The Conversation Yearbook 2019 9780522876062, 9780522876079

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: From the Perspective of Time
An incredible journey: The first people to arrive in Australia came in large numbers, and on purpose
Earthrise, a photo that changed the world
History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren’t
Notre Dame: How a rebuilt cathedral could be just as wonderful
What’s the point of education? It’s no longer just about getting a job
Courting ‘quiet Australians’ from ‘bubble central’, it’s been a remarkable first year for Scott Morrison
Chapter Two: Hate and Fear: Twin Tests of Freedom
Christchurch mosque shootings must end New Zealand’s innocence about right-wing terrorism
Christchurch attacks are a stark warning of toxic political environment that allows hate to flourish
Why overhauling NZ’s gun and terrorism laws alone can’t stop terrorist attacks
To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage—and an overhaul of our laws
Chapter Three: Weighing Up the Risks
Ministers fiddle while buildings crack and burn
Banning mobile phones in schools: beneficial or risky? Here’s what the evidence says
Why dangerous asteroids heading to Earth are so hard to detect
Drinking water study raises health concerns for New Zealanders
According to TV, heart attack victims are rich, white men who clutch their hearts and collapse. Here’s why that’s a worry
Chapter Four: In Answer to Your Question
How might Labor win in 2022? The answers can all be found in the lessons of 2019
Why do we not use the magnetic energy the Earth provides to create electricity?
Explainer: What is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?
Below zero is ‘reverse’. How the Reserve Bank would make quantitative easing work
A report claims koalas are ‘functionally extinct’—but what does that mean?
Why do spiders need so many eyes but we only need two?
Chapter Five: Teasing Out the Truth
Myth-making, social media and the truth about Leonard Cohen’s last letter to Marianne Ihlen
Team-building exercises can be a waste of time. You achieve more by getting personal
Election tip: 23.9% is a meaningless figure, ignore the tax-to-GDP ratio
NZ has dethroned GDP as a measure of success, but will Ardern’s government be transformational?
These 5 foods are claimed to improve our health. But the amount we’d need to consume to benefit is ... a lot
Is it true dogs don’t like to travel?
Separating the art from the badly behaved artist—a philosopher’s view
Chapter Six: From Cradle to Grave: Key Policy Challenges
Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that
More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help
Jobs are changing, and fast. Here’s what the VET sector (and employers) need to do to keep up
It’s perfectly legal for doctors to charge huge amounts for surgery, but should it be allowed?
The edges of home ownership are becoming porous. It’s no longer a one-way street
Chapter Seven: Creatures of Our Emotions
Ooshies—a cautionary toy story about cashing in on childhood innocence
The paradox of happiness: The more you chase it the more elusive it becomes
In an Australian first, the ACT may legally recognise animals’ feelings
Why do some people worry more than others?
Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you—so how do you get one?
‘I really have thought this can’t go on’: Loneliness looms for rising numbers of older private renters
Chapter Eight: Living with Climate Change
Forty years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change
The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought
Cities turn to desalination for water security, but at what cost?
Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard
Chapter Nine: The Many Faces of Australia
Queensland to all those #Quexiteers: Don’t judge, try to understand us
How indigenous expertise improves science: The curious case of shy lizards and deadly cane toads
Hidden women of history: Mary Jane Cain, land rights activist, matriarch and community builder
Vale Les Murray, a witty, anti-authoritarian, national poet who spoke to the world
Loud, obnoxious and at times racist: The sordid history of AFL barracking
Australia’s ethnic face is changing, and so are our blood types

Citation preview

THE CONVERSATION YEARBOOK 2019

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2019 Text © 2019 remains with the individual original authors Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2019 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Text design and typesetting by Typeskill Cover design by Mary Callahan Design Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522876062 (paperback) 9780522876079 (ebook)

Contents Introduction Misha Ketchell, Editor, The Conversation

Chapter One

From the Perspective of Time

An incredible journey: The first people to arrive in Australia came in large numbers, and on purpose Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Laura S. Weyrich, University of Adelaide; Michael Bird, James Cook University; Sean Ulm, James Cook University

Earthrise, a photo that changed the world Simon Torok, University of Melbourne; Colleen Boyle, RMIT University; Jenny Gray, University of Melbourne; Julie Arblaster, Monash University; Lynette Bettio, Bureau of Meteorology; Rachel Webster, University of Melbourne; Ruth Morgan, Monash University

History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren’t Nicole Lee, Curtin University; Jarryd Bartle, RMIT University

Notre Dame: How a rebuilt cathedral could be just as wonderful Claire Smith and Jordan Ralph, Flinders University

What’s the point of education? It’s no longer just about getting a job Luke Zaphir, University of Queensland

Courting ‘quiet Australians’ from ‘bubble central’, it’s been a remarkable first year for Scott Morrison Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra, Associate Editor and Chief Political Correspondent at The Conversation

Chapter Two

Hate and Fear: Twin Tests of Freedom

Christchurch mosque shootings must end New Zealand’s innocence about right-wing terrorism

Paul Spoonley, Massey University

Christchurch attacks are a stark warning of toxic political environment that allows hate to flourish Greg Barton, Deakin University

Why overhauling NZ’s gun and terrorism laws alone can’t stop terrorist attacks John Battersby, Massey University

To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage—and an overhaul of our laws Peter Greste, University of Queensland

Chapter Three

Weighing Up the Risks

Ministers fiddle while buildings crack and burn Geoff Hanmer, UNSW

Banning mobile phones in schools: beneficial or risky? Here’s what the evidence says Neil Selwyn, Monash University

Why dangerous asteroids heading to Earth are so hard to detect Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland

Drinking water study raises health concerns for New Zealanders Michael Joy, Victoria University of Wellington; Michael Baker, University of Otago

According to TV, heart attack victims are rich, white men who clutch their hearts and collapse. Here’s why that’s a worry Deborah Lupton, UNSW

Chapter Four

In Answer to Your Question

How might Labor win in 2022? The answers can all be found in the lessons of 2019 Chris Wallace, Australian National University

Why do we not use the magnetic energy the Earth provides to create electricity? Stephen G. Bosi, University of New England

Explainer: What is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

Donell Holloway, Edith Cowan University

Below zero is ‘reverse’. How the Reserve Bank would make quantitative easing work Stephen Kirchner, University of Sydney

A report claims koalas are ‘functionally extinct’—but what does that mean? Christine Hosking, University of Queensland

Why do spiders need so many eyes but we only need two? Samantha Nixon and Andrew Walker, University of Queensland

Chapter Five

Teasing Out the Truth

Myth-making, social media and the truth about Leonard Cohen’s last letter to Marianne Ihlen Tanya Dalziell, University of Western Australia; Paul Genoni, Curtin University

Team-building exercises can be a waste of time. You achieve more by getting personal Julien Pollack and Petr Matous, University of Sydney

Election tip: 23.9% is a meaningless figure, ignore the tax-to-GDP ratio Peter Martin, Australian National University, and Business and Economy Editor of The Conversation

NZ has dethroned GDP as a measure of success, but will Ardern’s government be transformational? David Hall, Auckland University of Technology

These 5 foods are claimed to improve our health. But the amount we’d need to consume to benefit is … a lot Emma Beckett, University of Newcastle; Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, University of Wollongong

Is it true dogs don’t like to travel? Paul McGreevy, University of Sydney

Separating the art from the badly behaved artist—a philosopher’s view Janna Thompson, La Trobe University

Chapter Six

From Cradle to Grave: Key Policy Challenges

Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that Jen Jackson, Victoria University

More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help Andrew Norton, Grattan Institute

Jobs are changing, and fast. Here’s what the VET sector (and employers) need to do to keep up Pi-Shen Seet, Edith Cowan University; Ann-Louise Hordacre, Janice Jones and John Spoehr, Flinders University

It’s perfectly legal for doctors to charge huge amounts for surgery, but should it be allowed? Louisa Gordon, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

The edges of home ownership are becoming porous. It’s no longer a one-way street Rachel Ong ViforJ, Curtin University

Chapter Seven

Creatures of Our Emotions

Ooshies—a cautionary toy story about cashing in on childhood innocence Louise Grimmer and Martin Grimmer, University of Tasmania

The paradox of happiness: The more you chase it the more elusive it becomes Lorenzo Buscicchi and Dan Weijers, University of Waikato

In an Australian first, the ACT may legally recognise animals’ feelings Bronwyn Orr, University of Sydney

Why do some people worry more than others? Christine Grové, Monash University

Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you—so how do you get one? Lisa A. Williams, UNSW

‘I really have thought this can’t go on’: Loneliness looms for rising numbers of older private renters Alan Morris and Andrea Verdasco, University of Technology Sydney

Chapter Eight

Living with Climate Change

Forty years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right Neville Nicholls, Monash University

Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change Alessandro Ossola, Hugh Burley, Leigh Staas, Linda Beaumont, Michelle Leishman and Rachael Gallagher, Macquarie University

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought Fran Sheldon, Griffith University

Cities turn to desalination for water security, but at what cost? Ian Wright and Jason Reynolds, Western Sydney University

Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard Trivess Moore, RMIT University; Michael Ambrose, CSIRO; Stephen Berry, University of South Australia

Chapter Nine

The Many Faces of Australia

Queensland to all those #Quexiteers: Don’t judge, try to understand us Anne Tiernan, Jacob Deem and Jennifer Menzies, Griffith University

How indigenous expertise improves science: The curious case of shy lizards and deadly cane toads Georgia Ward-Fear and Rick Shine, University of Sydney

Hidden women of history: Mary Jane Cain, land rights activist, matriarch and community builder Heidi Norman, University of Technology Sydney

Vale Les Murray, a witty, anti-authoritarian, national poet who spoke to the world David McCooey, Deakin University

Loud, obnoxious and at times racist: The sordid history of AFL barracking Matthew Klugman, Victoria University

Australia’s ethnic face is changing, and so are our blood types

Tanya Davison, Swinburne University of Technology; James Daly, Queensland University of Technology; Robert Flower, University of Sydney

Introduction The articles collected in this volume have been chosen from among several thousand published on The Conversation Australia website throughout 2019. All were published at a particular moment in the news cycle, and many bear traces of the fleeting preoccupations of those moments. Each one has earned inclusion here because it contributes something of ongoing significance and is an exemplar of the clear writing based on evidence that is at the heart of The Conversation’s mission. Founded in 2011, The Conversation has been a big success. Today, it is produced in four languages and ten countries. Over 38 million people read it every month. The idea behind it is simple: articles are written by academic experts, commissioned and edited by professional journalists, and distributed for free online. Articles are free to republish by any media outlet that credits The Conversation. Australia’s universities support The Conversation because it helps them meet their community engagement objectives—we give them rich analytics and metrics. Academics like The Conversation because it gives them a large and diverse audience. Our articles appear in print and online publications across the country. Teachers value The Conversation as a free and easily accessible educational resource. It provides accurate, informative and concise articles written in everyday language that their students can easily understand. By helping academics share their knowledge and expertise when it is most relevant, The Conversation makes the best thinking and research available to the public, as well as political decision-makers and those who advise them. We frequently hear from authors about calls from senior politicians wanting to know more about articles they read in The Conversation. Political staffers have been spied with printouts of Conversation articles, briefing ministers as they sweep through the corridors of parliament. Our

articles have been quoted in federal and state parliaments and have formed the basis of dozens of submissions to government inquiries. This type of reliable and high-quality information is as important for the proper functioning of democracy as clean water is to health. Our readership is growing rapidly because our work is useful, trustworthy, informative and engaging. In a time of increasing division, our focus is on collaboration. The Conversation serves and is supported by a range of stakeholders—including universities and individual scholars, foundations, governments and individual donors, and the talented journalists and technologists who come to work every day determined to see facts inform public discourse. I hope you find our work informative and learn as much from reading this collection as I did from working on it. Thanks to this book’s editor, John Watson, our terrific academic authors and to all my colleagues whose hard work has made The Conversation a global success. Misha Ketchell Editor, The Conversation

CHAPTER ONE

From the Perspective of Time

An incredible journey: The first people to arrive in Australia came in large numbers, and on purpose Corey J.A. Bradshaw Professor, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University

Laura S. Weyrich ARC Future Fellow, Metagenomic Cluster Lead at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, UoA Node Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Adelaide

Michael Bird ARC Laureate Fellow, JCU Distinguished Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

Sean Ulm Distinguished Professor and Deputy Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

The size of the first population of people needed to arrive, survive and thrive in what is now Australia is revealed in two studies published today. It took more than 1,000 people to form a viable population. But this was no accidental migration, as our work shows the first arrivals must have been planned. Our data suggest the ancestors of the Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Melanesian peoples first made it to Australia as part of an organised, technologically advanced migration to start a new life. Changing coastlines The continent of Australia that the first arrivals encountered wasn’t what we know as Australia today. Instead, New Guinea, mainland Australia and Tasmania were joined and formed a mega-continent referred to as Sahul. This mega-continent existed from before the time the first people arrived right up to about 8,000–10,000 years ago. (Try the interactive online tool at http://sahultime.monash.edu.au/explore.html to view the changes of Sahul’s coastline over the past 100,000 years.) When we talk about how and in what ways people first arrived in Australia, we really mean in Sahul.

We know people have been in Australia for a very long time—at least for the past 50,000 years and possibly substantially longer than that. We also know people ultimately came to Australia through the islands to the northwest. Many Aboriginal communities across northern Australia have strong oral histories of ancestral beings arriving from the north. But how can we possibly infer what happened when people first arrived tens of millennia ago? It turns out there are several ways we can look indirectly at: • where people most likely entered Sahul from the island chains we now call Indonesia and Timor-Leste • how many people were needed to enter Sahul to survive the rigours of their new environment. First landfall Our two new studies—published in Scientific Reports and Nature Ecology and Evolution—addressed these questions. To do this, we developed demographic models (mathematical simulations) to see which island-hopping route these ancient people most likely took. It turns out the northern route connecting the current-day islands of Mangoli, Buru and Seram into Bird’s Head (West Papua) would probably have been easier to navigate than the southern route from Alor and Timor to the now-drowned Sahul Shelf off the modern-day Kimberley. While the southern route via the Sahul Shelf is less likely, it would still have been possible.

Modelled routes for making landfall in Sahul. Sea levels are shown at -75m and -85m. Potential northern and southern routes indicated by black lines. Arrows indicate the directions of modelled crossings. Source: Michael Bird

Next, we extended these demographic models to work out how many people would have had to arrive to survive in a new island continent, and to estimate the number of people the landscape could support. We applied a unique combination of: 1. fertility, longevity and survival data from hunter-gatherer societies around the globe 2. ‘hindcasts’ of past climatic conditions from general circulation models (very much like what we use to forecast future climate changes) 3. well-established principles of population ecology. Our simulations indicate at least 1,300 people likely arrived in Sahul in a single migration event, regardless of the route taken. Any fewer than that and they probably would not have survived—for the same reasons that it is unlikely that an endangered species can recover from only a few remaining individuals. Alternatively, the probability of survival was also large if people arrived in smaller, successive waves, averaging at least 130 people every 70 or so years over the course of about 700 years.

A planned arrival Our data suggest the peopling of Sahul could not have been an accident or random event. It was very much a planned and well-organised maritime migration. Our results are similar to findings from several studies that also suggest this number of people is required to populate a new environment successfully, especially as people spread out of Africa and arrived in new regions around the world. The overall implications of these results are fascinating. They verify that the first ancestors of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Melanesian people to arrive in Sahul possessed sophisticated technological knowledge to build watercraft, and they were able to plan, navigate and make complicated, open-ocean voyages to transport large numbers of people toward targeted destinations. Our results also suggest they did so by making many directed voyages, potentially over centuries, providing the beginnings of the complex, interconnected Indigenous societies that we see across the continent today. These findings are a testament to the remarkable sophistication and adaptation of the first maritime arrivals in Sahul tens of thousands of years ago. Article first published June 18, 2019.

Earthrise, a photo that changed the world Simon Torok Honorary Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Colleen Boyle Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, School of Design, RMIT University

Jenny Gray Chief Executive Officer, Zoos Victoria, University of Melbourne

Julie Arblaster Associate Professor, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University

Lynette Bettio Senior Climatologist, Bureau of Meteorology

Rachel Webster Professor of Astrophysics, University of Melbourne

Ruth Morgan Senior Research Fellow in History, Monash University

Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders. NASA/Public Domain

December 24, 2018, is the 50th anniversary of Earthrise, arguably one of the most profound images in the history of human culture. When astronaut William Anders photographed a fragile blue sphere set in dark space peeking over the Moon, it changed our perception of our place in space and fuelled environmental awareness around the world. The photo let us see our planet from a great distance for the first time. The living Earth, surrounded by the darkness of space, appears fragile and vulnerable, with finite resources. Viewing a small blue Earth against the black backdrop of space, with the barren moonscape in the foreground, evokes feelings of vastness: we are a small planet, orbiting an ordinary star, in an unremarkable galaxy among the billions we can observe. The image prompts emotions of insignificance —Earth is only special because it’s the planet we live on. As astronaut Jim Lovell said during the live broadcast from Apollo 8: The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realise just what you have back there on Earth. Earthrise is a testament to the extraordinary capacity of human perception. Although, in 1968, the photograph seemed revelatory and unexpected, it belongs to an extraordinary history of representing the Earth

from above. Anders may have produced an image that radically shifted our view of ourselves, but we were ready to see it. A history of flight People have always dreamed of flying. As we grew from hot-air balloons to space shuttles, the camera has been there for much of the ride. After the second world war, the US military used captured V-2 rockets to launch motion-picture cameras out of the atmosphere, producing the first images of Earth from space. Russia’s Sputnik spurred the United States to launch a series of satellites —watching the enemy and the weather—and then NASA turned its attention to the Moon, launching a series of exploratory probes. One (Lunar Orbiter I, 1966) turned its camera across a sliver of the Moon’s surface and found the Earth, rising above it. Despite not being the ‘first’ image of the Earth from our Moon, Earthrise is special. It was directly witnessed by the astronauts as well as being captured by the camera. It elegantly illustrates how human perception is something that is constantly evolving, often hand in hand with technology. Earthrise showed us that Earth is a connected system, and any changes made to this system potentially affect the whole of the planet. Although the Apollo missions sought to reveal the Moon, they also powerfully revealed the limits of our own planet. The idea of a Spaceship Earth, with its interdependent ecologies and finite resources, became an icon of a growing environmental movement concerned with the ecological impacts of industrialisation and population growth. From space, we observe the thin shield provided by our atmosphere, allowing life to flourish on the surface of our planet. Life forms created Earth’s atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide and generating free oxygen. They created an unusual mix of gases compared to other planets— an atmosphere with a protective ozone layer and a mix of gases that trap heat and moderate extremes of temperature. Over millions of years, this special mix has allowed a huge diversity of life forms to evolve, including (relatively recently on this time scale) Homo sapiens. The field of meteorology has benefited enormously from the technology foreshadowed by the Earthrise photo. Our knowledge is no longer limited to Earth-based weather-observing stations.

Satellites can now bring us an Earthrise-type image every ten minutes, allowing us to observe extremes such as tropical cyclones as they form over the ocean, potentially affecting life and land. Importantly, we now possess a long enough record of satellite information so that in many instances we can begin to examine long-term changes of such events. The human population has doubled in the 50 years since the Earthrise image, resulting in habitat destruction, the spread of pest species and wildfires spurred by climate warming. Every year, our actions endanger more species. Earth’s climate has undergone enormous changes in the five decades since the Earthrise photo was taken. Much of the increase in Australian and global temperatures has happened in the past 50 years. This warming is affecting us now, with an increase in the frequency of extreme events such as heatwaves, and vast changes across the oceans and polar caps. With further warming projected, it is important that we take this chance to look back at the Earthrise photo of our little planet, so starkly presented against the vastness of space. The perspective that it offers us can help us choose the path for our planet for the next 50 years. It reminds us of the wonders of the Earth system, its beauty and its fragility. It encourages us to continue to seek understanding of its weather systems, blue ocean and ice caps through scientific endeavour and sustained monitoring. The beauty of our planet as seen from afar—and up close—can inspire us to make changes to secure the amazing and diverse animals that share our Earth. Zoos become conservation organisations, holding, breeding and releasing critically endangered animals. Scientists teach us about the capacities of animals and the threats to their survival. Communities rise to the challenge and people in their thousands take actions to help wildlife, from buying toilet paper made from recycled paper to not releasing balloons outdoors. If we stand together we can secure a future for all nature on this remarkable planet. But is a 50-year-old photo enough to re-ignite the environmental awareness and action required to tackle today’s threats to nature? What will be this generation’s Earthrise moment? The authors would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Alicia Sometimes to this article.

Article first published December 21, 2018.

History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren’t Nicole Lee Adjunct Professor, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

Jarryd Bartle Sessional Lecturer in Criminal Law, RMIT University

Drug-related offences take up a lot of the resources within Australia’s criminal justice system. In 2016–17 law enforcement made 113,533 illicit drug seizures and 154,650 drug-related arrests. Harm-reduction advocates are calling for the legalisation of some drugs and the removal of criminal penalties on others. And there’s public support for both. But how did some drugs become illegal in the first place? And what drives our current drug laws? Legal status isn’t based on risk or harm Most people assume drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. But the reasons aren’t related to their relative risk or harm. In a 2010 study, experts ranked 20 legal and illegal drugs on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society. This includes health damage, economic costs and crime. Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug. MDMA (ecstasy), LSD and mushrooms were among the least harmful. At various times around the world, coffee has been illegal and cocaine has been widely available. Many drugs that currently carry criminal penalties began life as useful medicinal therapies, such as opiates, cocaine, MDMA and amphetamines. They were often available over the counter at pharmacies or through licensed sellers.

Source: Drug harms in the UK, by David Nutt et al. The Lancet

History of drug laws in Australia Australia, like the rest of the world, has had a patchy approach to criminalising substances, driven mostly by a desire to maintain international relations—particularly with the United States—rather than by concern for the public’s health or welfare. Before federation in 1901, very few laws regulated the use of drugs in Australia. The first Australian drug laws in the early 20th century imposed restrictions on opium, primarily as a means to discourage the entry of Chinese people to Australia. The temperance movement, mostly known today for the prohibition of alcohol in the 19th and early 20th centuries, played a key role in shaping global drug policy. Influenced by temperance activists, US President Theodore Roosevelt convened an international opium conference in 1909, which eventually resulted in the International Opium Convention.

Australia signed up in 1913. By 1925 the convention had expanded to include the prohibition of opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine and cannabis. These drugs were prohibited in Australia well before their use became widespread or problematic. It wasn’t until the 1960s that recreational drug use became a social concern. That’s when cannabis, heroin and new psychedelic substances such as LSD became more commonly used for pleasure or in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs updated all existing international conventions and moved toward a strictly prohibitionist approach to recreational drug use (except alcohol and tobacco). One of the key contributing factors in drug consumption in Australia was the Vietnam War, during which soldiers provided viable markets for heroin, cannabis and other illicit drugs. By 1970 all Australian states had enacted laws that made drug supply a separate offence to drug use or possession, rather than merely a regulatory offence for misusing a medicine. Drug use and related harms increased exponentially in Australia by the mid-1980s. The emergence of HIV/AIDS, as well as a dramatic increase in heroin-related deaths, led to calls for a more comprehensive approach to illicit drugs. At that time, Australia led the world in a new way of thinking about drug policy. The National Drug Strategy came into effect in 1985, expanding from strict prohibition to explicitly include harm reduction, in addition to demand reduction (prevention and treatment) and supply reduction (customs and policing). In theory, that is. A recent study found just 2% of drug funding goes to harm reduction, while 66% goes to law enforcement. Cannabis possession and use is illegal in Australia. But starting around 30 years ago, several states and territories (South Australia, Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory) removed the criminal penalties for personal use of cannabis. That means it’s illegal, but not a criminal offence. In all other jurisdictions charges of possession can be subject to ‘diversion’ by police or court, allowing offenders to avoid a criminal penalty. How are drugs currently classified as illegal?

To be criminalised, a drug needs to be specifically scheduled under the relevant Poison Standards as well as having separate criminal drug legislation. Until recently, drugs needed to be specifically listed to be considered illegal. This meant legislation was constantly playing catch-up as new drugs were developed to circumvent the laws. Nearly 700 new psychoactive substances have been identified globally in the past decade. These synthetic drugs are designed to mimic the effects of common illicit drugs such as cannabis or cocaine. Most Australian states and territories now ban the possession or sale of any substance that has a ‘psychoactive effect’ other than alcohol, tobacco and food. However, evidence from the United Kingdom indicates such broad bans are unlikely to be effective. Selective bans have resulted in some drugs that are relatively safe in their pure form becoming much more dangerous. Bans on MDMA, for example, have led to the manufacture of illegal preparations with unknown potency and ingredients. Cannabis criminalisation has encouraged the production of more potent cannabis and, more recently, synthetic cannabinoids. The effect has also been implicated in the rise of fentanyl use in the United States as authorities crack down on heroin and pharmaceutical opioids. Why regulate illicit drugs? The focus on reducing drug use doesn’t translate to reducing harms. In fact, harms continue to increase despite a decrease in alcohol and other drug use in Australia. There is no evidence a prohibitionist approach to drug law has reduced the supply of illicit drugs. Instead, it has increased organised crime and acted as a barrier for people seeking help. Given the failures of prohibition, jurisdictions around the world are starting to look at the issue differently. Several have brought cannabis under regulatory control, much like alcohol and tobacco. Others have removed criminal penalties associated with other drug use. Most of the arguments to maintain current prohibitionist drug laws continue the moral objection to drug use that began in Australia with our early race-driven opium laws.

Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been taking mindaltering substances. Around 43% of Australians have tried an illicit drug at least once in their lifetime. Whether you morally agree with drug use or not, the current drug laws are neither reducing harm nor stopping use. It’s time for a different approach. Article first published January 31, 2019.

Notre Dame: How a rebuilt cathedral could be just as wonderful Claire Smith Professor of Archaeology, Flinders University

Jordan Ralph PhD candidate in Archaeology, Flinders University

The destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral is lamentable. A wonderful icon has been largely destroyed by fire. However, we should not despair. Part of the reason this loss is so upsetting is because we are immersed in a Western way of thinking that equates authenticity with preserving the original materials used to create an object or building. But not all societies think like this. Some have quite different notions of what is authentic. Iconic buildings such as the Catherine Palace in Russia and Japan’s historic monuments of Ancient Nara have been successfully restored, sometimes after great damage, and are today appreciated by millions of people. The preamble to the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (The Venice Charter 1964) states: ‘Imbued with a message from the past, the historic monuments of generations of people remain to the present day as living witnesses of their age-old traditions … It is our duty to hand them on in the full richness of their authenticity.’ But, in our diverse world, the definition and assessment of authenticity is a complex matter. The World Heritage Convention guidelines state that properties may be understood to meet the conditions of authenticity if their cultural values ‘are truthfully and credibly expressed’.

Accordingly, a building’s authenticity is determined in relation to its location and setting, use and function, spirit and feeling, as well as form and materials. Japan’s historic monuments of Ancient Nara—comprised of Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and the excavated remains of the great Imperial Palace—provide important insights into the nation’s capital during the eighth century. These buildings are not less authentic because they were extensively restored after the enactment of the Ancient Shrines and Temples Preservation Law in 1897. A palace gutted The Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo (Pushkin), south of Petersburg, was gutted during the second world war. When Russian people first saw the damage, they must have despaired. Nevertheless, the government provided the resources to allow room-byroom restorations. The restoration of the Amber Room, one of the most famous palace interiors of the 18th century, is a triumph. Panels that had been looted by the Nazis were recreated over 25 years with an investment of $11 million. Today, the palace is fully restored, a spectacular icon that attracts millions of visitors a year. What about the relics and artworks? The fire at Notre Dame has endangered a vast collection of Christian relics and artworks housed within the building and on its grounds, including the crown of thorns. First responders saved many, but not all, objects. We do not yet know which ones have survived. Does the argument regarding authenticity also apply to these relics and precious artworks? Well, yes and no. There are two scenarios. The first is that the relics and artworks are partially damaged by fire, smoke and falling building materials. Within this scenario, the focus will be on restoration—and marvellous things can occur in the realm of materials conservation. The second scenario is that relics or artworks are virtually, or entirely, destroyed. Within this scenario, the artworks can only be replicated, not restored. Such replication would have a precarious tie to the original works. From the viewpoint of restoration, there is a crucial difference between portable and non-portable artefacts. Other than those that were part of the

fabric of the building, the relics and artworks were not made on site. The building itself, however, has a continuity of identity and function through being located within a specific landscape. What now for Notre Dame? One way forward is to use The Venice Charter to guide restoration. This would mean the new materials used in preserving this historic structure would be kept distinguishable from the original construction. Another way forward would be to restore the structure in a similar manner to that of Catherine I’s palace, in which an untutored eye finds it difficult to distinguish between the old and new parts of the structure. Given the extent of the damage, this would be the more aesthetically pleasing and less jarring approach. Unlike other places of deep cultural significance, which may be destroyed forever due to commercial development, Notre Dame can be rebuilt. With modern technology, it is entirely possible for the cathedral to be recreated with near accuracy to the original. We can do this and keep the previous building’s spirit and feeling. Article first published April 16, 2019.

What’s the point of education? It’s no longer just about getting a job Luke Zaphir Researcher, UQ Critical Thinking Project, University of Queensland

For much of human history, education has served an important purpose, ensuring we have the tools to survive. People need jobs to eat, and to have jobs, they need to learn how to work. Education has been an essential part of every society. But our world is changing and we’re being forced to change with it. So what is the point of education today? The ancient Greek model Some of our oldest accounts of education come from Ancient Greece. In many ways the Greeks modelled a form of education that would endure for

thousands of years. It was an incredibly focused system designed for developing statesmen, soldiers and well-informed citizens. Most boys would have gone to a learning environment similar to a school, although this would have been a place to learn basic literacy until adolescence. At this point, a child would embark on one of two career paths: apprentice or ‘citizen’. On the apprentice path, the child would be put under the informal wing of an adult who would teach them a craft. This might be farming, potting or smithing—any career that required training or physical labour. The path of the full citizen was one of intellectual development. Boys on the path to more academic careers would have private tutors who would foster their knowledge of arts and sciences, as well as develop their thinking skills. The private tutor–student model of learning would endure for many hundreds of years after this. All male children were expected to go to statesponsored places called gymnasiums (‘school for naked exercise’), with those on a military–citizen career path training in martial arts. Those on vocational pathways would be strongly encouraged to exercise too, but their training would be simply for good health. Until this point, there had been little in the way of education for women, the poor and slaves. Women made up half of the population, the poor made up 90% of citizens, and slaves outnumbered citizens 10 or 20 times over. These marginalised groups would have undergone some education but likely only physical—strong bodies were important for childbearing and manual labour. So, we can safely say education in civilisations like Ancient Greece or Rome was only for rich men. While we’ve taken a lot from this model, and evolved along the way, we live in a peaceful time compared to the Greeks. So what is it that we want from education today? We learn to work—the ‘pragmatic purpose’ Today we largely view education as being there to give us knowledge of our place in the world, and the skills to work in it. This view is underpinned by a specific philosophical framework known as pragmatism. Philosopher Charles Peirce—sometimes known as the ‘father of pragmatism’— developed this theory in the late 1800s.

Philosophies of knowledge and understanding (also known as epistemology) have a long history. Many early philosophies were based on the idea of an objective, universal truth. For example, the ancient Greeks believed the world was made of only five elements: earth, water, fire, air and aether. Peirce, on the other hand, was concerned with understanding the world as a dynamic place. He viewed all knowledge as fallible. He argued we should reject any ideas about an inherent humanity or metaphysical reality. Pragmatism sees any concept—belief, science, language, people—as mere components in a set of real-world problems. In other words, we should believe only what helps us learn about the world and require reasonable justification for our actions. A person might think a ceremony is sacred or has spiritual significance, but the pragmatist would ask: ‘What effects does this have on the world?’ Education has always served a pragmatic purpose. It is a tool to be used to bring about a specific outcome (or set of outcomes). For the most part, this purpose is economic. Why go to school? So you can get a job. Education benefits you personally because you get to have a job, and it benefits society because you contribute to the overall productivity of the country, as well as paying taxes. But for the economics-based pragmatist, not everyone needs to have the same access to educational opportunities. Societies generally need more farmers than lawyers, or more labourers than politicians, so it’s not important everyone goes to university. You can, of course, have a pragmatic purpose in solving injustice or creating equality or protecting the environment—but most of these are of secondary importance to making sure we have a strong workforce. Pragmatism, as a concept, isn’t too difficult to understand, but thinking pragmatically can be tricky. It’s challenging to imagine external perspectives, particularly on problems we deal with ourselves. How to problem-solve (especially when we are part of the problem) is the purpose of a variant of pragmatism called instrumentalism. Contemporary society and education In the early 20th century, John Dewey (a pragmatist philosopher) created a new educational framework. Dewey didn’t believe education was to serve

an economic goal. Instead, he argued education should serve an intrinsic purpose: education was a good in itself and children became fully developed as people because of it. Much of the philosophy of the preceding century—as in the works of Kant, Hegel and Mill—was focused on the duties a person had to themselves and their society. The onus of learning, and fulfilling a citizen’s moral and legal obligations, was on the citizens themselves. But in his most famous work, Democracy and Education, Dewey argued our development and citizenship depended on our social environment. This meant a society was responsible for fostering the mental attitudes it wished to see in its citizens. Dewey’s view was that learning doesn’t just occur with textbooks and timetables. He believed learning happens through interactions with parents, teachers and peers. Learning happens when we talk about movies and discuss our ideas, or when we feel bad for succumbing to peer pressure and reflect on our moral failure. Learning would still help people get jobs, but this was an incidental outcome in the development of a child’s personhood. So the pragmatic outcome of schools would be to fully develop citizens. Today’s educational environment is somewhat mixed. One of the two goals of the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians is that: All young Australians become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens. But the Australian Department of Education believes that: By lifting outcomes, the government helps to secure Australia’s economic and social prosperity. A charitable reading of this is that we still have the economic goal as the pragmatic outcome, but we also want our children to have engaging and meaningful careers. We don’t just want them to work for money but to enjoy what they do. We want them to be fulfilled. And this means the educational philosophy of Dewey is becoming more important for contemporary society.

Part of being pragmatic is recognising facts and changes in circumstance. Generally, these facts indicate we should change the way we do things. On a personal scale, that might be recognising we have poor nutrition and may have to change our diet. On a wider scale, it might require us to recognise our conception of the world is incorrect, that the Earth is round instead of flat. When this change occurs on a huge scale, it’s called a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift Our world may not be as clean-cut as we previously thought. We may choose to be vegetarian to lessen our impact on the environment. But this means we buy quinoa sourced from countries where people can no longer afford to buy a staple, because it’s become a ‘superfood’ in Western kitchens. If you’re a fan of the show The Good Place, you may remember how this is the exact reason the points system in the afterlife is broken—because life is too complicated for any person to have the perfect score of being good. All of this is not only confronting for us in a moral sense but also seems to demand we fundamentally alter the way we consume goods. And climate change is forcing us to reassess how we have lived on this planet for the last hundred years, because it’s clear that way of life isn’t sustainable. Contemporary ethicist Peter Singer has argued that, given the current political climate, we would only be capable of radically altering our collective behaviour when there has been a massive disruption to our way of life. If a supply chain is broken by a climate-change-induced disaster, there is no choice but to deal with the new reality. But we shouldn’t be waiting for a disaster to kick us into gear. Making changes includes seeing ourselves as citizens not only of a community or a country, but also of the world. As US philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues, many issues need international cooperation to address. Trade, environment, law and conflict require creative thinking and pragmatism, and we need a different focus in our education systems to bring these about.

Education needs to focus on developing the personhood of children, as well as their capability to engage as citizens (even if current political leaders disagree). If you’re taking a certain subject at school or university, have you ever been asked: ‘But how will that get you a job?’ If so, the questioner sees economic goals as the most important outcomes for education. They’re not necessarily wrong, but it’s also clear that jobs are no longer the only (or most important) reason we learn. Article first published June 17, 2019, as part of a series on the future of education.

Courting ‘quiet Australians’ from ‘bubble central’, it’s been a remarkable first year for Scott Morrison Michelle Grattan Professorial Fellow, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Associate Editor and Chief Political Correspondent at The Conversation

Even Scott Morrison, with his abundant self-belief, couldn’t have imagined that on the first anniversary of his seizing the prime ministership he’d be winging his way to France for a G7 meeting, where Australia has observer status for the first time. A grim brand of luck—the spectacular collapse of two Liberal prime ministers—and a dash of cunning brought Morrison the top job. His own campaigning skills and a hapless Labor performance enabled him to keep it. In the next three years, it might all go to hell in a handbasket, given an uncertain economy, a fickle electorate and a thin majority. But after 12 months in the position, Morrison looks the strong leader, clearly in charge, with few constraints. It’s not just the election win. It’s that there isn’t the remotest sign of a trouble-making aspirant or a vengeful wrecker. New party rules protect a Liberal PM. Infighting has subsided. The party is generally satisfied with its leader, in a way it wasn’t with either Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull. Three months after the ‘miracle’ victory, we’re seeing how the campaigning prime minister has morphed into the governing one, while remaining the campaigner. To analyse Morrison’s ideology has always been to plunge into a puzzle box. He’s conservative on moral issues, driven by his Pentecostalism. On

secular social issues he’s more moderate—some in the welfare sector found him unexpectedly flexible when he was social services minister. On economics, he can be soggy, lacking the true dry’s distaste for government intervention. In the election, it was said Morrison looked like he was running for ‘mayor of Australia’. It’s an accurate characterisation in part. The PM who’ll hobnob at the G7 and soon sup at a White House state dinner has his feet firmly planted in the local community centre, his ear tuned to his ‘quiet Australians’, the people he asserts are alienated because the ‘Canberra bubble’ too often has ignored them. We only have to observe what he’s done and how he talks. Setting up ‘Services Australia’. A pledge to bust ‘congestion’—in traffic, regulations, the bureaucracy. Badgering the public service to improve delivery. Moving to try to stop the export of plastic waste. An inquiry into the NDIS. He dog-whistles to his ‘quiet Australians’—not in a racist way, but through deriding the ‘Canberra bubble’ and publicly putting the bureaucrats in their place. Morrison likes the practical; he looks from the ground up. It’s all about Mr and Mrs Average from the Sutherland Shire. Indeed, that’s him and Jenny, although their address is Kirribilli House. After he became PM, Morrison moved very quickly to define himself to the public as one of them. When Sky’s David Speers asked about his image as ‘the daggy dad with the baseball cap’, Morrison said: ‘Well, that’s how it’s described by others, but you’re describing my life … this is who I am.’ Can he maintain the guise of separation from the Canberra elite, given he’s its most powerful member? Monash University political scientist Paul Strangio says: ‘It will take political and image-making dexterity by the prime minister to sustain the idea that he is somehow distinct from that “bubble”.’ There’s been much claimed about Morrison’s lack of an ‘agenda’ beyond the now-legislated tax cuts, but it’s notable that since the election he’s organised ‘deep dives’ into policy areas. He gets together the minister, public servants and interested or qualified backbenchers. The sessions run from one to four hours; Morrison stays through them. Topics have included recycling, youth suicide, veterans’ mental health, NDIS, water, aged care.

He also has reviews and inquiries in train or pending, including one on industrial relations, where he has signalled he’ll proceed cautiously. On the fraught area of religious freedom, still in the works, backbenchers have been extensively consulted to smooth the path to decisions. ‘Relative to his two predecessors, he has a much better idea of what he wants to do—he’s a better long-term planner than [they were],’ says someone familiar with all three of these Liberal PMs. Former Liberal staffer David Gazard, a close personal friend, describes Morrison as a ‘pragmatic incrementalist—he will get what he can get in areas he wants to go to’. He’s fortunate that the post-election Senate is set to be easier than the last one. The questions hang. Is the incrementalist capable of implementing major reforms that the country will need? Will he make a substantial entry in the history book of Australian prime ministers? Given Morrison’s pragmatism, even his caution, his decision to put Indigenous constitutional recognition on his agenda sits oddly. It is becoming clear that, with his veto of any reference to a ‘Voice to Parliament’ being put in a referendum question, the initiative is likely to fizzle into a disappointing stalemate. Other issues are unavoidable but intractable. While the internal Liberal wars over climate and energy policy have quieted, the rifts remain. This is a self-imposed ‘wicked problem’ for the Liberals—beyond, it seems, any leader to satisfactorily resolve—and the struggle with energy prices will continue. Morrison is methodical, always political, perennially in action. ‘He would be the kind of person you’d expect to have a job list on his desk,’ says a minister. ‘I think he’s conscious of the short time frame of the federal cycle. He’s task-oriented—he wants to get stuff done and move on to the next project.’ One source likens his work style to rugby league’s ‘playing moves in blocks’, proceeding systematically from one thing to another. Another says he picks three or four things to drive, while putting others into ‘wider orbits’. Morrison the family man has his nuclear political family. Frontbenchers in his innermost circle are Stuart Robert (minister for government services and the NDIS) and Alex Hawke (minister for international development and the Pacific), both his factional mates from way back, as well as Ben Morton

(assistant minister to the prime minister), who travelled on the campaign plane with him. His chief of staff, John Kunkel, is a close confidant, as is Phil Gaetjens, his incoming departmental head, on whom he’ll lean heavily for advice on turning political objectives into policy outcomes. Those who work with Morrison stress how focused he is. A close observer describes his responses to problems. ‘He doesn’t dwell too much on pondering the entrails. He says, “How do we fix this?” His temperament is his biggest asset—he’s unflappable. He’s confident in his ability to handle the situation he confronts.’ This confidence reveals at times his arrogant side. That’s always been there (as when, in events before his downfall as head of Tourism Australia, he wrongly thought Prime Minister John Howard would side with him rather than with the minister, Fran Bailey). The arrogance is more concealed now, but shows when he summarily dismisses awkward questions as of interest only to the ‘bubble’. His natural instinct is for command and control, but this operates subtly in managing his ministers. He gives them rein in their own areas, but tells them not to freelance outside their remit. Their ‘charter letters’ emphasise goals and performance. He exhorts backbenchers to shut up publicly, but can’t make them, and they’ve been speaking out on subjects from China to superannuation and industrial relations. This is messy but quite different from the destructive sniping of the last term. In looking at Morrison’s positive first year it’s easy to forget how things can turn. Strangio identifies at least three risks: the party’s right could decide to ‘seize the moment’ and make divisive demands; the electorate could, over time, become frustrated with Morrison’s tendency to incrementalism, interpreting it as inertia; or, conversely, Morrison might eventually surrender to an impulse to which all prime ministers are prone— to leave some big imprint, and thereby plunge himself into political choppy waters. There’s a bit of muttering in some Nationals quarters about how Morrison has intruded on their turf. He’s dominated the drought issue, and sees as part of his constituency rural ‘quiet Australians’. The Nationals did well at the election, but party leader Michael McCormack is treated

(respectfully) as a pushover. A Nationals source contrasts Morrison with Howard, who let the junior Coalition partner be seen having a few wins. Morrison has found himself spending a lot of time on foreign policy; with the low-key Marise Payne backward in coming forward, he is effectively his own foreign minister. Donald Trump has lionised the PM, quite a mixed blessing (and naturally Australia has signed up to the American request to be part of the freedom-of-navigation mission in the Middle East). The Pacific Island leaders gave Morrison both barrels over Australia’s climate change policy and coal, when he was wedged between them and domestic politics. Australia’s ‘Pacific step up’ bogged, at least momentarily, in the acrimony of Tuvalu. Morrison finds himself in office at a time when managing Australia’s relationship with China is becoming increasingly challenging. Indeed, central in his current preoccupations is policy on China, which includes complex responses in resisting that country’s various encroachments on Australian sovereignty. It’s far from being all about trade. But the most immediate worry is the economy. Will the ‘global headwinds’ turn gale force, requiring more government stimulus and threatening the surplus? With wage growth sluggish and interest rates, already near rock bottom, cut twice since the election, the Reserve Bank prods the government to help with the load. So far, Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg are holding back and hoping that the tax package will do enough. The quiet Australians, the people who rode with Morrison’s promises about ensuring good economic management, are watching, quietly. Article first published August 22, 2019.

CHAPTER TWO

Hate and Fear: Twin Tests of Freedom

Christchurch mosque shootings must end Zealand’s innocence about right-wing terrorism

New

Paul Spoonley Distinguished Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University

Mosques across New Zealand remain closed and police presence is strong, following a terrorist attack at two mosques in central Christchurch on Friday, March 15. Fifty people have been killed at Masjid Al Noor and a second mosque nearby. Three people have been taken into custody in connection with the shootings. One man in his late 20s has been charged with murder. In the hours after the attacks, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, made it clear this was a terrorist attack of ‘extraordinary and unprecedented violence’ that had no place in New Zealand. She said extremist views were not welcome and contrary to New Zealand values, and did not reflect New Zealand as a nation. ‘It is one of New Zealand’s darkest days. Many of the people affected by this act of extreme violence will be from our refugee and migrant communities. New Zealand is their home. They are us.’ She is right. Public opinion surveys such as the Asia New Zealand Foundation annual surveys of attitudes tend to show that a majority of New Zealanders are in favour of diversity and see immigration, in this case from Asia, as providing various benefits for the country. But extremist politics, including the extreme nationalist and white supremacist politics that appear to be at the core of this attack on Muslims, have been part of our community for a long time. History of white supremacy I completed research in the UK on the National Front and British National Party in the late 1970s. When I returned to New Zealand, I was told explicitly, including by authorities that were charged with monitoring extremism, that we did not have similar groups here. It did not take me long to discover quite the opposite.

Through the 1980s, I looked at more than 70 local groups that met the definition of being extreme right-wing. The city that hosted many of these groups was Christchurch. They were a mixture of skinhead, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups. Some were traditional in their ideology, with a strong underpinning of anti-Semitism and a belief in the supremacy of the ‘British race’. Others inverted the arguments of Māori nationalism to argue for separatism to keep the ‘white race pure’. And, yes, there was violence. The 1989 shooting of an innocent bystander, Wayne Motz, in Christchurch by a skinhead who then walked to a local police kiosk and shot himself. The pictures of the internment showed his friends giving Nazi salutes. In separate incidents, a Korean backpacker and a gay man were killed for ideological reasons. Things have changed. The 1990s provided the internet and then social media. And events such as the September 11 terror attacks shifted the focus —anti-Semitism was now supplemented by Islamophobia. Hate speech online The earthquakes and subsequent rebuild have significantly transformed the ethnic demography of Christchurch and made it much more multicultural— and more positive about that diversity. It is ironic that this terrorism should take place in this city, despite its history of earlier far-right extremism. We tend not to think too much about the presence of racist and white supremacist groups, until there is some public incident like the desecration of Jewish graves or a march of black-shirted men (they are mostly men) asserting their ‘right to be white’. Perhaps, we are comfortable in thinking, as the prime minister has said, they are not part of our nation. Last year, as part of a project to look at hate speech, I looked at what some New Zealanders were saying online. It did not take long to discover the presence of hateful and anti-Muslim comments. It would be wrong to characterise these views and comments as widespread, but New Zealand was certainly not exempt from Islamophobia. Every so often it surfaced, such as in the attack on a Muslim woman in a Huntly carpark. An end to collective innocence

It became even more obvious during 2018. The Canadian YouTuber, Stefan Molyneux, sparked a public debate (along with Lauren Southern) about his right to free speech. Much of the public comment seemed to either overlook or condone his extreme views on what he regards as the threat posed by Islam. And then there was the public protest in favour of free speech that occurred at the same time, and the signs warning us about the arrival of Sharia law or ‘Free Tommy’ signs. The latter refers to Tommy Robinson, a long-time activist (and former English Defence League leader) who was sentenced to prison—and then released on appeal—for contempt of court, essentially by targeting Muslims before the courts. There is plenty of evidence of local Islamophobic views, especially online. There are, and have been for a long time, individuals and groups who hold white supremacist views. They tend to threaten violence; seldom have they acted on those views. There is also a naivety among New Zealanders, including the media, about the need to be tolerant towards the intolerant. There is not necessarily a direct causation between the presence of Islamophobia and what has happened in Christchurch. But this attack must end our collective innocence. No matter the size of these extremist communities, they always represent a threat to our collective well-being. Social cohesion and mutual respect need to be asserted and continually worked on. Article first published March 15, 2019.

Christchurch attacks are a stark warning of toxic political environment that allows hate to flourish Greg Barton Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

When lives are tragically cut short, it is generally easier to explain the ‘how’ than the ‘why’. This dark reality is all the more felt when tragedy comes at the hands of murderous intent. Explaining how 50 people came to be killed, and almost as many badly injured, in Christchurch’s double

massacre of Muslims at prayer is heartbreaking but relatively straightforward. As with so many mass murders in recent years, the use of an assault rifle, the ubiquitous AR15, oxymoronically referred to as ‘the civilian M16’, explains how one cowardly killer could be so lethal. It was much the same in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando three years ago, when one gunman shot dead 49 people in a crowded space and, though the motive appears very different, the same sort of military instrument of death lies behind the 58 deaths in Las Vegas a year later. An AR15 was used to shoot dead 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018 and a similar weapon was used to kill six people in a Quebec City mosque in January 2017. It is a credit to the peaceful nature of New Zealand society that, despite the open availability of weapons like the AR15, the country’s last mass shooting was in 1997. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rightly identified reform of gun laws as one of the immediate outcomes required in response to this tragedy. But lax gun laws are arguably the only area in which blame can be laid in New Zealand. The rise of right-wing extremism Ardern, together with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was also right to refer to this barbaric act of cold-blooded murder of people in prayer as right-wing extremist terrorism driven by Islamophobic hatred. State and federal police in Australia have long warned that, next to the immediate threat posed by Salafi jihadi terrorism, they are most concerned about the steady rise of right-wing extremism. There has been some comfort in the recognition that the most active right-wing extremist groups, and there are many, are disorganised, poorly led and attract but small crowds. On the face of it, then, right-wing extremism in Australia is nowhere near as serious as the neo-Nazi movements of Europe or the various permutations of white supremacy and toxic nationalism that bedevil American politics. In America, it is conservatively estimated that there were 50 deaths due to terrorist attacks in 2018, almost all linked to right-wing extremism.

In 2017, it is calculated that there were 950 attacks on Muslims and mosques in Germany alone. Many of last year’s attacks in America involved a common right-wing extremist hatred of Islam and a targeting of Muslims, joining a long-standing enmity towards Jews. Almost all recent terrorist attacks have been lone-actor attacks. They are notoriously difficult to predict. Whether inspired by Salafi jihadi Islamist extremism or right-wing extremism, lone-actor attacks commonly feature individuals fixated on the deluded dream of going from ‘zero to hero’. Extremist signals lost in noise of toxic politics One of the main reasons authorities struggle with identifying right-wing extremist ‘nobodies’ who post online, before they turn to violence, is that it’s difficult to pick up a clear signal in the noise of a national discourse increasingly dominated by exactly the same narrative elements of mistrust, anxiety and a blaming of the other. In Australia, as in Europe and America, mainstream politicians and mainstream media commentators have increasingly toyed with extremist ideas in the pursuit of popularity. Many have openly brandished outrageous ideas that in previous years would have been unsayable in mainstream political discourse or commentary. Donald Trump can be deservedly singled out for making the unspeakable the new normal in mainstream right-wing politics, but he is hardly alone in this. And sadly, for all of the relative civility and stability of Australian politics, we too have now come to normalise the toxic politics of fear. No one put it better than The Project TV host Waleed Aly in saying that Friday’s terrorist attacks, although profoundly disturbing, did not come as a shocking surprise. Anyone who has been paying attention and who really cares about the well-being and security of Australian society has observed the steady growth of right-wing extremist and white supremacist ideas in general, and Islamophobia in particular. They have seen the numerous attacks on Muslims and Jews at prayer and worried about the day when the murderous violence that has plagued the northern hemisphere will visit the southern hemisphere. But more than that, they have worried about the singling out of migrants, and in particular asylum seekers, African youth and Muslims as pawns to be played with in the cynical politics of fear.

Scott Morrison is right to say these problems have been with us for many years. But he would do better to point out that our downward trajectory sharply accelerated after John Howard’s ‘dark victory’ of 2001. The unwinnable election was won on the back of the arrival of asylum seekers on the MV Tampa in August followed by the September 11 attacks, and at the price of Howard and the Liberal Party embracing the white supremacist extremist politics of Pauline Hanson. Both major parties, it must be said, succumbed to the lure of giving focus groups and pollsters the tough language and inhumane policies the public appeared to demand and reward. We are now beginning to see the true price that we have paid with the demonising of those arriving by boat seeking asylum, or looking too dark-skinned, or appearing too religious. The result has been such a cacophony of hateful rhetoric that it has been hard for those tasked with spotting the emergence of violent extremism to separate it from all the background noise of extremism. There are, of course, lessons to be learned. Authorities need to do better. We can begin with a national database of hate crimes, with standard definitions and robust data collection. Clearly, we need to pay attention to hateful extremism if we are to prevent violent extremism. But ultimately, we need to address the permissive political environment that allows such hateful extremism to be promulgated so openly. The onus is on commentators and political leaders alike. They cannot change the past, but they will determine the future. Article first published March 17, 2019.

Why overhauling NZ’s gun and terrorism laws alone can’t stop terrorist attacks John Battersby Teaching Fellow, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Massey University

My research focuses on terrorism in or affecting New Zealand. Until Friday, March 15, my phone didn’t ring that often because few were interested in anything I had to say. Since then, it has not stopped. There is no understating the horrific nature of the Christchurch tragedy. Fifty people have been killed and more than 40 are being treated for injuries

at Christchurch hospital. Three people have been arrested in relation to the mosque shootings. One Australian citizen has appeared in court charged with murder. New Zealanders will need to come to terms with this tragedy and vent emotions and frustrations. They will want to know why this could not be stopped. These are valid questions. New Zealand is a small country, geographically distant from the rest of the world. It has been happy in the assumption that the violent extremism that has showed itself on multiple occasions on five continents over the last 20 years had never happened here. Many New Zealanders believed that because it hadn’t, it couldn’t. Geographic isolation no protection There was a definite realisation by those in the security sector that this assumption was not safe. The spread of extremism through social media simply obliterates geographical distance and there is really nothing to prevent overseas events being replicated here. The emphasis was on monitoring and detecting extremism—in whatever form it took. The few arrests for possession and distribution of ISIS-related propaganda exhibit that fact. It was not confined—as some commentators have suggested—to just those engaging with violent jihadism. Another key problem is hindsight. Now that the culmination of a sequence of activities has become so painfully clear, it will be inevitable that several points will be picked out that security sector operators perhaps did see, or could have seen. A retrospective case will be made that therefore they should have seen this coming. But any sign there was would have occurred in the context of the day before yesterday. Trying to convince the average New Zealander that anything like this could ever happen here would have been no easy endeavour. Review of gun and terrorism laws There will be questions about the resourcing and powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and rightfully so. But we must be mature and evidence-based in the conclusions we take from all this.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced a review of gun laws. New Zealand doesn’t have a gun register, but there are an estimated 1.3 million legally owned firearms, with illegal firearms a significant problem. It is not just the law that needs a review. Gun control, monitoring and enforcement will need to be tightened, but changes need to be considered calmly and focus on the individuals who are not likely to abide by any new law. The vast majority of licensed gun owners are not a problem, but they will need to accept that military-style automatic weapons will likely be banned and a national register will become a reality. New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act was found wanting in 2007, following the ‘Urewera raids’. Police relied on the act to spy on and arrest activists who allegedly trained to use semi-automatic weapons in militarystyle camps in the Urewera forest. Then Solicitor-General David Collins QC described the act as ‘incoherent and unworkable’. Nothing meaningful has been done with it since. Social media to blame New Zealand is a democratic country in which freedom of expression, conscience, religious freedom and free speech are valued. Any legislative change will need to impinge on these rights as little as possible, but people need to be safe here. Regardless of how big and well-resourced security agencies are, overseas experience has shown that individual actors, or small tightly integrated groups, can slip through any security filter. It is simply impossible to monitor people’s thoughts, intentions, sayings and social media accounts so closely that every signal that someone might be planning to carry out an attack is seen. Australian media suggestions of an ‘intelligence failure’ are useful to a point. But the fact that at least one of the Christchurch offenders left Australia a short time ago and was not on any watch-list of concern in Australia, where police and intelligence powers are much more comprehensive, demonstrates this is a very difficult failure to guard against. This attack was enabled by, and certainly comprised a strong element of, social media. Social media have been wilfully and readily adopted across modern societies. This has happened without much thought being given to their usefulness to organised criminals or extremists to spread their

toxic views, or their ready use as a means of sourcing an audience for terror attacks. As a society, perhaps we should pause to consider the broader implications before rushing to adopt every new piece of communications technology. It’s all very well to ask the security sector what could they have done to stop this attack, when we could ask ourselves the same: what could we have done? Article first published March 16, 2019.

To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage —and an overhaul of our laws Peter Greste Professor and UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communications, University of Queensland

A few days ago, Waleed Aly asked a not-so-rhetorical question in The Sydney Morning Herald. He wondered how many Australians were worried about the fact that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) had spent a good portion of this week raiding the offices and homes of journalists who’ve published stories clearly in the public interest. His conclusion? Not many. Aly went on to argue that it is because we have developed a culture of accepting excessive state power, with no real thought about the consequences for civil liberties or the functioning of our democracy. Sadly, I would have to agree with Aly, but as with so many surveys, the answer you get depends on the question you ask. What if we asked: ‘Hands up who feels comfortable with relying on the Facebook posts and Twitter feeds of our politicians and departmental spokespeople for information about what our government is up to? Who thinks that is a good way to run a democracy?’ Then, I bet you’d get a very different answer. I agree that Australian media are hardly trusted by the public, but I am also convinced that most Australians recognise the need for some kind of independent watchdog keeping track of politicians and the government on our behalf. It might be imperfect and messy, but a free press has performed that role well enough to keep us broadly on track for much of our history.

Earlier this week, my colleague and fellow University of Queensland researcher, Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, laid out the intricate web of national security laws passed in recent years that collectively serve to straight-jacket journalists and threaten legitimate whistleblowing. In a number of research projects, we have been looking at these laws and their impact on reporting. While we still have a long way to go, the early results suggest something deeply troubling. While the laws may have helped shore up national security, they have also led to a net loss of transparency and accountability. It has become harder for journalists to reach and protect sources and keep track of wrongdoing by government officials. It has also become harder for them to safely publish in the public interest without risking long years in prison or cripplingly expensive and traumatic court cases. An overhaul of Australia’s legal landscape My organisation, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom (AJF), has published a white paper that offers a better way of balancing those two crucial elements of our democracy—national security and press freedom. The most important of its seven recommendations is a media freedom act. Australia has no legal or constitutional protection for press freedom. It isn’t even formally recognised in law; the High Court has merely inferred that we have a right to ‘political communication’. That needs to change. The AJF is proposing a law that would write press freedom into the DNA of our legal system. It would both prevent our legislators from unnecessarily restricting journalists from doing their jobs and give judges a benchmark they can use whenever they are adjudicating cases that deal with media freedom issues. That alone isn’t enough, though. The second recommendation in the white paper calls for changes to the national security laws themselves. Many of the current laws that Ananian-Welsh laid out in her article include a ‘public interest’ defence for journalists. But as we have seen in this week’s raids, that does nothing to stop the AFP from trawling through journalists’ documents for sources and forcing everyone into court. Instead, there should be an exemption for journalists and their sources when reporting on matters of public interest. That isn’t to suggest that journalists should be immune, though. Rather, the onus should be shifted to the authorities to show why the public interest

defence should not apply. It is also important that the exemption include whistleblowers. Beyond national security, a host of other laws have contributed to a wide culture of secrecy at odds with the principles of open government. Payouts under defamation laws now routinely run to millions, potentially destroying news organisations and chilling further investigative work. Shield laws that allow journalists to protect their sources in court are inconsistent across states and need to be strengthened. Suppression orders that judges use to smother reporting of certain court cases are being applied with alarming frequency and urgently need review. And whistleblower legislation needs to be strengthened to encourage and protect anybody speaking out about wrongdoing in government or elsewhere. While the raids of the past week have been shocking, they have forced us all to think again about the role of the media in a democracy. If it leads to better legislation that protects both national security and media freedom, then some good might have come out of it after all. Article first published June 8, 2019.

CHAPTER THREE

Weighing Up the Risks

Ministers fiddle while buildings crack and burn Geoff Hanmer Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

The Building Ministers’ Forum (BMF) met yet again on July 18 to discuss implementing the February 2018 Shergold Weir Report they commissioned in mid-2017. The BMF is responsible for overseeing the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) and building regulation across Australia. The BMF announced it’s going to ‘strengthen’ the ABCB, which will be ‘expanded to include greater representation and engagement from industry’. This is the same regulator and the same industry that have been responsible for producing the dud buildings that have been making news across the country: Lacrosse, Opal, Neo200, Mascot Towers, the Gadigal Avenue apartments and countless others that have burned, leaked, cracked and failed, but in less newsworthy ways. On being appointed by the federal Coalition government in November 2017, the current chair of the ABCB, ex-NSW premier John Fahey, had this to say about his priorities: The reform must reduce significantly red tape and have an overriding focus of industry affordability. In other words, the ABCB was to improve compliance by reducing red tape and focusing on ‘affordability’, which is about making buildings cheaper at completion. As the White Queen said to Alice in Wonderland: ‘Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ Self-regulation has failed Needless to say, virtually no progress has been made to re-regulate the industry, provide protection for consumers, or improve the durability and safety of buildings in the 19 months Fahey has held the reins. Both major political parties have played a role in creating the policy and self-regulation regime that has produced so many faulty buildings over the last 30 years. It is about time the ALP, the Coalition, the BMF and the

ABCB admitted self-regulation has failed. NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian has already done so: We allowed the industry to self-regulate and it hasn’t worked. There are too many challenges, too many problems, and that’s why the government’s willing to legislate. The building ministers should instruct the ABCB to dump its focus on self-regulation. They should also require the regulator to start taking into account whole-of-life building costs, not just cost at completion. Senior ABCB staff, including the chair, appear to be part of the problem. Asking for their resignation or sacking them would not be unreasonable in the circumstances. Regulations are far from watertight Section F of the National Construction Code (NCC), which controls waterproofing, should be immediately rewritten to make it clear buildings should be waterproof. Section FP1.4 now reads: A roof and external wall (including openings around windows and doors) must prevent the penetration of water that could cause—(a) unhealthy or dangerous conditions, or loss of amenity for occupants; and (b) undue dampness or deterioration of building elements. What are ‘unhealthy or dangerous conditions’? What constitutes a ‘loss of amenity’? What is ‘undue dampness’? No one can answer these questions. That’s why builders and developers regularly try to dodge responsibility for leaks, by claiming moisture ingress is due to occupants ‘taking too many showers’ or that ‘a bit of moisture is normal’. The ABCB should change this clause to read: A roof and external wall including all penetrations and inclusions must prevent the ingress of water and water vapour to the habitable part of a building for a minimum period of 40 years, without any maintenance.

Specifying durability standards is important. At present, most of the test methods in the NCC are satisfied if a sample component performs once in a lab. This does not deal with issues that occur in practice. We know that any joint depending entirely on a sealant or paint is likely to last for only between seven and ten years if it is exposed to typical Australian sunlight and atmospheric conditions. That is nowhere near good enough on a tall building, where the entire facade will have to be scaffolded to rectify defects. Unfortunately, we can’t sack the past state and federal ministers who have presided over this fiasco. But the least the current politicians can do is to not appoint them to the authorities that are supposed to be cleaning up the mess. For example, former Victorian deputy premier John Thwaites was appointed to lead the Victorian Cladding Taskforce. Thwaites chaired the Australian Building Control Board from 2011 to 2017, appointed by the Rudd government. The problems are widespread In 1996, according to ABS data, nearly one in five (18%) of all Australia’s occupied apartments were four storeys or over. By 2016 this had more than doubled to 38% of all occupied apartments (or 463,557 in total in 2016). All of these buildings have been completed during a period where there has been ‘an overriding focus on affordability’ to use Fahey’s words. If the research we have is any guide, between 80% and 97% of these buildings may have serious defects. If these buildings are defective, the owners and tenants have virtually no recourse. Development companies and building companies are routinely wound up after a building is completed, state governments have withdrawn from the insurance market and private insurers have been proven to provide limited protection—some have now withdrawn indemnity insurance. This situation is so bad, and trust in the industry so damaged, that we were treated last week to the unique spectacle of Meriton boss Harry Triguboff, among others, asking the government to do a better job of regulating builders. What we need now is concerted and urgent action to stop defective buildings being built and a plan to help residential apartment owners rectify

their buildings. (The commercial and government sector by and large can look after itself.) The highest priority is to replace combustible cladding on tall residential buildings. The Victorian government should be congratulated for going forward with a scheme to achieve this. Meanwhile, the BMF and the ABCB are still fiddling while Rome burns. They need to get on with it. Article first published July 19, 2019.

Banning mobile phones in schools: Beneficial or risky? Here’s what the evidence says Neil Selwyn Distinguished Research Professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University

Victorian Education Minister James Merlino’s announcement that mobile phones will be banned for all students at state primary and secondary schools is certainly a bold move. The policy has been justified as a direct response to mounting levels of cyberbullying, concerns about distractions and schools struggling with discipline relating to students’ misuse of phones. Students will have to switch off their phones and store them in lockers from the start of the school day until the final bell. In case of an emergency, parents or guardians can reach their child by calling the school. The minister said: The only exceptions to the ban will be where students use phones to monitor health conditions, or where teachers instruct students to bring their phone for a particular classroom activity. Whether to allow student use of mobile phones in school is certainly a hot topic in education. The Victorian announcement follows a French government ban on mobiles in school in 2018. Debates on the issue are also taking place in Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom. There is considerable public support for banning mobiles. In our recent survey of more than 2,000 Australian adults, nearly 80% supported a ban on

mobile phones in classrooms. Just under one-third supported an outright ban from schools altogether. Support for a classroom ban was remarkably consistent across different demographics, including political affiliation and age group. But while banning phones from classrooms, and from schools altogether, might seem sensible, there are reasons to be cautious. It’s clear we need to carefully consider how we want to make use of digital devices being brought into schools. Previous experience, such as in New York, suggests a blanket ban might introduce even more problems. And the little research evidence that addresses the issue is mixed. What’s the evidence? Reports of cyberbullying have clearly gone up among school-aged children and young people over the past ten years, but the nature and precedents of cyberbullying are complex. Research suggests there is a large overlap between cyberbullying and traditional forms of bullying. It wouldn’t follow, then, that digital devices are somehow causing these behaviours. Cyberbullying also often takes place outside school hours and premises. There is a danger banning phones from classrooms might distract education staff from having to continue with efforts to address the more immediate causes of cyberbullying. There is also growing research literature exploring the links between digital devices and classroom distractions. The presence of phones in the classroom is certainly found to be a source of multitasking among students of all ages—some of which can be educationally relevant and much of which might not be. But the impact of these off-task behaviours on student learning outcomes is difficult to determine. A review of 132 academic studies concluded it is ‘difficult to determine directions and mechanisms of the causal relations between mobile phone multitasking and academic performance’. There is also a strong sense from classroom research that issues of distraction apply equally to laptops, iPads and other digital devices. All told, the sense from academic literature is that the realities of smartphone use in classrooms are complex and decidedly messy. Our own research into how smartphones are being used in Victorian classrooms

highlighted the difficulties teachers face in policing student use (what some teachers described as requiring ‘five minutes of firefighting’ at the beginning of every lesson). Despite this, we also found instances of students using smartphones for a range of beneficial purposes—from impromptu information seeking to live-streaming lessons for sick classmates. These benefits are also reflected in classroom studies elsewhere in the world. Research from Stanford University has demonstrated, for instance, that with proper support and preparation, teachers in even the most challenging schools can ‘build on the ways students already use technology outside of school to help them learn in the classroom’. There is now a whole academic field known as ‘m-Learning’, where researchers have explored the pedagogical and learning advantages of using mobile devices (including phones) in lessons. But what about a blanket ban from school altogether? Experience from elsewhere suggests enforcing a mobile ban in schools might not be as easy as it sounds. What we can learn from others The New South Wales government announced a review of the benefits and risks of mobile phone use in schools in June 2018, led by child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg. At the review’s completion, the government said it would only ban mobile phones from the state’s primary schools, leaving secondary schools free to make their own choice. It noted: We recognise that technology plays an important and increasing role as students progress through their education … We want to give secondary schools the flexibility to balance the benefits and risks of technology in the way that best supports their students. Perhaps the most pertinent example is the ban enforced in New York City from 2006, which was eventually lifted in 2015. The reasons given for this reversal highlighted several of the concerns the new ban in Victoria will likely face. These include practical difficulties of enforcing a ban in the classroom being exacerbated by banning phone use during break times and lunchtimes.

First, it was clear the New York ban was being inconsistently enforced by schools. Better-resourced schools in more affluent areas were more likely to bend the rules and permit student use. In contrast, schools in lower-income areas with metal detectors were more likely to be rigidly enforcing the ban. Other motivations for lifting the ban were concerns about student safety, such as the need for students to contact family members during break times and lunchtimes. Families were also incurring costs to store phones securely outside the school. It was also recognised that teachers should be trusted to exercise their professional judgment as to how they could be making good educational use of devices in their lessons. At the same time, it was reckoned government resources were better directed toward supporting students to learn how to use technology responsibly through cyber-safety lessons. All these reasons are as relevant now to Victorian schools as they were to New York City schools in 2015. The use (and non-use) of mobile phones in schools is certainly an issue we need to have a proper conversation about. But it might not be as clear-cut as the recent policy announcements suggest. Article first published June 26, 2019.

Why dangerous asteroids heading to Earth are so hard to detect Jonti Horner Professor of Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland

Earth is often in the firing line of fragments of asteroids and comets, most of which burn up tens of kilometres above our heads. But occasionally something larger gets through. That’s what happened off Russia’s east coast on December 18, 2018. A giant explosion occurred above the Bering Sea when an asteroid some ten metres across detonated with an explosive energy ten times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. So why didn’t we see this asteroid coming? And why are we only hearing about its explosive arrival now?

Nobody saw it Had the December explosion occurred near a city—as happened at Chelyabinsk in February 2013—we would have heard all about it at the time. But because it happened in a remote part of the world, it went unremarked for more than three months, until details were unveiled at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this week, based on NASA’s collection of fireball data. So where did this asteroid come from? At risk from space debris Our Solar System is littered with material left over from the formation of the planets. Most of it is locked up in stable reservoirs—the Asteroid Belt, the Edgeworth–Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud—far from Earth. Those reservoirs continually leak objects into interplanetary space, injecting fresh debris into orbits that cross those of the planets. The inner Solar System is awash with debris, ranging from tiny flecks of dust to comets and asteroids many kilometres in diameter. The vast majority of the debris that collides with Earth is utterly harmless, but our planet still bears the scars of collisions with much larger bodies. The largest, most devastating impacts (like the one that helped to kill the dinosaurs 65 million years ago) are the rarest. But smaller, more frequent collisions also pose a marked risk. In 1908, in Tunguska, Siberia, a vast explosion levelled more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. Due to the remote location, no deaths were recorded. Had the impact happened just two hours later, the city of St Petersburg could have been destroyed. In 2013, it was a 10,000-tonne asteroid that detonated above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. More than 1,500 people were injured and around 7,000 buildings were damaged, but amazingly nobody was killed. We’re still trying to work out how often events like this happen. Our information on the frequency of the larger impacts is pretty limited, so estimates can vary dramatically. Typically, people argue that Tunguska-sized impacts happen every few hundred years, but that’s just based on a sample of one event. The truth is, we don’t really know.

What can we do about it? Over the past couple of decades, a concerted effort has been made to search for potentially hazardous objects that pose a threat before they hit Earth. The result is the identification of thousands of near-Earth asteroids upwards of a few metres across. Once found, the orbits of those objects can be determined and their paths predicted to see whether an impact is possible or even likely in the future. The longer we can observe a given object, the better that prediction becomes. But, as we saw with Chelyabinsk in 2013 and again in December 2018, we’re not there yet. While the catalogue of potentially hazardous objects continues to grow, many still remain undetected, waiting to catch us by surprise. If we discover a collision is pending in the coming days, we can work out where and when the collision will happen. That happened for the first time in 2008 when astronomers discovered the tiny asteroid 2008 TC3, 19 hours before it hit Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan. For impacts predicted with a longer lead time, it will be possible to work out whether the object is truly dangerous, or would merely produce a spectacular but harmless fireball (like 2008 TC3). For any objects that truly pose a threat, the race will be on to deflect them—to turn a hit into a miss. Searching the skies Before we can quantify the threat an object poses, we first need to know the object is there. But finding asteroids is hard. Surveys scour the skies, looking for faint star-like points moving against the background stars. A bigger asteroid will reflect more sunlight and therefore appear brighter in the sky—at a given distance from Earth. As a result, the smaller the object, the closer it must be to Earth before we can spot it. Objects the size of the Chelyabinsk and Bering Sea events (about 20 and 10 metres diameter, respectively) are tiny. They can only be spotted when passing very close to our planet. The vast majority of the time they are simply undetectable. As a result, having impacts like these come out of the blue is really the norm rather than the exception!

The Chelyabinsk impact is a great example. Moving on its orbit around the Sun, it approached us in the daylight sky, totally hidden in the Sun’s glare. For larger objects, which impact much less frequently but would do far more damage, it is fair to expect we would receive some warning. Why not move the asteroid? While we need to keep searching for threatening objects, there is another way we could protect ourselves. Missions such as Hayabusa, Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx have demonstrated the ability to travel to near-Earth asteroids, land on their surfaces and move things around. From there, it is just a short hop to being able to deflect them—to change a potential collision into a near-miss. Interestingly, ideas of asteroid deflection dovetail nicely with the possibility of asteroid mining. The technology needed to extract material from an asteroid and send it back to Earth could equally be used to alter the orbit of that asteroid, moving it away from a potential collision with our planet. We’re not quite there yet, but for the first time in our history we have the potential to truly control our own destiny. Article first published March 22, 2019.

Drinking water study raises health concerns for New Zealanders Michael Joy Senior Researcher, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington

Michael Baker Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

A Danish study last year reported a link between nitrate in drinking water and the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer. This finding could have important implications for New Zealanders.

New Zealand has one of the highest bowel cancer rates in the world. Recent data show also that drinking water supplies in some parts of New Zealand have nitrate levels more than three times the threshold level for colorectal cancer risk identified in the Danish study. This study and other research raise an important question about the contribution nitrate exposure through drinking water may be making to New Zealand’s high rates of bowel cancer. Health implications of nitrates in drinking water Nitrate fertiliser is added to pasture and crops to accelerate plant growth. Much of it enters waterways either directly with rain and irrigation or indirectly through animal urine. The Danish study, published in the International Journal of Cancer, was extensive both in number of participants and length of follow-up. It included 2.7 million people over 23 years and monitored their individual nitrate exposure levels and colorectal cancer rates. The findings confirmed widely held suspicions that long-term exposure to nitrate may be linked to cancer risk. The investigators propose that the risk results from nitrate converting into a carcinogenic compound (Nnitroso) after ingestion. The research found a statistically significant increase in colorectal cancer risk at 0.87ppm (parts per million) of nitrate-nitrogen in drinking water. At levels over 2.1ppm, there was a 15% increase in risk compared with those who have the least exposure. One key implication is that the current nitrate standard for drinking water used in most countries, including New Zealand, is probably too high. International nitrate standards The cancer risk level (0.87ppm) identified in the study is less than a tenth of the current maximum allowable value (MAV) of nitrate-nitrogen of 11.3ppm (equivalent to 50ppm of nitrate). This level has been in use in many countries for decades and comes from the World Health Organization’s limit. It is based on the risk of ‘blue baby syndrome’ (infantile methaemoglobinaemia, a condition that reduces the ability of red blood cells to release oxygen to tissues)—but not the risk of cancer. Rates of bowel cancer vary across New Zealand, with the highest incidence in South Canterbury, with an age-standardised rate of 86.5 cases

per 100,000 people. Bowel cancer is the second-highest cause of cancer death in New Zealand. Each year around 3,000 people are diagnosed and 1,200 die of the disease. A recent epidemiological review estimated the contribution of a range of modifiable ‘lifestyle’ risk factors to colorectal cancer in New Zealand. In order of importance, these factors are: • • • • •

obesity alcohol physical inactivity smoking consumption of red meat and processed meat.

It would be useful to conduct more research to see if nitrate exposure in drinking water should be added to this list. A recent Fish and Game New Zealand investigation of drinking water supplies in the Canterbury region found nitrate levels in drinking water sourced from groundwater in areas of intensive farming and horticulture are already high and rising. The findings are consistent with data from the regional council Environment Canterbury. The latest groundwater report showed half of the monitored wells have values greater than 3ppm nitrate-nitrogen, more than three times the Danish study’s trigger level for colorectal cancer risk. Christchurch City Council data show that of 420 samples collected from 2011 to 2016, 40% exceeded 0.87ppm. Impact on ecosystems When nitrate enters waterways, it accelerates algae growth. Freshwater scientists have long been pushing for nitrate limits to curtail algal proliferation, but restrictions have been slow and in some regions nonexistent. An important coincidence is that the Australian and New Zealand guideline for healthy aquatic ecosystems for nitrate is at 0.7mg/l nitratenitrogen, close to the level required to stay under the colorectal cancer risk value found in the Danish study. The Canterbury region exemplifies the problems resulting from the failure of central and local government policy in New Zealand to protect

both ground and surface water. These failures cannot be blamed on a lack of awareness as these outcomes were predicted decades ago. For example, in 1986 the Ministry of Works predicted the nitrate contamination we now see as a consequence of regional irrigation schemes. It made it clear that alternative drinking water supplies would have to be found for Canterbury residents. Apart from health and ecological concerns, another worry is that public fears about drinking water safety will prove a boon for water bottling companies, which have free access to New Zealand’s cleanest water. While many New Zealanders face significant and increasing costs for water treatment, water bottlers pay virtually nothing. The only cost, apart from bottling costs, is a one-off 35-year regional council consent fee. This anomaly highlights the urgent need for government to put tougher limits on nitrate loss and face up to dealing with water-ownership issues in New Zealand. In conclusion, surface water in many parts of New Zealand is highly contaminated with nitrates as a result of intensified farming. These elevated levels are undoubtedly damaging freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity, and may also be harming human health. At the very least, public health authorities need to conduct a systematic survey to assess nitrate levels in New Zealand drinking waters, including those that are not part of the routinely monitored networked system. This information could then be used to provide a quantitative estimate of the colorectal cancer burden in New Zealand that can be attributed to this hazard. Article first published January 25, 2019.

According to TV, heart attack victims are rich, white men who clutch their hearts and collapse. Here’s why that’s a worry Deborah Lupton SHARP Professor, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Centre, UNSW

What kind of person do you imagine having a heart attack? Is it a middleaged white businessman clutching his chest? Someone like the Roger

Sterling character from the popular television series Mad Men, who had two heart attacks in season 1? While Mad Men was set in the 1960s, popular culture continues to repeat this stereotype. Can you think of any women in news reports, magazines, literary fiction, television drama or film who have been shown having a heart attack or with any other symptoms of heart disease? If not, this is hardly surprising. Several studies over the past decades have shown that popular media tend to pay little attention to women’s experiences of heart disease compared with men’s. That can have serious consequences. Women may fail to recognise they’re at risk of heart disease or don’t recognise they’re having a heart attack because their experiences don’t match what’s most commonly portrayed. A review of studies analysed how heart disease was portrayed in North American popular media and public health campaigns. It found a white man in a well-paid professional job (the Roger Sterling type) was represented as the typical person at risk from or already dealing with heart disease. Even when the media covered women’s experiences of heart disease, the study showed there was a distinctive approach. North American popular media often portrayed women at risk as white, middle-aged and of high socioeconomic status. That’s despite medical research showing non-white and less advantaged women in the US experience higher levels of heart disease. Women tended to be shown juggling intensive caring roles for their family with stressful employment, placing them at risk of heart disease. Women not in heterosexual relationships were rarely acknowledged. Why does it matter? The gendered nature of media portrayals of heart disease can have serious health effects. Epidemiological research shows cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death for women in wealthy countries such as the US, where it is number one for women, and Australia, where it is number two for women. Yet media coverage often fails to acknowledge these statistics. As a result, women and health-care providers can neglect the warning signs of heart disease. This can lead to lower-quality care, poorer health outcomes and higher rates of potentially avoidable deaths.

A recent Australian study showed women and people aged under 45 years were more likely to be under-treated for their heart disease symptoms. Women were less likely than men to be prescribed the recommended medications, have blood tests for lipids (fats), or have their body mass or waist measured. A spokesperson for the Heart Foundation, which funded the study, suggested one reason is these demographic groups tend not to fit the ‘heart attack victim’ stereotype, and media representations played a role in reinforcing those stereotypes. By contrast, American research found breast cancer has received far more media attention as a health risk to women compared with heart disease, and women are consequently more aware of breast cancer risks. Facebook, digital media doing a better job Members of the public generate masses of information about their experiences of illness, disease and surgery on blogs and social media sites. But hardly any research has looked at what kinds of information about heart disease are shared on these platforms. My research on Australian women’s use of digital health technologies found women often use Facebook groups to find and share health and medical information. Many heart disease or heart failure support groups operate on this platform, some of which have thousands of members. Facebook can be an important forum for attempts to challenge the male face of heart disease. The US-based Women’s Heart Alliance was established to fight for equity in medical treatment to be offered to women with heart disease. An analysis of its Facebook page found female members often complained that medical professionals had ignored their heart disease symptoms when they sought help. The Heart Foundation has for some time now drawn attention to the importance of Australian women, realising they may be at risk from heart disease. A special section of its website provides important information targeted at Australian women about what it’s like for women to experience heart attacks and other symptoms of heart disease. It also outlines risk factors for women and warning signs. Initiatives directed at women by organisations such as the Heart Foundation and the Women’s Heart Alliance, as well as social media groups

such as these Facebook communities, have made a start on challenging the wealthy male face of heart disease. Other forms of popular culture continue to lag well behind. It’s time characters other than the Roger Sterling alpha male, including not only women but men from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, are recognised as being at risk from heart disease too. Article first published August 7, 2019.

CHAPTER FOUR

In Answer to Your Question

How might Labor win in 2022? The answers can all be found in the lessons of 2019 Chris Wallace ARC DECRA Fellow, School of History, Australian National University

The high tide of analysis concerning the Australian Labor Party’s shock 2019 federal election loss has been reached. It looks like so much flotsam and jetsam with the odd big log—leadership popularity, Queensland— prominent among the debris. Sorting through it, making sense of it and weighing the factors driving the result really matters. It matters because decisions influencing the outcome of the next federal election will flow from it. The learner’s error is to grasp onto a couple of factors without considering the full suite, weighing them and seeing the connections between them. What does the full suite look like? 1. Leadership popularity Labor’s Bill Shorten was an unpopular leader, neither liked nor trusted by voters. The shift from Shorten in private to Shorten in leadership mode in the media was comparable to the shift in Julia Gillard when she moved from the deputy prime ministership to prime minister: the charm and wit went missing, replaced by woodenness and lack of relatability. Shorten accepted advice to appear ‘leader-like’, creating a barrier Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who sought to directly connect with voters, was not hampered by. ‘It is often said of democratic politics,’ historian David Runciman has said, ‘that the question voters ask of any leader is: “Do I like this person?” But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: “Would this person like me?”’ Morrison passed and Shorten flunked that test. Shorten generally failed the ‘theatre of politics’. His suits often looked too big, making him look small. Television footage of him jogging in oversized athletic clothes during the campaign made him look small. Poor production of Shorten in these ways diminished perceptions of him as an

alternative prime minister—a professionalism fail that could have easily been fixed but was not. Lesson: Leadership unpopularity costs votes. Successful ‘theatre of politics’ matters. 2. Supporting players’ unpopularity Shorten was weighed down by frontbenchers in the key economic and environment portfolios who fell well short in the performativity stakes too. The camera is not kind to shadow treasurer Chris Bowen. While he developed serious policy chops, partly through sustained study of Paul Keating’s history as a reforming treasurer of historic stature, he also picked up Keating’s hauteur, but without actually being Keating and able to pull it off. The arrogance of Bowen’s franking credits policy comment that ‘if people very strongly feel that they don’t want this to happen they are perfectly entitled to vote against us’ was a defining misstep of the Shorten opposition. It made the leader’s job that much harder. Shadow environment minister Mark Butler is another to whom the camera is unkind. He embodied the soft, urban environmentalist persona that is poison in those parts of Australia where Labor needed to pick up seats. An equally knowledgeable but more knockabout environment spokesperson—Tony Burke, for example—would have been the cannier choice in a ‘climate election’ where regional voters had to be persuaded to accept Labor’s greener policy agenda. Lesson: Appoint frontbenchers capable of winning public support in their portfolios. 3. Misleading polls The maths wasn’t wrong but the models on which the two-party-preferred vote is calculated have been blown up by this election, an event foreshadowed by recent polling miscalls in Britain. Long-time conservative political consultant Lynton Crosby’s presence in the Coalition campaign has been invisible except for the tiny but crucial, and completely overlooked, detail that the Liberals’ polling ‘was conducted by Michael Brooks, a London-based pollster with Crosby Textor who was brought out from the United Kingdom for the campaign’.

The Coalition had better polling. Labor and everyone else were relying on faulty polling that misallocated preferences and uniformly predicted a Labor win—false comfort to Labor, which stayed a flawed course instead of making necessary changes to avoid defeat. Lesson: Focus on the primary vote, the polling figure least vulnerable to modelling assumptions. 4. Media hostile to Labor The Murdoch media have created an atmospheric so pervasively hostile to Labor that it has become normalised. It contributed significantly to Shorten’s unpopularity and Labor’s loss. Its impact is only going to get worse with Australia’s nakedly partisan Fox News-equivalent, Sky After Dark, extending from pay TV to free-to-air channels in regional areas. Lesson: Labor has to be so much better than the Coalition to win in this dire and deteriorating media environment. It needs a concrete plan to match and/or neutralise the Murdoch media’s influence. 5. Regional variations Labor failed to win support in resource-rich states where it needed to pick up seats to win, and suffered a big fall in its primary vote in Queensland. There is a danger of this being overplayed as a factor since, in fact, not much really changed at this election: the Coalition has two more seats and Labor two fewer seats than in the last parliament. Further, there are nuances to be engaged with, even in hard-core resource areas. More Queenslanders, for example, are employed in the services sector in industries like tourism than are employed in the coal sector; and Labor has a strong tradition in Queensland and is capable of renewal. The concerns of both sides need to be woven into a plausible policy path forward, with opportunities for different, deeply held views to be heard and acknowledged as part of the process. Lesson: Develop ‘ground up’, rather than ‘top down’, policies that integrate diverse concerns without overreacting to what was actually a modest change in electoral fortunes. 6. Weak advertising strategy

Labor’s advertising campaign was complacent, unfocused and completely failed to exploit the leadership chaos and chronic division in the Coalition parties for the previous six years. Why? Labor’s decision not to run potent negative ads on Coalition chaos in parallel with its positive advertising campaign is the biggest mystery of the 2019 election—naive in the extreme. It left Labor defenceless in the face of a relentlessly negative, untruthful campaign from the other side. Lesson: Have brilliant ads in a sharply focused campaign that doesn’t fail to hit your opponents’ weaknesses. 7. Massive advertising spending gap Along with the hostile media environment created by the Murdoch press, the unprecedented spending gap between the Labor and anti-Labor sides of politics and its role in the Coalition win has passed largely unremarked. The previous election was bought by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with a $1.7 million personal donation that boosted Coalition election advertising in the campaign’s crucial last fortnight. That now looks like small beer next to the 2019 election’s anti-Labor advertising spending (about A$80 million when one adds the Coalition’s A$20 million spend to the Clive Palmer United Australia Party spend of A$60 million-plus). This is four times the size of Labor’s A$20 million ad budget—a huge disparity. Palmer’s gambit, which creates a friendly environment for him to gain regulatory approval for a Queensland coal mine vastly bigger than Adani’s during this term of parliament, takes Australia into banana republic territory in terms of money politics. Lesson: Australia already needed campaign finance laws to stop the purchasing of elections. It needs them even more urgently now. 8. Large policy target Misleading polling showing it was persistently ahead gave Labor false comfort pursuing a ‘big’ policy agenda—that is, making policy offerings normally done from government rather than opposition. If everything else goes right in an election, and with a popular leader and effective key supporting frontbenchers, this may be possible. That was not the case in the 2019 election. Lesson: When in opposition, don’t go to an election promising tax changes that make some people worse off. Save it for government.

9. Green cannibalisation of the Labor vote The primary vote of the Labor Party (33.5%) and the Greens (9.9%) adds up to 43.4%—a long way off the 50%-plus required to beat the conservatives. For a climate action-oriented government to be elected in Australia, Labor and the Greens are going to have to find a better modus vivendi. They don’t have to like each other; after all, the mutual hatred of the Liberals and Nationals within the Coalition is long-standing and wellknown. But like the Liberals and Nationals, though without a formal agreement, Labor and the Greens are going to have to craft a way forward that forestalls indulgent bus tours by Green icons through Queensland coal seats and stops prioritising cannibalisation of the Labor vote over beating conservatives. Lesson: For climate policy to change in Australia, Labor and the Greens need to strategise constructively, if informally, to get Labor elected to office. 10. Every election is winnable Paul Keating won an ‘unwinnable’ election in 1993 and pundits spoke of the Keating decade ahead. John Howard beat Keating in a landslide three years later, despite being the third Coalition leader in a single tumultuous parliamentary term. Morrison won the 2019 election despite internal Coalition leadership turmoil, political scandals and a revolt of the party’s women MPs against the Liberals’ bullying internal culture. Lesson: Every election is there to be won or lost. Take note of Lessons 1 to 9 to do so. Article first published May 27, 2019.

Why do we not use the magnetic energy the Earth provides to create electricity? Stephen G. Bosi Senior Lecturer in Physics, University of New England

Why do we not use the magnetic energy the Earth provides to create electricity? —student of Ms Brown’s Year 5 science class, Neerim South Primary School, Victoria This sounds like a good idea at first, but it’s not very practical. Before I explain why, let me first explain how we generate electricity in case somebody reading this doesn’t already know. Electricity (let’s say ‘electrical current’) is when electrically charged particles flow, like water in a pipe. There are two kinds of electrical charge —positive and negative. Positive charges attract negative charges, but two particles with the same charge (both positive or both negative) will repel. That means they push apart. In other words, opposites attract. Usually, electrical current is made of tiny negative charges called ‘electrons’, which come from atoms. Everything you can touch is made of atoms. Every atom is surrounded by a cloud of electrons moving randomly like bees around a beehive, attracted to the positive charges in the centre (or ‘nucleus’) of the atom. An electrical current usually happens when electrons leave their atoms and flow to other atoms. How to create an electrical current We produce electrical current in three main ways. The first is batteries. In batteries, an ‘electrochemical reaction’ causes electrons to move from one kind of atom onto another kind of atom with a stronger attraction to electrons. A battery is designed to force these electrons to pass through a wire into your electronic devices. A second way is solar cells. Electrons in something called ‘semiconductors’ (usually silicon) absorb light energy, which causes electrons to move, creating electrical current. But I think you’re asking about the third way, which is usually used to generate electrical currents for power sockets in your house. Spinning a coil of wire in a strong magnetic field This third way is to move an electrical wire quickly through a magnetic field. You need to do this because electrons in a wire cannot feel the

magnetic force unless they are moving. To get enough current for everybody, you must move a lot of wire through a magnetic field. We do this by spinning a coil (containing many loops of wire) quickly in a strong magnetic field. During each turn of the coil, electrons get a kick from the magnetic field, moving them along. This creates electrical current. Machines that do this are called generators. You can spin the coil using falling water (that’s called ‘hydroelectricity’), steam (produced from coal, oil, gas, nuclear energy or heat from the Sun), wind turbines that use the wind, and so on. In most generators, each time the coil does half a turn, electrons get a magnetic kick. In the next half-turn, they get a magnetic kick in the opposite direction. This means the direction of the current keeps swapping rapidly through many cycles. Electrical current that swaps direction is called ‘alternating current’, or AC for short. Batteries produce current that travels only in one direction, called ‘direct current’, or DC for short.

S stands for the ‘south pole’ of the magnet and N for the ‘north pole’. This diagram shows only a single loop of wire spinning in the magnetic field. In a real generator, there would be hundreds or even thousands of loops.

In generators, we are not taking energy out of the magnetic field. The energy going into electrical current is actually coming from the energy used to spin the coil. Scientists call this ‘kinetic energy’. Back to the Earth’s magnetic field

Now (finally!) to answer your question: why don’t we use Earth’s magnetic field to generate electricity? The amount of current a generator produces depends mostly on at least three things: 1. how many loops of wire in the coil 2. how fast the coil is spun 3. how strong the magnetic field is. Earth’s magnetic field is very weak, so you would get very little current from your generator. How weak? Have you ever seen those button-shaped neodymium-ironboron magnets, also called ‘neo-magnets’? (Be careful, they can really pinch you). These magnets are small, but powerful. They have magnetic fields around 6,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic fields inside electrical generators are similar to this. Even fridge magnets have magnetic fields about 200 times stronger than Earth’s. Article first published May 20, 2019, as part of the Curious Kids series.

Explainer: What is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy? Donell Holloway Senior Research Fellow, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University

I recently bought a bedroom bundle (mattress, bed base, pillows and sheets) from a well-known Australian startup for my son, who has flown the nest. Now I’m swamped with Google and Facebook ads for beds and bedding. The week before it was puffer jackets. Ever wonder why and how this happens? The answer is surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism describes a market-driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance of the internet. This activity is often carried out by companies that provide us with free online services, such as search engines (Google) and social media platforms (Facebook).

These companies collect and scrutinise our online behaviours (likes, dislikes, searches, social networks, purchases) to produce data that can be further used for commercial purposes. And it’s often done without us understanding the full extent of the surveillance. Academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2014. She suggests that surveillance capitalism depends on: … the global architecture of computer mediation … [which] produces a distributed and mostly uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other’. The big data economy Since the late 20th century our economy has moved away from mass production lines in factories to become progressively more reliant on knowledge. Surveillance capitalism uses a business model based on the digital world and relies on ‘big data’ to make money. The data used in this process are often collected from the same groups of people who will ultimately be its targets. For instance, Google collects personal online data to target us with ads, and Facebook is likely selling our data to organisations that want us to vote for them or to vaccinate our babies. Third-party data brokers, as opposed to companies like Google or Facebook that hold the data, are also on-selling our data. These companies buy data from a variety of sources, collate information about individuals or groups of individuals, then sell it. Smaller companies are also cashing in on this. Last year, HealthEngine, a medical appointment booking app, was found to be sharing clients’ personal information with Perth lawyers particularly interested in workplace injuries or vehicle accidents. Cambridge Analytica was a wake-up call Last year’s Cambridge Analytica revelations highlighted the extent to which internet companies surveil online activity. Cambridge Analytica’s actions broke Facebook’s own rules by collecting and on-selling data under the pretence of academic research. Its dealings may have violated election law in the United States.

Despite the questionable nature of Cambridge Analytica’s actions, the bigger players and leading actors in surveillance capitalism, Facebook and Google, are still legally amassing as much information as they can. That includes information about their users, their users’ online friends and even their users’ offline friends (known as shadow profiling). A shadow profile is a profile created about someone who hasn’t signed up to a particular social platform, but who might have some data stored about them because they have interacted with someone who has. Platforms make huge profits from this. In this sense, Cambridge Analytica was a small player in the big data economy. Where surveillance capitalism came from Surveillance capitalism practices were first consolidated at Google. It used data extraction procedures and packaged users’ data to create new markets for this commodity. Currently, the biggest ‘Big Other’ actors are Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Together, they collect and control unparalleled quantities of data about our behaviours, which they turn into products and services. This has resulted in astonishing business growth for these companies. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple and Facebook are now ranked in the top six of the world’s biggest companies by market capitalisation. Google, for instance, processes an average of 40,000 searches per second, 3.5 billion per day and 1.2 trillion per year. Its parent company, Alphabet, was recently valued at US$822 billion. Sources of data are increasing Newly available data sources have dramatically increased the quantity and variety of data available. Our expanding sensor-based society now includes wearables, smart home devices, drones, connected toys and automated travel. Sensors such as microphones, cameras, accelerometers and temperature and motion sensors add to an ever-expanding list of our activities (data) that can be collected and commodified. Commonly used wearables like smart watches and fitness trackers, for example, are becoming part of everyday health-care practices. Our activities

and biometric data can be stored and used to interpret our health and fitness status. These same data sets are of great value to health insurance providers. In the US, some insurance providers require a data feed from the policyholder’s device in order to qualify for insurance cover. Connected toys are another rapidly growing market niche associated with surveillance capitalism. There are educational benefits from children playing with these toys, as well as the possibility of drawing children away from screens towards more physical, interactive and social play. But major data breaches linked to these toys have already occurred, marking children’s data as another valuable commodity. In her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zubboff suggests our emerging sensor-based society will make surveillance capitalism more embedded and pervasive in our lives. Article first published June 25, 2019.

Below zero is ‘reverse’. How the Reserve Bank would make quantitative easing work Stephen Kirchner Program Director, Trade and Investment, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

With its official cash rate expected to fall below 1% to a new extraordinarily low close to zero, all sorts of people are saying the Reserve Bank is in danger of ‘running out of ammunition’. Ammunition might be needed if, as during the last financial crisis, it needs to cut rates by several percentage points. This view assumes that when the cash rate hits zero there is nothing more the Reserve Bank can do. The view is not only wrong, it is also dangerous, because if taken seriously it would mean that all of the next rounds of stimulus would have to come from fiscal (spending and tax) policy, even though fiscal policy is probably ineffective long-term, its effects being neutralised by a floating exchange rate. The experience of the United States shows that Australia’s Reserve Bank could quite easily take measures that would have the same effect as

cutting its cash rate a further 2.5 percentage points—that is: 2.5 percentage points below zero.

Source: Reserve Bank of Ausrtalia

In a report released today by the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, I document the successes and failures of the US approach to so-called ‘quantitative easing’ (QE) between 2009 and 2014. It demonstrates that it is always possible to change the instrument of monetary policy from changes in the official interest rate to changes in other interest rates by buying and holding other financial instruments such as long-term government and corporate bonds. The more aggressively the Reserve Bank buys those bonds from private sector owners, the lower the long-term interest rates that are needed to place bonds and the more former owners’ hands are filled with cash that they have to make use of. The US Federal Reserve also used ‘forward guidance’ about the likely future path of its funds rate to convince markets the rate would be kept low for an extended period. It is unclear which mechanism was the most powerful, or whether the Fed even needed to buy bonds to make forward guidance work. However, in a stressed economic environment, it is worth trying both. As it comes to be believed that interest rates will stay low for an extended period, the exchange rate will fall, making it easier for Australian corporates to borrow from overseas and to export and compete with imports. The consensus of the academic literature is that QE cut long-term interest rates by around one percentage point and had economic effects equivalent to cutting the US Federal fund rate by a further 2.5 percentage points after it approached zero.

QE need not have limits … Based on US estimates, Australia’s Reserve Bank would need to purchase assets equal to around 1.5% of Australia’s Gross Domestic Product to achieve the equivalent of a 0.25 percentage point reduction in the official cash rate. That’s around A$30 billion. With over A$780 billion in long-term government (Commonwealth and state) securities on issue, there’s enough to accommodate a very large program of Reserve Bank buying. The bank could also follow the example of the Fed and expand the scope of purchases to non-government securities, including residential mortgage-backed securities. It could also learn from US mistakes. The Fed was slow to cut its official interest rate to near zero and slow to embark on QE in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Its first attempt was limited in size and duration. Its success in using QE to stimulate the economy should be viewed as the lower bound of what’s possible. … even if it becomes less effective as it grows It’s often suggested (although it is by no means certain) that monetary policy becomes less effective when interest rates get very low, but this isn’t necessarily an argument to use monetary policy less. It could just as easily be an argument to use it more. Because there is no in-principle limit to how much QE a central bank can do, it is always possible to do more and succeed in lifting the inflation rate and spending. Fiscal policy may well be even less effective. To the extent that it succeeds, it is likely to push up the Australian dollar, making Australian businesses less competitive. US economist Scott Sumner believes the extra bang for the buck from government spending or tax cuts (known as the multiplier) is close to zero. Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe this month appealed for help from the government itself, asking in particular for extra spending on infrastructure and measures to raise productivity growth. He is correct in identifying the contribution other policies can make to driving economic growth. No one seriously thinks Reserve Bank monetary policy can or should substitute for productivity growth. But it is a good, perhaps a very good, substitute for government spending that does not contribute to productivity growth.

Three myths about QE In the paper I address several myths about QE. One is that it is ‘printing money’. It no more prints money than does conventional monetary policy. It pushes money into private sector hands by adjusting interest rates, albeit a different set of rates. Another myth is that it promotes inequality by helping the rich to get richer. This is a widely believed myth. Former Coalition treasurer Joe Hockey told the British Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014: Loose monetary policy actually helps the rich to get richer. Why? Because we’ve seen rising asset values. Wealthier people hold the assets. But it widens inequality no more than conventional monetary policy, and may not widen it at all if it is successful in maintaining sustainable economic growth. A third myth is that QE leads to excessive inflation or socialism. In the US it has in fact been associated with some of the lowest inflation since the second world war. These days central banks are more likely to err on the side of creating too little inflation than too much. Some have argued that QE in the US is to blame for the rise of left-wing populists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ‘millennial socialism’. But it is probably truer to say that their grievances grew out of too tight rather than too loose monetary policy. QE has been road-tested. We’ve little to fear from it, just as we have had little to fear from conventional monetary policy. Article first published June 18, 2019.

A report claims koalas are ‘functionally extinct’—but what does that mean? Christine Hosking Honorary Research Fellow, University of Queensland

Today the Australian Koala Foundation announced it believes ‘there are no more than 80,000 koalas in Australia’, making the species ‘functionally extinct’.

While this number is dramatically lower than the most recent academic estimates, there’s no doubt koala numbers in many places are in steep decline. It’s hard to say exactly how many koalas remain in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory, but they are highly vulnerable to threats including deforestation, disease and the effects of climate change. Once a koala population falls below a critical point it can no longer produce the next generation, leading to extinction. What does ‘functionally extinct’ mean? The term ‘functionally extinct’ can describe a few perilous situations. In one case, it can refer to a species whose population has declined to the point where it can no longer play a significant role in the ecosystem. For example, it has been used to describe dingoes in places where their numbers have become so reduced they have a negligible influence on the species they prey on. Dingoes are top predators, and therefore can play a significant role in some ecosystems. Our innocuous, leaf-eating koala cannot be considered a top predator. For millions of years koalas have been a key part of the health of our eucalyptus forests by eating upper leaves. And on the forest floor their droppings contribute to important nutrient recycling. Their known fossil records date back about 30 million years, so they may have once been a food source for megafauna carnivores. Functionally extinct can also describe a population that is no longer viable. For example in Southport, Queensland, native oyster reef beds are functionally extinct because more than 99% of the habitat has been lost and there are no individuals left to reproduce. Finally, functionally extinct can refer to a small population that, although still breeding, is suffering from inbreeding that can threaten its future viability. We know that at least some koala populations in urban areas are suffering in this way. Genetic studies on the Koala Coast, located 20km south-east of Brisbane, show the population is suffering from reduced genetic variation. In south-east Queensland, koalas in some areas have experienced catastrophic declines. We also know that koala populations in some inland

regions of Queensland and New South Wales are affected by climate extremes such as severe droughts and heatwaves and have declined by as much as 80%. Exhaustive multidisciplinary koala research continues apace to find ways of protecting wild koala populations and ensuring they remain viable now and into the future. Habitat loss, population dynamics, genetics, disease, diet and climate change are some key areas being studied. How many koalas are there? Koala researchers are often asked: ‘How many koalas are in the wild?’ It’s a hard question to answer. Koalas are not stationary, are patchily distributed throughout an extremely wide range, encompassing urban and rural areas in four states and one territory, and are usually difficult to see. To determine whether each population of koalas scattered across eastern Australia is functionally extinct would require a gargantuan effort. In 2016, in an attempt to determine population trends for the koala within the four states, a panel of 15 koala experts used a structured, fourstep question format to estimate bioregional population sizes of koalas, and changes in those sizes. The estimated percentage of koala population loss in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia was 53%, 26%, 14% and 3%, respectively. The estimated total number of koalas for Australia was 329,000 (within a range of 144,000–605,000), with an estimated average decline of 24% over the past three generations and the next three generations. Since May 2012, koalas have been listed as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory because populations in these regions have declined significantly or are at risk of doing so. In the southern states of Victoria and South Australia, koala populations vary widely from abundant to low or locally extinct. Although not listed as vulnerable, these koalas are also experiencing a range of serious threats, including low genetic diversity. To date, the present ‘vulnerable’ listing has not achieved any known positive results for koala populations in Queensland and New South Wales. In fact, recent research invariably shows the opposite. This is because the key threats to koalas remain and are mostly increasing.

The primary threat is habitat loss. Koala habitat (primarily eucalyptus woodlands and forests) continues to rapidly diminish. Unless it is protected, restored and expanded, we will indeed see wild koala populations become ‘functionally extinct’. We know what comes after that. Article first published May 10, 2019.

Why do spiders need so many eyes but we only need two? Samantha Nixon PhD Candidate, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland

Andrew Walker Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland

‘Can you find out why spiders need six eyes but we only need two?’ —Amos, age 3, Newcastle The first thing we should say is that while it’s true that some spiders have six eyes, most actually have eight. The short answer to your question is that animals have evolved different eyes that best suit the lives they lead. Humans have two eyes that face forward. Our eyes are very good at seeing colours and shapes. Having two big eyes in the front of our head means they can work together to guess how far away something is (we call this ‘judging distance’). That makes it easier for us to catch another animal so we can eat it. Spiders are also hunters and they need eyes that help them find and catch their food. In fact, most spiders can’t see very well and use touch and taste to explore the world. But the kind of eyes they have tells us something about the food they eat and the lives they live. Spider eyes for spider lives Jumping spiders are active hunters, like tiny lions chasing down their prey (bugs). They usually have eight eyes: two very large front eyes to get a clear colour image and judge distance, and extra side eyes to detect when something is moving.

Some spiders make nets to catch their prey. These net-casting spiders also need to see clearly and judge distances. Some have developed huge, scary-looking black eyes that stare straight ahead, so they are nicknamed ogre spiders! These gigantic eyes help the spider to see a wide area and accurately throw down its spiderweb net to catch its prey. Some spiders live in caves that are completely dark, where eyes are no use at all. They have to rely on other senses to find their food in the dark. To save energy making eyes, these spiders lost their eyes during evolution, so now some of them have no eyes at all. So why did most spiders end up with so many eyes? Both human and spider eyes are the result of slowly evolving to help us survive in our different environments. One reason our human eyes are different from spiders is because our bodies and brains are also built differently. For example, spiders don’t have necks. So they can’t turn their heads to look at things like we can. Having extra eyes around their heads is one way that spiders see more of the world around them, helping them to quickly spot prey or a potential predator. Human eyes and spider eyes also do different jobs. Our two eyes are very complex and are good at doing many jobs at once. Spiders have different sorts of eyes that do different jobs. For example, the large central eyes of jumping spiders are best for seeing shapes, but the simple side eyes have the important job of watching out for predators. So a two-eyed spider or even an eight-eyed human isn’t impossible. But the two eyes we have and the eight eyes most spiders have are perfectly suited to help each of us live our lives just the way they are. Article first published June 24, 2019, as part of the Curious Kids series.

CHAPTER FIVE

Teasing Out the Truth

Myth-making, social media and the truth about Leonard Cohen’s last letter to Marianne Ihlen Tanya Dalziell Associate Professor of English and Literary Studies, University of Western Australia

Paul Genoni Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University The note Leonard Cohen wrote to his former lover Marianne Ihlen as she lay upon her death bed became a viral phenomenon after they both died in 2016. But Cohen’s last letter to Ihlen was not entirely what you read.

Ihlen had been hospitalised with leukaemia in Norway when a friend contacted Cohen to inform him of her impending death. He responded with the letter (sent as an email) within hours. Ihlen died several days later, on July 28, having had this farewell message read to her. For a private communication, this letter soon became very public. Already it is canonised, and not only among fans of the Canadian poet, singer and songwriter. It was recently included in a collection of correspondence, Written in History: Letters that Changed the World, edited by English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. Montefiore starts his introduction to the book with the declaration: ‘Nothing beats the immediacy and authenticity of a letter.’ But the history of the Cohen letter’s circulation shows how ‘authenticity’ can be rendered questionable by those seeking to exploit its ‘immediacy’. It also highlights the myth-making around this writer–muse relationship, which gathered fabled resonance after Cohen and Ihlen met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, although the relationship had all but run its course by the decade’s end. Ihlen’s friend who brokered this final exchange with Cohen was filmmaker Jan Christian Mollestad. Within days of Ihlen’s passing, Canada’s national English-language broadcaster, CBC Radio, had tracked down Mollestad. An interview with him was posted on the station’s website, along with a truncated transcription, on August 5, 2016. In response to a question from the interviewer, Mollestad went on to ‘quote’ Cohen’s letter in full.

Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. ‘And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road. The text of this letter, as Mollestad recited it, was immediately picked up by other news outlets. The Guardian and Rolling Stone both ran the story of the letter on August 7, repeating the CBC version in full. The letter’s instant notoriety was born not only of its gentle farewell to the soon-to-be departed Ihlen, but also because of the intimations of Cohen’s own demise. And its consumption was massively enabled by social media. ‘The syntax of love’ A follow-up article in The Guardian praised the letter’s ‘economy of words, the syntax of love, his ability to go straight to the only matter that matters— her death, his mortality, their love—is a thing of beauty and wisdom in itself’. It was a sentiment echoed by many. On November 7, 2016, Cohen died. The letter was immediately resurrected across multiple news and social media outlets. It was used now to focus on Cohen’s prediction that ‘I will follow you very soon’, and his evocation, through the image of Ihlen’s reaching hand, of being drawn towards her in death. Over the following months, the letter was read in ‘tributes’ for the departed singer, frequently paired with a performance of ‘So Long, Marianne’ from Cohen’s 1967 debut album. In November 2017, Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, interpolated the letter into the lyrics of ‘So Long, Marianne’ at a star-studded, first-anniversary tribute show in Montreal. Cohen’s letter, now seemingly endorsed by his family, had become part of his canon. All good … except that the words used in it weren’t Cohen’s. What happened?

Bypassing the abbreviated transcript and listening to the recorded version of the CBC interview with Mollestad is revealing. Journalist Rosemary Barton asks: ‘I know you don’t have it [the letter] in front of you, but I’m sure, given it was written by Leonard Cohen, you can remember part of it?’ In response, it is clear that Mollestad is paraphrasing. He stumbles a number of times, trying several phrases over in different forms as he struggles to accurately recall Cohen’s words. As he reaches the conclusion of the letter as he recalls it, he simply mumbles, ‘something like that’. When the interview was transcribed for the CBC website some editorial ‘smoothing’ of Mollestad’s recalled version of the letter was undertaken to remove his justifiable hesitations. In the process, more minor changes were made. In his book, Montefiore resurrects what is likely an accurate copy of Cohen’s letter, with permission to use it attributed to ‘The estate of Leonard Cohen’. Its differences are, understandably, considerable. It reads in full: Dearest Marianne, I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now. I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude. Leonard Not only is the Mollestad–CBC version a full third longer, but in small but meaningful ways the intent of Cohen’s original was also altered. Cohen’s ‘Dearest Marianne’ strikes a different opening note to the resignation of ‘Well Marianne’. Mollestad has Ihlen reaching out (or back) for Cohen’s hand, whereas Cohen gives himself the possibility of reaching for hers; Mollestad’s introduced reference to Ihlen’s ‘wisdom’ changes the inflection of the relationship between the two protagonists; and Cohen’s reference to the couple facing ‘eviction’ from their bodies alters the constant gentleness and intimacy of Mollestad’s version. Arguably Mollestad’s version is a little more pleasing in some of its phrasing, with ‘so close behind you’ coming more easily than Cohen’s ‘just a little behind you’; and his reference to a ‘good journey’ chiming more

satisfactorily than Cohen’s ‘safe travels’ with the shared closing salutation, ‘see you down the road’. The Cohen letter’s circulation in its original form may change, ever so slightly, how the personal histories of Cohen and Ihlen are remembered. And this is a letter that has been changed by history, as journalists and social media commentators, feeding a voracious news cycle, cast authenticity aside in the process. Although the appearance of the Cohen letter in Montefiore’s volume appears to correct the record, it will be interesting to see which of the two versions survives. It will likely be the one originally posted by the CBC. Not only is it far more widely known and available, but many people will probably find it more appealing and moving than the original. Article first published December 6, 2018.

Team-building exercises can be a waste of time. You achieve more by getting personal Julien Pollack Associate Professor, Project Management Program, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sydney

Petr Matous Associate Dean (Indigenous Strategy and Services), University of Sydney

Someone we know recently told us about a team-building event that proved anything but. The chief executive who arranged it loved mountain biking. So he chose a venue to share his passion with his team. On the day, he shot around the track. Others with less experience took up to three hours longer. He settled in at the bar with a small entourage. Other staff trudged in much later, tired and bloody, not feeling at all like a team. Many of us can recall team-building exercises that seemed like a waste of time. One problem is overcoming the natural human tendency to hang out with those people we already feel comfortable with, just as that chief executive did. We suggest there is a better team-building approach. It doesn’t involve bicycles or obstacle courses or whitewater rafting. It doesn’t even

necessarily involve your whole team. It’s about understanding that teams are social networks built on connections between individuals. It involves deep one-on-one conversations, designed to get people out of their comfort zones. Psychological safety In any situation, be it at a party or at work, most of us naturally tend to gravitate towards those we know. In doing so we strengthen already strong relationships. Familiarity creates psychological safety—the feeling of trust that you are free to be you. Research suggests psychological safety is crucial in the work environment. There is much more to team success than simply focusing on the task at hand. Team members need to talk regularly and be comfortable raising difficult issues. Feeling able to make a mistake and express oneself freely improves team performance and the ability to innovate. Building psychological safety takes time, however, and normal workplace interactions may not be conducive to developing trust naturally. Which is why managers often turn to team-building exercises. Analysing the social network But what exercises work the best? Well-designed team-building should target and strengthen relationships that are for some reason too weak. Such weaknesses can disrupt communication networks by stopping critical information from getting to the people who need it. We have used what is called social network analysis to map relationships in project teams. Social network analysis is used in economics, marketing and management to study the structures of relationships between people and organisations. The focus is on the structural patterns of relationships within the entire team. These patterns can be systemically visualised using network graphs, such as those opposite.

A network diagram of a team can visualise potential communication gaps. Circles stand for team members and lines depict the most comfortable relationships. Team members who are relatively more comfortable with each other are placed closer together.

As researchers we gauged the strength of connections by asking questions such as: ‘How often or how comfortable are you talking to each member of your team?’ The two diagrams opposite are the same group three months apart. In scenario A the group was split into two subgroups that were relatively comfortable communicating with each other. The group had, in fact, been two teams, brought together under a single manager. They were co-located but still largely working as two separate groups. The company’s management thought team-building might help bring the subgroups together, and asked us to help. Scenario B shows the team three months later. There were more connections within the group, with one individual particularly pivotal in unifying the team. What caused this change? Not traditional team-building exercises but ‘targeted self-disclosure exercises’. The 36 questions We began with social network analysis to identify pairs of colleagues whose relationships were critical for the cohesion of the network and would benefit the group by being stronger. We then paired people across the group divide and let those pairs do an exercise involving a structured conversation over one hour, working through a series of 36 increasingly personal questions. The questions start with relatively safe topics, like: ‘Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?’ Near the end of the session, they’re like this:

‘When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?’ You may have heard of this before, as the ‘36 questions that lead to love’. The questions were first published in 1997 as part of research by psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues about how feelings of interpersonal closeness are cultivated by disclosing personal details. They became an internet sensation in 2015, after an article in The New York Times by Mandy Len Caltron pitched them as a technique ‘to fall in love with anyone’. But their applicability is by no means limited to romantic contexts, as our workplace experiments have demonstrated. Changing communication patterns The last question involves you sharing a personal problem with your discussion partner and asking their advice on how to handle it. This is not the sort of thing most people would normally choose to do at work, but our results show its worth. We measured significantly changed patterns of communication over three months. Participating pairs felt more comfortable talking to each other and talked more often—the most common change being from ‘not in the last month’ to ‘once a week’. The participants who got to know each other better also started to talk about work a bit more, as shown in the chart opposite. The change—about half-a-point increase on a six-point frequency scale—was relatively small compared to the dramatic increase in the personal comfort the participants felt towards each other, but even a small change can make a big difference. Importantly, as already shown in the first diagram, the divide between the two cliques decreased by more bridging links being created.

Comparison of changes in relationship strengths over three months among pairs of coworkers who participated in a self-disclosure exercise and those who did not. Comfort is measured on a 10-point scale and frequency on a 6-point scale. Source: Author provided

Risks and rewards For some, there is a clear line between work life and personal life. Not everyone feels comfortable with talking about personal issues, let alone with colleagues to whom they’re not close. It’s true that rapid personal disclosure can be risky. In any such exercise you need to proceed at a pace at which you and your colleague are willing to reciprocate. Though the gradually increasing sensitivity of questions in the facilitated self-disclosure exercise are meant to help achieve this, even then it may not suit everyone—and management shouldn’t compel anyone to feel uncomfortable. But if you are willing to accept a little discomfort, our findings suggest that sharing a bit more in the workplace can be both personally rewarding and beneficial to the group. Article first published July 17, 2019.

Election tip: 23.9% is a meaningless figure, ignore the tax-to-GDP ratio Peter Martin Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and Business and Economy Editor of The Conversation

Expect to hear a lot about tax during the coming leaders’ debates for the federal election. Which is why it’s important to get two things straight. The first is that you can’t argue against a tax by pointing out that it will take money from people. By all means, use that as an argument against taxes in general. It’s true —taxes take money from people. But to oppose better taxing capital gains or tightening up on dividend imputation refunds because they will take money from people is to leave unexplored the more important question of whether those particular tax measures are better or worse than the alternatives. You can’t escape that question by just saying that all taxes are bad—that we ought to collect less. For any amount of tax collected, the next most important question is the way in which it is collected. Low tax and high spending can be the same thing The second thing we ought to get straight is that talk about one side of politics being ‘low tax’ and the other being ‘high tax’ tells us next to nothing. To see this, consider Bill Shorten’s newly announced childcare policy. Labor has promised to spend A$1 billion a year in subsidies to cut the cost of childcare for every family with a combined income of up to A$175,000 and to make it free for working families earning up to A$69,000. But what if, instead of subsidies, it had promised to deliver the A$1 billion via tax rebates, to be paid to parents on proof of their use of childcare? The effect would be the same, although the method of payment would be more complicated. Childcare would be just as supported, and just as supported from the public purse, but one policy would be called ‘big spending’, while the other would be called ‘low tax’. Take the quiz Here’s a quiz: is the Private Health Insurance Rebate a tax break (and counted in the budget as a contribution toward lower taxes and smaller government) or is it a spending measure (and counted in the budget as boosting the size of government)?

What about the Family Tax Benefit? Or the film industry tax rebates or the Seniors and Pensioners Tax Offset or the Low Income Tax Offset or the existing Child Care Rebate? It’s okay. You’re not expected to know. The answer varies from case to case. The point is that it is silly to claim that tax cuts are good, and government spending is bad, when in many cases each could be easily classified as the other. The signature measure in the April budget is a case in point. It’s a tax offset of up to A$1,080 per person to be paid out with tax returns after July 1. It’ll push billions into the economy, just as the Rudd government’s cash bonuses during the global financial crisis did. But Rudd’s payments were categorised as spending; these payments will be categorised as tax cuts, which means they will keep down the tax-to-GDP ratio. Which means it is silly to talk about the tax-to-GDP ratio, as the government insists on doing. That speed limit, where did it come from? Labor was keen enough to do it while it was in office, boasting in its final budget in 2013 that its tax-to-GDP ratio was lower than in the Howard years, and lower than it had been before the global financial crisis, as if that was an achievement to be proud of. It wasn’t. The ratio was lower than during the mining booms because fewer tax dollars were rolling in, and it was lower than before the financial crisis because the economy was weaker. The Coalition has hardened the tax-to-GDP ratio into a target. As treasurer, Scott Morrison spoke last year of ‘a speed limit on taxes in our budgets, that requires that taxes do not grow beyond 23.9% of our economy’. Why 23.9%? Well, in the Coalition’s first budgets it wasn’t a target at all, merely an operating assumption used by the Treasury for long-term forecasting. As it explained in the 2017 budget papers: A tax-to-GDP ‘cap’ assumption is adopted for technical purposes and does not represent a government policy or target. It is based on the average tax-to-GDP ratio over the period from the introduction of the GST and to just prior to the global financial crisis.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have begun talking about 23.9% as if it’s a commitment, a pledge, even though it would be hard to keep if the economy picked up (and probably unwise to keep), and even though it is fairly meaningless given the ease with which changes in spending can be classified as changes in tax and the other way around. Treasury makes pretty clear what it thinks about the measure in the back of Budget Paper 1. That’s where it sets out the history of the important budget measures and its forecasts. You won’t find the tax-to-GDP ratio in the first two tables. Instead, it details ‘revenue to GDP’, which is a much more relevant measure because it includes income from all sources—fees as well as taxes, and income from Future Fund earnings, which are revenue too. Think like Treasury Early in his time as shadow treasurer, Labor’s Chris Bowen bought into the tax-to-GDP debate, challenging the Coalition to keep the ratio below such and such per cent. He isn’t doing so now. It’d be wise to ignore talk of the tax-to-GDP ratio in the coming leaders’ debates. Focus instead on what they’re planning to do and how they are planning to pay for it. You’ll get a handle on how to vote. Article first published April 29, 2019.

NZ has dethroned GDP as a measure of success, but will Ardern’s government be transformational? David Hall Senior Research Officer—Social Science and Public Policy, The Policy Observatory, Auckland University of Technology

When you’re in politics, words are a high-stakes game. Voters and journalists hold you to them and there is a risk in using words that are hard to live up to. This is particularly true for politicians whose reputation is founded on sincerity and authenticity.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern saddled herself with the word ‘transformational’. She used it heavily in the heady days of the 2017 election campaign, although less so in the compromised reality of a coalition government. Still, it is the aspiration she is held to. The 2019 wellbeing budget is held to it by association. But how do we know transformation when we see it? Beyond the status quo Obviously, transformation must go beyond the status quo. But to be transformative, it must also go beyond mere reform. A reform agenda recognises that trouble is brewing, that social, economic and environmental trends are on the wrong track. It accepts that major changes to policy and lifestyle may be required. As sustainable development research shows, it does ‘not locate the root of the problem in the nature of present society, but in imbalances and a lack of knowledge and information’. It tends to reach for existing policy levers and to hang its hopes on technical solutions. It reacts to the toughest choices by devising new frameworks for analysing them. The well-being budget easily goes this far. Finance Minister Grant Robertson is entitled to say, as he did in his budget speech, that this is a government ‘not satisfied with the status quo’. Most important, New Zealand’s well-being approach decentres GDP as the principal measure of national success, using instead the multidimensional living standards framework. In doing so, Ardern’s government has acted upon doubts that are as old as GDP itself, and gained traction in the years after the 2008 global financial crisis. As economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argued in their influential analysis of what went wrong: What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted. By arguing for more nuanced national accounting that captures quality of life, they made a case for reform that Ardern’s government is putting into practice.

Beyond reform A transformative agenda goes further. It sees problems as rooted in the present structure of society. It isn’t only about managing the flaws and oversights of the dominant system, but overturning the system itself. This involves an order of ambition that the well-being budget lacks. Consider, for instance, its centrepiece investment: NZ$455 million (over four years) for a new frontline service for mental health. This is vital support for those in need, complemented by wider reforms recommended by He Ara Oranga, the report of the inquiry into mental health and addiction. But its primary focus is to address existing suffering. It doesn’t aim for the socioeconomic or historical causes of many people’s misery and strain. Other aspects of government policy may do, such as the Provincial Growth Fund, by creating meaningful jobs in places where opportunities are low and shame or whakamā is high. But whether you think this is adequate depends on how you answer the big questions about the structure of the economy, distribution of power and decolonisation. This is undoubtedly the territory of transformational politics, but the well-being budget only touches the edges. Just transitions There is another word for change that the prime minister sides with: not ‘transformation’ but ‘just transition’. This is the idea that socioeconomic change should be guided by principles of justice, such as equity and inclusivity, to minimise the disruption that change can bring. The aim of a just transition is to achieve revolution without revolt. The concept is prominent in climate change policy—and the well-being budget delivers projects to support these objectives, including a clean energy development centre in Taranaki, sustainable land-use funding to enable the shift to low-emissions landscapes, and an extended budget line for just transition planning. But Ardern obviously sees the idea of a just transition as more broadly relevant, contrasting it with the ‘rapid, uncaring change’ of structural reforms in 1980s New Zealand. To my mind, this better captures the temper of this government—not transformational, but potentially transitional. As the well-being approach is bedded in—not only with policy wonks but also business and community leaders and the voting public—it will

loosen GDP’s grip on the minds of decision-makers. GDP will be repositioned as only one among many indicators that ought to inform political judgment. Then political leaders can be confidently ambitious, not only with their words, but also their actions. Article first published June 7, 2019.

These 5 foods are claimed to improve our health. But the amount we’d need to consume to benefit is … a lot Emma Beckett Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz Epidemiologist and PhD Candidate, University of Wollongong

Food gives us the nutrients we need to survive, and we know a balanced diet contributes to good health. Beyond this, many people seek out different foods as ‘medicines’, in the hope that eating certain things might prevent or treat particular conditions. It’s true many foods contain ‘bioactive compounds’—chemicals that act in the body in ways that might promote good health. These are being studied in the prevention of cancer, heart disease and other conditions. But the idea of food as medicine, although attractive, is easily oversold in the headlines. Stories tend to be based on studies done in the lab, testing concentrated extracts from foods. The effect seen in real people eating the actual food is going to be different to the effects in a petri dish. If you do the maths, you’ll find you actually need to eat enormous amounts of particular foods to get an active dose of the desired element. In some cases, this might endanger your health, rather than protecting it. These four foods (and one drink) show the common healing claims around the foods we eat don’t always stack up. Cinnamon Cinnamon, which contains a compound called cinnamaldehyde, is claimed to aid weight loss and regulate appetite.

There is evidence cinnamaldehyde can reduce cholesterol in people with diabetes. But this is based on studies of the chemical in large doses—not eating the spice itself. These studies give people between 1 and 6 grams of cinnamaldehyde per day. Cinnamon is about 8% cinnamaldehyde by weight—so you’d have to eat at least 13 grams of cinnamon, or about half a supermarket jar, per day. That’s much more than you’d add to your morning porridge. Red wine The headlines on the health benefits of red wine are usually because of a chemical in grape skins called resveratrol. Resveratrol is a polyphenol, a family of chemicals with antioxidant properties. It has been claimed resveratrol protects our cells from damage and reduces the risk of a range of conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease. There is some limited evidence that resveratrol has benefits in animal models, although studies done in humans have not shown a similar effect. It varies by wine, but red wine contains about 3 micrograms (about 3 millionths of a gram) of resveratrol per bottle. The studies that have shown a benefit from resveratrol use at least 0.1 grams per day (that’s 100,000 micrograms). To get that much resveratrol, you’d have to drink roughly 200 bottles of wine a day. We can probably all agree that’s not very healthy. Blueberries Blueberries, like red wine, are a source of resveratrol, but at a few micrograms per berry you’d have to eat more than 10,000 berries a day to get the active dose. Blueberries also contain compounds called anthocyanins, which may improve some markers of heart disease. But to get an active dose you’re looking at 150 to 300 blueberries per day. That’s more reasonable, but still quite a lot of fruit—and expensive. Chocolate The news that dark chocolate lowers blood pressure is always well received. A chemical in chocolate, theobromine, has been shown to lower

blood pressure in doses of about 1 gram of the active compound, but not at lower doses. Depending on the chocolate, you could be eating 100g of dark chocolate before you reached this dose. Chocolate is a discretionary food, or ‘junk food’. The recommended serve for discretionary foods is no more than 600 kilojoules per day, or 25g of chocolate. Eating 100g of chocolate would be equivalent to more than 2,000kJ. Excess kilojoule consumption leads to weight gain, and being overweight increases risks of heart disease and stroke. So these risks would likely negate the benefits of eating chocolate to lower your blood pressure. Turmeric Turmeric is a favourite. It’s good in curries, and recently we’ve seen hype about the turmeric latte. Stories pop up regularly about its healing power, normally based on curcumin. Curcumin refers to a group of compounds, called curcuminoids, that might have some health benefits, like reducing inflammation. Inflammation helps us to fight infections and respond to injuries, but too much inflammation is a problem in diseases like arthritis, and might be linked to other conditions like heart disease or stroke. Human trials on curcumin have been inconclusive, but most use curcumin supplementation in very large doses of 1 to 12 grams per day. Turmeric is about 3% curcumin, so for each gram of turmeric you eat you get only 0.03g of curcumin. This means you’d have to eat more than 30g of turmeric to get the minimum active dose of turmeric. Importantly, curcumin in turmeric is not very bioavailable. This means we absorb only about 25% of what we eat, so you might actually have to eat well over 100g of turmeric every day to get a reasonable dose of curcumin. That’s a lot of curry. What to eat then? We all want food to heal us, but focusing on single foods and eating mounds of them is not the answer. Instead, a balanced and diverse diet can provide foods with a range of different nutrients and bioactive compounds. Don’t get distracted by quick fixes; focus instead on enjoying a variety of foods.

Article first published May 15, 2019.

Is it true dogs don’t like to travel? Paul McGreevy Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney

‘Hello. My dad says that dogs don’t like to travel. Is that true?’ —Ankush, India The answer depends a bit on the dog and what you mean by travel. Most dogs don’t like to travel, and those that do have usually had to learn to like it. In the wild, being too adventurous could get a dog killed, so dogs may have mostly evolved to be cautious and remain close to what is familiar. That said, dogs may see some kinds of travel as a chance to find things they want—like food or a mate. Home sweet home It’s normal for dogs to value the territory they know well, where they know they can find food, water and shelter easily. It is also home to the thing most precious to them: their social group. That is, the other dogs or humans they know and like. Yes, dogs probably see the humans they live with as their social group. Most dogs have what scientists call a ‘home range’. That’s the area in which they feel comfortable. At the core of the home range is its den (for example, your dog may see your home and garden as its den). Beyond that core, there’s what we call the periphery—that might be the neighbour’s front yard, the park down the road, and your street. Dogs can recognise their home range by its smell. Have you ever noticed a dog weeing on trees and lamp posts or scraping his hind paws against the ground? That’s how dogs mark their territory with their own scent. Many humans love to travel, but for dogs travelling too far from home comes with risks. Dogs that wander into another’s territory might be outnumbered by other dogs, or overpowered by a stronger individual. Or they may return to their home range only to discover that the social group

changed while they were away and they no longer fit in as well as they used to. Travelling with friends When we exercise dogs in unfamiliar areas, they may love the challenge of all those new places and smells to explore. Many dogs are clearly joyful as they explore all this with us, their social groups, but when alone their response may be very different. For domestic dogs, exercise beyond the den (the house and garden) is exciting because it offers so many opportunities: to play, pee and poo in new places, to explore and eat food, to meet and greet new dogs, mark territory and find a mate. So some dogs will take the chance to wander, if they really need to do any of those things. Car travel—a mixed blessing Many puppies and dogs who are not used to cars will get carsick. But, then again, cars can also be a way for dogs to encounter a cascade of odours, see new dogs, or score a stimulating walk in a new territory. Car rides can bring enormous joy to some dogs once they get used to car travel. For some dogs, hopping into the car is associated with a trip to the park or beach. For others, it reminds them too much of a trip to the vet where they may have had a scary experience, like having an injection. Dogs learn to mistrust the smell of the vet’s waiting room. Some vets now use calming pheromones in their clinics. Pheromones are special chemicals that can affect mood. So, whether or not dogs like to travel might depend a lot on the individual dogs and their life experience. It may depend on whether travel reminds them of fun-filled trips or fear-filled ones. Despite what some movies ask us to believe, very few dogs ever get the travel bug and want to explore the world. At the end of the day, they’re usually happiest at home. Article first published January 7, 2019, as part of the Curious Kids series.

Separating the art from the badly behaved artist—a philosopher’s view Janna Thompson Professor of Philosophy, La Trobe University

When actor Kevin Spacey was accused of attempted sexual assault of a teenage boy, his role in the Ridley Scott film, All the Money in the World, was erased and reshot with Christopher Plummer. When the celebrated Torres Strait Island painter Dennis Nona went to jail for raping a 12-yearold girl, Australian art galleries responded by taking his works off their walls and putting them into storage. R. Kelly’s concerts were cancelled and his RCA contract was not renewed because of his alleged sexual abuse of underage women. The history of art is full of artists who were cruel, exploitative, prejudiced or predatory. Picasso mistreated women, the Renaissance painter Caravaggio was a murderer. Wagner was an anti-Semite, Alfred Hitchcock tried to ruin Tippi Hedren’s career as an actress because she refused his sexual advances. The #MeToo movement has thrown a spotlight on contemporary cases of artists and producers harassing and bullying those in their power. Those who harass or rape should be exposed and punished. The licence to break moral rules that genius is sometimes thought to bestow on artists has to be revoked. But should the character of an artist affect how we judge their works? Should the works or performances of wrongdoing artists be censored, shunned, or locked away? Should good behaviour be a criterion for exhibiting an artist’s works? ‘Once we start removing paintings from walls, where do we stop?’ asks arts editor and art historian Ashleigh Wilson. Shunning art because of the behaviour of the artist offends against traditional assumptions about the value of art and the relationship between artists and their works. We are supposed to value artistic expression and oppose attempts to suppress artistic works even when people are deeply offended by their content. Piss Christ, a photograph by Andres Serrano of a crucifix

submerged in a tank of his urine, was exhibited in galleries even though many Christians viewed it as sacrilegious. But if it is wrong to censure art or refuse to display it because of its content, how can it be right to shun it because of the behaviour of the artist? What’s the difference? The perils of biography The view that we shouldn’t judge art because of the behaviour of the artist is backed up by common ideas about how we should appreciate art. A work of art or a performance is supposed to have value and meaning in its own right. It’s supposed to be judged for what it is and not its relation to extraneous factors. This view allows that the biography of the artist can be used to provide an insight into the work, but the life of the artist is not supposed to affect our judgment of the aesthetic value of his or her works. Artists themselves warn against taking their works as a reflection of who they are. When asked whether his films helped him work through his life dilemmas, Woody Allen denied any relation between his life and his works. ‘Movies are fiction. The plots of my movies don’t have any relationship to my life.’ If works of art belong to a realm separated off from the life of the artist they can’t be polluted by the bad things artists do. But the separation of life and character from art is far from complete. In his new book, On Artists, Ashleigh Wilson finds a scene in Allen’s Annie Hall that suggests the wrong kind of attitude to children’s sexuality. This scene is especially disturbing because of Allen’s daughter Dylan’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her as a child, which Allen denies. Wilson also cites dialogue in Hitchcock’s Marnie that seems to reveal his perverse obsession with Hedren. Some of R. Kelly’s lyrics can be interpreted as condoning sexual harassment and it is not difficult to find anti-Semitic or pro-nationalist elements in Wagner’s operas. But does this matter? Works of art now regarded as classics frequently contain assumptions about race or the roles of women that we now reject. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice makes anti-Semitic assumptions about Jews, and The Taming of the Shrew has its misogynous moments. But these do not significantly detract from the value we find in these works.

We should be willing to accept that artists are not free from the prejudices of their culture, from blindness to its prejudices, or from faults of character. We should make allowances for that when we evaluate their art and not let ourselves be distracted from appreciating its values. When Spotify took R. Kelly off its playlist it faced the objections of fans who value his music. The brilliance of Michael Jackson’s music transcends accusations of paedophilia levelled against him. Many people, including Wilson, believe that Wagner’s works deserve veneration despite their dubious elements. When is a ban justified? The distinction between art and the artist breaks down when the intention of the artist is to support a racist or sexist ideology. Leni Riefenstahl used her talents as a filmmaker to celebrate Hitler’s regime. D.W. Griffith defended the prejudices of white Southerners in Birth of a Nation. It also breaks down when the artist is a celebrity and a role model. One museum director defended her refusal to exhibit Nona’s art because showing it would endorse his status as a role model in his Indigenous community. Football players are suspended for acting badly. Why not penalise artists by taking their art out of circulation? If a work of art vilifies a group or incites violence then there are legal as well as moral reasons for banning or censoring it. If showing an artist’s work impacts on his community and causes serious distress to his victims, then these people should have a say about what should be done with it. But a ban on a work of art is justifiable only so long as the danger or harm exists. Nona has apologised for his deeds and has tried to rehabilitate himself. There is no good reason why his works should not reappear on gallery walls. The #MeToo movement provides the most plausible reason for shunning or boycotting the works of artists who rape, assault or bully others. This movement arose from women’s complaints about their treatment by powerful men as actors and producers—men whose position and fame gave them the power, the women allege, to wreck careers and get away with sexual assault and harassment. Punishing these men through the courts is a difficult course of action. The charges are often hard to prove and cultural acceptance of bad

behaviour by artists sometimes makes it difficult for judges, juries and witnesses to regard their acts as serious wrongs. What is needed, most #MeToo advocates agree, is a cultural change. An effective way of changing the culture of artists is to prevent them from exhibiting their works or performing their roles. Kevin Spacey’s removal from All the Money in the World (despite the fact that he has pleaded not guilty to the charge that he assaulted an 18-year-old busboy in a Nantucket bar) sent the message that allegations of sexual assault would no longer be overlooked or tolerated. It was both a punishment and an expression of moral distaste. It vindicated the status of victims and it warned others to avoid offending. A dangerous way to achieve cultural change But this strategy for achieving cultural change has obvious dangers. Wilson is right to worry about where we are going when we start removing pictures from gallery walls or preventing actors from performing. If the character of the artist becomes a criterion for judging art then the door is open to the exclusion of artists because they belong to a despised group or because they have said or done something that many people do not like. Removing or censoring artworks can also be an unfair way of achieving a moral goal, especially when the complicity of others has encouraged wrongdoing by artists. In an interview after Hitchcock’s death, Tippi Hedren refused to allow the wrong he did to override her judgment about his talent and contribution as a film director: ‘I still admire the man for what he was.’ The distinction she insists on making is worth preserving. We should expose the wrongdoing of artists, but we should not be prevented from admiring their works. Article first published May 10, 2019, as part of the Friday Essay series. (The charges against Kevin Spacey were dropped in July 2019.)

CHAPTER SIX

From Cradle to Grave: Key Policy Challenges

Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that Jen Jackson Education Policy Lead, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University Leading up to the 2019 federal election, the Labor opposition campaigned on an ambitious suite of early childhood policies, including 15 hours of funded preschool for every Australian three-year-old and A$4 billion to increase childcare subsidies.

The Coalition government said little about early childhood reform. It did put in place a reformed set of childcare subsidies that came into force in July 2018. These streamlined a previously complex funding system and benefited some (but not all) low-income families. Yet Australia is still far from having an early childhood sector that delivers what children and families need. Here’s where the next government needs to look to ensure an effective, affordable early childhood sector for Australia. 1. Invest more in preschool, keep an eye on evidence The evidence for the benefits of quality preschool is well established. So far, the Coalition has committed to another 12 months of preschool funding for four-year-olds. But there is a strong case for long-term investment. School readiness among Australian children has improved since the first national partnership agreement on preschool funding for four-year-olds in 2009. Ongoing funding would also improve efficiency in preschool provision by allowing providers to plan ahead. Evidence shows the earlier children have access to quality early childhood services, the better their longer-term learning outcomes are likely to be. But the jury is still out about what kind of model will best provide these opportunities to Australian children. Australia has a complex early childhood sector. An estimated 57.8% of Australian three-year-olds are already enrolled in preschool—although the Australian Bureau of Statistics advises caution in reporting preschool data. This is because ‘preschool’ can mean many things, including stand-alone services, programs in childcare, or preschools located in schools.

Different models of preschool for three-year-olds are emerging across Australia. Victoria is providing subsidised preschool to three-year-olds in all settings (including long daycare); NSW is funding community preschools only; while the ACT is yet to release details. Other jurisdictions are targeting preschool to three-year-olds who require additional support. The federal government would be smart to keep a close eye on the relative costs and benefits arising from different models as an evidence base to guide future investment. 2. Ensure every educator can help children learn Preschools aren’t the only places Australian children can learn. Of all Australian children aged 0 to 5, around 43% receive some kind of government-subsidised early childhood education and care. But there is a widening gap in participation in early childhood services based on family income. Fewer than one-quarter (22.4%) of young children from low-income families used preschool or childcare services in 2017, with a steady decline over the last five years. While it may be too soon to see an impact from the Coalition’s childcare subsidy reforms, the government should aim for this figure to increase. There’s also plenty to be done to keep improving quality across the early childhood sector. Again, wide gaps exist across income groups. Early childhood service quality is lower in less wealthy communities, especially in the crucial area of educational quality. The Australian E4Kids study—which followed around 2,500 children for five years—found only 7% of disadvantaged children received highquality educational support compared to 30% of the wealthiest children. Expanding access to preschool is one way to improve the teaching quality younger children receive. In 2016, 92% of preschools met or exceeded national standards in their educational program, compared to 74% of long daycare services. One reason is that most preschool educators have degrees, and higher qualifications are associated with higher-quality teaching. Effective preschool for three-year-olds requires skilled teachers who can design specific programs to meet the learning needs of younger children. If the federal government’s appetite for preschool investment is limited, it could also look into developing the skills of the many educators who do

not hold university degrees. They make up around 80% of the early childhood workforce. Australia urgently needs a national strategy to support all educators to develop the skills they need to provide children with high-quality learning experiences. The national training package for vocational early childhood qualifications is being updated alongside the major review of the Australian Qualifications Framework, which provides the blueprint for Australia’s entire tertiary education sector. This is the perfect time for governments to take a fresh look at the full suite of education and training options for professionals working with Australia’s youngest children. 3. Ensure investment meets its goals Government investment in Australia’s early childhood sector has risen dramatically over the last decade. Quality reforms, such as higher ratios of adults to children, explain part of the increase. The Coalition’s childcare subsidy package also represented a A$2.5 billion increase in government investment. Yet educators’ wages have remained unacceptably low over this period. Staff turnover has also increased—the proportion of educators employed for three years or less (the period of time many children attend childcare) has climbed from 30.3% to 38.2% from 2010 to 2016. This is not only inefficient but undermines the stable, caring relationships that help children learn. The government should look closely at how investment is flowing through the early childhood sector, especially appropriate models of support for for-profit providers. The profitability of early childhood services varies widely, but corporate providers recorded healthy profits during the last decade of government investment. However, this has recently eased due to oversupply. Given profitability and quality don’t always mix, funding models must ensure every dollar delivers benefits for children and families. Targeted programs can also help ensure investment reaches those most in need. The evidence base for Australian-based targeted early childhood programs is growing, building on international research.

One example is the Early Years Education Program, providing 145 vulnerable children with three years of tailored high-quality early childhood education and care. This program is already showing an impact on children’s IQ. Early childhood advocates have long encouraged the two major parties to adopt policies that evidence shows will deliver the best opportunity for Australian children to thrive. The challenge is for the Coalition government to design a package of support for early learning that optimises investment and gets the best out of all the types of early childhood services children and families use. Article first published June 4, 2019.

More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help Andrew Norton Higher Education Program Director, Grattan Institute

Enrolments in Australian public universities boomed during the last decade. This was due to a government policy known as ‘demand-driven funding’. Between 2012 and 2017, this policy allowed universities to enrol unlimited numbers of domestic bachelor-degree students. In 2017, 45% more students started a bachelor degree than a decade earlier. Boosting higher education participation rates, particularly for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, was one of the policy’s aims. But the Productivity Commission has today given the demand-driven system a ‘mixed report card’. The report estimates that six in ten school leavers now go to university by age 22, up from a little over half in 2010. But student outcomes deteriorated from their pre-demand-driven peaks. Drop-out rates increased while employment rates decreased (although the most recent data suggest positive trends). It’s important to note, however, that higher education participation rates have been trending up in Australia and around the world for decades,

despite significant differences in funding policies. Demand-driven funding just led to a particularly quick surge in Australia. As student enrolments in university are likely to increase, so are the downsides that come with this. The system needs to put in place better measures to help students at risk of dropping out. The Productivity Commission’s report Many of the broad conclusions of the report, The Demand Driven University System: a mixed report card, are not new. But the Productivity Commission explored them in depth by tracking young Australians through their final years of school and up to age 25, using the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY). The report used the LSAY data to perform what’s known as a multivariate regression analysis to calculate the ‘additional students’—the students who probably wouldn’t have gone to university without demanddriven funding. It compared them to ‘other students’, who would have enrolled anyway. Additional student analysis can be useful because, at a system level, good outcomes can hide poor results for more vulnerable groups of students.

Source: Productivity Commission, The Demand Driven University System: a mixed report card

The analysis revealed significant differences between the two groups. Nearly three-quarters of additional students had no ATAR or an ATAR below 70, compared to just over one-quarter of other students. Additional students were more likely to come from a low socioeconomic status background (which was one of the aims of demanddriven funding), to have attended a government school, and to be the first in their family to attend university. But additional students were less likely to come from a regional area. Compared to the students who would have gone to university anyway, overall outcomes for additional students were less positive. They were more likely to drop out. If they did finish their course, they were slightly less likely to work in a professional or managerial job than other students.

On average, additional students earned just over A$100 a week less at age 25 than other students. Rates of full-time work were identical for the two groups at 75%. Because university participation rates are trending upwards anyway, the relevance of additional student analysis goes beyond debates about demanddriven funding, which Labor promised to restore if it won office in the May 2019 federal election. Each wave of expansion brings similar concerns about entry requirements and outcomes, which means we need to think about how to better help at-risk students. How to help students at risk On the Productivity Commission’s analysis, a clear majority of additional students did benefit. Most of them (68%) completed a course, while 59% found the professional or managerial work to which university students typically aspire. But additional students also faced a higher risk, compared to other students, of not getting the hoped-for outcomes. Although that greater risk is not surprising, we should do what we can to reduce it. The Productivity Commission’s report observes improved school achievement would make a difference to poor outcomes, such as university drop-out rates. This is because, on its analysis, weaker academic preparation is the source of much—but not all—of the participation and achievement gap between student groups. But the commission also acknowledges improving school achievement is not easy. It has been the generally unsuccessful goal of schools’ policy for a long time. There are other, easier, ways to manage student risk, which can be done quickly and would provide immediate benefits. Diverting students with weaker academic backgrounds to preparatory courses before starting a bachelor degree can help. These courses were omitted from the demand-driven system and either had capped student numbers or high fees. They should be made more accessible. We can also give students better advice on the practicalities of study. Studying part-time creates a high risk of not completing a course. If students knew how high that risk was—less than 30% of bachelor-degree students who continuously study parttime finish a course—they might find a way to enrol full-time, or decide to do something else.

When study plans aren’t working out, we can do more to protect students from unnecessary costs and debt. The report suggests course counselling so that students ‘fail fast, fail cheap’. But we can also act before students fail. Universities could be required to check that students are on track by the census date—the day usually about four weeks into the teaching term when students become liable to pay their student contribution. If students aren’t actively studying, or have no realistic prospect of passing a subject, they should be encouraged to drop it before they incur a debt. While many students take advantage of the census date, Grattan Institute research found it was not as well understood as it should be. As a result, students end up paying for subjects they don’t want to complete. A simple name change to highlight the census date’s financial significance, such as ‘payment date’, would help. Practical measures such as these would preserve the benefits of expanded access to higher education, while reducing its costs and risks. They are worth doing whether we keep current government controls on enrolment expansion or go back to the demand-driven system. Article first published June 17, 2019.

Jobs are changing, and fast. Here’s what the VET sector (and employers) need to do to keep up Pi-Shen Seet Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

Ann-Louise Hordacre Deputy Director Operations, Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, Flinders University

Janice Jones Associate Professor, College of Business, Government and Law, Flinders University

John Spoehr Director, Australian Industrial Transformation Institute, and Pro-Vice Chancellor Research Impact, Flinders University

Technological developments are expected to majorly, and rapidly, disrupt or change the nature of employment. The multiplier effect of these disruptions

interacting with each other has led to what has been termed the fourth industrial revolution (i4.0). The first industrial revolution took us from agrarian to industrial economies. The second used resources like electricity and steel to create mass production. The third refers to technology advancing from analogue and mechanical devices to the digital technology available today. The fourth industrial revolution represents ways technology has become embedded in societies by the fusion of technologies, or what is known as cyber-physical systems. For example, 3D printing needs advanced materials with printers linked to the internet, which are increasingly intelligent and autonomous. The consensus among experts is that our training providers and employers aren’t adapting fast enough to meet the skill needs of the fourth industrial revolution. This is reflected in a growing technological and digital skills gap. But there are some things the sector can do to catch up. Doom or opportunity? Commentators have polarising views on the possible effects of the fourth industrial revolution. Some see technologies offering limitless new opportunities. Others see major economic disruptions—the so-called dark side of technological change. The pessimistic perspective is provided in an often cited 2013 study by labour researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, who argue 47% of total employment in developed economies is at risk of automation. This figure underlies eyecatching headlines such as: ‘Could a robot do your job?’ ‘Artificial intelligence and automation are coming, so what will we all do for work?’ In Australia, the Productivity Commission estimates 40% of employment is at risk of being digitally disrupted by automation over the next 10 to 15 years. The Australian Industrial Transformation Institute estimates the level of disruption to be between 5 and 10%. But an important point, often overlooked in these and related studies based on Frey and Osborne’s modelling, is that they investigate the potential for existing jobs to be automated. They don’t take into account the

net effect of automation on jobs and that new jobs may be created as a consequence of automation. More recent reports consider this issue and point to a less pessimistic future. The World Economic Forum recently projected that while robots will likely displace 75 million jobs, 133 million new jobs will be created. This means a net gain of more than 50 million jobs globally. This suggests that, by 2022, some established roles such as data analysts and software developers—as well as so-called emerging roles such as machine learning specialists and robotics engineers, together with existing roles based on distinctively human traits such as customer service workers and people and culture specialists—will rise from 16% of the labour force to 27%. On the flip side, as algorithms replace workers, declining roles such as accountants and telemarketers, currently representing around one-third of the labour force, will fall to one in five workers. In Australia, Deloitte Access Economics estimates more than 80% of jobs will be created between now and 2030 for knowledge workers. Should we be worried? The suggested net employment gains are not a foregone conclusion. There is growing consensus developed economies like Australia must take urgent steps to limit the negative effects of technological disruption and take advantage of opportunities. The fourth industrial revolution is predicted to be as disruptive as the preceding three, if not more so, in part as a consequence of the pace of change and magnitude of skill shifts. Australian workers are growing increasingly worried they will be displaced by technology because of irrelevant skills. More than half expect they will need skills they currently lack within five years and that they will need to upskill, reskill and retrain. Skills are a Darwinian survival issue, not only for workers, but for the organisations that employ them. Two-thirds of employers say technologyrelated skills shortages are impacting them now (not in five years) and have noted their biggest challenge is to reskill employees. Recent research shows that while disruptive technology has reduced the need for some jobs, the main issue facing Australian employers is the changing nature of existing jobs.

This is particularly the case for the expanded range of tasks workers are expected to do. Employers seeking external training report difficulties finding VET providers delivering training in disruptive technologies. Accordingly, larger firms will likely resort to in-house training, while smaller firms with fewer resources look to hire skilled workers. Employers also often view university graduates with technology-related skills as more valuable than employees with VET qualifications. The result is a decline in confidence in the ability of the VET sector to deliver training that meets the challenges of technological disruption. What kind of skills will future jobs need? Much of the recent debate related to digital disruption has focused on the dichotomy between the importance of hard or technical skills (such as industry 4.0 programming, software engineering and data science) and soft or non-technical skills (such as creativity, design and teamwork). For example, about half of chief information officers favour hard skills, while the other half prefer soft skills among future employees. This divide is driven by modelling based on a technology-centred (automation) scenario. But it ignores two other important scenarios, as reported by German research into the fourth industrial revolution: the hybrid and specialisation scenarios. Under the hybrid scenario, the distribution of tasks between people and technologies is based on the relative strengths and weaknesses of workers versus machines, and employees will face increased demand to be highly flexible. Control tasks will still need to be performed through technologies that require people for monitoring and directing. Under the specialisation scenario, people use cyber-physical systems to aid decision-making. Cyber-physical systems are technologies that enable bringing the virtual and material dimensions together to produce a fully networked domain in which intelligent objects interact with each other. For example, new smart production systems will have less need for employees with administrative, production and monitoring competencies. But there will be a growing need for qualified and ultra-specialised employees with IT competencies, in particular those who can integrate them with production—technical competencies. Applying this to the Australian context, disruptive technologies are influencing the demand for both hard and soft skills in many occupations,

with some skills in decline and others in demand. Industry needs both technical and non-technical skills to ‘future-proof’ Australian workers. What needs to be done? The VET sector requires increased collaboration between industry, educators and governments. It also needs responsiveness and flexibility in delivering skills, from formal qualifications to micro-credentials or nonformal education, to reflect the needs of rapidly changing technologies. A good example of this is the first nationally recognised qualification in automation, launched in Perth earlier this month. This came out of a collaboration led by Rio Tinto, South Metropolitan TAFE and the Western Australian government. Employers should also take the lead in experimenting and testing new methods to meet future skill needs. A South Australian electronics firm, REDARC, is preparing employees to become ready for the fourth industrial revolution by engaging experts to run dedicated sessions on the application of an overarching i4.0 lens across the core competencies of mechanical, chemical and electronic engineering. The VET sector can play a complementary and reinforcing role. Besides catering for current students and apprentices, VET providers need to work with industry to build systems to facilitate continual learning (such as through flexible micro-courses) to ensure the skills of VET graduates or alumni are upgraded responsively. Federal and state governments need to work to restore the confidence of employers and students in the VET sector. An important first step is to implement the early recommendations of the Joyce Review of VET. Recent initiatives indicate the VET sector, industry and government have recognised these issues. They will need to pick up the pace to ensure vocational education provides students—and businesses that employ them —with the future-ready skills needed to succeed in the fourth industrial revolution. Article first published June 25, 2019.

It’s perfectly legal for doctors to charge huge amounts for surgery, but should it be allowed?

Louisa Gordon Associate Professor and Team Head—Health Economics, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, will investigate how to better protect patients from doctors charging ‘really unjustifiable, excessive fees’ of up to A$10,000 or more for medical procedures.

Murphy said it was potentially unethical for doctors to charge such high out-of-pocket fees that left families in severe financial pain and, contrary to some patients’ hopes, paying more didn’t equate to better outcomes. The call comes as desperate families increasingly turn to crowdfunding, remortgaging their homes and eating into their superannuation to raise tens of thousands of dollars for surgery and other medical expenses. It is perfectly legal for a doctor working in private practice to charge what they believe is fair and reasonable. It’s a private market, so buyers beware. But that doesn’t mean it’s right, or that it should be allowed to continue. Not everything is available in the public system Some patients’ out-of-pocket costs are from the gap between what their private health insurance and/or Medicare will pay for a procedure or treatment. But some treatments aren’t funded by Medicare or offered in public hospitals because their safety, efficacy and value for money have not yet been demonstrated. Medical technologies, devices and surgical techniques need to be rigorously tested in clinical trials to demonstrate safety and clinical effectiveness. They will only be widely adopted when they have a strong evidence base. When the government pays for a health service, value for money is also considered. For really expensive services and medicines that have the potential to greatly benefit patients, the government will try to negotiate prices down, to reduce the impact on the health budget. While a lack of evidence of a benefit does not necessarily mean the procedure does not benefit patients, the outcomes need to be reviewed and demonstrated to justify its ongoing use. Sometimes new technologies are adopted prematurely based on weak evidence and strong marketing, which can lead to poor investment

decisions. This was the case with robotic surgery for prostate cancer, offered early in private practice in Australia, only to find later it was no better than traditional surgery. If a patient chooses to spend money on a high-risk surgery, is it really anyone’s business? Sometimes patients will choose to undergo high-risk surgery, not covered under the public system, and are willing to pay out of their own pocket, or raise the funds through crowdsourcing or remortgaging their home. Some will argue the value is whatever the patient is willing to pay for it and it’s up to the patient’s own risk-benefit preferences. There are some major problems with this. Patients often make health decisions while distressed, ill and emotional. They may not be able to determine the best course of action or have all the information at hand. They must trust the doctor and his or her superior knowledge and experience. Health economists call this ‘asymmetric information’. The doctor has extensive years of training, expertise and qualifications. The patient has Dr Google. A key reason governments intervene in health-care systems is to avoid market failure arising from unequal information and the profiteering of providers. Our ‘fee for service’ system is failing In the private system, doctors are paid a fee for each service they provide. This creates an incentive for doctors to provide more services: the more services they provide, the more they get paid. But the high volumes of testing, consultations and fragmented services we’re seeing aren’t translating to a better quality of care. As such, economists are calling for major reforms of our fee-forservice private health system and the way that doctors are paid. This could involve paying doctors for caring for a patient’s medical condition over a set period, rather than each time they see the patient, or charging private patients a ‘bundled fee’ for all the scans, appointments and other costs associated with something like a hip replacement. Out-of-pocket costs are very high for some Australians with cancer. A quarter of Queenslanders diagnosed with cancer will pay provider fees of

more than A$20,000 in the first two years after diagnosis. While what constitutes ‘value’ will be in the eye of the beholder, a wellfunctioning and sustainable health system is one that puts patients’ interests above all others and holds health providers accountable. Australia’s universal health-care system is one of the best in the world and we need to work hard to preserve it. Surgeries costing tens of thousands of dollars will continue unless the government regulates private medical practice or reforms the way doctors are remunerated. It’s time to cap what physicians can charge for services and to provide incentives for specialists to bulk-bill their patients. Article first published June 5, 2019.

The edges of home ownership are becoming porous. It’s no longer a one-way street Rachel Ong ViforJ Professor of Economics, Curtin University

More than in many countries, in Australia home ownership has traditionally been seen as a journey. Most of us aspire to own a home and pay off a mortgage by the time we retire. Because it has been seen as a one-way street, we have tended to worry most about the first big transition: moving from renting to getting a mortgage, assuming that afterwards things will be okay. But things are becoming more complicated.

Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. Source: Author’s calculations, ABS.

The charts opposite are built from microdata from the Bureau of Statistics Survey of Income and Housing. Each shows the changing housing profiles of Australians in a particular age group between 1990 and 2015. The bars show—from left to right—the share of Australians who are renting, have large mortgage debt, moderate mortgage debt, low mortgage debt, and have become outright owners, in 1990 and 2015. Less ownership, more churning

In each age group there is more renting and less ownership than there used to be. And among owners, there is much less outright ownership and much more high debt than there used to be. This means more of them are exposed to the risk of losing their homes. Indeed, data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey show nearly 2 million people left home ownership and returned to renting in the first decade of this century alone. These ‘leavers’ represent one-fifth of all home owners in the decade. But this wasn’t a one-way street. Of those who lost their home, nearly two-thirds regained home ownership later in the decade. Astonishingly, 7% of these ‘churners’ moved in and out of home ownership more than once. Who’s leaving, who’s churning? The edges of home ownership are becoming permeable, in an especially Australian way. Leavers and churners are more common in Australia than in Britain, a country that on the surface has a similar high home ownership rate and a well-developed mortgage market. Leavers appear to be characterised by mortgage stress, divorce or relationship breakdown and poor health. They have better chances of regaining ownership if they were able to extract relatively large amounts of home equity before they left. Those who are able to find rent-free housing—from parents, say—find it easier to save for a deposit to get them back into home ownership. Some have direct access to the ‘bank of mum and dad’. It is a leg-up available only to those with wealthy and willing parents, which accentuates the socioeconomic divide between owners and renters. What will have to change? There are at least three important implications. First, debt-free home ownership in old age can no longer be regarded as the norm. Instead, mortgage stress in old age will become more common as churners take on more debt later to regain home ownership. This raises complex questions around how ageing mortgage holders will manage retirement strategies, superannuation payouts and spending to cope with mortgages that aren’t extinguished.

Second, lifelong renting will become more common. This means governments will need to prepare for an upsurge in spending on housing assistance and face pressure for laws to provide greater security of tenure for private renters. Evidence suggests mortgage indebtedness depresses well-being. On the other hand, people who have abandoned their mortgage experience a notable rebound in well-being, especially if they get secure rental tenure. Finally, governments cannot just focus on programs that help first home buyers, such as the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme announced during the 2019 federal election. They will need to design programs that help prevent people dropping out and help former owners get back. The growing twilight zone between being an owner and being a renter is largely unrecognised in the political imagination. Article first published July 15, 2019.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Creatures of Our Emotions

Ooshies—a cautionary toy story about cashing in on childhood innocence Louise Grimmer Lecturer in Retail Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania

Martin Grimmer Professor of Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania

Ooshies, the plastic collectible toys Australian supermarket chain Woolworths is using to lure shoppers to its aisles, aren’t just a bit of fun. They’ve been connected to a black market among Woolworths staff, frenzied online trading replete with death threats, chaotic crowds and and feral behaviour at supermarket swap days, and a shocking decapitation live on breakfast television. The plastic figures, based on characters in Disney’s new movie The Lion King, are aimed at kids but are really intended to sway the shopping habits of parents (you get one for every $30 you spend). They have inspired some very bad adult behaviour—with the worst behaviour arguably that of Woolworths itself. The Woolworths Group proclaims ‘family-friendly values’. Just last month it announced it would get out of liquor and pokies. Yet it has targeted children with a manipulative promotion that relies, among other things, on the same psychological triggers that can promote gambling addiction in adults. Why we collect Collectible promotions are tried and true. We seem to be hardwired to collect things. Among the earliest evidence of this human impulse is a large collection of seal impressions in clay. Made with flat stamps or cylinder seals, they were found during the excavation of the Ziggarut of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, and date from the fifth or fourth century BCE. An estimated 30% of the population collect something, according to noted consumer behaviour expert Russell Belk. Among children, collecting

is even more common. In one study, University of Nebraska researchers Menzel Baker and James Gentry interviewed 79 primary school students and found 72 (more than 90%) had some kind of collection. Across generations, items commonly collected include rocks, shells, eggs, stamps, coins, sports cards and figurines. Collecting is connected to children’s natural curiosity. It’s a process of making sense of things through gathering and categorising. This can be seen in the enjoyment children get from counting and subdividing their collections into categories. Young children typically care more about the quantity of their collection than aesthetic considerations. As they get older, more subjective values develop. Quantity becomes less important. This is what ultimately distinguishes the psychological motivation to collect from the compulsion to hoard, in which one is incapable of making an emotional distinction between what is valuable and what is junk. Commercialising collecting So tending to a collection can be both enjoyable and educational. Coins or stamps, for example, can spark an interest in geography, history and other cultures. But there are aspects that also make the urge to collect exploitable by marketers. One is the way things form part of what psychologists call the ‘extended self’. As Russell Belk explained in his 1988 paper, Possessions and the Extended Self: We cannot hope to understand consumer behaviour without first gaining some understanding of the meanings that consumers attach to possessions. A key to understanding what possessions mean is recognising that, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves. The extended self’s manifestation in possessions is particularly striking in young children, who take great comfort from favourite dolls, bears and the like. Gambling for kids

Another unpalatable aspect that businesses exploit in marketing to children is the ‘thrill of the hunt’ through the use of so-called ‘blind bags’. An astounding range of toys are based on the child not knowing what they are going to get until they open it. This practice makes use of intermittent reinforcement. When the outcome is uncertain, the process is much more exciting and a desired result much more pleasurable. It’s the same neurological mechanism that makes gambling so addictive. Blind bags are highly conducive to marketers pushing sales through the scarcity principle, which makes some toys ‘more valuable’. In the case of the Ooshies, there are 24 different toys produced in different quantities. Some are very rare—there are just 100 ‘furry Simbas’, for example. This can inspire strong fears of missing out in child peer groups, putting pressure on parents to secure missing toys. Shameless targeting Finally, younger children are innocent to the cynical ways of the world. They do not necessarily understand the persuasive intent of such sales promotions. Children, even adolescents, don’t necessarily have the cognitive skills to recognise the manipulative aspects. They are the soft target. As one mother of three has put it: Like most, I hate the fact they’re exploiting our children, but at the end of the day my kids love The Lion King … For these reasons we believe the ethics of specifically targeting children with a collectibles promotional campaign are questionable—and the Ooshies promotion is unashamedly directed at children. If Woolworths wants to celebrate family-friendly values, this is not the way to go about it. Article first published August 9, 2019.

The paradox of happiness: The more you chase it the more elusive it becomes

Lorenzo Buscicchi PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, University of Waikato

Dan Weijers Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Waikato

New Zealand will release its first well-being budget this week, based on a suite of measures that track how New Zealanders are doing, including how happy they are. The latest World Happiness Report, issued by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks New Zealand eighth in the world, after the Nordic nations but two spots above Australia. Critics may suggest that happiness is a meaningless political goal that can be propagandised both by turbo-capitalists and green socialists. Supporters of the politics of happiness see it as a concept that helps us to rise above partisan politics, emerging nationalism and other ideological barriers to harmony and progress. The paradox of happiness Since well before pants and shirts replaced togas, philosophers have been the main source of wisdom about happiness and the good life. A central tenet of this ancient wisdom is the ‘paradox of happiness’. In essence, the paradox of happiness states that if you strive for happiness by direct means, you end up less happy than if you forget about happiness and focus on other goals. Ancient wisdom advises us not to pursue happiness directly. But philosophers have a natural inclination for splitting hairs. As such, we would be failing our discipline if we did not point out that the paradox of happiness is not, in a strict sense, a paradox. It is an empirical irony. Normally valuable things are achieved by striving for them, but, according to ancient wisdom, happiness bucks this trend. Why does striving for happiness tend to result in unhappiness or disappointment? Many people frequently experience happiness, but both philosophers and psychologists note that we are so inept at pursuing it that if we do strive for it we fail, sometimes catastrophically, and end up far less happy than if we had never tried. The political paradox of happiness

What does the paradox of happiness mean for the new politics of wellbeing? Happiness plays only a relatively small role in New Zealand’s new wellbeing approach to public policy. New Zealand’s policymakers, just like many philosophers and most psychologists working on happiness, distinguish between happiness and the much more holistic concept of wellbeing. New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework is a well-being framework that lies at the heart of Treasury’s policy advice. It is composed of 12 domains: subjective well-being, civic engagement and governance, cultural identity, health, housing, income and consumption, knowledge and skills, safety, social connections, environment, time use, and jobs and earnings. If we understand happiness as feeling good (and not bad) and being satisfied with life, then it features directly in only one of the domains: subjective well-being. Another example is Indicators Aotearoa, developed by Stats New Zealand to measure national progress in areas New Zealanders care about. Subjective well-being is one of 27 domains in this suite of indicators. So, even if the political paradox of happiness is true, it would be an overreaction to advise abandoning a well-being approach to public policy based on one problematic domain. Research to the rescue Critics might still argue that the political paradox of happiness poses an important problem for part of the well-being approach to public policy in New Zealand and other nations. Why include happiness as a goal at all if doing so will result in worse outcomes than if it had been left out entirely? Luckily for the nations that already include happiness as a policy goal, this worry can easily be dealt with. As with the original paradox of happiness, the mechanism behind the political paradox of happiness is likely to be incompetence. Both paradoxes get their power from a contingent factor—being very bad at knowing how to pursue happiness effectively. Fortunately, thousands of researchers and policymakers have been advancing global knowledge about the causes and effects of happiness and happiness-promoting activities for decades. We learn more every day about

how best to measure and increase the happiness of individuals and groups with a variety of backgrounds and in a variety of contexts. Scientific experts at the Global Happiness Council publish annual reports with research-based policy recommendations for promoting happiness. This year’s report includes a chapter on measuring well-being for central government (which mentions New Zealand 33 times) and a chapter outlining why and how to use a happiness-based approach to guide policy on health-care. Such an approach would recommend putting more emphasis on mental health and end-of-life care. Given this wealth of happiness research, politicians and policymakers can now make competent policies based on evidence. Assuming relevant data gathering and evidence-based policymaking, nations like New Zealand will only get more competent at pursuing happiness over time. Article first published May 27, 2019.

In an Australian first, the ACT may legally recognise animals’ feelings Bronwyn Orr PhD Candidate and Veterinarian, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney

Have you ever wondered what’s going through your dog’s mind when you say the word ‘walk’? And does your pup seem to show guilt when you sternly ask them: ‘What have you done?’ Their tail might drop between their legs, their ears droop and their eyes turn away. We often attribute human emotions to animals, in a practice called anthropomorphism. It’s frowned upon in scientific circles, because it can lead us to incorrectly assume what animals are expressing. In the example of your naughty pet, you’d be right to think your dog displays some change in emotional state when you scold them. However, the emotion isn’t guilt: they’re expressing confusion and occasionally anxiety. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is considering legislation that would enshrine animal ‘sentience’ in the law. This means an Australian jurisdiction will for the first time consider animals’ feelings as well as their physical well-being in animal protection laws.

The emotional lives of animals Modern science has clearly demonstrated that animals experience feelings, sensations and emotional states (or as scientists like to call them, ‘affective states’). What owners and livestock attendants have known or suspected for a long time, we can now definitively prove. Unfortunately, the idea that animals can experience emotions has reemerged only fairly recently. We can blame thinkers during the Renaissance for the spread of the idea that animals weren’t capable of experiencing emotions or feelings. They maintained that animals were like machines, unable to feel or perceive. Any animal that cried out when injured or beaten was thought to be showing an automatic response, similar to a reflex, rather than a conscious response. It wasn’t until the 18th century that philosophers and scientists began recognising that animals were not only conscious but actually sentient and capable of suffering. What is sentience? Sentience can be defined simply as the ability to feel or perceive. Humans are obviously sentient, but many other animal species are also considered sentient. These are animals that respond to a sensory input such as heat, interpret that sensation as an emotion or feeling such as discomfort, then consider an appropriate response to that feeling. This goes beyond a simple reflex, as sentient animals may choose different responses based on their environment or internal state. For example, a sheep experiencing uncomfortable heat might not move and seek shade if a predator is nearby. Most animals are sentient All animals with spines, which includes all mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, as well as some animals without spines, such as octopus, squid, crabs and lobsters, are generally considered sentient. This means that essentially all the animals we use for food, entertainment, work and companionship have feelings, emotions and the ability to suffer. Other animals like insects and some lower crustaceans haven’t demonstrated sentience. However, as knowledge increases and experimental

methods improve, it is possible that in the future we may reclassify these animals as sentient too. Moral responsibility With the knowledge that almost all animals are able to experience both positive and negative emotions such as fear, happiness, anxiety and excitement, how we deal with this information is underpinned by our morals and ethics. Some people consider the moral responsibility of knowing our actions may cause pain and suffering towards animals too great and follow a type of virtue ethics called ‘animal rights’. People who believe in animals’ rights think that no amount of harm towards animals for human gain is worth the suffering it causes. Hence they seek to do no harm by not eating animals or using them for entertainment. A more dominant ethical position is that of utilitarianism, a type of consequentialist ethical theory often associated with the saying ‘the end justifies the means’. Utilitarians try to minimise the amount of harm done to the largest number of moral subjects. As animals can suffer, they are considered moral subjects alongside humans. Therefore, it would be wrong to cause animals to suffer for no reason. However, if only a small number of animals suffered in order to feed or bring joy to a large number of people, that might be morally acceptable. There are many other types of ethical theories that consider the idea of animal sentience, and, in reality, most people are a mixture of a few different moral positions (it is really hard being a strict utilitarian: see the Trolley Dilemma). What the ACT is proposing The ACT is proposing to become the first Australian state or territory to formally recognise the sentience of animals in animal welfare legislation. With public consultation closed, the ACT government will now consider public feedback on the proposed changes. This feedback will inform the final piece of legislation, to be debated by the Legislative Assembly later in the year. If sentience is included in the amended law, the ACT won’t be the first jurisdiction to have done so. New Zealand, Europe and Canada have

already included it in their animal welfare laws. However, it is significant for Australia, as it commits the government to consider how the feelings of animals may impact their welfare. Far from giving animals rights, it acknowledges that an animal can be physically healthy but mentally suffering, and this mental suffering can lead to poor welfare. With animal welfare an issue of growing importance to many Australians, recognising the inner lives of animals is an important step forward. Article first published February 14, 2019.

Why do some people worry more than others? Christine Grové Educational Psychologist and Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Monash University

‘Why do some people worry more than others?’ —Shifra, age 5, Melbourne You might think there are some people who never worry. But that’s not true. We all worry but at different times and about different things. A bit of worrying is normal and healthy. It’s your brain telling you something helpful. It might be telling you there’s something you need to think more about. We couldn’t get rid of worries even if we really wanted to! Why people worry Some people worry more than others because they’re born that way. Some experts say your genes or personality can make a person more likely to be a worrier. Worries can run in families—maybe mum, dad, your sibling or grandparents could be worriers too. Worries are actually really common. In your class, there’s a good chance that three or four other kids would know about worries because they’ve got them too. Maybe they’re thinking about a few worries right now. Worrying has nothing to do with being brave, strong or your character.

Big worries and small worries Worries can be helpful. There is a part of the brain called the amygdala. It’s not very big and it’s shaped like an almond. It switches on really quickly when it thinks you’re in danger. It’s there to protect you. Its job is to get you ready to run away from any danger. But worries become a problem when they show up at unexpected times. Sometimes you can’t forget the worry. The worry stays on your mind, and maybe you feel sick in your tummy or have a headache. These worries can turn your brain’s amygdala on and make it feel like you need to run even when there is no danger around. Sometimes people can worry a lot because something in their life is hard. If you are having a hard time in your life—like an illness, family or school issues, or problems with friends—that can make you feel worried. We could call these big worries. Big worries can feel scary and confusing. Sometimes a little worry can feel like a big one, too. Avoiding worries big or small doesn’t help. It can make them worse. But we can ease our big worries into smaller ones so they’re not on our mind all the time.

The small almond-shaped section of the brain is the amygdala. Its job is to protect you—by getting you ready to run away from any danger.

That way they don’t stop us from doing things or make us feel like we need to run away from danger when there is none there. What can help with worrying too much? If you feel like you worry too much, the most important thing you can do is make yourself the boss of your worries. Whether they are big or small, you can try: Hot cocoa breathing: pretend you have a mug of hot cocoa in your hands. Smell the warm chocolaty smell for three seconds, hold it for one, blow it cool for three, hold it for one. Repeat three or four times; Grounding: distract yourself from the worry by looking and finding: • • • • •

five things you can see four things you can touch three things you can hear two things you can smell one thing you can taste.

Talk: to an adult you trust like a teacher, neighbour or parent. Article first published July 23, 2019.

Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you—so how do you get one? Lisa A. Williams Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, UNSW

The pursuit of happiness and health is a popular endeavour, as the preponderance of self-help books would attest. Yet it is also fraught. Despite ample advice from experts, individuals regularly engage in activities that may only have a short-term benefit for well-being, or even backfire. The search for the heart of well-being—that is, a nucleus from which other aspects of well-being and health might flow—has been the focus of decades of research. New findings recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences point towards an answer commonly overlooked: meaning in life. Meaning in life: part of the well-being puzzle? University College London psychology professor Andrew Steptoe and senior research associate Daisy Fancourt analysed a sample of 7,304 UK residents aged 50-plus drawn from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Survey respondents answered a range of questions assessing social, economic, health and physical activity characteristics, including: ‘To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’ Follow-up surveys two and four years later assessed those same characteristics again. One key question addressed in this research is: what advantage might having a strong sense of meaning in life afford a few years down the road?

The data revealed that individuals reporting a higher meaning in life had: • lower risk of divorce • lower risk of living alone • increased connections with friends and engagement in social and cultural activities • lower incidence of new chronic disease and onset of depression • lower obesity and increased physical activity • increased adoption of positive health behaviours (exercising, eating fruit and vegetables). On the whole, individuals with a higher sense of meaning in life a few years earlier were later living lives characterised by health and well-being. You might wonder if these findings are attributable to other factors, or to factors already in play by the time participants joined the study. The authors undertook stringent analyses to account for this, which revealed largely similar patterns of findings. The findings join a body of prior research documenting longitudinal relationships between meaning in life and social functioning, net wealth and reduced mortality, especially among older adults. What is meaning in life? The historical arc of consideration of meaning in life (not to be confused with the meaning of life) starts as far back as Ancient Greece. It tracks through the popular works of people such as Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl, and continues today in the field of psychology. One definition, offered by well-being researcher Laura King and colleagues, says: Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have a significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos. This definition is useful because it highlights three central components of meaning:

• purpose: having goals and direction in life • significance: the degree to which a person believes his or her life has value, worth and importance • coherence: the sense that one’s life is characterised by predictability and routine. Curious about your own sense of meaning in life? You can complete an interactive version of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, developed by Michael Steger and colleagues, at https://kevgrig.github.io/mlq-react/. This measure captures not just the presence of meaning in life (whether a person feels that their life has purpose, significance and coherence), but also the desire to search for meaning in life. Routes for cultivating meaning in life Given the documented benefits, you may wonder: how might one go about cultivating a sense of meaning in life? We know a few things about participants in Steptoe and Fancourt’s study who reported relatively higher meaning in life during the first survey. For instance, they often contacted their friends, belonged to social groups, engaged in volunteering, and maintained a suite of healthy habits relating to sleep, diet and exercise. Backing up the idea that seeking out these qualities might be a good place to start in the quest for meaning, several studies have causally linked these indicators to meaning in life. For instance, spending money on others and volunteering, eating fruit and vegetables, and being in a well-connected social network have all been prospectively linked to acquiring a sense of meaning in life. For a temporary boost, some activities have documented benefits for meaning in the short term: envisioning a happier future, writing a note of gratitude to another person, engaging in nostalgic reverie, and bringing to mind one’s close relationships. Happiness and meaning: is it one or the other? There’s a high degree of overlap between experiencing happiness and meaning—most people who report one also report the other. Days when people report feeling happy are often also days that people report meaning.

Yet there’s a tricky relationship between the two. Moment to moment, happiness and meaning are often decoupled. Research by social psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues suggests that satisfying basic needs promotes happiness, but not meaning. In contrast, linking a sense of self across one’s past, present and future promotes meaning, but not happiness. Connecting socially with others is important for both happiness and meaning, but doing so in a way that promotes meaning (such as via parenting) can happen at the cost of personal happiness, at least temporarily. Given the now-documented long-term social, mental, and physical benefits of having a sense of meaning in life, the recommendation here is clear. Rather than pursuing happiness as an end-state, ensuring one’s activities provide a sense of meaning might be a better route to living well and flourishing throughout life. Article first published February 13, 2019.

‘I really have thought this can’t go on’: Loneliness looms for rising numbers of older private renters Alan Morris Professor, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney

Andrea Verdasco Research Associate, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney

Loneliness is increasingly recognised worldwide as a critical social issue and one of the major health hazards of our time. Our research shows older private renters are at high risk of loneliness and anxiety. This is a growing concern as more Australians are renting housing later in life. By contrast, only a small proportion of the social housing tenants we interviewed said they were lonely. The links between housing arrangements and loneliness could have profound implications for our health. As former US surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy said: The reduction in life span [for people experiencing loneliness] is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and it’s

greater than the impact on life span of obesity … Look even deeper, and you’ll find loneliness is associated with a greater risk of heart disease, depression, anxiety and dementia. What causes loneliness? The causes of loneliness are multifaceted and complex. The number of people living alone in Australia is clearly a factor. In 2016, just under one in four households (24.4%) were single-person households. That’s up from one in five in 1991. Research suggests low-income individuals are more likely to experience loneliness. So, too, are people who have a serious mental or physical health condition or have had a serious disruptive event (financial or job loss, illness or injury, or relationship breakdown) in the last couple of years. The impact of housing tenure on loneliness has received little attention. While recognising that there are no definite associations, we interviewed about 80 older (65-plus) private renters and social housing tenants who depended on the Age Pension for their income. These in-depth interviews indicated that their housing tenure was a critical factor in their risk of experiencing loneliness. Many older private renters are lonely Many older private renters have little disposal income, because the cost of housing uses up much of their income. They also live with the constant possibility that they may be asked to vacate their accommodation. Their limited budgets mean they often end up living in a poorly located property. These features, individually or in combination, create fertile ground for anxiety and loneliness. Tenants’ dire financial situation was often an obstacle to social activities. One interviewee told of how she had to choose between food or breaking her isolation by using public transport. Well, you sort of think what you can do with $2.50. That’s a loaf of bread type of thing.—Beverley* A 72-year-old woman living by herself said she could not afford the outings organised by her church.

There’s quite an active social club at the church for over-55s but I can’t go to any of those … Sometimes I think it would be nice to go on something that appeals to me, yes. And they might have an afternoon at somebody’s home and you’re asked to bring a plate [of food]. You see, I couldn’t afford to do that. Peter, 67 and divorced, had left the workforce prematurely due to illhealth. I’ve become very isolated. I used to, before I had the hip operation, I used to play tennis and I loved to play tennis … but I really can’t afford it. I’ve found a few clubs that I could go and play in. I’d like to get back to it, but they say, ‘Ah, the fees are this and you pay it annually,’ and I can’t come up with $150 or $200 or whatever. Lack of money and insecure tenure were sources of enormous distress and anxiety, which further discouraged social contact. Brigette, 67, was brutally honest: You do get depressed and I believe that’s why people suicide … And there have been times when I’ve thought, what is the point to life? I really have thought this can’t go on, you know … I feel sorry for people because it is hard, and once you stay in it’s like crawling out of a slime pit … I have to say, ‘Get up and go out, go up the shops … Pretend you need potatoes or something.’ Not all of the private renters interviewed experienced loneliness. These interviewees usually had strong family ties or had managed to find affordable and secure accommodation. Social housing tenants feel less isolated In sharp contrast, only a small proportion of the social housing tenants interviewed said they were lonely. Almost all were adamant they did not experience loneliness and felt they had strong social ties. Their affordable rent, security of tenure, long-term residence and having neighbours in a similar position meant they could socialise and were not beset by anxiety.

An 85-year-old, long-established social housing tenant’s response to the question about loneliness and isolation was typical: I do like it around here. I know where everything is and I know all the people, especially around these units you know. I know everyone and they know me. I like it around here. This is my home, you know. This is a community, I think. Like I know all the people and we’ve become really good friends. I couldn’t think of being anywhere else.—Kay Pam, who had been a private renter before being allocated social housing, reflected on how her life had changed: Well, it is changed because I’m happier and I think I’m healthier and I have a lot of new friends. I also have a lot more people around me for support if anything does happen. If I get sick and if they don’t see me for a few days someone will come and say, ‘Pam, are you OK?’ In private housing there was nobody. The residualisation of social housing meant some tenants were living in what they perceived to be unbearable conditions. However, they generally were able to deal with their situation. Patricia coped with her very challenging neighbours by going to the local community centre. No, I hate it [public housing]. I live here [at the community centre] every day. Yes, I’m on the committee here and I do things every day. This is my home, my family. Everybody is friendly with everybody. We have outings and things. What the interviews indicate is that the housing tenure of age pensioners often plays a fundamental role in whether they are able to escape the experience of loneliness. Older private renters are far more likely to experience loneliness than their counterparts in social housing and that loneliness can be acute. *All the names used are pseudonyms. Article first published June 12, 2019.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Living with Climate Change

Forty years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right Neville Nicholls Emeritus Professor, School of Earth Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University

This month the world has been celebrating the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. But this week brings another scientific anniversary, perhaps just as important for the future of civilisation. Forty years ago, a group of climate scientists sat down at Woods Hole in Massachusetts for the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate. It led to the preparation of what became known as the Charney Report—the first comprehensive assessment of global climate change due to carbon dioxide. It doesn’t sound as impressive as landing on the Moon, and there certainly weren’t millions waiting with bated breath for the deliberations of the meeting. But the Charney Report is an exemplar of good science, and the success of its predictions over the past 40 years has firmly established the science of global warming. What is this ‘greenhouse gas’ you speak of? Other scientists, starting in the 19th century, had already demonstrated that carbon dioxide was what we now call a ‘greenhouse gas’. By the 1950s, scientists were predicting warming of several degrees from the burning of fossil fuels. In 1972 John Sawyer, the head of research at the UK Meteorological Office, wrote a four-page paper published in Nature summarising what was known at the time, and predicting warming of about 0.6° by the end of the 20th century. But these predictions were still controversial in the 1970s. The world had, if anything, cooled since the middle of the 20th century. There was even some speculation in the media that perhaps we were headed for an ice age. The meeting at Woods Hole gathered together about 10 distinguished climate scientists, who also sought advice from other scientists from across the world. The group was led by Jule Charney from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, one of the most respected atmospheric scientists of the 20th century. The report lays out clearly what was known about the likely effects of increasing carbon dioxide on the climate, as well as the uncertainties. Its main conclusion was direct: We estimate the most probable warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3° with a probable error of 1.5°. In the 40 years since their meeting, the annual average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, as measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, has increased by about 21%. Over the same period, global average surface temperature has increased by about 0.66°, almost exactly what could have been expected if a doubling of CO2 produces about 2.5° warming—just a bit below their best estimate. It was a remarkably prescient prediction.

Sounce:Author provided

Reception of the article Despite the high regard in which the authors of the Charney Report were held by their scientific peers at the time, the report certainly didn’t lead to immediate changes in behaviour, by the public or politicians.

But over time, as the world has continued to warm as they predicted, the report has become accepted as a major milestone in our understanding of the consequences our actions have for the climate. The current crop of climate scientists revere Charney and his co-authors for their insight and clarity. Strong science The report exemplifies how good science works: establish a hypothesis after examining the physics and chemistry, then based on your assessment of the science make strong predictions. Here, ‘strong predictions’ means something that would be unlikely to come true if your hypothesis and science were incorrect. In this case, their very specific prediction was that warming of between 1.5° and 4.5° would accompany a doubling of atmospheric CO2. At the time, global temperatures, in the absence of their hypothesis and science, might have been expected to stay pretty much the same over the ensuing 40 years, cooled a bit, possibly even cooled a lot, or warmed a lot (or a little). In the absence of global warming science any of these outcomes could have been feasible, so their very specific prediction made for a very stringent test of their science. The Charney Report’s authors didn’t just uncritically summarise the science. They also acted sceptically, trying to find factors that might invalidate their conclusions. They concluded: To summarise, we have tried but have been unable to find any overlooked or underestimated physical effects that could reduce the currently estimated global warmings due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 to negligible proportions or to reverse them altogether. The report, and the successful verification of its prediction, provides a firm scientific basis for the discussion of what we should do about global warming. Over the ensuing 40 years, as the world warmed pretty much as Charney and his colleagues expected, climate change science improved, with better models that included some of the factors missing from their 1979 deliberations.

This subsequent science has only confirmed the conclusions of the Charney Report, although much more detailed predictions of climate change are now possible. Article first published July 23, 2019.

Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change Alessandro Ossola Research Coordinator, Centre for Smart Green Cities, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University

Hugh Burley Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Spatial Analysis, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University

Leigh Staas Associate Director for Engagement & Research Partnerships, Centre for Smart Green Cities, Macquarie University

Linda Beaumont Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University

Michelle Leishman Distinguished Professor and Head of Department of Biological Sciences, Co-Director Centre for Smart Green Cities, Macquarie University

Rachael Gallagher ARC DECRA Fellow, Centre for Smart Green Cities, Macquarie University

We need trees in our lives. This past summer, Adelaide experienced the hottest temperature ever recorded in an Australian state capital, hitting 46.6 degrees on January 24. Trees beautify otherwise grey cities and cool our suburbs during heatwaves. But different species have different levels of tolerance of heat, lack of water and other threats posed by climate change. In a newly published study, we investigated likely climate change impacts on 176 of the most common tree species planted in Australian cities. Our analysis showed more than 70% of these species will experience harsher climatic conditions across Australian cities by 2070. Some of the most commonly planted trees are unlikely to survive these conditions. So which tree species are best suited to particular places? Which species are more likely to thrive, rather than just survive, under a changing climate?

Which of our beloved tree species won’t make it? Tree species growing in warmer cities are more likely to be affected than those in cooler cities. Some species, such as the golden wattle (Acacia longifolia) or the prickly paperbark (Melaleuca styphelioides), might not make it in northern cities, unless we invest precious resources—such as water—to maintain these civic assets. Other species, such as the native frangipani (Hymenosporum flavum) or the tuckeroo (Cupaniopsis anacardioides), will likely become more suitable for planting in southern cities. Why do cities need trees? Trees are wonderfully effective at improving the microclimate of our cities, which makes tree plantings an effective and efficient way to adapt to climate change. The leaves of trees absorb and dissipate much of the sun’s radiation. Trees cool air and land by several degrees compared to areas of concrete and asphalt. Governments recognise the importance of trees and have developed vital initiatives, such as the national 20 Million Trees program and the 5 Million Trees program in New South Wales. These are important first steps to increase urban tree cover across Australia. But the question arises: are we planting the right tree species? What does the science say? Australian cities are blessed with a higher diversity of tree species compared to other cities globally. However, the 30 most commonly planted species make up more than half of Australia’s urban forests. This poses a great risk for our cities. If we were to lose one or two of these common species, the impact on our urban tree cover would be immense. Consequently, our best insurance is to increase the diversity of our trees. Our quest to find climate-ready tree species is only just beginning. Supported by Hort Innovation Australia, the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and the Commonwealth government, our team embarked on a project called Which Plant Where in conjunction with researchers at Western Sydney University. Our mission is to find the best plant species for urban landscapes that will be resilient to climate change.

We work with the nursery industry to provide evidence on species’ resilience to extreme heat and drought by testing plants to their limits in research glasshouses. Our work with plant growers and nurseries will inform them on how to adapt their business, by identifying the new challenges posed by climate change, as well as selecting highly diverse palettes of climate-ready species.

Source: Ossala et al., unpublished.

We advise landscape architects, designers and urban planners about not only the best planting choices, but also how to increase the biodiversity of our cities. You can help! We are committed to do more science in coming years, but you can start making a difference today. Australia’s National Tree Day will be celebrated again this year on Sunday, July 28. It’s a great opportunity to teach our families, communities and businesses about the importance of tree planting and environmental stewardship as key elements of adapting to climate change.

An old Chinese adage says: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. This weekend is your time. The game is simple—head to your closest plant nursery. Ask your local grower about which tree species are suitable for the local growing conditions and pick one you like. Then, plant a tree in your yard, or join one of the many planting events across Australia. Teach your kids, family and friends about the difference they can start making today—for their future and our common good—one tree at a time. Article first published July 26, 2019.

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought Fran Sheldon Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University

The deaths of a million or more fish in the lower Darling River system over the past few weeks should come as no surprise. Quite apart from specific warnings given to the New South Wales government by its own specialists in 2013, scientists have been warning of devastation since the 1990s. Put simply, ecological evidence shows the Barwon–Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools—even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems. Unless we allow flows to resume, we’re in danger of seeing one of the worst environmental catastrophes in Australia. Dryland river The Barwon–Darling River is a ‘dryland river’, which means it is naturally prone to periods of extensive low flow punctuated by periods of flooding. However, the presence of certain iconic river animals within its channels tells us that a dry river bed is not normal for this system. Murray cod, dead versions of which have recently bought graziers to tears and

politicians to retch, are the sentinels of permanent deep waterholes and river channels—you just don’t find them in rivers that dry out regularly. Less conspicuous is the large river mussel, Alathyria jacksoni, an inhabitant of this system for thousands of years. Its shells are abundant in Aboriginal middens along the banks. These invertebrates are unable to tolerate low flows and low oxygen. While dead fish will float (for a while), shoals of river mussels are probably dead on the river bed. This extensive drying event will cause regional extinction of a whole raft of riverine species and impact others, such as the rakali, or water rat. We are witnessing an ecosystem in collapse. Catastrophic drying We can see the effects of permanent drying around the world. The most famous example is the drying of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake, it was reduced to less than 10% of its original volume after years of water extraction for irrigation. The visual results of this exploitation still shock: images of large fishing boats stranded in a sea of sand, abandoned fishing villages, and a vastly changed microclimate for the regions surrounding the now-dry seabed. Its draining has been described as ‘the world’s worst environmental disaster’. So, what do the Aral Sea and its major tributaries and the Darling River system with its tributary rivers have in common? Quite a lot, actually. They both have limited access to the outside world: the Aral Sea basin has no outflow to the sea, and while the Darling River system connects to the River Murray at times of high flow, most of its water is held within a vast network of wetlands and floodplain channels. Both are semi-arid. More worryingly, both have more than 50% of their average inflows extracted for irrigation. There is one striking difference between them. The Aral Sea was a permanent inland lake and its disappearance was visually obvious. The wetlands and floodplains of the Barwon–Darling are mostly ephemeral, and the extent of their drying is therefore hard to visualise. All the main tributaries of the Darling River have floodplain wetland complexes in their lower reaches (such as the Gwydir Wetlands, Macquarie Marshes and Narran Lakes). When the rivers flow they absorb water from upstream, filling before releasing water downstream to the next wetland

complex. The wetlands act like a series of tipping buckets. Regular river flows are essential for these sponge-like wetlands. So, how has this hydrological harmony of regular flows and fill-andspill wetlands changed? And how does this relate to the massive fish kills we are seeing in the lower Darling system? While high flows will still make it through the Barwon–Darling, filling the floodplains and wetlands, and connecting to the River Murray, the lowand medium-flow events have disappeared. Instead, these are captured in the upper sections of the basin in artificial water storages and used in irrigation. This has essentially dried the wetlands and floodplains at the ends of the tributaries. Any water not diverted for irrigation is now absorbed by the continually parched upstream wetlands, leaving the lower reaches vulnerable when drought hits. By continually keeping the Barwon–Darling in a state of low (or no) flow, with its natural wetlands dry, we have reduced its ability to cope with extended drought. While droughts are a natural part of this system and its river animals have adapted, they can’t adjust to continual high water caused in some areas by water diversions—and they certainly can’t survive long-term drying. The Murray–Darling Basin Plan has come some way in restoring some flows to the Barwon–Darling, but unless we find a way to restore more of the low and medium flows to this system we are likely witnessing Australia’s worst environmental disaster. Article first published January 16, 2019.

Cities turn to desalination for water security, but at what cost? Ian Wright Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, School of Science and Health, Western Sydney University

Jason Reynolds Research Lecturer in Geochemistry, School of Science and Health, Western Sydney University

Removing salts and other impurities from water is really difficult. For thousands of years people, including Aristotle, tried to make fresh water from sea water. In the 21st century, advances in desalination technology mean water authorities in Australia and worldwide can supply bountiful fresh water at the flick of a switch. Achieving water security using desalination is now a priority for the majority of Australia’s capital cities, all but one of which are on the coast. Using the abundance of sea water as a source, this approach seeks to ‘climate proof’ our cities’ water supplies. It’s hard to believe now that as recently as 2004 all Australian capital city water authorities relied on surface water storage dams or groundwater for drinking water supplies. Since Perth’s first desalination plant was completed in 2006, Australian capital cities have embraced massive sea water desalination ‘water factories’ as a way to increase water security. Perth and Adelaide have relied most on desalination to date. Canberra, Hobart and Darwin are the only capitals without desalination. The drought that changed everything From the late 1990s to 2009 southeastern Australia suffered through the Millennium Drought. This was a time of widespread water stress. It changed the Australian water industry for ever. All major water authorities saw their water storages plummet. Melbourne storages fell to as low as 25% in 2009. The Gosford–Wyong water storage, supplying a fast-growing area of more than 300,000 people on the New South Wales Central Coast, dropped to 10% capacity in 2007. These were familiar issues in locations such as Perth, where the big dry is epic. For more than four decades, the city’s residents have been watching their supply of surface water dwindle. Remarkably, only about 10% of Perth’s water now comes from this source. Perth’s two desalination plants have a combined output of up to 145 billion litres (gigalitres, GL) a year. That’s nearly half the city’s water needs. Both have remained in operation since they were built. Modern industrial-scale desalination uses reverse osmosis to remove salt and other impurities from sea water. Water is forced under high pressure through a series of membranes through which salt and other impurities cannot pass.

Design, construction and maintenance costs of these industrial plants are high. They also use massive amounts of electricity, which increases greenhouse gas emissions unless renewable energy sources are used. Another concern is the return of the excess salt to the environment. Australian studies have shown minimal impact. Just as many of the massive new desalination factories were completed, and proudly opened by smiling politicians, it started raining. The desalination plants were switched off as storages filled. However, water consumers still had to pay for the dormant plants to be maintained— hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the case of the Melbourne and Sydney plants. Bringing plants out of mothballs Now drought has returned to southeast Australia. Once again, many capital city water storages are in steep decline. So what is the response of water authorities in the desal age? Not surprisingly, more desalination is their answer. One by one the desalination plants are being switched back on. Sydney has just begun the process of restarting its plant, which was commissioned in 2010. Adelaide has plans to greatly increase the modest output from its plant this year. The Gold Coast plant, which can also supply Brisbane, is operating at a low level in ‘hot standby’ mode. After a dry winter, Melbourne Water is expected to advise the Victorian government to make the largest orders for desalinated water since its plant, able to produce 150GL a year, was completed in December 2012. Mothballed for more than four years, it supplied its first water to reservoirs in March 2017. The previously forecast need for 100GL in 2019–20 (annual orders are decided in April) is almost one-quarter of Melbourne’s annual demand. Plant capacity is capable of being expanded to 200GL a year. When bushfires recently threatened Victoria’s largest water storage, the Thomson Dam, the government said desalinated water could be used to replace the 150GL a year taken from the dam. Sydney’s plan for future droughts is to double the output of its desalination plant from 250 million litres (megalitres, ML) a day to 500ML a day. This would take its contribution from 15% to 30% of Sydney’s water demand.

Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast already have the capacity to supply larger proportions of their populations with desalinised water as required. What about inland and regional settlements across Australia? Largescale desalination plants may not viable for Canberra and other inland centres. These regions would require sufficient groundwater resources and extraction may not be environmentally sound. How much, then, do we pay for the water we use? The plants supplying our biggest cities cost billions to construct and maintain, even when they sit idle for years. The Australian Water Association estimates the cost of supplying desalinated water varies widely, from $1 to $4 per 1,000 litres (kilolitre, kL). In fact, water costs in general vary enormously, depending on location and how much is used. The pricing structures are about as complex as mobile phone plans or health insurance policies. The highest price is in Canberra where residents pay $4.88 for each kL they use over 50kL per quarter. The cheapest rate is Hobart’s $1.06/kL. The issue of water pricing leads on to the question of what happened to the alternative strategies—recycling and demand management—that cities pursued before desalination became the favoured approach? And how do these compare to the expensive, energy-hungry process of desalination? Article first published February 12, 2019. This was the first of two articles looking at the increasing reliance of Australian cities on desalination to supply drinking water, resulting in less emphasis on recycling and demand management.

Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard Trivess Moore Research Fellow, Sustainable Building Innovation Laboratory, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University

Michael Ambrose Research Team Leader, Land and Water, CSIRO

Stephen Berry

Renewable Energy and Decarbonisation Manager, Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment, University of South Australia

New housing in Australia must meet minimum energy performance requirements. We wondered how many buildings exceeded the minimum standard. What our analysis found is that four in five new houses are being built to the minimum performance standard and a negligible proportion to an optimal standard. Before these standards were introduced the average performance of housing was found to be around 1.5 stars. The current minimum across most of Australia is six stars under the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS). This six-star minimum falls short of what is optimal in terms of environmental, economic and social outcomes. It’s also below the minimum set by many other countries. There have been calls for these minimum standards to be raised. However, many policymakers and building industry stakeholders believe the market will lift performance beyond minimum standards and so there is no need to raise these. What did the data show? We wanted to understand what was happening in the market to see if consumers or regulation were driving the energy performance of new housing. To do this we explored the NatHERS data set of building approvals for new Class 1 housing (detached and row houses) in Australia from May 2016 (when CSIRO and Sustainability Victoria integrated all data sets) to December 2018. Our analysis focuses on new housing in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, all of which apply the minimum six-star NatHERS requirement. The other states have local variations to the standard, while New South Wales uses the BASIX index to determine the environmental impact of housing. The chart below shows the performance for 187,320 house ratings. Almost 82% just met the minimum standard (6.0–6.4 star). Another 16% performed just above the minimum standard (6.5–6.9 star). Only 1.5% were designed to perform at the economically optimal 7.5 stars and beyond. By this we mean a balance between the extra upfront

building costs and the savings and benefits from lifetime building performance.

Source: CSIRO and Sustainability Victoria, author analysis

The average rating is 6.2 stars across the states. This has not changed since 2016. The data analysis shows that, while most housing is built to the minimum standard, the cooler temperate regions (Tasmania, ACT) have more houses above 7.0 stars compared with the warm temperate states.

The ACT increased average performance each year from 6.5 stars in 2016 to 6.9 stars in 2018. This was not seen in any other state or territory. The ACT is the only region with mandatory disclosure of the energy rating on sale or lease of property. The market can thus value the relative energy efficiency of buildings. Providing this otherwise invisible

information may have empowered consumers to demand slightly better performance. We pay for accepting a lower standard The evidence suggests consumers are not acting rationally or making decisions to maximise their financial well-being. Rather, they just accept the minimum performance the building sector delivers. Higher energy efficiency or even environmental sustainability in housing provides not only significant benefits to the individual but also to society. And these improvements can be delivered for little additional cost. The fact that these improvements aren’t being made suggests there are significant barriers to the market operating efficiently. This is despite increasing awareness among consumers and in the housing industry about the rising cost of energy. Eight years after the introduction of the six-star NatHERS minimum requirement for new housing in Australia, the results show the market is delivering four out of five houses that just meet this requirement. With only 1.5% designed to 7.5 stars or beyond, regulation, rather than the economically optimal energy rating, is clearly driving the energy performance of Australian homes. Increasing the minimum performance standard is the most effective way to improve the energy outcomes. The next opportunity for increasing the minimum energy requirement will be 2022. Australian housing standards were already about 2.0 NatHERS stars behind comparable developed countries in 2008. If mandatory energy ratings aren’t increased, Australia will fall further behind international best practice. If we continue to create a legacy of homes with relatively poor energy performance, making the transition to a low-energy and low-carbon economy is likely to get progressively more challenging and expensive. Recent research has calculated that a delay in increasing minimum performance requirements from 2019 to 2022 will result in an estimated A$1.1 billion (to 2050) in avoidable household energy bills. That’s an extra 3 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Our research confirms the policy proposition that minimum house energy regulations based on the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme are a powerful instrument for delivering better environmental and energy

outcomes. While introducing minimum standards has significantly lifted the bottom end of the market, those standards should be reviewed regularly to ensure optimal economic and environmental outcomes. Article first published June 24, 2019.

CHAPTER NINE

The Many Faces of Australia

Queensland to all those #Quexiteers: Don’t judge, try to understand us Anne Tiernan Professor of Politics, Dean (Engagement) Griffith Business School, Griffith University

Jacob Deem Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Griffith Business School and Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith University

Jennifer Menzies Principal Research Fellow, Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith University

‘What the hell is wrong with Queensland?’ Such comments are at the polite end of social media responses from progressive voters in other parts of Australia who were disappointed by the Coalition’s ‘miracle’ win on Saturday. Putting to one side the fact that the swings against Labor were not much bigger in Queensland than some other parts of the country, and that it had the most marginal seats in the election, the instinct to blame and deride Queensland highlights exactly what went wrong for the ALP. Contrary to the claims of #Quexiteers, Queenslanders are not all deeply conservative, rusted-on LNP voters, even in central and northern regions. If they were, they wouldn’t have elected Labor governments for 25 of the past 30 years. Anna Bligh was the first woman in Australia to be elected premier and Annastacia Palaszczuk was the first woman to be elected premier from opposition. Her ministry was the first in Australia to have a female majority. Voters who elected LNP members in Leichhardt, Herbert, Dawson and Capricornia on Saturday voted in ALP members in the 2017 state election in seats like Cook, Cairns, Gladstone, Mackay and Keppel. The problem for Labor, then, isn’t that Queenslanders don’t like voting Labor. Instead, the federal Labor Party, like the many pundits who predicted an ALP win, seems to have underestimated or misunderstood the variances and nuances of the Queensland electorate. As the only state where a majority of the population lives outside the capital city, regionalism matters in Queensland in a way it does not elsewhere.

Why Queensland is different Settlement patterns in Queensland did not mirror other states. Regional towns and cities developed as service centres and ports for the hinterland industries, among them beef, gold, sugar, coal and gas. The first railways in the 1860s ran from the ports in coastal towns to these inland production centres, creating an interdependence not replicated in other parts of the country. Queensland’s regions, therefore, developed as separate economic entities, with limited connection to the rest of Queensland (including the capital Brisbane), or indeed Australia. This geography also informs the way people have historically voted. Any threat to the economic viability of hinterland industries had a spillover effect on the regional towns that serviced them. As regions reliant on export industries, they have been highly susceptible to cycles of boom and bust. Many are still suffering high unemployment and depressed housing prices following a slowdown in mining and the end of the LNG construction boom in and around Gladstone. Frequent natural disasters have compounded their difficulties. As a result, Queensland governments have had to be highly responsive to the interests and fears of diverse communities. The national focus of federal politics, however, is less conducive to understanding the differences between, say, Cairns and Clermont, Caboolture and Charleville. This hurt both Labor and the Coalition in the recent federal election, as evidenced by the rise in first preference votes for minor parties like One Nation and the United Australia Party. Labor suffered more, though, due to its policy-rich campaign platform focused mainly on metropolitan, first-time home buyers and environmentalists. This did not signal to regional Australians, particularly those in Queensland, that their concerns had been heard. Who is representing the workers? Queensland has a proud place in Labor history. The Labor movement was born under the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine in 1891. The state also elected the world’s first Labor government in 1899. To characterise Queensland as regressive and redneck is to deny its historic and contemporary relationship with the Labor Party and workers.

It may be that working Queenslanders no longer see their lives or aspirations reflected in the federal Labor Party and its leadership. The pathway that Andrew Fisher and Ben Chifley took, for example, from engine driver to prime minister has gone the way of the poisoned Tree of Knowledge. Labor is now dominated by professional political operatives drawn from the knowledge and professional classes—the group Bill Shorten personified. When workers couldn’t see their concerns and fears reflected in Labor policies, they parked their vote with the permanent voices of disaffection— Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer. And in the federal election those parties’ preferences flowed strongly to the LNP. In the marginal seats of Flynn, Capricornia, Dawson, Forde and Petrie, the LNP’s primary vote scarcely moved. After preferences, however, swings to the LNP ranged from 5.7% in Flynn to 11.1% in Capricornia and 11.4% in Dawson, with votes still to be counted as of Wednesday. Concerns of the ‘neglected classes’ Labor paid the electoral price for misjudging Queensland, but it was far from alone in doing so. Analysts and commentators, predominantly those south of the Tweed, indulged in the smug chauvinism of tired stereotypes. Social media lit up, exposing the cultural and political divide between urban, regional and rural Australia that journalist Gabrielle Chan documented in her recent book, Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up. Chan describes the ‘neglected classes’—Australians locked out of opportunity by economic and social shifts, as well as a lack of technology, in the nation’s left-behind places. An index of prosperity and distress in Australian localities developed by the Centre of Full Employment and Equity identifies the seats of Hinkler, Wide Bay, Kennedy, Maranoa, Flynn and Capricornia in Queensland among the most economically distressed in the nation. Dawson, Blair, Longman, Herbert and Rankin are classified as ‘high risk’. Another index developed by Griffith University researchers identifies Gladstone, Logan (encompassing the marginal seat of Forde retained by the LNP) and Far North Queensland as ‘hotspots’ of energy poverty, meaning they lack access to affordable energy services.

The prevailing discourse in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne that this was the ‘climate change’ election obscured the role that economic insecurity and disadvantage might have played in shifting votes to One Nation and United Australia, which flowed as preferences to the Coalition. Lessons for the future What, then, can we learn from the 2019 federal election? For one, we need a better way of understanding the needs and interests of all Australians in election campaigns and developing a nuanced sense of local contexts and concerns. Griffith University’s data dashboard and our coverage of Queensland seats sought to ensure more informed reporting of the campaign than we have come to expect from the national media and commentators, whose lack of knowledge of different parts of Queensland seldom tempers their opinions. Another important take-home is that federalism matters, perhaps more than ever. Australia’s federal framework was premised on the principle of subsidiarity—that decision-making should be devolved to the most local level possible. National governments, by their nature, are homogenising. Political elites often strive to force states and regions to conform to a one-size-fits-all national policy approach, usually driven from the top down. Labor’s experience in Queensland, however, suggests that local governments are better placed to accommodate regional differences and try to balance competing influences and perspectives. Federalism was not mentioned once in the 2019 federal election campaign, but the result in Queensland suggests the need to rethink and reconceptualise the role the national government plays in a contemporary federation. This could help foster a political culture that is more responsive to, and respectful of, all parts of Australia—including and perhaps especially Queensland. Article first published May 22, 2019.

How indigenous expertise improves science: curious case of shy lizards and deadly cane toads

The

Georgia Ward-Fear Postdoctoral Fellow and Conservation Ecologist, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

Rick Shine Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Emeritus Professor, University of Sydney

It’s a common refrain—Western ecologists should work closely with Indigenous peoples, who have a unique knowledge of the ecosystems in their traditional lands. But the rhetoric is strong on passion and weak on evidence. Now, a project in the remote Kimberley area of northwestern Australia provides hard evidence that collaborating with Indigenous rangers can change the outcome of science from failure to success. This research had a simple but ambitious aim: to develop new ways to save at-risk predators such as lizards and quolls from the devastating impacts of invasive cane toads. Fighting a toxic invader All across tropical Australia, the arrival of these gigantic alien toads has caused massive die-offs among meat-eating animals such as yellow-spotted monitors (large lizards in the varanid group) and quolls (meat-eating marsupials). Mistaking the new arrivals for edible frogs, animals that try to eat them are fatally poisoned by the toad’s powerful toxins. Steep population declines in these predators ripple out through entire ecosystems. But we can change that outcome. We expose predators to a small cane toad, big enough to make them ill but not to kill them. The predators learn fast. They ignore the larger (deadly) toads that arrive in their habitats a few weeks or months later. As a result, our trained predators survive, whereas their untrained siblings die. Conservation on Country But it’s not easy science. The site is remote and the climate is harsh. We and our collaborators, the Western Australian Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, decided at the outset that we

needed to work closely with the Indigenous Traditional Owners of the East Kimberley—the Balanggarra people. So as we cruised across the floodplain on quad bikes looking for goannas, each team consisted of a scientist (university-educated and experienced in wildlife research) and a Balanggarra Indigenous ranger. Although our study species is huge—a male yellow-spotted monitor can grow to more than 1.7 metres in length and weigh more than 6kg—the animals are well camouflaged and difficult to find. Over an 18-month study, we caught and radio-tracked more than 80 monitors, taught some of them not to eat toads, and then watched with trepidation as the cane toad invasion arrived. Excitingly, the training worked. Half of our trained lizards were still alive by the end of the study, whereas all of the untrained lizards died soon after toads arrived. That positive result has encouraged a consortium of scientists, government authorities, conservation groups, landowners and local businesses to implement aversion training on a massive scale (see www.canetoadcoalition.com), with support from the Australian Research Council. Cross-cultural collaboration key to success But there’s a twist to the tale, a vindication of our decision to make the project truly collaborative. When we looked in detail at our data, we realised that the monitor lizards found by Indigenous rangers were different to those found by Western scientists. The rangers found shyer lizards, often further away from us when sighted, motionless and in heavy cover where they were very difficult to see. We don’t know how much the extraordinary ability of the rangers to spot those well-concealed lizards was due to genetics or experience—but there’s no doubt they were superb at finding lizards that the scientists simply didn’t notice. And reflecting the distinctive ‘personalities’ of those ranger-located lizards, they were the ones that benefited the most from aversion training. Taking a cautious approach to life, a nasty illness after eating a small toad was enough to make them swear off toads thereafter.

In contrast, most of the lizards found by scientists were bold creatures. They learned quickly, but when a potential meal hopped across the floodplain a few months later, the goanna seized it before recalling its previous experience. And even holding a toad briefly in the mouth can be fatal.

Source: Georgia Ward-Fear, University of Sydney

As a result of the intersection between Indigenous abilities and lizard personalities, the overall success of our project increased because of our multicultural team. If we had just used the conventional model—university researchers doing all of the work, Indigenous people asked for permission but playing only a minor role—our project could have failed, and the major conservation initiative now under way might have died an early death. So our study, now published in Conservation Letters, provides an unusual insight—backed up by evidence.

Moving beyond lip service, and genuinely involving Indigenous Traditional Owners in conservation research, can make all the difference in the world. This research was published in collaboration with James ‘Birdy’ Birch and his team of Balanggarra rangers in the eastern Kimberley. Article first published April 9, 2019.

Hidden women of history: Mary Jane Cain, land rights activist, matriarch and community builder Heidi Norman Professor of Social and Political Sciences, Chair of Aboriginal Politics and History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

For the communities of Coonabarabran in New South Wales and her grasslands Gomeroi people, Mary Jane Cain is a revered figure. Cain lived from 1844 to 1929. In the late 1880s, she successfully advocated for Aboriginal land security—a rare concession to an Aboriginal woman at the time. In 1920, she penned a 23-page manuscript detailing her life, her observations of new landowners and their workers, and a list of Gomeroi words. Cain was born when frontier violence was at its zenith. Decades-long guerrilla warfare had raged as the Gomeroi people resisted pastoral invasion and violent recriminations. Some estimate as few as 10% of the Aboriginal populations survived these killing times. Mary Jane Cain’s mother, Jinnie Griffin, a ‘full blood’ whose life likely spanned pre- and post-contact years, had married an Irishman, Eugene Griffin. They moved between Mudgee and Coonabarabran where they operated, for a time, as travelling salespeople. After being held up by bushrangers, they spent decades working on pastoral runs—Jinnie as a shepherd and Eugene as a dairyman. At the time of Mary Jane’s birth, they’d been working on Toorawindi property for some years. The advent of gold mining in 1852 marked a significant shift on the pastoral frontier. As Cain wrote in her 1920 manuscript, all the white people working on one station ‘left to go mining’. Renewed interest in Aboriginal people as shepherds and stock-workers contributed to an easing in frontier violence on Gomeroi lands. This created opportunities for Aboriginal

families to get back to their country, but in very different circumstances—as workers, generally without pay. By the 1880s Cain had begun agitating for Aboriginal land rights. The 1890s depression caused a further wave of displacement of Aboriginal workers. In this context, the Aboriginal Protection Board emerged, partly in response to rising numbers of Aboriginal people now relegated to the fringes of towns. The board introduced ways to control Aboriginal populations, including containment on reserves. Mary Jane had married Aboriginal stockman George Cain (her second husband) in 1865 at Weetalabah station, where they were both living and working, in the home’s ‘best parlour’. By the 1880s she was living closer to town and shepherded her goats to the mountains and back each day. George became unwell and, as she wrote to the Crown, she needed to secure land to support him and her nine children. She petitioned for land at Forky Mountain, about 10 kilometres from Coonabarabran, where she could run her goats. The politics of land In February 1892, Cain secured 400 acres (162 hectares). Further land grants in 1902, 1906 and 1911 saw her recover 600 acres that became home to displaced Aboriginal families until the late 1950s. These families made homes from kerosene tins lined with glued sheets of newspaper, grew vegies, milked their cows, hosted pantomimes and lived lives recalled with enormous fondness. Over this site, Mary Jane Cain was queen. Cain’s grandchildren all recalled ‘multiple letters’ from Cain addressed ‘to the Queen (Victoria)’, requesting the land at Forky Mountain, and her trips to Sydney to meet government officials to petition for her land. Her descendants emphasised that Queen Victoria granted Cain land to manage as a place ‘for the dark people to live on’. While Aboriginal reserves and missions are often viewed as sites of segregation and genocidal violence, Mary Jane Cain’s story highlights the economic, social and political context in which reserves, at least initially, were self-selected and defended by Aboriginal families, where Aboriginal worlds survived and where political organisation occurred. In NSW, of the 85 Aboriginal reserves created in the period 1885 to 1895, Aboriginal families initiated more than half (47). The new interest in taking up reserves coincided with a downturn in the two dominant

economies—pastoralism and gold mining. Land likely represented an option for Aboriginal security in the wake of decades of colonial violence and disease that caused loss of land, people and livelihood. ‘Queen Mary Jane’ Cain’s grandchildren, Julia and Violet Robinson, Ethel Sutherland, Joe Cain and Emily Chatfield, share generous and proud stories of ‘Queen’ Mary Jane: she was a great cook, hand-stitched marvellous outfits from hessian and old sugar bags and ran a large, immaculately scrubbed, loving home. They loved her dearly and worked hard to fetch her goats from the mountains. They say she dressed beautifully and descriptions of her ‘sharp features’ suggest they thought her beautiful. She was generous and kind, lent money to those in need and welcomed all to Burra Bee Dee (as the Aboriginal reserve was known from 1912). She was queen of the reserve and queen in the eyes of her family. ‘Queen’ was clearly a title Mary Jane was comfortable with: her 1920 manuscript is annotated at page 23 ‘by M.J. Cain, Queen 1920’. Available studio photos show a regal figure. Flanked by her grandsons in military uniform, her own clothing and stature match this formal authority. Visiting missionaries to Burra Bee Dee in 1909 were also reminded and duly acknowledged her queen status. They fondly reported on the performances, poetry recital, dancing and the singing, at the end of a long evening, of ‘God Save the King’. Mary Jane Cain implored a further and final recital in her honour: ‘God Save the Queen’. They obliged. She also held a powerful place in white society. After her death in 1929, the Coonabarabran Times described Mary Jane as being: known and loved by all from a very great distance round this district and outside it … and a word against her … would have evoked the undying hostility from the oldest and most respected families of the North Western slopes and Central West. Cain’s keen sense of justice is evident in one entry in her 1920 manuscript where she refers to organising a petition in 1864 ‘which everyone signed’ in defence of two brothers and ‘a young [“half caste”] man … whom they hired’ who had been wrongly arrested and charged for cattle stealing.

She writes: ‘I presented the petition to Thomas Gordon Danger who was at that time member of Parliament’, which had the effect of reducing their sentence and had ‘them liberated at five years’. Aboriginal people negotiated the rapid change to their worlds as the grasslands country came to be intensively farmed. At Burra Bee Dee and through the oral history of Mary Jane Cain’s descendants we hear the stories of matriarchs who acquired the skills of the new world—literacy, shepherding and stock work, knowledge of political systems and how to effect change—and who built ways to sustain Aboriginal worlds in dramatically altered circumstances. Today, after several years of careful community work, the history of Burra Bee Dee is beautifully documented with signage and photos detailing where families lived. The cemetery is a site of return for many generations to come. The bridge over the Castlereagh River bears Mary Jane’s name, the local Rotary club has installed a plaque in her honour and her life has inspired an art exhibition. Still, the story of this matriarch and queen to her people deserves to be more widely told. Professor Heidi Norman is a descendant of the Gomeroi people. Her Nan’s uncle (Charles Ruttley) married Mary Jane’s daughter (Eliza Josephine). Article first published January 25, 2019.

Vale Les Murray, a witty, anti-authoritarian, national poet who spoke to the world David McCooey Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

The death of the Australian poet Les Murray at the age of 80 is a profound loss for his family and friends. It is also a great loss for literature. Whether one writes ‘world literature’ or ‘Australian literature’ here signifies not only Murray’s standing, but also a profound tension in his status as a poet. Murray has long been seen not only as Australia’s pre-eminent living poet but also as its national poet. Often referred to as the ‘Bard of Bunyah’—after the property in New South Wales on which he grew up and to which he returned in adulthood— Murray was often seen as an unofficial Australian poet laureate (though he repeatedly said he was not interested in such a role).

He was the poet that John Howard turned to when, as prime minister, Howard wanted help with drafting a preamble to the Australian constitution. (The preamble, along with a proposed Australian republic, was sunk at the 1999 referendum.) Murray was the poet of the rural poor, and many of his poems deal with Australian life beyond the metropolitan centres, as well as with Australian history. But he was, especially since the 1990s, lauded as a global poet; routinely name-checked with figures such as the Saint Lucian Derek Walcott and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Indeed, Murray was touted for a time for the Nobel Prize, which Heaney won in 1995. And just as Murray’s poetry can be seen as ‘intensely Australian’, it can also be seen as ‘intensely transnational’, concerned with global histories, languages and cultures. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, as a supposedly ‘national poet’ Murray is no Banjo Paterson. He was not an easy poet. His signature style was a potent mix of ordinary language, specialist vocabulary and eccentric syntax. His poetry cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. It is something of a critical cliché to say that poetry makes us see things anew, but Murray’s really did that with its extraordinary linguistic power. This was the case particularly with his representation of the animal world, as seen in the sequence of poems entitled ‘Presence’ from Translations from the Natural World (1992). Who else has described cows as Murray does in ‘The Cows on Killing Day’? All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. And what about this description of an emu in ‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’? Weathered blond as a grass tree, a huge Beatles haircut / raises an alert periscope and stares out / over scrub. Certainly, his poems also deal with the ‘big subjects’: death, nation, religion (Murray was a Catholic convert), family, and poetry itself. Many of his best poems are about such topics. We see this in his extraordinary elegy

for his father, ‘The Last Hellos’, and in essayistic poems such as ‘Poetry and Religion’, ‘The Tin Wash Dish’, and ‘The Instrument’. But as ‘Second Essay on Interest’, and other serio-comic poems like it show, one should never underestimate the importance of play and comedy in Murray’s work. His poems, like the poet himself, are profoundly creative because they are uninterested in compliance, whether with majority opinion, political ideology, or the literary history that so profoundly informed his art. Non-compliance This anti-authoritarian streak shaped Murray’s career from the beginning. When he had to write a statement for Australian Poetry Now (1970), a poetry anthology notable for its avantgardist experimentation, Murray provocatively stated: ‘Real experiment would be Baptist, or funny, or popular, or charitable in spirit and tone—something unthinkable like that.’ This connection between creativity and non-compliance, between comedy and art, is one that Murray himself thematised. As he wrote in ‘Cycling in the Lake Country’, ‘we are a colloquial nation, / most colonial when serious’. (For the radical-conservative Murray, to be ‘colonial’ was akin to being authoritarian.) As Murray’s peer, the poet and critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe once wrote, ‘Time burns the isms’. While Murray’s various forays into cultural and political controversies will remain of interest to historians, it is the poetry— recently brought together in Murray’s latest Collected Poems (the last in his lifetime, as it turned out)—that will be read for many years to come. In Collected Poems, as well as his masterly long work, the verse novel Fredy Neptune (1998), we can see his extraordinary poetic strengths: his linguistic capaciousness, his formal range (from epigram to epic), his wit and playfulness, his originality, his difficulty and his clarity. While Murray was associated with the political right, his best poems are everything that a One Nation version of Australia would distrust: complex, witty, genuinely anti-authoritarian, transnational and encyclopedically knowledgeable. They are also profoundly human, alive not just to the poet’s sufferings, but also to those of others. Murray’s humanity is perhaps most clearly shown in his generosity, his sharing of his attentive, thoroughly original, view of the world.

In the end, poetry knows no national boundaries, and poetry, and the English language, is the poorer for his passing. Article first published April 29, 2019.

Loud, obnoxious and at times racist: The sordid history of AFL barracking Matthew Klugman Research Fellow, Institute for Health and Sport, Victoria University

In 1890, a columnist for The Queenscliff Sentinel, an early Victorian newspaper, sardonically announced that the raucous noise of barrackers at footy matches was one of the wonders of the world: What a babel of sound! What a magnificent uproar! What a glorious cloud-shattering eruption of profanity! Today, the Australian Football League feels quite differently about the unbridled enthusiasm of supporters at games and, in recent weeks, has sought to quell this profane uproar. In a perplexing move that was widely mocked by fans, the league dispatched ‘Behavioural Awareness Officers’ in high-vis vests to patrol venues for barrackers who were being too loud or otherwise offensive. It was a heavy-handed approach that backfired. On Wednesday, the AFL chief executive, Gillon McLachlan, apologised to ‘people who are going along to the football to have a day out who feel that they haven’t been able to do that’. Ye, McLachlan was at pains to emphasise that the AFL’s philosophy on crowd behaviour remained unchanged. We want our fans to come to the footy and be themselves. Equally, we want the men, women and children of our game to feel safe. The ‘delightful privilege’ of abusing umpires This issue has been a long-standing dilemma for sport officials as long as Australian rules football and other sports have excited the passions of crowds.

When Australian rules football became a mass spectator sport in the late 1800s, the game’s fans became infamous for their emotional outbursts during matches. They yelled, stamped, prayed, grieved and celebrated with gusto. In Melbourne, the birthplace of Australian rules football, the word ‘barrack’ was coined to describe the way supporters jeered and shouted abuse, especially at umpires. It was not a compliment. Like other sports fans, the barrackers who started flocking to football matches were pathologised by newspaper columnists. To them, barrackers seemed sick, fevered, even mad. There were concerns that barrackers threatened the safety of umpires, players and other supporters. But there was also money to be made from such madness. Obsessed fans not only paid to attend games, they consumed everything related to their teams, such as media and merchandise. Over time, the turbulent emotions of sports fans became more tolerated. In 1888, Victorian Football Association secretary T.S. Marshall, the most powerful football official of the time, signalled the new public attitude toward barracking when he described it as: the delightful privilege of abusing umpires, and players to the top of his bent. Soon, to ‘barrack’ would come to mean ‘support’ (albeit loudly and offensively). Yelling remained a central component of barracking throughout the years, as the Collingwood Football Club song made clear from 1906. See the barrackers a shouting, as all barrackers should. When barracking turned ugly For over half a century, the sometimes vitriolic nature of barracking did not overly trouble Australian football officials. But in the 1980s concern grew over the way many spectators were using the ‘delightful privilege’ of barracking to racially abuse Indigenous players. Matters came to a head in 1993 when Nicky Winmar lifted his St Kilda jumper and pointed with pride to his dark skin after being vilified by Collingwood supporters.

After at first downplaying the problem, the AFL moved to outlaw racial and religious vilification by both players and fans. These actions were widely lauded, and AFL administrators believed the problem was largely contained. Some clubs banned barrackers for racist abuse, but overall the problem didn’t seem as entrenched as the racial vilification of black football players in much of Europe. In 2015, however, AFL barrackers turned booing into ‘an act of racial hatred’ directed at the Indigenous player Adam Goodes. Goodes, one of the greatest men to play the game, was made to feel unsafe. To their shame, the AFL and most clubs responded defensively, unwilling to call the booing racist. Goodes soon retired from the game. A reactive, ineffective approach It is this sense of shame that has framed the AFL’s current crackdown on barracking. Earlier this month, The Final Quarter, a documentary chronicling the vilification of Goodes, was released. On the same day, the AFL issued an unreserved apology for failing to support Goodes when he was being booed during his final season as a player. One day later, a barracker was evicted from a Carlton–Brisbane game for yelling ‘bald-headed flog’ at an umpire. Later that long weekend, a Collingwood fan was warned that his barracking was too loud and he would be evicted if he continued to shout. Soon after, the ‘Behavioural Awareness Officers’ started patrolling the crowds for unruly fans. The AFL clearly wanted to stop the behaviour of some barrackers from making other spectators feel unsafe. But the change in policy felt too arbitrary and reactionary—the league did not consult, explain or seek to educate AFL supporters about it. The result was confusion, angst and resentment among fans. To many, a core aspect of barracking—the ‘delightful privilege’ of shouting out at umpires and players—was under threat. The issue began dominating conversations about football. And the league, perhaps concerned about the damage to its brand, quickly backed down. The AFL is frequently celebrated for the inclusivity of its fan culture, especially the large percentage of female fans. Yet the shouts of barrackers are regularly sexist and homophobic. This makes some spectators feel unsafe and unwelcome at games. The league needs to address this.

But a blanket ban on vociferous barracking is not the answer. Instead, the AFL needs to work with its passionate fans, rather than against them. It needs to demonstrate to fans how certain forms of abuse create unsafe environments, and to set clear limits indicating what forms of abuse are unacceptable beyond racial and religious vilification. At issue are the values of the league and the effects of certain words. Challenging questions need to be asked and answered. Is it OK to call an umpire a ‘bald-headed flog’? Is it OK to tell a male player that he kicks ‘like a girl’? This is too important an issue to be addressed in a hurried and reactive manner. The ‘magnificent uproar’ of footy has been a central part of the game for over 100 years. It should remain so, but in a way that neither threatens nor vilifies others. Article first published June 21, 2019.

Australia’s ethnic face is changing, and so are our blood types Tanya Davison Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology

James Daly Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology

Robert Flower Associate Professor, Northern Clinical School, University of Sydney

It’s often said that no matter who we are, ‘we all bleed red’. But although our blood may be the same colour, we’re as individual on the inside as we are on the surface. Just as our background determines the way we look, where we come from is one of the major factors that influences the make-up of our blood. About half of people living in Australia today were either born overseas, or have a parent born overseas. This increase in the diversity of our population leads to a corresponding diversity in the people who need medical treatment—and in their blood types.

We need a broad mix of ethnicities in our donor pool to meet the needs of patients with rare blood types. Providing the right blood and blood products for an ethnically diverse population presents an evolving challenge for blood collection agencies around the world, including here in Australia. People from diverse backgrounds tend to be underrepresented in donor populations. While Australians born overseas account for roughly one-third of the population, they account for only one in five blood donors. This limited diversity in our pool of donors creates challenges in identifying blood matches for transfusion to patients with rare blood types. The link between your blood group and where you come from Blood types consist not only of the commonly recognised groups such as A, B and O, but also include more than 300 other variants. Each of these variants is a marker on the surface of our red blood cells and is known as an ‘antigen’. Our blood type is inherited from our parents. Like other inherited characteristics such as skin and hair colour, the frequency of blood types in a population shifts in response to stresses in the environment (known as ‘selection pressure’). For example, in parts of the world where malaria thrives, the proportion of the population with various blood types has altered over time to make people less prone to infection. So this effect has more to do with where you and your ancestors lived than your ethnic group. One blood type, known as Duffy null, is much more frequent in Africans in Africa than in African-Americans, possibly because African-Americans are no longer exposed to the malaria parasite. In short, one reason we have different blood groups is to improve our chances of fighting disease. Who needs specially matched blood? Most transfusions of red cells are matched for the commonly recognised ABO and Rh blood groups (the Rh group is the one that gives you the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ in your blood type). If someone receives a transfusion of blood that doesn’t match their own type, their body may recognise the transfused blood as foreign and develop antibodies to try to destroy the ‘invader’. Their body will keep making these antibodies, which can then interfere with future transfusions.

Some patients need specially matched red cells for transfusion. This means on top of being matched by ABO and Rh type, the donor’s blood is matched to make sure it doesn’t contain blood group variants that aren’t present in the recipient’s blood. This is more difficult to achieve. There are three groups of patients who need specially matched blood: 1. patients who have already developed antibodies because they have had a transfusion of blood that is not fully matched in the past 2. patients who may have developed antibodies to blood group antigens, but other conditions or drug treatments make it hard for their doctors to test for antibodies 3. patients who need to have many transfusions throughout their life, so doctors want to avoid the development of blood group antibodies. Patients who may need to have multiple transfusions throughout their life include those with disorders affecting the blood such as sickle cell anaemia, thalassemia major and myelodysplasia. Thalassemia is most common in people of African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indian and Mediterranean descent. Sickle cell anaemia affects these ethnic groups and also people of Hispanic descent. Which groups are most in need in Australia at the moment? There are so many different blood group antigens, combinations of even the most common blood group types are found in only a small proportion of donors, making it difficult to provide blood fully matched for a particular patient. In addition, as our patient population becomes more diverse, there is a greater need for blood types that are rare in a Caucasian population. Ultimately, the distribution of blood groups that we collect from our donors should reflect the distribution of blood groups required by patients who need transfusion. Blood centres in many countries have introduced a variety of campaigns to attract a broader donor group. At the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, we are interviewing donors from diverse backgrounds to learn more about their experiences in donating blood. Our goal is to build a donor panel that represents the diversity of the broader Australian community. The benefits are not only for the patients and the health system— research suggests participating in blood donation helps with social inclusion

among migrant communities. Dr Alison Gould, Scientific Communications Specialist for the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, co-authored this article. Article first published May 9, 2019, as part of a series, Where Culture Meets Health.