Three reasons you have neck pain – and why ‘bad posture’ probably isn’t one of them

shutterstock/WAYHOME studio

Christian Worsfold, University of Hertfordshire

If you suffer from neck pain, you’re not alone. Spinal pain is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide and its occurrence has increased dramatically over the past 25 years. While most episodes of neck pain are likely to get better within a few months, half to three-quarters of people who have neck pain will experience repeated episodes of pain.

It’s often said there are “good and bad postures” and that specific postures can contribute to spinal pain but this belief is not supported by scientific evidence. Indeed, research shows that poor sleep, reduced physical activity and increased stress appear to be more important factors.

So despite attempts by health professionals to correct your posture and the use of “ergonomic” chairs, desks, keyboards and other gadgets chances are so-called “lifestyle factors” – such as getting enough sleep, making sure you exercise and keeping stress to a minimum – seem to be more salient in relieving and preventing the pain in your neck.

The posture myth

Although beliefs about posture run deep, science is telling a very different story – and there is a strong challenge to the long-assumed role of posture as a cause of neck pain.

A recent high-quality study, of more than 1,000 teenagers, for example, showed no statistically significant relationship between spinal posture and neck pain – despite there being easily identifiable postural subgroups in the study, such as those who sat slumped or those who sat upright. So yes, people do sit in positions that vary from person to person, but it appears to have nothing to do with pain. In fact, it appears from this particular study that the adolescent’s “posture” has more to do with their mood.

Research has also shown that changing the way you sit while working – by altering your workstation – so-called “ergonomic interventions”, have little to no impact on whether a person develops neck pain. Also, there is little high-quality evidence that ergonomic interventions can lead to a speedier recovery for someone with neck pain.

A pain in the neck or just not enough sleep?
ShutterstockMDGRPHCS

In various studies, researchers have followed groups of people who don’t have neck pain along with those who only experience occasional neck pain for periods. Some people in these groups developed troublesome neck pain and the researchers looked closely at them. Those with neck pain were found to be getting less quality and quantity of sleep and were working in jobs with high strain. They were also less physically active and had depressed mood. Their bodies are essentially experiencing greater stress and they notice more “muscle tension” in their neck. Importantly, this is all before the pain has even developed.

Researchers have found that, even among children as young as nine years old, symptoms such as tiredness and sleep difficulties – along with headaches, abdominal pain and lower mood – were risk factors for both the occurrence and persistence of weekly neck pain when the children were monitored for four years.

Sleep, exercise and relaxation

The flip side of this is that having a stronger neck, enjoying exercise – even simply walking a greater number of steps each day – have all been shown to protect against getting neck pain. This, along with making sure we don’t become sleep deprived, less physically active and stressed will hopefully manage and prevent neck pain more successfully.

So feel free to sit how you want to at your desk. If you find yourself sitting for long periods in one position make an effort to switch it up – as one of the key things to avoid getting pain in your neck is to change positions frequently through the day.

And if you do have neck pain, get a few early nights, consider doing something relaxing – and why not go for a walk at lunchtime. Importantly, you also need to stop worrying about how you sit or walk, because science seems to show that there may be no such thing as a “bad” posture after all.

Christian Worsfold, Visiting Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of Hertfordshire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Research Check: is white meat as bad for your cholesterol levels as red meat?

Whether you’re eating red meat or white meat, a lean cut is the healthier way to go.
From shutterstock.com

Clare Collins, University of Newcastle

You’ve probably heard eating too much fatty red meat is bad for your health, while lean meat and chicken are better choices. So, recent headlines claiming white meat is just as bad for your cholesterol levels as red meat might have surprised you.

The reports were triggered by a paper published in the The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition earlier this month.

The study did find lean white meat had the same effect on cholesterol levels as lean red meat. While this might be construed as good news by lovers of red meat, more research on this topic is needed for a clearer picture.

How was this study conducted?

The researchers set out to compare three diets: one where the main dietary source of protein came from eating red meat (beef and pork), another where it came from poultry (chicken and turkey), and a third where it came from plant foods (legumes, nuts, grains and soy products).

They wanted to measure the impact of these diets on specific categories of blood fats, as markers of heart disease risk. They tested blood fat markers including low density lipoprotein cholesterol (or LDL, commonly known as “bad cholesterol”), apolipoprotein B (apoB), and the ratio of total cholesterol to high density lipoprotein cholesterol (or HDL, commonly known as “good cholesterol”).

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The researchers also wanted to know whether blood fat levels changed more when the background dietary patterns were high in saturated fat, derived mostly from full-fat dairy products and butter, or when they were low in saturated fat.

To achieve this, 177 adults with blood cholesterol levels in the normal range were randomised to follow either a high-saturated fat diet (14% of total energy intake) or a low-saturated fat diet (7% of total energy intake).

Within these two groups they were further randomly assigned to follow three separate diets for four weeks each: red meat, white meat, and plant protein sources. The main protein sources in the meat groups came from lean cuts of red and white meat. In the plant diet, protein came from legumes, nuts, grains and soy products.

Participants met research staff weekly to collect their food products and received counselling on following their specified diet. Participants were asked to maintain their physical activity level and keep their weight as stable as possible so these factors did not bias the results.

To eliminate any carry-over effects from eating one type of protein to the next, participants were given between two and seven weeks break in between each diet and told to return to their usual eating patterns.

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Organic, grass fed and hormone-free: does this make red meat any healthier?

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What did the study find?

Some participants dropped out along the way, so in the end researchers had results from 113 participants.

Blood concentrations of LDL cholesterol and apoB were lower following the plant protein diet period, compared to both the red and white meat periods. This was independent of whether participants were on a background diet of high- or low-saturated fat.

There was no statistically significant difference in the blood fat levels of those eating red meat compared to those eating white meat.

We’re often told to limit our consumption of red meat.
From shutterstock.com

Eating a diet high in saturated fat led to significant increases in blood levels of LDL cholesterol, apoB, and large LDL particles compared with a background diet low in saturated fat.

So, all the dietary protein sources as well as the level of saturated fat intake had significant effects on total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, non-HDL cholesterol, and apoB levels.

How should we interpret the results?

Although the test diets only lasted four weeks each, this study is important. It’s rare to see intervention studies that directly compare eating different types of meat and sources of protein and the impact on heart-disease risk factors. This is partly due to the challenge and expense of providing the food and getting people to follow specific diets.

Most studies to date have been cohort studies where people are categorised based on what they eat, then followed up for many years to see what happens to their health.

One review of cohort studies found no greater risk of stroke in those who eat more poultry compared to less poultry, while another showed a higher risk of stroke among those eating more red and processed meat relative to poultry intake.

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Should we eat red meat? The nutrition and the ethics

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There are a few things to keep in mind with this study. First, the researchers used the leanest cuts of both red and white meats, and removed all visible fat and skin. If participants were eating fatty meat, we may have seen different results.

The significant variation in breaks between different diets (ranging from two to seven weeks) may have also affected the results. Participants with a longer break would have had more time for their blood cholesterol levels to change, compared to those with shorter breaks.

Finally, in reporting their results, it would have been better to include all 177 participants who began the study. People who drop out often have different health characteristics and leaving them out may have biased results.

This short-term study does not provide evidence that choosing lean white meat over red meat is either better or worse for your health.

But the findings are consistent with recommendations from the Heart Foundation to include a variety of plant-based foods in our diets, foods containing healthy types of fat and lower amounts of saturated fat, and in particular, to choose lean red meat and poultry. – Clare Collins

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Blind peer review

The article presents a fair, balanced and accurate assessment of the study. In this study, they showed lean red meat and lean white meat (with all visible fat and skin removed) had the same effect on blood fat levels.

Importantly, plant protein sources (such as legumes, nuts, grains and soy products) lowered blood fat levels compared to the red and white meats, and this was independent of whether the participants had been placed on a background diet low or high in saturated fats. This study did not look at the impact of a fish-based diet on blood fats. – Evangeline Mantzioris

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Three charts on: Australia’s declining taste for beef and growing appetite for chicken

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

Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What actually is populism? And why does it have a bad reputation?

Thanks to current right-wing populists, people are conflating right wing ideologies such as being anti-migrant with populism.
Felicity Burke/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

Octavia Bryant, Australian Catholic University and Benjamin Moffitt, Australian Catholic University

No doubt thanks to Donald Trump, Brexit, and a string of anti-establishment leaders and parties in Europe, Latin America and Asia, everyone seems to be talking about populism.

But populism is nothing new. It’s long accompanied democratic politics, and its activity and success has experienced peaks and troughs. Right now we’re in a bit of a heyday for populism, and this is impacting the nature of politics in general. So it’s important we know what it means and how to recognise it.

Even among academics, populism has been difficult to define. This is partly because it has manifested in different ways during different times. While currently its most well-known cases are right-wing parties, leaders and movements, it can also be left-wing.

There’s academic debate on how to categorise the concept: is it an ideology, a style, a discourse, or a strategy? But across these debates, researchers tend to agree populism has two core principles:

1. it must claim to speak on behalf of ordinary people

2. these ordinary people must stand in opposition to an elite establishment which stops them from fulfilling their political preferences.

These two core principles are combined in different ways with different populist parties, leaders and movements. For example, left-wing populists’ conceptions of “the people” and “the elite” generally coalesce around socioeconomic grievances, whereas right-wing populists’ conceptions of those groups generally tend to focus on socio-cultural issues such as immigration.

The ambiguity of the terms “the people” and “the elite” mean the core principles of people-centrism and anti-elitism can be used for very different ends.

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Populism’s problems can be fixed by getting the public better-informed. And that’s actually possible

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How can appealing to ordinary people be a bad thing?

Populism gets a bad name for a couple of reasons.

First, because many of the most prominent cases of populism have recently appeared on the radical right, it has often been conflated with authoritarianism and anti-immigration ideas. But these features are more to do with the ideology of the radical right than they are to do with populism itself.

Second, populists are disruptive. They position themselves as outsiders who are radically different and separate from the existing order. So they frequently advocate for a change to the status quo and may champion the need for urgent structural change, whether that is economic or cultural. They often do this by promoting a sense of crisis (whether true or not), and presenting themselves as having the solution to the crisis.

A current example of this process is Trump’s southern border wall, where he’s characterised the issue of illegal crossings on the southern border as a national emergency, despite, for example, more terrorist-related border crossings occurring on the northern, Canadian border and by air.

The fact populists often want to transform the status quo, ostensibly in the name of the people, means they can appear threatening to the democratic norms and societal customs many people value.

And the very construction of “the people” plays a large part in populists being perceived as “bad”, because it ostracises portions of society that don’t fit in with this group.

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Perspectives on migrants distorted by politics of prejudice

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What are some examples of populist leaders and policies?

The most famous contemporary example of a populist leader is the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the renewed interest in populism is partly due to his 2016 electoral success. One way researchers measure populism, and consequently determine whether a leader or party is populist, is through measuring language.

Research has found Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign was highly populist. He targeted political elites, drawing on the core populist feature of anti-elitism and frequently used people-centric language, with a strong use of collective pronouns of “our” and “we”.

He combined this populist language with his radical right ideology, putting forward policies such as “America First” foreign policy, his proposed wall between the US and Mexico, and protectionist and anti-globalisation economic policies.

The combination of populism and such policies allowed him to draw a distinction between “the people” and those outside that group (Muslims, Mexicans), emphasising the superiority of the former.

These policies also allow for the critiquing of the elite establishment’s preference for globalisation, free trade and more liberal immigration policies. His use of the “drain the swamp” slogan – where he’s claiming he’ll rid Washington of elites who are out of touch with regular Americans – also reflects this.

Along with Trump, Brexit has also come to exemplify contemporary populism, because of its European Union-centred anti-elitism and the very nature of the referendum acting as an expression of “the people’s” will.

In South America, populism has been most associated with the left. The late Hugo Chavez, former president of Venezuela, was also highly populist in his rhetoric, and is perhaps the most famous example of a left-wing populist leader.

Chavez’s populism was centred around socioeconomic issues. Even while governing, he positioned himself as an anti-establishment politician, channelling the country’s oil revenues into social programs with the aim of distributing wealth among the Venezuelan people, relieving poverty and promoting food security.

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The current Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the Bolivian president, Evo Morales are also considered left-wing populist leaders.

But left-wing populism is not just confined to South America. In Europe, contemporary examples of left-wing populist parties include the Spanish Podemos and the Greek Syriza. These parties enjoyed success in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They questioned the legitimacy of unregulated capitalism and advocated structural economic changes to alleviate the consequences of the recession on their people.

It doesn’t look like populism is going anywhere. So it’s important to know how to recognise it, and to understand how its presence can shape our democracies, for better or worse.

Octavia Bryant, Doctoral Candidate, National School of Arts, Australian Catholic University and Benjamin Moffitt, Senior Lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Morrison’s health handout is bad policy (but might be good politics)

The funding proposal is no fix for Australia’s health system but it could take some political pressure off the Coalition in the lead up to the 2019 federal election.
OnE studio/Shutterstock

Stephen Duckett, Grattan Institute

The A$1.25 billion Community Health and Hospitals Program Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced this week should be awarded a big policy fail.

The move sets back Commonwealth-state relations by decades – and it’s unclear exactly how much money will actually be provided.

Rather than being based on any coherent policy direction, it appears designed to shore up support in marginal electorates.

Bad for Commonwealth-state relations

One of the complicating factors in providing health care to Australians is the fact that the Commonwealth and states each have leadership roles in different parts of the system: the Commonwealth for primary care; and the states for public hospitals.

Health professionals yearn for the Holy Grail of a single level of government being responsible for all aspects of a patient’s care. That quest has proved illusory. But recent policy direction has at least sought to clarify the roles of the two levels of government.

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Public hospital blame game – here’s how we got into this funding mess

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For the past five years, the states have been acknowledged as the “system managers” of the public hospital system. A rational, formula-driven funding framework has been created.

Under this framework, the Commonwealth shares the cost of growth in public hospital activity with the states. This exposes the Commonwealth directly to growing costs of technology-driven needs and giving it an incentive to work with the states to meet needs in the most efficient way.

This framework means there is one level of government to whom all public hospitals are accountable: the state. And it means voters can hold their state government accountable for hospital planning and management.

The new Morrison proposal tramples all over this policy rationality in the interests of electoral expediency. It replaces state-based planning with submission-based funding, which will enable a politician with a whiteboard in Canberra to override state priorities in favour of projects which have the greatest electoral appeal in targeted marginal seats.

It makes accountability for the overall system more confusing, and it assumes Canberra knows best.

It is a federalism fail.

An opaque policy

Labor ran a devastating campaign in the July federal by-elections, especially in the Queensland seat of Longman, which involved calculating and publicising precisely how much worse off the local hospital was under the Liberal health policy – where the Commonwealth funds 45% of hospital growth – compared with Labor’s 50% sharing policy.

In the Longman case, Labor asserted there was a A$2.9 million cut to Caboolture Hospital based on the decisions taken in the 2014 Abbott/Hockey “slash and burn” budget.

Scott Morrison’s new cash splash is no doubt designed to overcome this political weakness for the Coalition.

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However, unlike Labor’s funding, which is ongoing, it’s unclear whether the extra largess the Coalition is offering will continue beyond the budget “forward estimates” (that is, the next four years). It’s unclear how much will be devoured from existing Commonwealth funding agreements, such as the dental agreement, which are coming to an end.

The Commonwealth has responsibility for most aspects of policy to address social determinants of health, particularly employment and income policies. Rational health policy would recognise the importance of considering these issues and balancing the health benefits of, for example, lifting the Newstart allowance, against funding for specific health initiatives. There is no hint this has happened with this announcement.

New handouts under the Morrison package will be portrayed as being for specific areas of “high political need”. But the reality is funding will eventually be swept into the Grants Commission allocation process and redirected according to the Grants Commission formula.

This may restore some rationality into the health handout, albeit with a lag of a few years. But the actual level of funding to be allocated to specific areas will be shrouded in Grants Commission opacity. Insiders will be able to follow the money, but voters will be kept in dismal ignorance about how much they will benefit in the long-term – after the gloss of a local funding handout has worn off.

This policy is a transparency fail.

Politics versus policy

The Community Health and Hospitals Program lists four feel-good, worthy funding targets:

• specialist hospital services such as cancer treatment, rural health and hospital infrastructure
• drug and alcohol treatment
• preventive health, primary care and chronic disease management, and
• mental health.

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Read more:
Morrison government promises $1.25 billion for health care

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Everyone has a potential place in this funding Nirvana. Lobby your local MP, and your local hospital or community health program might be the lucky health policy lottery winner!

Provided voters don’t see this as a cynical political exercise – and that is a big risk in an electorate which already ranks politicians low on the trustworthiness scale – then the new policy could be smart politics. We won’t know until the votes in next year’s federal election are counted.

In the meantime, given the drubbing the Liberals received in last month’s Victorian state election, the biggest challenge for the Morrison Government might be deciding which electorates are now marginal and worth shoring up.

Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why a first strike option on North Korea is a very bad idea

Unification flags hang on a military fence near the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas in Paju, South Korea.
Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji

Andrew O’Neil, Griffith University

The prospect of South Korean and North Korean athletes marching together under a “unification” flag at this month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics signifies a brief respite in tensions rather than being a genuine thawing on the Korean peninsula.

After an initial surge of optimism in response to Pyongyang’s decision to accept Seoul’s offer to march as one Korea, reality has started to bite with the mechanics of implementing the deal.

While welcoming the Pyeongchang initiative, many South Koreans have pushed back against the decision to merge both countries’ women’s ice hockey teams, calling out the sexist nature of the decision (not a single woman was involved in determining the merger).

Meanwhile, citing “insulting” behaviour on the part of South Korean media, the North Koreans have cancelled a joint cultural performance with South Korea, scheduled for next week.

Understandably, the Pyeongchang “thaw” has attracted major headlines. But it obscures the significant possibility that we will witness major conflict on the Korean peninsula in 2018.

The South Korean government has worked hard to engage North Korea in structured dialogue in an effort to defuse the nuclear-armed state’s continued military threats. But there is nonetheless a growing risk that the Trump administration will authorise limited military strikes against the North’s weapons of mass destruction, conceivably within the next few months.

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Despite extracting a commitment from the US that any military action against North Korea is contingent on first gaining South Korea’s endorsement, there is justifiable concern among South Koreans that the Trump administration will act unilaterally if US intelligence assesses Pyongyang is about to deploy an operational nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force.

Given the extent to which we have underestimated the sheer pace of North Korea’s nuclear and missile development over the past decade, this intelligence assessment might happen sooner than we think. Donald Trump would then face a difficult problem: how to avoid being the president who allowed North Korea to achieve the capability to hit the US homeland with nuclear weapons.

Since coming to power, the Trump administration has been deliberating over whether to carry out preventive strikes to degrade Pyongyang’s ability to sprint to the finish line of acquiring a deployable ICBM that can hit the continental US with a nuclear payload.

An increasingly popular assumption is that the price of living with a nuclear-armed North Korea that can destroy prime targets on the US mainland is higher than risking a second Korean War. And this is not just the musings of a few hardheads in the Pentagon: a growing number of Americans believe some form of military action against North Korea is justified if sanctions and diplomacy fail to achieve denuclearisation.

Most worrying of all, a belief seems to be gathering pace that the US can somehow launch “surgical” military strikes while containing a larger conflict, because Kim Jong-un will not respond for fear of triggering an overwhelming retaliatory response.

There are two basic flaws underlying what one expert has termed “the myth of the limited strike”. The first, and most obvious, is that it’s highly unlikely Kim Jong-un will believe the Trump administration’s assurances that “surgical” strikes are not the opening phase of an all-out US assault aimed at overthrowing the regime.

When the US goes to war, it tends to go full throttle – in recent times, this has translated into regime change (think of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Why would the leadership in Pyongyang assess that this time around would be any different?

The second major flaw in the argument is that what is portrayed as limited in Washington, and among some armchair strategists supporting this course, will inevitably be seen in Pyongyang as a major assault on North Korean territory and its prized strategic assets.

Even in the scenario that Kim Jong-un actually believed the Trump administration did not intend to implement regime change, as Van Jackson notes, his position as North Korean supreme leader would be untenable domestically if he did not respond with force.

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Five assumptions we make about North Korea – and why they’re wrong

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Pyongyang would have a compelling incentive to retaliate early with any nuclear reserve that survived a US first strike. In this scenario, the North Korean leadership would confront a stark choice of either using these weapons of mass destruction to maximum effect or risk losing them in follow-on US precision munition strikes.

As I have argued elsewhere, like all new nuclear powers, North Korea will place a premium on permissive command and control systems that allow authorities to use nuclear weapons whenever they want. This will be reflected in a hair-trigger launch posture if it perceives an imminent threat.

Whichever way you cut it, a US first strike against North Korea would almost certainly trigger major war on the Korean peninsula, with a high risk of escalation to full-scale nuclear conflict. While the appalling humanitarian consequences of this don’t need to be spelt out, the strategic illogic of the arguments advocating a first strike must be continually reinforced.

Andrew O’Neil, Dean and Professor of Political Science, Griffith University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Banking royal commission will expose the real cost of bad behaviour

Jenni Henderson, The Conversation

Australia’s federal government has announced a royal commission into the financial services sector, following a letter from the big four bank heads supporting the move.

The commission will run for 12 months, delivering a final report in February 2019, at an estimated cost of A$75 million. It will explore not only banking but also the wealth management, superannuation and insurance industries.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had previously denied the need for a royal commission but said in announcing the move that political uncertainty had forced the decision.

“Uncertainty…over the potential for such an inquiry is starting to undermine confidence in our financial system. And as a result, the national economy. And that is precisely what we have always been determined to avoid,” he said.

The commission should be allowed to go on for longer, for closer to three years, because the 12-month period is the bare minimum, says Andrew Schmulow, a senior lecturer in the faculty of law at University of Western Australia.

“If the commission doesn’t find other skeletons in the closet, I will eat my hat,” he adds.

Schmulow believes there will be more revelations to come from the commission and that the banks will have to answer for covering up these as well.

“You can’t have this many scandals on this kind of scale without a corporate culture that is rotten to the core,” he said.

The royal commission won’t award compensation but will have the powers to compel the banks and other institutions to present documents and witnesses.

Earlier in the year, in an attempt to fend off a royal commission, the government announced a raft of new measures in the 2017 Federal Budget to address concerns surrounding the finance industry.

Timeline of Australian bank scandals

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=16t5cJvvQqZqnJPl1M9C1t8fNOveF64OxTxKoPDZHJLc&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

Timing of the announcement

Malcolm Turnbull defended the delay in calling the royal commission due to these measures.

“There would’ve been legitimate calls to delay any new measures until the findings of the inquiry were handed down. And that is one of the reasons why we have not established a banking inquiry to date,” he said.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten said the timing of the commission called into question the government’s credibility and said that Australians had every right to be cynical.

“It says everything about Turnbull’s values and priorities that he only agreed to Labor’s Royal Commission when the banks told him he had to. He ignored the pleas of families and small businesses, he rejected the words of whistle-blowers. But when the big banks wrote him a letter, he folded the same day.”

Turnbull’s move comes after the possibility of a Nationals bill on the same issue. Andrew Schmulow, said it was “stage managed”, designed to regain control on the terms of reference and the length of the commission.

“Turnbull either losses control or keeps a modicum of control. It’s one or the other,” Schmulow said.

Costs of a banking royal commission versus bad behaviour

The bank heads, in their letter to the government, described the deliberations on the commission as “costly and distracting”. But the real cost is to the economy and is a direct result of the bank behaviour, Schmulow said.

The funding costs of the banks are based on a risk profile which is underwritten by taxpayers through an implicit bank guarantee, which will only be affected if the government itself suffers a credit downgrade, Schmulow said.

Mum and dad investors are often brought up as having a vested interest in the banks’ strength through their superannuation. But Schmulow says a small portion of super is invested in the banks but it’s also invested in other things in the economy as well. He says investors’ savings are more likely to be hurt by the impact of the behaviour of the banks in other areas of the economy.

“They are already making so much profit off every individual and company that borrows money we have the most profitable banking sector in the world, you only get that by gouging,” Schmulow says.

Banks have traditionally prioritised shareholders and investors have had a superb return on equity said Elizabeth Sheedy, associate professor of financial risk management at Macquarie University.

But she said the community seemed to be wanting the balance to shift more in favour of the customer rather than returns and this raised fundamental questions about bank governance.

“Should remuneration be based on the metrics of concern to shareholders (profits, return on equity) or metrics of concern to customers (lack of complaints, value for money)? These fundamental questions are not going to be resolved in the ordinary course of business and a far-reaching inquiry seems to be a way that they can be thoroughly aired and debated,” Sheedy said.

“It seems that the community is prepared to pay that price in order to create a better deal for customers,” she added.

The commission won’t examine regulators like the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) or the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) who have recently been given more power to hold the banks to account.

The regulators have been criticised in the past for their inaction on scandals in the banking and financial sectors. But Andy Schmulow said the royal commission would show up their inaction and raise serious questions about who was watching the watchdogs.

Eliza Wu, associate professor in finance at the University of Sydney says the banking sector’s exposure to the real estate market and the lack of regulatory oversight of the fintech and peer-to-peer lending sectors, were a worry.

“The heavily disrupted world of banking and finance is evolving very quickly and the regulators and often industry operators themselves, exist under an unforgiving regime of catch-up,” she said.

Jenni Henderson, Section Editor: Business + Economy, The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The budget is the government’s Plan B, but what’s Plan C if polls stay bad?

Scott Morrison addresses the media on Sunday.
Julian Smith/AAP

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

The government inoculated itself against the post-budget polls. Budgets don’t produce bounces, people said.

True for the most part – though there were Newspoll bounces (three points or better) in 1996, 1999, 2000, 2009, and 2012.

Nevertheless the fact that the first four post-2017 budget polls were all bad must have been a disappointment for Malcolm Turnbull. Newspoll and Fairfax-Ipsos on Monday both had the Coalition trailing Labor 47-53%; on Friday two ReachTEL polls, for Sky and Channel 7, had it behind 47-53% and 46-54% respectively.

Given that polling has found that the main budget measures are in themselves popular – from which Turnbull appears to be taking heart – the government might have hoped for something better in the voting results.

“Polls are not news,” Turnbull told a news conference on Monday, though he admitted to John Laws: “I do take notice of the polls naturally”. His throwaway “not news” line just invited a rerun of the clip from the day he challenged Tony Abbott, when he pointed to the Coalition losing 30 Newspolls on the trot. This week marks his loss of a dozen of them in a row.

Accepting, however, that bounces are not the norm, the Coalition backbench will be holding its collective breath in coming months.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said Australians will be absorbing the budget “over time”. From the government’s point of view, he’d better be right, and they will need to absorb it positively.

If there is not a clawback for the Coalition later this year – and of course factors other than the budget will be feeding into public opinion – things will be looking pretty dire. Some predict Turnbull’s leadership will be in the frame unless the numbers improve; on the other hand, another change would be extremely hard.

Budgets disappear quickly but not before an intense selling effort. On Monday night Morrison was mixing it at a Sky News forum on the New South Wales central coast, where the audience ranged from One Nation supporters and the party’s NSW senator Brian Burston to local Labor MP Liesl Tesch, who scored a question.

Morrison was tackled on debt, housing (at length), the banks, immigration and identity politics. A woman bluntly told him his reference to “mum and dad investors” in the property market was “ludicrous – they are all investors”. A man who described himself as editorial cartoonist to Mark Latham’s Outsiders declared the government had shifted too far to the left and wanted to know “when we’ll get the government we voted for”.

As he’s done in and since the budget, Morrison stressed eschewing ideology and just “getting things done”. The Liberals believed in investing in education and sustainable services, he said; the difference between a Liberal and Labor budget was “the Liberal budget is paid for”.

Morrison reiterated that the banks should absorb the levy the budget has placed on them. The audience thought it would be passed on – something Turnbull admitted earlier in the day the government could not actually stop, although “there are plenty of factors that will inhibit them from doing so”.

For those watching the Liberal Party’s internals, one of the notable reaction to the budget has been Abbott’s. Given that, at its core, the 2017 budget is about trashing the remnants of the 2014 Abbott-Hockey effort, one might have expected him to be much more critical, though his words have had an edge.

He said on 2GB on Monday (in the spot formerly occupied by Morrison): “We would have liked to have had a savings budget. The Senate doesn’t like savings budgets as they showed in 2014, so instead we’ve got a taxing budget but this is the best that the budget can do in these circumstances.”

In contrast, his former chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, has been bitterly critical, saying on Sky “the budget is about the Liberal Party junking everything that it has stood for”.

One assumes Abbott’s views are much stronger than he is expressing. So why is he being careful, when often he’s anything but?

Credlin said she thought “he’s trying hard not to be accused … of fuelling an anti-Malcolm sentiment”.

If those polls don’t turn around, Abbott doesn’t want people being able to point fingers of blame at him. He’d been keen for all the responsibility to be squarely on the shoulders of the prime minister and his treasurer.

The government has been candidly admitting that this budget, so out of character for a Coalition government, is not its preferred choice. In other words, it is Plan B. But if Plan B doesn’t help do the trick with the polls, it is not clear what Plan C would be.

https://www.podbean.com/media/player/55eic-6aa7da?from=yiiadmin

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

To get the ‘good debt’ tick, infrastructure needs to be fit for the future

Cynthia Mitchell, University of Technology Sydney; David Singleton, Swinburne University of Technology, and Jim Bentley, University of Auckland

In distinguishing between “good” and “bad” debt, federal Treasurer Scott Morrison equates good debt with infrastructure investment. However, not all infrastructure investment announced in the budget is necessarily “good”.

We are now in the Anthropocene – a new geological age defined by the global scale of humanity’s impact on the Earth – which places new requirements on our infrastructures. We need to move beyond the AAA ratings mindset, and instead aim for net-positive outcomes in social, economic and ecological terms from the outset.

Infrastructure (such as transport, water, energy, communications) underpins our ability to live in cities and our quality of life. And most infrastructure is very, very long-lived. Therefore, our infrastructure investment decisions matter enormously, especially for tomorrow.

More than half of the world’s people live in cities, and have just one planet’s worth of material resources to share around. This means we must define a new set of expectations and performance criteria for infrastructure.

Rather than settling for doing less bad, such as less environmental destruction or social disruption, we must aim from the outset to do more good. This net-positive approach requires us to restore, regenerate and increase social, cultural, natural and economic capital.

What sort of change is needed?

Examples of this kind of thinking are, as yet, rare or small.

Bishan Park on the Kallang River in Singapore gets close. Formerly a channelled stormwater drain, this collaboration between the national parks and public utility agencies has recreated significant habitat while providing flood protection and an exceptional recreational space. All this has been done in an extremely dense city.

Singapore’s Bishan Park is an example of a new approach to urban infrastructure.

Looking further into the future, in transport, a net-positive motorway might prioritise active transport and make public transport central by design. It might send price signals based on the number of passengers, vehicle type (such as autonomous) and vehicle ownership (shared, for instance).

Net-positive thinking aligns with a groundbreaking speech by Geoff Summerhayes, executive board member of Australia’s Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), earlier this year. He identified climate change risk as a core fiduciary concern, and therefore central to directors’ duties.

This shift raises significant questions for the financial and operational validity of major infrastructure projects.

For example, in assessing the WestConnex motorway project, Infrastructure Australia queried why a broader set of (potentially less energy-intensive) transport options was not considered. Similar questions arise for the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund’s support for Adani’s giant Carmichael coal mine and associated water and transport infrastructure.

A core part of the switch to net-positive infrastructure is the realisation that resilience and robustness are different things. Historically, robustness has been central to infrastructure planning. However, robustness relies on assuming that the future is more or less predictable. In the Anthropocene, that assumption no longer holds.

How do we build in resilience?

So, the best we can do is set ourselves up for a resilient future. This is one where our infrastructure is at its core flexible and adaptable.

This could include, for example, phasing infrastructure investment and development over time. Current analysis is biased toward building big projects because we assume our projected demand is correct. Therefore, we expect to reduce the overall cost by building the big project now.

However, in a more uncertain future, investing incrementally reduces risk and builds resilience, while spreading the cost and impact over time. This approach allows us to monitor and amend our planning as appropriate. It has been shown to save water utilities in Melbourne as much as A$2 billion.

Maybe the fact that we can be criticised for not having enough capacity ready in time has influenced our decision-making. We should really be challenged over investing too much, too soon, thereby eliminating the opportunity to adapt our thinking.

Or maybe we are so concerned about the need to build certainty into our planning that we are missing the opportunity to build learning through feedback loops into our strategies.

Surely there is a balance to be struck between providing enough certainty for investment without pretending we know with absolute certainty what we need to invest for the next 30 years.

We need long-term plans alongside learning and adaptation to respond to the imminent challenges facing infrastructure everywhere. These include:

• major unregulated growth in interdependencies between infrastructures;

• lack of systems thinking in planning and design;

• radical shifts in the structure of cities and how we live and work;

• increasingly fragmented provision;

• no central governance of infrastructure as a system; and

• much existing infrastructure approaching or past its end of life.

Regulatory reform is part of what’s required to enable public and private investment in better outcomes. Here too we need to learn our way forward.

Sydney’s emerging, world-leading market in recycled water is an example of a successful niche development that delivers more liveable and productive pockets in our cities through innovative integrated infrastructure.

Ultimately, doing infrastructure differently will also require investment in research on infrastructure. The UK is investing £280 million in this through the Collaboratium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities. But in Australia’s recent draft roadmap for major research investment, infrastructure is largely absent. We overlook infrastructure research at our peril.

Cynthia Mitchell, Professor of Sustainability, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney; David Singleton, Chair, Smart Cities Research Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, and Jim Bentley, Honorary Director, Centre for Infrastructure Research, University of Auckland

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Can You Erase Bad Memories?

Cricket: The Ashes Report – 15 July 2013

In the end it was a very close match that England won and Australia lost. The first test of the current Ashes series is over with plenty of controversy and action a plenty. It was a great game, though sadly it will be remembered for the controversy surrounding the DRS as much as for the game itself. But having said that, Australia really did a bad job in the way it used the DRS system, while England handled the DRS masterfully and full credit to them. With just 14 runs between the two sides, the second test has a lot to live up to following this match.

I can’t really make any useful comments on the English team, but as far as Australia is concerned I think it is time for Ed Cowan to be shown the door and for David Warner to return. Failing the return of Warner, who I believe has been sent to Africa with Australia A for some batting practice, perhaps it is time for the return of Usman Khawaja. The Australian batsmen really need to lift their game, because in reality the match was a lot closer than it should have been and they have the lower order to thanks for that – particularly the bowlers.

As for the bowling effort – work needs to be done also. There was far too much waywardness in the fast bowling ranks. Thankfully Nathan Lyon should be banished to the sidelines given the performance of Ashton Agar – a spinner who actually spins the ball and he can bat, which is very handy in the absence of a reliable upper order.