ISSUE 11, 18 FEBRUARY 2014

UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS

Sea of despairWith boat people still making the headlines, Australia looks to many like a big country with a small heart. Our academics and authors examine the whirligig of fear around refugees.Pages 4, 5 and 7

A young Sri Lankan asylum seeker, part of a group of refugees on board

a wooden boat at Merak seaport, Indonesia, 2009.

Photo: EPA/Mast Irham/AAP.

Management by terrorAcademics are gleaning lessons from the likes of Pol PotPAGE 3

Motorway madnessWestConnex could well be Australia’s most flawed infrastructure projectPAGE 6

2 UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS | FEBRUARY 2014

Late last year, governments around the world sent billions of dollars of foreign aid to countries devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, such as the Philippines.

However, after a series of cuts to foreign aid budgets, including Australia’s, experts from Australia and neighbouring countries are questioning the future of aid and international development.

Despite substantial economic growth, widening inequalities in income are creating a world of “haves and have-nots”, which experts say government policies and programs do not reflect.

How to ensure the world’s poorest people benefit from global economic growth was discussed at a conference hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in November.

The Development Futures: Alternative pathways to end poverty conference could not have come at a more important time, says UTS Associate Professor Juliet Willetts, research director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, which convened the conference.

“Poverty and inequality are being overlaid with global issues – climate change, natural disasters, declining resources and the urbanisation of many developing countries,” says Professor Willetts.

“It’s clear that bold alternatives for sustainable development are needed,” she says.

“With recently announced cuts to Australia’s national aid budget and the approaching end date in 2015 for the Millennium Development Goals, Australia is at a crossroads in our role as a global citizen. With the means to effect change on the lives of the poor, it is our responsibility to rethink future approaches to ending poverty.”

Before the federal election in September, then opposition

treasurer Joe Hockey said growth in foreign aid would be cut by $4.5 billion over the forward estimates to help fund essential infrastructure in Australia.

In the US in December, a bipartisan budget deal was drawn up to cut international food aid to millions who needed it, thanks to a continued requirement to ship American food abroad rather than buying from local producers.

In contrast, in Britain, the Conservative government has said it will approve a £1billion increase in foreign aid after years of cuts.

The UTS conference, co-convened by the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), covered a wide range of challenges and opportunities facing the development sector.

Despite a significant reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty during the past two decades, about 2.4 billion people live on less than $US2 a day, says ACFID Executive Director Marc Purcell.

“We are also confronted by a new challenge with three-quarters of the world’s poor living in middle-income countries,” Mr Purcell says.

“The conference heard about promising new approaches to sustainable development and key challenges, including how the sector can grow public awareness and work with the media in a changing, fast-paced environment.”

The Development Futures: Alternative pathways to end poverty summit, the fourth ACFID University Network conference, was held on November 21–22, 2013. For more information, visit www.development-futures.com.

In July 2012, Sydney teenager Thomas Kelly was killed by a single punch to the head as he began a night out in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Last November, the young man who delivered the blow, 19-year-old Kieran Loveridge, was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to a minimum of four years’ jail.

According to evidence tendered in court, Loveridge had attacked four other young men on the night he killed Thomas, splitting the eyebrow of one with an elbow to the head.

After so many other deadly one-punch attacks in the past two years – including that on Daniel Christie on New Year’s Eve – the debate has been re-ignited about seemingly callous assaults on strangers, attacks that are nearly always fuelled by alcohol.

State MP for Baulkham Hills David Elliott (Thomas attended school in that area) said Loveridge’s actions were the “very definition of evil”.

“Evil is flourishing and it is time the judiciary of our state began honouring their commitment to justice and human rights for all – not just those who come before the bench,” Elliott told Parliament after the sentencing.

The words “wickedness” and “evil” have gained popularity in recent years, especially since the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. But the meaning of the words is not clear, says Senior Law Lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Dr Penny Crofts.

“The media, community and political response to the very sad

death of Thomas Kelly can be regarded as a social debate about what it means to be wicked, and the role of the criminal law in constructing notions of right and wrong,” says Dr Crofts.

“Criminal law organises wickedness whether it wants to or not and we should critically evaluate the models of wickedness that are expressed in the law.”

Despite the importance of wickedness in criminal law, the question of what it means to be wicked is either avoided or ignored.

In her new book Wickedness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice, Dr Crofts seeks to expose the ways in which criminal

law communicates and sanctions different types of wickedness in contemporary society.

In criminal law, the dominant account of wickedness is that of subjective blameworthiness, she says. A person cannot be guilty unless they did the wrong thing intentionally or knowingly.

“This is a very thin account of wickedness,” says Dr Crofts. “It doesn’t account for all the different ways of being wicked or what the criminal justice system actually does.”

If a person intentionally kills someone they may not be guilty of murder if they didn’t want to kill them – if they were forced by a threat to murder. “This is an emotional account of wickedness that moves beyond a focus on intention,” says Dr Crofts.

Dr Crofts has found that in older philosophical and legal models, wickedness is related to an absence of goodness and a failure to care.

“We need an account of wickedness that includes an evaluation of individual emotions and thoughts as well as external or objective evaluation of what their actions were threatening,” says Dr Crofts.

Just because a person did not want to kill someone does not mean they should not be held responsible.

“If a person failed to exercise care for a value [life] that we as a society enshrine as important, they could be regarded as wicked,” says Dr Crofts.

Foreign aid shrinks as poverty growsBy Xavier Mayes

BOOKSExploring breath in art and culture

BUSINESS Learning lessons from dictators

Page

FEATURESupport for refugees can come from unlikely sources

Page

COVER STORYWriters turn to storytelling to break the political morass surrounding the asylum seeker debate

Page

OPINIONBuilding a new Sydney motorway won’t solve our traffic problems

Page

4 5 63Contents

FEATUREAustralia must start planning for an influx of climate change refugees

Page

7

Managing Editor: Robert ButtonEditor: Wendy FrewDesign and layout: Meegan Desmond

Printer: Blue Star Print NSW

Editorial enquiries: 02 9514 2732, brink@uts.edu.au

Brink is published by the University of Technology, Sydney through its Marketing and Communication Unit.

The views expressed in Brink are not necessarily the views of the university or its editorial team.

Brink is published on The Sydney Morning Herald iPad app on the third Tuesday of every month.

www.smh.com.au/interactive/ ipad-app-landing/

Brink online: www.newsroom.uts.edu.au/brink

When should a criminal action be deemed wicked? By Shona Kervinen

Haitian civilians unload relief supplies, 2008. Photo: Marion Doss on Flickr.

Photo: Thinkstock.

3FEBRUARY 2014 | UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS

Business bestseller lists are heavy with tales of inspirational leadership but a group of academics is gleaning lessons for management from the “dark side” by studying the methods of Pol Pot, the dictator responsible for the

“killing fields” of Cambodia.As commander of the Khmer

Rouge, Pol Pot orchestrated the genocide of an estimated 1.7 million people, killing one in five in the then Kampuchea in five years, in pursuit of his “utopian vision” of a classless, peasant society.

Totalitarian regimes are not only social and political movements but also “organisational projects”, says the Research Director of the Centre

for Management and Organisation Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney Business School, Professor Stewart Clegg.

“The processes that produced [the killing fields] can and should be analysed,” says Professor Clegg. “Scholars in the field of organisational studies have an ethical responsibility to analyse not just the best in organisations but also the worst. There are things we can learn to enable us both to avoid those sorts of outrages in the future and to avoid the worst excesses that organisations are capable of.”

Professor Clegg and his fellow researchers have isolated 20

principles that underpin totalitarian organisations. For instance, managers demand conformity, maintain their distance and favour certain people. They also ensure a ceaseless round of activity leaves little room for reflection.

“These 20 principles or rules for constructing totalitarian institutions are phenomena that you might find in normal organisations,” says Professor Clegg. “It just needs a little accentuation of some of these aspects to begin to produce ethically very dubious organisations.”

Bullying, stress and emotional burnout are found in “toxic” business organisations, he says.

At the extreme, “management by terror” – a term associated with Pol Pot – sometimes surfaces.

In France, former France Telecom chief executive Didier Lombard was charged with harassment after 35 workers committed suicide. Lombard has rejected allegations his efficiency measures were to blame.

In China, a wave of suicides drew attention to work practices at Foxconn, electronics maker for global brands such as Apple. In a New York Times investigation in 2010, workers complained about military-style drills, verbal abuse by superiors and “self-criticisms” they were forced to read aloud.

Professor Clegg says the example of Pol Pot “tells you that where you have leadership that is absolutely convinced of the moral rightness and ideological purposefulness of its mission, and demands conformity among members for the achievement of that mission, anything is possible – and the anythings that are possible are not necessarily good things”.

He says that, rather than having staff “singing from the same sheet”, very strong corporate cultures are to be avoided. “I don’t think they’re a very good idea. I think it’s from dissonance, from resistance, from polyphony that you get creativity and innovation.”

A small step from a toxic workplace to dictatorshipBY LESLEY PARKER

BOOKS

BUSINESS

Myriad meanings of a life forceBreathing is intrinsic to some Eastern philosophies yet in the West we overlook its deeper physical and spiritual significance. A new book aims to explore what we often ignore, writes Wendy Frew.

Westerners have forgotten about the most indispensable

element in life, says French philosopher Luce Irigaray: breath.

It is through breathing that we can draw awareness back to our bodies, rediscover respect for others and for nature, and reconnect metaphysical thought with the living, breathing world, she contends.

This exploration of breath and what it signifies, along with other ideas about how breathing relates to the body, spirituality and culture are part of the inspiration for a new project by scholar Dr Meredith Jones and award-winning designer Suzanne Boccalatte.

Breath will be the third in their Trunk series of books about the stuff of the body: a collection of art, photography, fiction and essays about every aspect of breath, encased in a small, beautifully designed book.

Breath is a motif that runs through art and music. Thanks to Irish avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett we have the world’s shortest known play, Breath, (25 seconds), which consists of the sound of a birth cry followed by an amplified recording of somebody inhaling and exhaling slowly.

In 1977, performance artist Marina Abramović and her husband Uwe Laysiepen used their bodies to explore their physical and emotional limits in the video Breathing In/Breathing Out.

Locked in what looks like a long kiss they are, in fact, breathing the air from each other’s lungs, almost to the point of suffocation.

More recently, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk produced an entire album about breath, with the working title of Pneuma.

Breathing is also a strong component of many religious and spiritual beliefs, says Boccalatte, even though it is a process we often take for granted.

“What is breath? It is air as a life force … I am very interested in taking some material from Eastern philosophy. Breath is all pervasive but you can never capture it so I also like the idea of developing an art exhibition around the book,” she says.

Jones, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney, describes the Trunk series as a “labour of love” that the two friends funded themselves and published via Boccalatte’s eponymous agency.

At a time when sales of traditional books are stalling and e-books are still finding their place in the market, Jones and Boccalatte want to create something that will be read more than once, dipped into at random.

“I don’t think the book is dead but it is changing,” says Jones. “I only buy novels on Kindle now but I still buy academic books and art books. The Trunk books are Bible-like, printed on very high quality paper and beautiful things

in themselves.”All the Trunk books deal with

dualities. With the first, Hair, it was our competing feelings of disgust and admiration for body hair and what that says about our ideas about gender, as well as the thousands of different cultural meanings of head hair. With Blood, it was the dual roles of a life force which, when spilt, signals injury or death.

With Breath, the duality is more about consciousness and unconsciousness: we are always breathing but usually we are not

aware of it. We tend to think about it only when we lose it or when we have to control it.

The editors are calling for contributions for Breath. The writing could be anything from a scientist writing about respiratory diseases, a free diver describing what happens to the body when the breath is held for extended periods, or a short dissertation on the spiritual connections to breath. The call for artworks is equally broad. The editors are open to any medium.

Jones and Boccalatte will

consider submissions of up to 1500 words, in any genre, including fiction and poetry. They might commission a piece of writing to match a work of art or vice versa.

“With these books we think of lists of what we want and then are totally surprised by what we get, so we have to keep an open mind,” says Jones.

For more information about Breath go to www.trunkbook.com or contact meredith.jones@uts.edu.au

The book isn’t dead yet according to Breath editors, Meredith Jones and Suzanne Boccalatte. Photo: Wade Laube.

Pol Pot victims, Siem Reap. Photo courtesy of totalitarism on flickr.

4 UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS | FEBRUARY 2014

COVER STORY

Lucy Fiske was at a conference in Jakarta about a year ago when she met

a young woman on her way to Bogor on the Indonesian island of Java. With other Indonesians, the woman planned to act as a human shield for refugees who were being threatened with violence by a minority extremist group.

Dr Fiske was impressed by their courage and struck, too, by how rare it was to hear about ordinary Indonesian citizens offering assistance to refugees.

“Here was a strong, civil-minded group of people helping refugees,” says Dr Fiske, a human rights and gender justice researcher who has been studying refugee issues for more than a decade.

“I wondered if there were other links between refugees and the Indonesian community that allowed some of the refugees to work and get help. Could this be an alternative form of protection that we needed to explore?”

That question now forms the basis of Dr Fiske’s research project for her 2014 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Technology, Sydney. The fellowship is funded for four years.

The postdoctoral scheme has given Dr Fiske, originally from Curtin University, an opportunity to conduct research designed to help shift thinking on asylum seekers by investigating the lives of refugees living without formal

protection in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

In December, things became more difficult for those refugees trying to get to Australia when the Federal Government – which wants Indonesia to put more refugees in detention – capped the number of permanent protection visas for asylum seekers. The situation for hundreds of thousands of other refugees in South-East Asia is also dire because they have little legal protection.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), several countries in South-East Asia have generously hosted large numbers of refugees for decades, but the region lacks strong legal frameworks for

the protection of refugees.Just before Christmas, Dr Fiske

visited the Indonesian town of Cisarua, a temporary home for many refugees fleeing war in their home countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. In the first of what she hopes will be several similar trips, she discovered a network of informal protection for asylum seekers, within their own cultural groups, within the wider refugee community and from Indonesians themselves.

Many refugees in Indonesia end up in Cisarua where they wait for their cases to be processed by UNHCR. Others are there to board a boat for Australia. They live in spartan accommodation, often with several families in one house, and usually have little more than two sets of clothes. They are not allowed to work and their children don’t go to school.

“Many of these people live their entire lives without being able to access formal protection, with no residency rights and no citizenship. And they can’t return to their country,” says Dr Fiske.

The mental health of asylum seekers is also often at risk.

“The utter boredom, the feeling that your life is slipping away ... one young man we met had formerly been working on a building site, he was a welder and carpenter. But now he was sitting inside all day long. This 26-year-old had no idea how long it would be before he was processed.”

It is a precarious existence that leaves people open to exploitation in the housing and job markets.

“But they do forge out lives,” says Dr Fiske. “They get married; they raise children … My project looks at how they do that.

“I interviewed about 30 refugees

while I was there. The majority of the local community seemed to be friendly and welcoming [of the refugees]. Some business owners wanted them there because they spend money in the community but there is a small extremist group that doesn’t want them … In the case of most Indonesians I met, they don’t care about [religion].”

Muslim refugees weren’t allowed to worship at the mosque but sometimes, the town’s imam would show them where fellow countrymen were living. Sri Lankan refugees were given lunch every day by the local Hindu temple.

“They are forbidden by law to work but they are also acutely aware that many Indonesians still live in poverty, many of them working as street vendors. The refugees can’t start their own small enterprises because they would be competing with local traders, which would likely test relationships with the local community too much.”

Help comes in the form of advice and assistance from other refugees or the Jesuit Refugee Service - but sometimes from unexpected quarters. For example, a young Pakistani woman living in the town with her husband and small child had no other women to talk to. Her Indonesian neighbour, who also had a small child, befriended her.

“Despite the language barrier the two women spent a lot of their time together,” says Dr Fiske.

“I was really moved by stories they told me about helping each other … It is more of a goodwill story than I expected because of the care from Indonesians. But no one hears about that side of the story in Australia. These voices need to be heard.”

A rare insight into human kindnessAsylum seekers who have come from countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan to Indonesia receive help from some unexpected sources, reports Wendy Frew.

Finally, a home for some down underThe cover photo of this month’s Brink shows a young Sri Lankan asylum seeker holding a placard during a protest demanding the United Nations High Commission for Refugees take care of a group of asylum seekers, including this young boy, stranded in Indonesia in late 2009.

The group of 255 asylum seekers were aboard a wooden boat anchored at Merak, a seaport in the Indonesian province of Banten. Heading for Australia,

they had been stopped by Indonesian authorities at the request of then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was alarmed at a sharp rise in the number of boat people arriving in Australia.

According to a report in Fairfax Media, for months, the asylum seekers lived on the boat, and then in tents on the shore at Merak. One died, dozens escaped, some caught boats to Australia, and the following year,

the remaining 138 people were sent to an Indonesian detention centre. Among them was a man named Nimal, who had become a spokesperson for the group.

Despite the Australian Government’s bluster about keeping them out, eventually, about 70 of the Sri Lankans received visas for Australia, Fairfax Media reported last month. Nimal arrived in Sydney in January, excited about starting a new life in the Victorian town of Mildura.

You can read the full story, as told by Fairfax Media’s Michael Bachelard, here: www.smh.com.au/national/nimals-long-journey-to-australia-has-an-ending-at-last-20140115-30vaf.html

Many refugees make extremely dangerous journeys by sea. Photo: Global Campaign for

Climate Action, flickr.

5FEBRUARY 2014 | UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS

Writers take up asylum seekers’ cause

Some of Australia’s best authors are inviting readers to step into the shoes of boat people, writes Wendy Frew.

Last year, Australia entered its 22nd year of uninterrupted economic growth.

At the same time, the Australian government denied work rights to more than 21,000 asylum seekers and threatened to put them in detention if they behaved “antisocially”, such as congregating in large numbers in apartments.

That threat is part of the rhetoric from both the Liberal and Labor parties that has dominated the debate about boat people for more than a decade. Author and journalist David Marr once described the damning rhetoric about asylum seekers as a consolation prize offered to those Australians, often living in marginal electorates, who had missed out on the prosperity the rest of the country enjoyed.

In a public lecture in 2003, Marr asked why the nation’s writers and poets had not taken up the cause of asylum seekers.

A new book sets out to do just that. A Country Too Far, edited by University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Creative Writing lecturer, Dr Rosie Scott, and acclaimed Australian author Thomas Keneally, is a collection of 29 stories, poems and essays about asylum seekers by some of Australia’s best writers, including Christos Tsiolkas, Geraldine Brooks, Les Murray, John Tranter and Anna Funder.

Scott and Keneally believe passionately in the power of words to move people’s emotions. They hope the anthology will help shift the debate away from what Scott

describes as a “whirligig of venom, fear and hatred” to a more humane consideration of the plight of people fleeing war-torn homelands and persecution.

Instead of viewing boat people as “illegals” and “queue jumpers”, the book invites Australians to step into their shoes and sympathise with their plight.

“People have been trying to dispel the myths [about asylum seekers] forever,” says Scott, “which is why I think this book is so important. If you can move people with human stories … it bypasses the bullshit and the ideology.

“I have great faith in beautiful and powerful writing. Our brief to the writers was ‘do whatever you want’. We did not want to proscribe anything. We trusted them to choose the writing format that best suited them.”

Keneally, who worked with Scott on Another Country, a 2004 anthology of writing by refugees, shares that faith.

“Fiction and poetry is usually about intimate human experiences,” says Keneally, who was last year awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by UTS.

“Most of the writers [in the book] have gone for fiction, which is a good way of individualising the story of asylum seekers.

“I think a lot of Australians believe the whole discourse has been debased and that it has been used for the rawest political purpose. It is easy to condemn a group of people by giving them a less than human face. This [book]

was an attempt by creative means to give them a human face.

“We are showing there is dissent ... that cannot be entirely dismissed.”

The Booker Prize winner and author of Australian classics such as Schindler’s Ark, says Australia’s major political parties attacked asylum seekers because they believed they could win votes by tapping into people’s basest reactions to foreigners.

“We had been so manipulated it was almost inevitable that by the time Labor got to its second term it would make a stab at clearing up the boat arrivals,” says Keneally.

“It was a competition between one soap powder brand and another soap powder brand but the other product [the Liberal Party] has always been better at this game.”

The critically acclaimed book has inspired a sister anthology that is being put together by British editor Lucy Popescu. It will include contributions from top British writers.

The Australian novelist Alex Miller’s contribution to A Country Too Far attracted media attention after he wrote that he had been forced, by what he describes as the government’s cruel and inhumane treatment of refugees, to “reconsider what it means to be an Australian”.

In an interview with a UK newspaper, the British-born Miller blamed the hardened attitudes on Australia’s prosperity and the

emergence of an affluent, self-interested class.

“It is not the Australia I came to,” Miller told the newspaper. “The big-toys people who buy the big boats and have places in the country – the barbecue aristocracy – did not exist then.”

Scott also blames Australia’s political leaders, few of whom have dared to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

“We seem to be stuck in a morass. No one in the major parties has been brave enough to stand up and say ‘this is wrong’.”

Hazara refugees fleeing to Australia, September 2012. Photo by Barat Ali Batoor

COVER STORY

EXODUSBy Dorothy Hewett

In such a time as this when multitudes

stream out abandoned bombed from ruined cities

grandmothers hobbling babies bicycles

luggage on carts and backs the crying children

there are no boundaries a private grief

shrinks to a pin-prick on this frontier

the ditches filled with blood and suitcases

lovers shot through the heart abandoned toys

dragging a severed limb

a three-legged dog limps off across the plain

this unmourned multitude who trudge

across earth’s thunderous surface

Belgrade to Kosovo to Baghdad burning.

From A Country Too Far, Writings on Asylum Seekers, edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally. Reprinted with permission from Kate Lilley.

6 UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS | FEBRUARY 2014

OPINION

Motorway a sure bet to derail commutersThe State Government’s plan to build more tollways won’t solve Sydney’s transport woes, argues Michelle Zeibots.

Most people will tell you it is just common sense.

Morning trains arriving in the city from the western suburbs are packed with passengers like tins of sardines. There’s no room for more commuters. We need more rail capacity. The roads are full too but a road lane only accommodates 2000 cars, or 2400 people per hour while the same amount of space given over to a rail line accommodates about 20,000 commuters. If we improve public transport services in western Sydney, we will relieve road congestion too, because people will have another commuting option.

This is why regular public opinion surveys tell us most people – about 60 per cent to 70 per cent – think money being spent on roads should be spent on public transport instead. The NSW Government’s plans to spend $11 billion on the WestConnex tollway – a tollway that widens the M4 and M5 and builds a six-lane tunnel between the two – doesn’t gel with what most people want.

There’s good science to back up the common sense view. It goes like this: public transport operates to a fixed speed, a timetable. Most people will take whichever transport option is fastest. They don’t care about the mode. If public transport is quicker they’ll catch a train or a bus, freeing up road space. If driving is quicker, they’ll jump in their car, adding to road congestion. In this way, public transport speeds determine road speeds. The upshot is that increasing public transport speeds is one of the best options available to governments and communities wanting to reduce road traffic congestion.

There is plenty of evidence to prove the point. When Sydney’s train service reliability disintegrated in 2004 and the unusual decision was made to slow the city’s rail network, embedding the slower speeds in the 2006 timetable, road speeds fell and congestion increased. Average road speeds were sitting on 34km/hour before things went pear-shaped on the rail network. Afterwards, road speeds

dropped to about 30km/hour and have basically stayed there.

The new timetable has made rail travel quicker for many areas throughout Sydney but it is still too early to see if there have been improvements in parallel road speeds.

This relationship is one of the key mechanisms that make city systems tick. It is basic microeconomics, people shifting between two different options until there is no advantage in shifting and equilibrium is found. We can see this relationship in data sets that make comparisons between international cities. Cities with faster public transport speeds generally have faster road speeds.

With all this evidence behind us, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to build the WestConnex tollway.

The $11 billion earmarked to expand existing motorways that filled up with traffic not long after they were first opened, could be far

better spent on public transport. A project like a second Sydney Harbour rail crossing is one of the things we won’t see because of WestConnex. It would improve operations across the network by freeing up the bottleneck in the central business district that’s stopping Sydney Trains from putting on more services across a whole suite of lines. If you free that strategically significant choke point, existing spare capacity on outer network links could be used to increase capacity across the entire network by a staggering 50 per cent to 60 per cent.

That’s how you make big improvements and a genuine dent in the problem of road congestion and cut petrol bills for car commuters.

Dr Michelle Zeibots is a research principal at the University of Technology, Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, specialising in the analysis of sustainable urban passenger transport systems.

Improving public transport will relieve road congestion. Photos: Thinkstock.

7FEBRUARY 2014 | UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS

Australia needs to plan for an influx of climate change refugees from

neighbouring countries that face ever increasing risks from cyclones, rising sea levels and more severe droughts, according to a researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

Fears about waves of mass migration from climate change are unfounded, says the university’s Elaine Kelly. But Dr Kelly, a UTS Chancellor’s Post Doctoral Research Fellow, says Australia should start planning migration streams that include people who have lost their homes to climate change, in addition to those we already accept for other humanitarian reasons.

“The reality is climate change will provoke more displacement, and displacement of those who are most poor,” says Dr Kelly.

“How are we going to plan for that?”

The international community is now talking less about how to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere and more about how to cope with the dramatic changes excessive amounts of CO2 will have on climate and temperatures, she says.

One of the possible solutions is planned migration from those areas particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of climate change to areas that

are less likely to be affected.It is a major shift in thinking

that has yet to be adopted by Australian politicians.

“We need to think about local, regional and international ways of regulating migration if we want to do it well,” says Dr Kelly.

“Australia needs to be involved in the [international] talks around climate change funding and how to initiate funds and implement these sorts of programs. But at the moment, we are withdrawing from those sorts of conversations,” she says.

Dr Kelly argues that because climate change is increasing the pressure for people living in South-East Asia to migrate to safer regions, it is more important than ever that the debate about migration, and particularly about refugees, should be based on ethics rather than politics or national security.

In November, one of the strongest cyclones to hit the Philippines, Typhoon Hayian, killed thousands of people and left millions homeless. A month earlier, in India, more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes before another cyclone hit. In May, one million people were evacuated as a cyclone hit Bangladesh, a country particularly vulnerable to cyclones and flooding.

Most climate change adaption will be local, says Dr Kelly. For

example, migration from low-lying rural areas in Bangladesh to the capital, Dhaka, is expected to increase the city’s population to 40 million by 2050 from 15 million today.

Dr Kelly has observed a sense of hospitality in the international refugee program for those suffering political persecution, a sense sorely lacking in Australia.

“Hospitality to affected countries from the industrial countries responsible for climate change must be seen as either a mode of adaptation or a form of compensation for profound losses and damages caused by climate change,” she says.

“I would love to see a reasoned discussion of [the ethics of climate change] in Australia, one that isn’t polemic and isn’t driven by fear.

“I’d love to see a discussion that looks at the human issues and at the pragmatic approaches that government can take.”

She also wants to see research conducted in communities that have welcomed migrants and regional communities that want more people.

“How can we develop and implement welcoming policies at that level? I’d love to see conversations happening at local levels and then putting pressure on members of parliament, and the state and federal governments to engage in the conversation.”

A child surrounded by flood water, Bangladesh. Photo: DFID-Rafiqur Rahman Raqu.

Climate change refugees are our responsibilityThose in the poorest countries will be most affected by cyclones, rising sea levels and drought, writes Åsa Wahlquist.

FEATURE

Flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Sumaiya Ahmed on flickr.

8 UTS: NEWS. VIEWS. BREAKTHROUGHS | FEBRUARY 2014

UTS CRICOS PROvIdeR COde 00099F1833

5

Courses designed and delivered by the business leaders of today to create the business leaders of tomorrow.

Live case studies, guest lectures and reality-based rigour. What you learn with us today you apply at work tomorrow.

THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS

IS HERE

uts.ac/pgbusiness

UTS BUSINESS SCHOOL

18 February

February27UTSPEAKS: FREE PUBLIC LECTURES

In our changing and complex world, keeping up with the latest ideas, issues and breakthroughs can be a challenge.UTSpeaks public lectures have engaged and enlightened Sydney audiences for almost a decade. By becoming a subscriber you can attend these and other free UTS events.UTSpeaks subscribers receive personal email invitations to lectures, Q&A forums, hypotheticals and industry events featuring leading local and international experts.

Tap inTo Tomorrow’s ideas Today

Tap into tomorrow’s ideas today. register your details at:https://sendstudio.itd.uts.edu.au or scan the Qr code.

RADIOIn the lead up to this year’s Mardi Gras, tune in to Star Observer Digital, a pop-up digital radio station powered by 2SER 107.3 and Melbourne’s JOY 94.9 that is tapping into Sydney’s queer scene. This year’s broadcast follows last year’s successful inaugural Mardi Gras digital programming.

nUntil 16 March.

BOOK LAUNCH The e-book may well be in the ascendancy but it’s great to see publishers have not forsaken the printed book. This month, James Stuart’s first full-length collection of poems, Anonymous Folk Songs, will be launched in Ultimo. When he is not handling communications for UTS’s massive building construction program, James is creating what Australian author Nicholas Jose has described as “worldscapes and dreamscapes” with an “uneasy eloquence of this assured poetic talent”.

n6pm, Bon Marche Studio, 755 Harris St, Ultimo.

FEBRUARY/MARCH

U T S Pub lic Ev ents Calend a r

March

MARDI GRASOne of Sydney’s best loved events, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, is once again heading to town, complete with what is sure to be a glittering procession of more than 9000 people, outrageous floats, lavish costumes, stunning designs and lots of dancing. If you can’t get there on the night, listen to 2ser 107.3 and Star Observer Digital’s simulcasts, in collaboration with JOY FM in Melbourne.

nFrom 7pm. www.2ser.com

1

March

CLIMATE CHANGEDespite overwhelming evidence the phenomenon known as Climate Change is dramatically changing our planet, mainstream media continue to give a voice to those politicians and business people who challenge the science. Next month, a panel of scientists and journalists will scrutinise how the media represents the science at the first UTSpeaks lecture for 2014.

n6pm drinks for 6.30pm start. Great Hall, UTS Tower, 15 Broadway, Ultimo.

5

EXHIBITIONHe has been named by the influential journal Art Review as an artist to watch out for, and next month you can do just that when Australian artist Ian Burns exhibits at UTS Gallery. Based in New York City, Burns – who says curiosity is the first of all passions – takes everyday objects and turns them into creative, kinetic contraptions.

nFor more information about his upcoming exhibition go to www.art.uts.edu.au