Friday 31 May 2019

Australian backyard astronomer praised for epic photos of Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Posted about 2 hours ago


Experts have praised an amateur astronomer from central Queensland for documenting a historic planetary event through a homemade telescope.

Key points:

  • Anthony Wesley takes photos of Jupiter with a camera mounted on his telescope, which he made from mirrors and metal framing
  • The photos are of the Big Red Spot, a storm which has raged above Jupiter for more than 200 years
  • Scientists say Jupiter is susceptible to sustained extreme weather events, but no one is certain how old the storm is

A storm has been raging above Jupiter for more than 200 years, known as its Great Red Spot.
But the storm may be in its death throes, under attack from other weather events which have been circling the gas giant since April.
The cosmic event has gained the attention of professional and amateur astronomers around the world, but one Australian computer programmer has stunned experts with his images.



Trading city lights for starry Queensland sky

In 2017, Anthony Wesley and his wife Leisa moved from Canberra to a remote central Queensland town for its weather, and because it was conducive to stargazing.
He worked as a government computer programmer before the tree-change took him to the remote property at Rubyvale — a four-hour drive west of Rockhampton.
He works for a photo company from home but can also be found at the observatory in his backyard, looking closely at his favourite planet.
"I'm a Jupiter enthusiast," Mr Wesley said.
Only 640 people live in Rubyvale, but Mr Wesley said he knew of at least six other space enthusiasts in the area.
He said the weather conditions were just right for stargazing.
He is out every morning and night looking at the planet and its most striking feature — the Great Red Spot — but in April, something changed.
"It's been quite dramatic … [the images have been] showing the spot in a state that nobody's ever seen before," Mr Wesley said.
"It's suddenly, in the last two months or so, started to undergo these massive peeling, or flaking events.
"Large, enormous pieces of storm are being shredded off by other storms nearby and Jupiter's red spot is shrinking — shrinking much more rapidly than it has been.
"No one has really seen this happen before and no one can really predict what is going to happen.
Mr Wesley said all his images were taken on his telescope, which he made at home from mirrors and metal framing.
It is attached to a camera lens mounted on what he calls a "system that tracks the sky".

Amateur's 'incredible images'

Jonti Horner, who is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, said Mr Wesley's latest photos were some of the best he had seen.
"While he's an amateur photographer in that it's not his day job, he's essentially a professional — he does such an incredible job of his imaging," he said.
"He's got a long and storied history of getting incredible images of Jupiter and has been on a significant number of scientific papers."
Professor Horner said Mr Wesley was among a group of international space enthusiasts who had been documenting the changes during recent weeks.
Editor of Australia's Astro Space News David Reneke said discoveries like these could not be made without amateurs like Mr Wesley, who looked at the same thing night after night.
"Because we use the term amateur, people think they're second rate, third rate — well they're not," Mr Reneke said.
"What Anthony has been doing here is produce photos that I've not seen even with the giant telescopes.


"Where he and other amateur astronomers come in here, they fit the gap that astronomers can't do.
"Where the amateurs come in they have time on their hands — this is their hobby and they've got some excellent equipment now.
"Some of the telescopes you can buy now over the counter rival any telescope 20 or 30 years ago right around the world."

Discovery helps experts understand the planet

There is disagreement among the scientific community about how old the Great Red Spot is.
Some argue it was discovered in the 1600s, but Professor Horner said it was unclear whether that was the same storm that is visible in 2019.
"The debate over whether it is 400 or 200 years old is a really interesting one because a red storm was seen by Giovanni Cassini back in the 1650s, and it has been regularly observed since the 1800s, but there were no observations during the 1700s," Professor Horner said.
"That doesn't mean it definitely wasn't there."
He said the planet may be susceptible to sustained extreme weather events.
"Either the storm is 400 years old, probably longer, or that storms like the Great Red Spot are a common feature of its weather," said Professor Horner.
He said the outcome of this event would lead to greater understanding of the planet, the biggest in our solar system.
"In a way what we will see over the coming years, the coming decades will actually help us to work that out as we work the atmosphere and how it behaves." 

Minimum wage to be increased by 3% to $740.80 a week

Fair Work commission raises minimum wage by $21.60 a week, increasing pay for 2.2 million lowest paid Australians

Labor says it will not ditch its policy to increase pay for the low-paid workers after the Fair Work Commission granted a 3% minimum wage rise on Thursday, a rate which unions have criticised as insufficient.
On Thursday the commission handed down its annual minimum wage decision, lifting the minimum rate to $19.40 an hour, up from $18.93, an extra $21.60 a week for the lowest paid.
Employees on the minimum wage will now receive $740.80 a week when pay rises take effect on 1 July.
During the election campaign, Bill Shorten labelled the current rate of the minimum wage “unfair”, signalled if elected Labor would make a fresh Australian government submission calling for a significant increase and change the rules to nudge the commission to grant bigger increases.
Labor’s defeat means the commission will continue to set the minimum wage under current rules, which prevent the industrial umpire from targeting it at 60% of the median wage, or a “living wage” as advocated by Australian unions.
Shadow industrial relations minister, Brendan O’Connor, told reporters in Canberra that although Labor’s policies are under review it “will not abandon workers” and “will not abandon the plan to lift wages”.
Justice Iain Ross, the president of the commission, said the decision would directly increase the pay of 2.2m Australians, suggesting a real increase was necessary to help households still experiencing “significant disadvantage”.
Ross noted that no party had identified “any data of adverse employment affects” as the result of previous years’ increases and the commission was satisfied there would be no measurable loss of jobs or adverse impact on inflation.
But the commission granted a pay increase smaller than last year’s increase of 3.5% – or $24.30 a week – due to slowing GDP growth, lower inflation and tax cuts benefiting low income households.
Australian unions had called for a 6% pay rise – or $43 a week – while employer groups asked for a modest increase of 2% or lower – $14.40 a week or less.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions assistant secretary Liam O’Brien said the decision was a “significant achievement” for unions although the increase “should be more”.
Industrial relations minister Christian Porter said the decision is “a real increase above the rate of inflation of 1.3% and higher than economy-wide wages growth of 2.3%”. O’Brien acknowledged that the lowest paid are “closing the gap” on average workers.
“Under the Coalition government, minimum wages have cumulatively increased by 6.9%,” Porter said, arguing this was enabled by “strong fiscal management”.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive, James Pearson, said the decision would cost employers “an additional $3.1 billion per year” and would be worth $33 a week for a worker on the median award wage of $1,100.
“Australia already has one of the highest minimum wages in the world, and continuously increasing minimum wages by significantly more than inflation has consequences,” Pearson said.
Australia has experienced a period of wage stagnation which the Reserve Bank has warned is harming growth.
A Reserve Bank of Australia research paper also found that “modest, incremental” wage increases do not harm jobs or hours, echoing a finding of the Fair Work Commission in its 2017 decision which prompted employer fears of larger increases to come.

Young climate strikers could achieve even more by joining a union

As the climate strikes have shown, the younger generation is ready to take collective action in the face of a crisis
Union membership in recent decades has been in stark decline. The picture has been particularly bleak over the past 20 years when it comes to young people.
Fewer than one in 10 workers under the age of 24 are now in a union, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics released on Thursday. The proportion of unionised 16- to 19-year-old workers has halved since 1995, from 6.4% to 3.2%, with a similar pattern among 20- to 24-year-olds.
But there are reasons for optimism: the same statistics also show a recent uptick in membership among young workers. In 2017-18, for 16- to 24-year-olds as a whole, the membership rate went up from 7.8% to 8.4%. Within this, for the 16-19 age bracket it went up from 2% to 3.2%.
Some people see the overall drop in membership as part of unions’ inevitable retreat into insignificance – casualties of a new, individualistic generation in a modern, flexible labour market that has no need for such outdated institutions.
But, as we have seen from the recent school strikes over the climate, young people are far from individualistic – they are prepared to take organised, collective action in the face of a crisis. If the 10,000 school strikers joined a union, then the number of members among 16- to 19-year-olds would increase by around one-third.
Fatalistic accounts of apathetic young workers ignore the structural changes in the world of work. Around a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds are in low-paid, casual and insecure forms of employment – more than any other age group. Increasing levels of work casualisation present practical problems for unions in accessing and recruiting workers, issues that are amplified by hostile policymaking that has added to the barriers in taking industrial action.
Unions are well aware that they need to evolve their tactics and are beginning to make headway: the GMB union has gained recognition with online retailer Net-a-Porter and delivery firm Hermes, and the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain continues to recruit in the gig economy and among outsourced workers. Last year saw major action by McStrike campaigners as well as the largest equal-pay strike in UK history, involving 8,000 low-paid female workers in Glasgow.
The atmosphere in the US provides more reason for optimism. Despite an even more hostile policy environment than in the UK and overall declining union numbers, youth membership is increasing. In 2017, of the 858,000 net new jobs for US workers under 35, almost one in four was unionised. Some have attributed this growth to the increased precarity faced by young workers; other explanations focus on the rise in popularity of a new socialist agenda.
Similar ingredients exist here, and aspects of the ONS data suggest they could be beginning to influence membership numbers. And though younger workers have always been less likely to be in a union, their participation now is vital: climate breakdown and automation will drive seismic shifts in the world of work in the coming decades.
Unions are also trying to reflect the values of the younger generations by taking action on issues outside of the traditional workplace. The University and College Union became the first trade union to pledge support for the school students’ upcoming general strike on the climate, with others likely to follow. Calls for a cross-union campaign for a four-day week are also ramping up. In the US, initiatives such as Bargaining for the Common Good have explicitly brought together workplace demands with wider demands on issues of racism, debt and corporate power. A UK version could involve forging links with the renters’ unions that have emerged over the past year, recognising the significant wins this burgeoning movement has had already.
Trade unions remain the largest type of membership organisation in the UK. Enabling a younger, more transient workforce to find a collective voice and take on major problems such as the climate crisis and gender inequality with workplace action is no small task. But the opportunity to do so, it seems, could be here.

Alice Martin is head of work and pay at the New Economics Foundation

Matt Canavan should stop wagging his finger at those who want climate action

Extract from The Guardian

I have mentioned this before, but the mystery persists. Matt Canavan, the federal resources minister, has an economics degree, graduating from the University of Queensland with first class honours.
Canavan also worked at the Productivity Commission prior to entering politics, first as a staffer for Barnaby Joyce and then as a senator for Queensland.
His professional background would point to a basic level of respect for facts and evidence – unless Canavan was the only staffer ever to work at the Productivity Commission overheard insisting stoutly in the tea room that everything needed to remain just the same, forever. It would also suggest a degree of fluency with the concept of industry transformation, a minor speciality of the commission.
It is possible, of course, that Canavan departed the technocracy and sought refuge in political life in order to enact a state of being called the permanent present, but in any case, let’s not sweat the mystery, because we need to review the latest thinking of the resources minister.
In an interview with The Australian, Canavan – normally a great champion of the resources sector – shared a few words of rebuke.
If I’ve understood him correctly, the resources minister expressed objection to “loud” Australians getting all mouthy about climate change, in the process (somehow) encouraging resources companies (timid characters that they are) to advocate carbon pricing and discouraging banks (also notoriously timid corporate players) from lending to new coal projects.
“Loud” Australians, he said, were skewing the debate.
It’s not entirely clear who these “loud and undemocratic voices within our community” are. Perhaps Canavan meant the Reserve Bank deputy governor, Guy Debelle, who in March warned climate change poses risks to Australia’s financial stability, and, in the process, noted policymakers needed to consider warming as a trend and not a cyclical event.
Perhaps he meant the banking regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. In March Apra flagged an intention to increase scrutiny of how banks, insurers and superannuation trustees are managing the financial risks of climate change to their businesses.
The Apra executive board member Geoff Summerhayes noted earlier this year the drive towards decarbonisation was being driven not by noisy undemocratic interests but “by the decisions of governments, business leaders, investors and consumers”.
The regulator surveyed 38 large banks, insurers and superannuation trustees in 2018 to assess their views and practices on climate-related financial risks, and that survey found a third of respondents believed climate change was a material financial risk to their businesses right now, and half believed it would be in the future.
Half of the insurers surveyed said they were already feeling the effects of climate change. “Companies that fail to respond to these forces risk being left behind,” Summerhayes said.
Perhaps Canavan meant the corporate regulator Asic. Last year that regulator said climate change was “a foreseeable risk facing many listed companies in the Australian market in a range of different industries” and warned directors and management of listed companies “to understand and continually reassess existing and emerging risks including climate risk that may affect the company’s business”.
In that report, 17% of listed companies in the Asic sample identified climate risk as a material risk in their operating and financial reviews.
Just in case this isn’t obvious, this isn’t wild, activist talk fomenting in the organic groceries of Brunswick, a revolution cooked up between the kale and the quinoa. This is hard-headed analysis by regulators with serious governance responsibilities.
This is an inconvenience, I suspect, for Australia’s resources minister but basic facts don’t change courtesy of an election result.
Governments don’t mandate reality, even when they win elections they didn’t expect to win.
Basic facts remain the same.
Canavan reasons these companies need to desist with their current dispositions on climate change, carbon risk and lending because the voters have spoken. Well, which voters? Because when it comes to this issue, voters expressed different views in different parts of the country. Which voters are we heeding?
Here’s another basic fact. It is profoundly obvious to anyone taking the time to absorb what resources companies are saying about carbon pricing that this is not some weak-kneed capitulation to abstract activism (although obviously these companies are attentive to the views of their shareholders, who are increasingly attentive to carbon risk).
The persistent call is actually a cry for help. Fiona Wild, the head of sustainability at BHP, told the Australian Financial Review last year carbon pricing was both a thing, but also a proxy for something that’s been missing from climate and energy policy in Australia for the best part of a decade.
Sanity.

“I think in the Australian context what we’d really like to see is a really well integrated climate and energy policy which looks at affordability, reliability and emissions reductions and that’s what we’re aiming for,” Wild said last October.
Big corporations can’t operate in a world that remains tethered to the permanent present of Canavan’s imagining, they have to plan for the future, and the future is carbon constraint.
That will either happen in a managed fashion, where governments tell Australians the truth about what needs to happen, and try to smooth the transformation, or it will happen chaotically, with maximum cost and maximum mayhem.
Rather than wagging his finger at banks and resources companies, which operate in the real world and make rational decisions, Canavan would be better placed thinking about his core responsibilities as a policy maker, including what the resources industries of the future might look like, and how to create economic opportunity for the blue collar workers he purports to represent.

  • Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s politicial editor

Australia just had its record warmest start to a year. Will winter turn it around?

Updated yesterday at 12:09pm


Australia has just recorded its warmest start to a year, while the national water storage has fallen to its lowest level in five years at just 46.4 per cent of capacity.
We're not talking millennium drought levels just yet, but in Sydney water restrictions start from this weekend, and all capital city water storages are down from a year ago, bar Perth.
Despite recent rain, and snow even in the past few days, soil moisture levels remain relatively low for large parts of the east and west coasts.
So is this the winter when it could all turn around, when the skies open, the soil gets nicely damp and the dams fill?
The current outlook suggests not.

What's the water situation?

The New South Wales total of 24.9 per cent is the lowest of all states and territories. Sydney's water capacity is at 53.5 per cent following a pretty steady decline since mid 2017.

Melbourne has been hovering around its driest start to a year on record, with only 95.6 millimetres of rain in 2019, as of Tuesday morning. The city's water storages are down nearly 10 per cent from a year ago.
Dams in Adelaide, meanwhile, are at 42.4 per cent. In December, the state and federal governments set up a $2 million study to see how its underutilised desalination plant, built in response to the millennium drought, could offset water from the River Murray.

The only capital city bucking the downward trend is Perth, where storage levels are up 5.3 per cent from last year, thanks to influxes last winter.
Its 40.1 per cent level may still be low, but the city has already moved away from depending heavily on rainfall, with groundwater and desalination making up two-thirds of supply.
Darwin's high percentage on this chart is deceiving. It has just come out of the Northern Territory's driest wet season since 1991, meaning the city largely missed out on its usual summer top-up.
So, if water usage remains similar to the past five years, and there is a dry dry season, Darwin could be down to around 50 per cent by the start of the next wet.

It's looking drier than normal

Away from the big city storages, it's a bit of a mixed, but generally dry, bag.
The Namoi system in northern NSW is down to 4.2 per cent of capacity, the Macquarie a bit further south is down to 12.3 per cent.
South-east Queensland is also dry, with storage in the Upper Condamine at 4.8 per cent and the Macintyre at 9.3 per cent.
Some Victorian systems are also low, but we are talking double digits — Loddon is down to 32.0 per cent and the Goulburn and Wimmera-Mallee systems are similar.

The Murray-Darling as a whole is at 33.0 per cent of capacity, down 18.3 per cent on this time last year.
Meanwhile, floods earlier in the year are still evident in the relatively high soil moisture in central Queensland, and recent rains have impacted the relative soil moisture in western NSW and Victoria.
Nevertheless, things are still looking drier than normal for the west and east coasts.
Rain over the past few weeks meant that many southern farmers received an autumn break, but follow-up rain is still wanted.
And let's not forget Tasmania, where the east coast is looking drier than usual.

What's the outlook?


The Bureau of Meteorology's latest outlook, released Thursday morning, suggests a drier-than-average winter is likely for much of eastern Australia and parts of the south.
Daytime temperatures are expected to be higher than average and clear skies are likely to lead to frost.
The climate drivers are not working in our favour.
Dr Andrew Watkins, head of long-range forecasts at the BOM, said it looked like we would back off from the current near-El Nino conditions this winter.
However, a positive Indian Ocean Dipole was likely to form over June and could persist all the way through to spring, he said.
"That typically brings warmer but also dry conditions, particularly for central and south-eastern Australia.
"So what we gain from moving away from El Nino, unfortunately we lose moving towards a positive Indian Ocean Dipole."

Will this winter turn it around?


"Unfortunately, no. It's not looking like we're going to have a rapid turnaround from the current conditions," Dr Watkins said.
"Having said that, it's winter, it's the southern wet season, it will rain — it's just likely to rain less than normal."
He said May was the time when water storages in the south typically either stopped falling or they began to rise.
"But unfortunately, most of the water storages are still falling ... with the dry soils, low stream flows, we are still seeing a drop in the storages at the moment.
"The soils will eventually start to wet up enough that we'll get some run-off into those dams.
"We don't necessarily expect the dams to keep falling right through the winter months."

Water storage data is taken from the Bureau of Meteorology's water storage information dashboard. Levels as at May 28.

'Shocking' DNA discovery traces most of the world's macadamias back to one Australian tree

Extract from The Guardian

Queensland researchers are shocked to discover the global macadamia industry may have originated from nuts from a single tree or small number of trees, taken from Queensland to Hawaii in the 19th century.
Given the lack of genetic diversity in the $3 billion crop, the race is on to preserve wild macadamia trees to improve traits like disease resistance, size and climate adaptability.
Southern Cross University's Dr Cathy Nock said the discovery back to Queensland was startling.
"They represent about 70 per cent of the trees that are grown in orchards around the world."

How the great trace began

University of Queensland horticultural science researcher Dr Craig Hardner used his Churchill scholarship to collect DNA from commercial macadamia orchards in Hawaii.
He traced their ancestry all the way back to a tiny patch of wild trees which still exist on private property at Mooloo, near Gympie in south east Queensland.
"A small collection of seeds were taken to Hawaii at the end of the 19th century and historical records suggest that there was maybe six trees grown from that sample of nuts that were taken by Robert Jordan and planted in his brothers' backyard in the suburbs of Honolulu in 1896," Mr Hardner said.
In collaboration with the Macadamia Conservation Trust, Healthy Land and Water and Brisbane City Council, the researchers have collected hundreds of DNA samples from wild trees in their native habitat of northern New South Wales and south east Queensland, as well as old trees in backyards.

Crop clones

Southern Cross University's Dr Nock said there was little diversity in the macadamia crop.
"Like many horticultural tree crops, macadamias are grafted, so if you fly over the Bundaberg area or north eastern New South Wales you'll see thousands of trees but there's really only a handful of actual individuals," Dr Nock said.
The United States, Australia, South Africa and Kenya are the world's largest producers, with China, South East Asia, South America, Malawi and New Zealand all now growing crops.
The oldest known cultivated macadamia tree stands in the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens and was planted by its first superintendent Walter Hill in 1858, not long after macadamias were discovered by Europeans.
Their native sub-tropical rainforest habitat has been decimated by clearing and development and of the four wild macadamia species, three are listed as threatened and one is endangered.

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Two of the native species are smaller, meaning their genetics could be used to reduce the size of macadamia trees in plantations, making them easier to manage and harvest.
"There's this amazing amount of diversity that's evolved and adapted over probably 30 million years that's there that we can use in future," Dr Nock said.
She added it was very rare to be able to pinpoint the origins of a crop's domestication.
"We're in a really enviable position because if you look at the domestication history of most other crops you go back thousands of years, so it's often difficult to find wild populations that still exist and if they do they've often been subject to gene flow from the crop so they're not pure wild populations anymore."

Wild macadamia hunt

Macadamia Conservation Trust executive officer, Denise Bond, said the hunt continued to find and preserve as many old and wild trees as possible and urged people to get involved.
"Those are the ones that we'd like to protect before they get completely cleared."
She said the plants also faced threats from smothering invasive weeds like cats claw creeper and madeira vine.
"We really want people to be vigilant about keeping those out of macadamia habitat and protecting the habitat and making sure that people know that south east Queensland and northern New South Wales are the only places in the world where macadamias grow in the wild."
Every new discovery of wild macadamias was exciting to the team because the trees could breed within two to three kilometres of each other.
"If there's a network of them throughout the landscape they'll maintain the population dynamic that keeps them being a viable species.
"We love to find out where they are."

Thursday 30 May 2019

Matt Canavan shrugs off Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increase

Extract from The Guardian

UN estimates indicate net greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 were 537 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent
The resources minister Matt Canavan has shrugged off Australia’s trend of rising emissions, saying the industry responsible for the growth is gas, and Australian gas exports reduce carbon emissions in other countries.
After a government report to the United Nations showed Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in 2018, Canavan told Sky News people needed to take a “balanced viewpoint” when assessing the trend.
“A lot of people comment on the fact that carbon emissions have gone up in Australia in the last couple of years, and they have, but that’s almost principally due to the construction or bringing online of LNG export terminals,” Canavan said on Wednesday.
“Yes, from a carbon accounting perspective, that increases Australia’s carbon emissions because we are the country where the gas is liquified, however the gas is then used in other countries and they use the gas to replace, often coal, but sometimes dirtier forms of power, and that helps the world’s carbon emissions,” he said.
“So we’ve got to take a balanced viewpoint here because I certainly think the export of Australian gas is helping the world lower its carbon emissions even though there is an issue in how it is accounted for country to country”.
The new report to the UN shows again that Australia faces a huge task in meeting its obligations under the Paris agreement despite the government’s insistence it has laid out “to the last tonne” how it will do this.
The national inventory report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) says preliminary estimates indicate Australia’s net greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 were 537 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
This is an increase from 534.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017.
Emissions rose in individual sectors including transport, fugitive emissions (leaks from other activities such as methane from a coalmine) and stationary energy (fuels burnt in equipment or plants not involved in electricity generation) and there were decreases in the electricity sector.
The report also presents the final emissions figures for 2017, which it says were an increase of 4.3m tonnes on 2016, or 0.8%.
Australia’s emissions have increased every year for the past four years. Emissions for the year to September 2018 went up 0.9% on the previous year, according to the latest Australian government inventory, primarily due, as Canavan says, to a 19.7% increase in LNG exports.
But there were also increases in stationary energy, transport, fugitive emissions, industrial processes and waste sectors. Transport emissions increased 2% over the year to September, and the Morrison government pilloried Labor in the recent election campaign for pursuing a vehicle emissions standard to drive pollution reduction in the transport fleet.
Emissions in Australia’s electricity sector continued to fall according to that data, courtesy of a 12.3% reduction in brown coal supply, and a 14.2% increase in generation from renewable sources. Canavan said on Wednesday he wanted the Morrison government to get moving on a new coal-fired plant for north Queensland before the end of the current term.
The report to the UN comes as the government is due to release its final emissions figures for 2018, which are published quarterly through the environment department.
The government’s energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, told media this week the government’s climate targets were “ambitious”, despite the fact that its 26%-28% emissions reduction target is not considered to be aligned with the Paris goal of limiting global heating to no more than 2 degrees.
On Tuesday, Taylor said Labor, which took a 45% target to the election, should back away from this policy and “agree to the 26% target”.

Comment on the UNFCCC report has been sought from Taylor.

Homelessness becoming concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne, study finds

Rough sleeping is increasingly an urban problem with almost half of all rough sleepers now in capital cities, up from one third
Australia’s homeless are becoming increasingly concentrated in the nation’s capital cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, according to a comprehensive study that tracks the changing geography of the problem over 15 years.
A report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (Ahuri), released on Thursday, said the proportion of people experiencing homelessness in capital cities had increased from 48% to 63% over the period studied, 2001 to 2016.
“Homelessness is becoming more of an urban phenomenon,” said Sharon Parkinson, a researcher at Swinburne University. “Homelessness within the major cities is also becoming more dispersed across the city.”
Historically, a large share of homelessness had been concentrated in remote areas, Parkinson said, in part due to the way the issue was defined by demographers.

Homelessness in Australia: a moving problem

Zoom in on the map to
“That’s still the case, per capita, it’s still where most homelessness is concentrated,” she added. “But if we look at where the shifts are concentrated, there is a move … from remote areas to the urban.”
The Ahuri study used census data dating back to 2001 to determine where people experiencing homelessness were living and how that has changed over time.
The problem of “rough sleeping has been transformed from a remote phenomenon to an urban phenomenon in the 15 years to 2016”, the report found.
“In 2001, roughly one-third of rough sleepers were located in capital cities, but in 2016 the share of rough sleepers in capital cities had reached nearly one-half of all rough sleepers,” the report said.
While homelessness is often thought of those sleeping rough, the definition used by demographers also includes people living in crisis accommodation, staying temporarily with friends or family, and those in overcrowded homes.
Parkinson said the study’s most “striking” finding was “the rate of overcrowding and how that is shaping a large part of homelessness growth”.
“Homelessness is rising in areas with a shortage of affordable private rental housing and higher median rents,” the study said. “This rise is most acute in capital city areas, specifically, Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne.”
The report, undertaken by researchers from Swinburne and RMIT, identifies a “corridor” in Sydney, from the inner city westward where homelessness rates are particularly high. It includes suburbs such as Marrickville, Canterbury, Strathfield, Auburn and Fairfield.
In Melbourne, suburban homelessness splays out in all directions, including hotspots such as Dandenong in the south-east, Maribyrnong and Brimbank in the west, and Moreland and Darebin in the north, and Whitehorse in the east.
In NSW, the state’s share of the nation’s homeless increased from about 25% to a third, between 2001 and 2016, with most of the increase concentrated in Sydney (16.1% to 24.9%). The state’s share of Australia’s population remained largely steady since 2001. Melbourne’s share of the nation’s homeless also increased – from 14.5% to 18% – over the period.
Conversely, smaller states and territories had a falling share of the national count. The share of homelessness in Queensland (18.7%), South Australia (5.3%) and Western Australia (7.7%) had reduced compared to 2001.
The report also found that “Indigenous background remains the strongest determinant of homelessness in remote areas, and much of this effect is accounted for by overcrowding”.
Parkinson attributed part of the shifting geography of the problem to the “processes of gentrification” in major cities.
“Our cities are undergoing a major structural change that is widening inequality and it’s having a spatial effect,” she said. “There needs to be a concerted effort to address that.”
Calling for more affordable housing as well as a broad range of housing types, Parkinson warned that despite declining growth in rent rises in some capitals, such as Sydney, the problem was a “long-term systemic change”.
“Low-income people are moving further out and even though rents are more affordable in those areas, if there are a number of people trying to compete for those affordable rents, there will be a discrepancy in supply,” she said.
It comes as the re-elected Coalition government is urged by welfare groups to tackle the issue head on. Scott Morrison has announced his new ministry will now be including a housing minister, Michael Sukkar, and an assistant minister for Community Housing and Homelessness, Luke Howarth.

While state governments have been blamed for a lack of investment in public and social housing, particularly in Victoria, advocates have also claimed the federal government lacks an overarching policy to address the issue.