, introducing the Pacific Aid Map at Auckland University last night. Image: Sri Krishnamurthi/PMC
Toeolesulusulu Associate Professor Damon Salesa speaking at the opening of the NZIPR Islands and Oceans conference at the Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland today. Image: David Robie/PMC
The Pacific Media Centre’s team at the NZ Institute for Pacific Research conference … Sri Krishnamurthi (left) and Blessen Tom. Image: David Robie/PMC
