Prime Minister Julia Gillard will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price following the elections. But first, she intends to build a community consensus for action. How hard is this likely to be? Earlier in the year, following “climategate” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s unsubstantiated finding that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, many claimed the case for a carbon price had evaporated.

Read the full article at the University of Sydney.

Professor Rosemary Lyster is from Sydney Law School and director of the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law.

Even as societies become more cosmopolitan, there is an increasing constituency appealing to parochialism. As the scale and intensity of international interactions increase, so does the potential for frictions and resentments.

This is often accompanied by a profession of one’s own country’s virtues compared with others, a belief that typically owes more to patriotism than evidence.

An international competition in self-righteousness would be closely fought. But Australia must be a strong contender.

The debate about Australia’s role in global warming is an urgent case in point. The domestic debate is often conducted with a blithe ignorance about international developments and perspectives. The statistic frequently quoted is that Australia doesn’t matter because it contributes ”only” 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gases.

At one level it is true that unless the two biggest contributors – China and the United States – take effective action, any global response will be inadequate. But it should be remembered there are about 200 countries in the world.

At 1.4 per cent of the world total, Australia is the 15th biggest emitter. If the 15th biggest country has an excuse for inaction, then at least 185 other countries have even more excuse than Australia to delay action on climate change.

Total emissions are one way of viewing the problem, but an equally important view is to examine it on a per population basis. Australia emits 1.4 per cent of emissions, but has only 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, so it emits more than four times the global average.

While 1 billion Chinese produce a lot more greenhouse gases than 22 million Australians, each individual Australian generates more than four times as many as each individual Chinese, and about 16 times as much as each individual Indian.

If we restrict the analysis to the most populous 130 countries, those with a population of 3.5 million or more, Australia is the world leader. Only a handful of small countries, especially oil producers such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have higher per person emissions.

Equally misleading is the argument that no other countries are doing anything to address global warming. In December, the Climate Action Network, an international non-government organisation, ranked 57 countries according to their anti-pollution efforts. Australia ranked equal worst along with Canada, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.

The European Environment Agency reports all but one of its 29 member countries are on track to achieve their Kyoto targets. Five have already reduced their greenhouse gas emissions to below the required 8 per cent reduction from 1990 totals. These include Britain, Germany and France.

Similarly Australia’s diplomatic efforts would surely have aroused the indignation of others. At Kyoto in 1997, the other countries were keen to achieve a unanimous agreement, and the Howard government exploited this to bargain for a relatively generous target for Australia. The government then boasted about its bargaining prowess, only to abandon the treaty altogether when George Bush withdrew the United States from Kyoto. How to win one friend and lose many others.

With great fanfare, Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto agreement in 2007. But there has been little attention since – by government, opposition or media – as to whether Australia will achieve the 2012 targets it signed up to.

Rudd and Australia played an active and constructive role at the Copenhagen summit, but when the prime minister decided to abandon an emissions trading scheme in April, he also renounced Australia’s unconditional commitment to achieve a 5 per cent reduction. The unconditional became retrospectively conditional. According to the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, Australia thus became the first country to abandon commitments it had made at Copenhagen.

Both Rudd and John Howard have given other countries cause to doubt the value of Australia’s word.

In the lead-up to Copenhagen, Tony Abbott said it threatened ”some latter-day environmental Munich agreement kind of thing”. He was comparing this inclusive international gathering on climate change to the infamous meeting between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after which the hapless British prime minister proclaimed ”peace in our time”, the high point of appeasement folly. But relating Munich to the Copenhagen summit must rank as the most absurd historical analogy ever drawn by an Australian politician.

If Abbott, with his view that anthropogenic climate change is ”crap”, had led Australia’s delegation to Copenhagen, he would have sat with Saudi Arabia, alone in a duumvirate of denial, isolated from all other democracies, from all Australia’s allies and trading partners. Despite their disagreements about what commitments they would make, other governments were unanimous that man-made global warming was a real and urgent problem.

The myth of Australia’s irrelevance and innocence both ring hollow. By what we do, and fail to do, we are an important part of the international equation. Sadly both in political hypocrisy and in greenhouse gases, Australia contributes well beyond our global share to hot air.

Professor Rod Tiffen is from the Department of Government and International Relations of the Faculty of Arts.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a revolution as a dramatic and wide-ranging change in the way something works. It is still not clear how Australia’s higher education landscape might be changed fundamentally by the conservative blueprint designed by the 2008 Bradley report, but I suspect it will not approach the revolutionary effects of the Dawkins reforms begun in 1987 by then Labor Education Minister John Dawkins.

Excerpt from a paper by Professor Vin Massaro titled “How goes the Revolution? – Targets, funding, compacts and regulation”, presented at the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Conference, From Revolution to Higher Achievement – Driving reform through innovative policy and finance, held in Sydney from 8-9 June 2010, first published online by University World News. Read the full article at UNW here.

Australia has a numeracy problem and we are not addressing it. Demand for mathematics and statistics graduates is predicted to grow in Australia by 3.5 percent annually until 2013. But two weeks ago the Group of Eight universities published a review that revealed a 27 percent decline between 1995 and 2007 in the number of high school students taking advanced maths, and a 15 percent decline during 2001-07 in the number of students majoring in maths at university.

Maths is critical to modern life.

The report is a warning that Australian policy-makers can ignore only at the peril of our future.

President Barack Obama announced a national STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) initiative last November to reverse similar declines in the US. Earlier legislation established a program called “10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds” to improve the education of maths and science teachers and to provide scholarships to students in STEM fields who commit to becoming maths and science teachers in the US.

In this international context, it is disappointing to see misguided responses from opinion leaders in Australia.

Among the most disappointing were those advocated by NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane in these pages (“Numbers game we can win,” HES, March 17). O’Kane underplayed the seriousness of this decline. She pointed to her state’s school system, arguing that “numeracy concepts” in NSW may now be “taught in the context of a history lesson”. The baffling implication seems to be that history teachers are teaching these “numeracy concepts” and this is a viable alternative to the teaching of maths by qualified maths teachers.

A second suggestion from the NSW chief scientist was the proposition that we can deal with the decline in maths education by modifying our engineering degrees at university. She proposed that universities should stop making school mathematics a prerequisite for studying engineering and recommended that the maths component in engineering education be replaced with more “entertaining exercises” that could “have a positive effect on student motivation”.

I would rather have engineers who could build bridges and buildings that stayed up and who could make sure mines operated safely and efficiently.

The NSW chief scientist makes no comment on the main recommendations of the Go8 report, specifically the one to provide a “systematic structure of enabling programs… addressing the problems of low mathematics experience and skills acquisition in schools before students reach university”. Instead, we are offered a smokescreen: the low representation of women “in professions where maths is a significant factor”.

As president of the Australian Mathematical Society and a woman, I feel very strongly about this issue.

The Go8 report shows there is low participation in maths by both men and women. The smokescreen distracts from the underlying issue, which is that there are simply not enough qualified maths teachers in Australia.

It seduces policy-makers and the public into believing erroneously that there probably isn’t a genuine problem with maths education because of the spurious suggestion that it must all be just a consequence of entrenched sexism in maths departments.

Instead of talk and smokescreens, I would like to see action: reverse the trend in NSW where some schools turn away students from advanced maths classes because they do not have suitably qualified teachers to teach them. Enable every school student who chooses to study maths in their final year at school with the opportunity to do so with a qualified maths teacher. Provide appropriate salaries for maths teachers so that good mathematicians are not all induced into the finance sector or into business, but choose to teach instead. Support a realistic framework of professional development programs and provide time and opportunity to increase the skills of maths teachers, with the help of the maths discipline. We would love to help.

Policy-makers of all spots and stripes have claimed to believe the evidence pointing to a looming disaster. For some inexplicable reason, the standard response is always to ignore the heart of the issue but to invest a huge amount of energy (and a small amount of money) in finding little contributions that can be made at the periphery.

As a mathematician, as a teacher, as a citizen of NSW, as a parent and as a woman, I want to know what’s wrong with tackling this issue head on.

I urge the wonderfully capable women at the top – O’Kane, NSW Education Minister Verity Firth and her federal counterpart Julia Gillard – to action.

University of Sydney professor Nalini Joshi is president of the Australian Mathematical Society and was part of the reference group on the Go8 Review of Education in Mathematics, Data Science and Quantitative Disciplines.

Media inquiries: Sarah Stock, sarah.stock@sydney.edu.au, 0419 278 715.

Academic freedom is essential to the work of Australian universities. Their role in educating students and advancing human knowledge depends upon academics and students working and learning in an environment in which they can freely exchange ideas, challenge conventional wisdom and debate controversial issues.

In countries such as New Zealand and South Africa, academic freedom is protected by legislation or even in a national constitution. By contrast, Australia does not protect academic freedom in its Constitution or by statute, nor does it have a national bill or charter of rights from which it might be implied.

The protection of academic freedom in Australia is limited. Industrial agreements can provide protection, but this is vulnerable.

Furthermore, this and other possible sources of protection can be overridden by federal law. Such laws can, and have, displaced the employment arrangements of a university or even any future recognition of academic freedom under state law.

Even though it has limited legal protection, academic freedom is still recognised in other ways. In law at present the freedom is mostly a set of conventions and assumptions for those who work in the university sector. In this form, academic freedom is fragile and easy to breach. Its maintenance depends on the vigilance of those who work in the sector and on the goodwill of those who have the power to undermine it.

Australian academics face the possibility that academic freedom will continue to be whittled away over time. There are many recent examples of the freedom having been compromised, such as through political interference in the allocation of Australian Research Council grant funding, the pressure on universities to become more like commercial enterprises and restrictions on teaching and research under Australia’s antiterror laws.

This is a problem not only for the academics, but also for society. We all depend on the quality of academic work to better understand the problems facing the nation and to promote economic development and social progress.

The federal parliament should legislate to protect academic freedom. The law should be drafted, however, to allow legitimate scrutiny of academics’ work and rigorous processes to ensure they operate in an accountable manner.

To protect academic freedom over the longer term we must also realise it is part of larger debates about other important values. These include the independence of the public service and its capacity to provide government with frank advice and the ability of non-government organisations to engage in public advocacy and not lose their funding as a result.

Attacks on these values are all too possible because Australia does not take seriously enough the need to protect our most important democratic rights. Even freedom of speech has no secure protection in Australian law and instead depends upon the goodwill and good sense of the government of the day. When such goodwill is in short supply, or during a climate of popular fear, freedom of speech can be curtailed and with it a number of other important principles like academic freedom.

If we do not take freedom of speech seriously, it is hard to argue for the maintenance of something like academic freedom. The best way forward is not only to legislate to protect academic freedom, but to support, with a coalition of like interests, broader reform to our system of government and legal rules. That reform should include a national charter of human rights. Although such a law has been enacted in the ACT and in Victoria, Australia remains the only democratic nation without a national law of this kind.

Experience elsewhere shows that a charter would give real protection to rights like freedom of speech and could have a powerful impact in shaping public debate. While no such law provides the whole answer, it would be a valuable tool in preventing the further erosion of academic freedom in Australia.

George Williams is the Anthony Mason Professor of Law and Foundation Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, UNSW. He is also an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.

This article was originally published in the November/December 2009 edition of Uniken, the bi-monthly magazine of the University of New South Wales.  It is reproduced by Science Hub Australia with permission from the author, Professor George Williams, and the editor of Uniken, Susi Williams.

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