Law at the End of the World
In this podcast, coming to you from the end of the world, Elizabeth Macpherson and Cristy Clark share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and those who depend on it - i.e. everyone.
Law at the End of the World
Doing a PhD, becoming an academic, and staying one - Episode 21 (with Inger Mewburn AKA The Thesis Whisperer)
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In this episode, Cristy and Liz explore academic career planning with our very special guest, Professor Inger Mewburn (AKA The Thesis Whisperer), who talks to us about her own academic career, her current research, her work with PhD students and neurodivergent academics, and the under-rated skill of project management for researchers (the subject of her latest book). As usual, we also share recent developments in domestic and international environmental law, including climate change litigation, water rights, and heritage protection.
Managing Your Research Project: A Guide for Researchers
Climate adaptation without funding is planning without delivery | EDS
Under the Lens | Podcast on Spotify
NZ’s overhaul of nature protection laws is a chance to move away from ‘fortress conservation’
NZ's climate goals off-track - Expert Reaction - Science Media Centre
Papunya Climate Safe Housing Case
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For a long time I've thought we should just get rid of the dissertation. And now I'm sure we should. But of course the world won't listen to me about that. We've taken a big piece of writing as a proxy for systematic thought, critical thinking, being able to generate ideas, being able to evaluate things, be able to have a record that we can read a lot. So there's the assessment alignment's always been a bit weird because my previous research around employability showed that actually even academics aren't happy with PhD graduates and their skill sets. So clearly we're missing something. What's a PhD for? Is it just a signifier that someone's super intelligent or is it something else?
SPEAKER_02Hi and welcome to Law at the End of the World, where we talk about the future of environmental law. I'm Christy Clark, an associate professor of law at Monash University, located on Morangeri Waiwurang and Boonarung Boonwarung Country in Australia.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Elizabeth McPherson, a professor of law and Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. University of Canterbury is located in the South Island of Aotearoa in the Takiwa of Naitahu. In this podcast coming to you from the end of the world, we share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and the people who depend on it. How are you, Christy? What have you been up to?
SPEAKER_02Pretty good. I we start teaching next week. I think I mentioned this on the last podcast that we were heading up for it. Well, it is now orientation week, and next week is the first week of semester. So a lot of my energy has been directed towards being ready for that. Um also yesterday was the annual Custan Centre for Human Rights conference, and so um I attended that and um I worked on the registration desk, which was actually lovely to have the opportunity to meet the people coming along and to greet them at the beginning of the day. But by the end of the day I felt I mean, these conferences, it's very funny, like you're just sitting there, but somehow by the end of the day, you feel thoroughly exhausted, like you're just taking so much information in and meeting people and and all those sorts of things. So I I literally went to bed at 8 p.m.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that's that's where I'm at at the moment. But yeah, going really well. How about you? What have you been up to?
SPEAKER_00I've been on holidays since we last caught up. Uh, went on a really cool ski trip down south with my family. We got snow just at the last minute, like literally like the day that we were going down there. Almost too much snow. Um, but that was nice spending some time with the kids and family. Um, and then I got sick afterwards, which is a bit of a pain, so I haven't been feeling that good for the last kind of week or ten days actually. But before the holidays, I traveled overseas to sit on an international research funding panel. It was an interdisciplinary panel, and I found that really interesting actually, just to see the other side of how judges sitting around a table looking at people's painstakingly put together funding applications, evaluate them. And in particular, how people bring their disciplinary biases to doing that. So I've had heaps of reflections out of that process. I've also had a few articles that were in the pipeline come out recently, a bit of op-eds and media engagement and some podcast stuff. I did a recording for my friend Virginie, her podcast, which is Law Beneath the Waves, which is about seabed mining. So it kind of feels like I've had some progress, but I actually really have a lot on that I s that's still in progress. Um there's always a bit of a delay between when you write things when they come out. And I also, yeah, have managed to get onto this international panel on earth system governance, which is doing a first assessment report of earth system governance. And it's it's trying to kind of be like the the panel on ecosystem services or the IPCC kind of reports, which are doing an assessment of the literature this around a particular issue. But it's specifically focused on social science literature. So it's social science literature around governance. So yeah, I'm I'm quite interested to start to wrap my head around what's happening. It's been run out of Ultrek University and it's going to they're going to be producing a report, an assessment report with a summary for policymakers and all of these sorts, the very similar kind of format to the IPES or the IPCC report. So that's been quite interesting, large collaborative international project to start to get involved in.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Yeah. I just remembered that I absolutely failed to mention one other thing, which was that the paper that Erin O'Donnell and uh Rachel Kalleen and I worked on last year actually, on carcerial and non-carcereal responses, reparative responses to water theft, was published on Tuesday in the Journal of Environmental Law. Um and so it was really nice to see that come out. And also just as an FYI to people, I have to note that the Journal of Environmental Law were an absolute joy to deal with at every step of the process. So thoroughly recommend 10 out of 10. Yeah. But back to today, one thing that you and I have both been thinking about a lot and actually trying to pencil into our diaries, you know, some focused time on, which we've actually just done, is around kind of career planning, you know, stepping back a couple of steps from the really um day-to-day reactive decisions of academia and thinking carefully about like where do we want to end up at retirement? Where do we want to end up in 10 years, where do we want to end up in five or three or one even? And and how does it all fit together? And then what are some of the kind of principles that we can use to make decisions when things kind of come flying across our desk or, you know, through an email at the last minute. And the temptation to either say reflexively no or reflexively yes without thinking through how it fits into those bigger picture goals and ambitions. So this is something that I've been increasingly aware that I really need to take a more careful approach to. And I think that today's interview really speaks, you know, to the fact that we can't plan everything. Some things are going to be based on opportunities that come up or things that work or don't work or whatever it is. But we can have some principles and some foundational guidelines that assist us to kind of do the work more quickly of deciding whether or not it fits or it doesn't fit. What what's that, what's the the parameters for making those decisions? So that's kind of where I've been paying a bit more attention lately.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think it's a question that we often ask our guests. It's sort of how do you prioritize which projects you take on and which you don't? And it's because we've learned that the hard way. And I think in particular, going into the mid-career phase and then the more senior career phase of being an associate professor and a professor, you're then getting more requests for projects or collaborations or or even service than you can you can service. Whereas at the beginning of your career, you're kind of like, oh, great new shiny opportunity. Oh, great new shiny opportunity. You get to a point where you realize that you've actually just spread yourself too thin. And we have learned that the hard way. And people have different approaches. I think that I really enjoyed the session that we just had and the way that we approached it of planning where we want to be at different stages of our career. And also, I think this backcasting approach. So we went right to like when we retire. What kind of retirement do we want? What impact do we want to have left on society and on academia when we take our last bow? And so starting there and then working back through all those phases of kind of how to get that through that backcasting process was quite useful. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So would you like to introduce our guest today, which is also relevant to the theme.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. So I'm thrilled to introduce our guest today, Professor Inga Muban, who is the Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University. Um, a job that involves working with PhD students and early career researchers and helping thousands to navigate academic and post-academic careers. Many of you will know Inga better as the thesis whisperer, after a blog that she's run for 16 years, which is read by over a hundred thousand followers globally, because she de provides really direct, incredibly generous and kind advice about getting through the PhD and surviving academia. I actually can't tell you how often I've sent a link to one of her posts to a PhD student to explain something better than I felt I could in the moment around how they should create a research matrix or how they should use language to sort of indicate their academic position on the literature or or various other things, or just to comfort someone when they felt like things were not working out in the way that they hoped and to make them feel less alone. It's a really lovely resource. So Inga's scholarly work covers higher education policy, post-PHD employability or post ac and most recently neurodivergence in researchers. She's a co-author or author of many books directed primarily at researchers, including How to Be an Academic, Be Visible or Vanished, which is on research, communication, and impact. And my personal favourite, the Text Expander Guide for Academics.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, cool.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I am a nerd.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Her newest book is Managing Your Research Project. It was co-written with Pat Thompson, Helen Kara, and Amy Grant. And she also co-created PostAc, which was a machine learning platform connecting PhD graduates with industry jobs. I really, I could just keep going. Um, but the very last detail I'll add is that Inga co-hosts her own podcast focused on academic productivity. It's called On the Rec and it's been running for just over six years. Hello, Inga. Welcome to Laura at the end of the world.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Christy. I'm so excited to be here.
SPEAKER_02Alright, so we always start by asking our guests just to tell us a bit about how they ended up in academia. It's rarely a smooth path or a straight path for anyone. And I know you started out as an architect. So what led you down the path that you're on today?
SPEAKER_01I didn't like working in architects' offices. I didn't like anything about the culture. It was the 90s. It was very harassy for a young woman in a very male-dominated environment. So I felt uncomfortable always. And when I started my working career as opposed to sort of being inside the university, there was a real overlap there because we were encouraged to kind of take up internships and all that kind of stuff. So I ended up working as an undergraduate, studying, and teaching. So I ended up teaching in 1994 when I was an undergraduate, which they should never have let me do. It would never happen now. It was just outrageous. But what had happened was that PCs had come into architects' offices, a bit like the AI revolution now. I see echoes of it. So PCs had come in and the offices were filled with male architects wearing bow ties because they didn't drag in the ink and they had like slanty desks, and it was very, you know, it's very 60s movie style. So I walked into these offices just full of drawing tables and there was one computer in the corner. And I'd be placed at the computer because I had skills for that. And the officers were clearly pressuring the uh teachers of architecture that they weren't getting graduates who could use these computers. And the teachers didn't know how to teach it because they only knew drawing boards as well. So I was drafted in. Um it was kind of a battlefield promotion. I was probably in, I think I was in third or fourth year, it's sort of it was a five-year degree at that point. And they just sort of put us in the classroom and gave us classes and said, teach people how to use AutoCAD, which was the dominant program at the time. I was like, Yeah, Rhino. Okay. I had no idea, no idea. And um Yeah, wow. Um I like quickly went to the library, which is what I always do when I'm confronted with something I don't know what to do into the library. I'm like, so teaching, what's this about then? And there were books on teaching and sort of like read some books and went, probably I'm doing this wrong. And I tried a few things and I started to do it right, and I just enjoyed it, you know. And so I sort of slid between somewhere graduating along that trajectory. I was teaching, I graduated, I was working in an office full-time instead of part-time. I still had one foot in the teaching world, and it went on like this for nearly a decade. And my husband just said to me one evening when I got home and I was just complaining so bitterly about how much I hated architecture and also um environmental values are really important to me. And every time I specified a rainforest timber, a little piece of me died. And so he said, Oh, you only seem happy when you come home when you're teaching. Why don't you do that? He says, This was not oh, 2000, just turn year 2000? Why don't you do that full time? He said, I said, Oh, that seems like a good idea. Little did I know that that was then like 10 years of partial employment, half doing PhD, masters. And so I in during that process, I made myself functionally useless in an architect's office. That wasn't the intention at the start. So a lot of that felt out of my control, to be honest. And a couple of years ago, some colleagues approached me with a paper proposition that they had tentatively labelled back to zero, which was about professionals just like myself, people who were in a profession who would sort of dragged into, can you just teach a little bit in the evenings and find out they like it, and then sort of get sucked into the PhD and then get sucked into all of that. So, like this isn't an uncommon experience, as I've found out, and your professional networks to help you get jobs as an architect atrophy, and your professional networks that help you get jobs as an academic grow. And so you kind of just go along this trajectory. And I was one of those who sort of w found myself too far along to go back when I worked out that academia was really hard, and then I was like, Oh, now I'm stuck.
SPEAKER_02And then I had a baby, and then you know, so that's how this sounds very familiar and different context, but yeah, similar issues. I was gonna ask you about kind of carrying some of those design skills across into the research training that you do, and I might come back to that. But something that really struck me in your story is that you are best known as the thesis whisperer. Sure, yeah. And I wonder how much of that experience of kind of looking around and going, This is where I am, that probably wasn't the plan. And maybe a bit more information would have at least enabled me to know what I was doing, even if I still did it. Has that been a big driver in that desire to help others just be a little bit more equipped and a little bit more clear about what they're doing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, 100%. There was always like someone handed me a book or told me a thing over a coffee or something, like just too late to be useful all the time. And I'd be like, someone had just written this down somewhere. And then when I was teaching um PhD students, 2006, I started doing that. And by 2008, I was doing my PhD at the same time as again. They should never have given me the job. Like it was just like now they wouldn't. But uh, as I was doing that teaching, people would say, Could you write this down somewhere? Because that whole thing where you just went on a rant for half an hour was really good. But I kind of stopped taking notes because you were telling me a story and I didn't realise the point of it. And then so I've always had real storytelling. That's just seems to be how I do. I don't I don't understand why that where that comes from. But so then I thought, oh, I'll just write down my stories, and that'll take me six months, and it's been 16 years of writing them down, and I haven't finished I've slowed down, but I haven't finished writing them down yet. So yeah, so that but it also comes from the autism, I think.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And well, I'm gonna jump to that actually. So one of your latest research interests is neurodivergence in academia. And I I guess I'm gonna ask what drew you to the research and what have some of the findings been. But maybe in relation to drawing you to the research, you could talk about what was at the forefront of your mind when you were drawn to the research, and maybe what you then subsequently uncovered was part of that attraction.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so part of my practice has always been just sitting and listening to what I call hairball problems. Like, you know, when a cat gets a hairball and they're like, eh, and you're like, this is sounding really bad, and then they like cough something up and then they walk away and they're quite happy. So I I run these things called thesis boot camps. I also take consults and stuff, and people will come to me with what I call a hairball problem, where it's like terrible coming out, and there's so many aspects and it's all intertwined and it's a mess. And they kind of leave it with me and go, Do you reckon you could help me with all of that? And I'm like, okay, where shall we start? Where do you start cleaning up a hairball, right? You start very tentatively, just pick up a corner of it and you pull out one hair and you say, Well, this bit I'll put over here because that's a money problem, and this bit I'm gonna put over here, that's a supervision problem. And then I and I put this sort of family problem over here, and then I'm gonna put this writing problem. So now we've got the context of the writing problem. So maybe if we do this without the supervision problem, we do this about the writing problem, and da da da da. And then through the process of that, people were relieved, right? Because you've solved their hairball, but there still seemed to me to be a missing piece that didn't seem to be solved by any of that practical stuff at all. And I don't question that who comes in front of me is capable because they've been through so much of a process. So, what is it that's making them incapable in this moment? And especially the incapability often developed during the PhD. And at the same time, some family members were diagnosed, in particular one of my nephews, who it was the first time I became aware that you could have autism and ADHD. And subsequently, his family became diagnosed, all of them. And then I was like, Well, what does that mean for my husband? And then I my child, who like it's subtle with him, but but there's something going on. He he self-diagnosed himself. And then I thought, wait, look at my father. There was like an 86-year-old autistic man staring back at me. Not that he cared about that. And then I was like, oh, I'm the only one here who isn't autistic. And then I'm like, wait, maybe, can you do this job without that? Is what I started to think. And then I'm like that started to think, what attracts you to the job, right? And then I thought, how consistent that is with special interests, with novelty seeking. And then I thought, wait, maybe this missing piece that I've always been, I'm able to help people with that seems sort of personal and is not always amenable to productivity hacks and tricks. Maybe that is to some degree autism or ADHD. And then I'm like, but wait, what about the other side of the equation? If I'm a supervisor and I'm like, maybe both of us are. And maybe what if there's a mismatch? So I'd often see people who who liked order and liked detail and liked processing things in an orderly way, encounter a supervisor who's just always off with the new idea and, you know, that kind of thing. And so they'd get into clashes and then I'd see the opposite where you have a really orderly supervisor and a a student who's like spinning out all sorts of ideas. And when I started to see that in a neurodivergent frame, suddenly everything made sense to me. And so I thought, well, I need to go and find some numbers and you know, I don't like thinking you have to prove things with numbers, but at least when it comes to getting institutional resources, you kind of helpful to prove something with numbers. So that's what I'm actually was just writing the paper that's sort of come out of all of that. But um I have been going around and just showing people some of the findings, getting some feedback. So that's sort of how all that started. I do think academics are, I reckon over 50% at least, maybe more, are neurodivergent. I'm also interested in other staff at the union about whether they are or not. Not that I position neurotypical as somehow a baseline against which other things are measured. I I see neurotypical, what we call neurotypical, as just another form of neurodiversity. So it's just a big group of people who think in a similar way, and they've come to claim the space of being normal, but they're just people in a group, and they just happen to be a large group. And um, and who's attracted to different forms of work? There's an interesting, I was looking it up today, um, it vaguely tickled that I had read a paper years ago that was, and it's I looked it up because I had to do it for my literature review. It's called Singular Scientists by Ione James, A-O-N. He goes backwardsly diagnoses Newton and Einstein and all these people. I'm like, this is kind of dodgy to go and sort of diagnose people from written accounts, but he does, and it's 2003, so that's he's not actually calling it autism. I think he uses Asperger's, but though there's been this long kind of assumption that academics are a bit weird. And you see it in popular culture, like figures like Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory and stuff. So the rest of the world has often coded us in this particular way. And like we want to reject the label, but what happens if we instead embrace it and start to talk about it in not a deficit frame? So that's the motivation behind that. Research. And again, helping people, you know, uncovering, showing what might be going on along with everything else that might be hidden from view. That's something I'm obsessed with.
SPEAKER_02So I know your research has been very broad in scope, including a systematic review. And that there's been a range of findings. But one of the things that's very interesting to go back to your hairval problem is that a lot of those issues are not located in the individual. They're located in systems that aren't serving them, financial systems that are, you know, impoverishing PhD students, time metrics that are somewhat arbitrary in comparison to the project and the lack of control that they might have. So in this case, when it comes to neurodivergence, I understand that some of your research has really looked at that context issue and what a neuroinclusive research environment might look like in practice, in order, I guess, to solve that aspect of the hairball. I wondered if you could speak a little bit to that, that kind of way that supervisors, HCR students, and even institutions could become more neuro-inclusive places.
SPEAKER_01So I have a range of things between very mundane and completely like out there. So I'm going to start completely out there because that's on brand.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_01I mean, for a long time I've thought we should just get rid of the dissertation, and now I'm sure we should. But of course the world won't listen to me about that. We've taken a big piece of writing as a proxy for systematic thought, critical thinking, being able to generate ideas, being able to evaluate things, be able to encompass a lot of just to be able to have a record that we can read a lot. So there's the assessment alignment's always been a bit weird though, because my previous research around employability showed that actually even academics aren't happy with PhD graduates and their skill sets. So clearly we're missing something. So, you know, what's the PhD for? Is it just a signifier that someone's super intelligent or is it something else? You know, so there's there's there's that whole piece. Like I really question our assessment alignment. So I think that's a big one. The other thing, of course, is milestones and time and you know, all that. There are a lot of people creatively working inside those constraints to give people the wriggle room that they need. On the other hand, if you don't have anything, and this is the people with a lot of ADHD coded behaviors find, they struggle all through undergraduate and they see the exams and the time schedules and everything as the things that got in their way. And they get into a PhD and think, thank God, all that's gone. And of course, it was in its own way enabling them. And when that really excessive structure is gone, they flounder really badly some of those people. So, like, I'm not saying take it all away is the answer. I think it's like, how do you flexibly and I think people do work their way through that? I think it just takes a lot out of supervisors, and some supervisors don't want to do it and put themselves on the line. So the working the flex in that system without it being so onerous would be helpful. I think individual supervisors just sit with yourself. Like that's just one thing supervisors could do is go, hey, maybe I'm not neurotypical, maybe I'm neurospicy. What is my spice? You know, you know, if you're bringing yourself to that interaction. And also if we complicate it to think of panels, why am I not getting along with this person or disagreeing with this person isn't always just methodological or whatever, but we often make it that when really it's a difference of cognitive styles and values and things like that. So I think just a bit of self-reflection by a supervisor, and I cannot say enough about meeting notes. It's boring. Can't say enough about meeting notes. Please take some. Please file them. Please keep them. That's all. Because when I get the hairball, I'm going, so how long has this been going on? You know, two years ago this started, a year ago this started, da-da-da. I'm like, what evidence do you have? And they're like, Oh, it's kind of a vibe thing. I'm like, Well, do you even have a calendar about when you meet? No, you don't. Okay. You know, so so some of it's banal and some of it's big scale.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01I think I've got little chance with either.
SPEAKER_02Surely the meeting nights. I feel like that's very achievable.
SPEAKER_01I do too, but some are like, don't tell me what to do. Also, you could use teams. I'm just saying. A lot of academics just don't they don't love the teams.
SPEAKER_02No, it doesn't have a good rep. All right, well, actually, moving on to something else you actually use teams for, but also that many academics have some struggles with. Your latest book, co-authored with Pat Thompson, Helen Cara, and Amy Grant, is about a skill that most academics are never explicitly taught, which is managing a research project or project management generally.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Is this in response to a skills gap that you've observed in researchers?
SPEAKER_01A hundred percent. I was so excited about this book. I wasn't originally on the team. I just happened to drop by Helen Carra's place when I was in the UK. She put me up overnight. You know, we had a nice chat at the table, you know, she's making me dinner and I'm stuffing my face. She's a good cook. And she's like, Oh, yeah, we're doing this project management book. I'm like, Oh, I'm so excited about that. Are you gonna do this and this and this and this and this, and by the way, this did this other thing and this. And she just looked at me and said, uh, maybe you should be on this booking, because I don't even know what you're talking about. And I suppose because the architecture degree had taught me the language about project management. And so that was just a great collab. And I mean, what a range of experiences. So Helen Carr is autistic and her and Amy Grant both wrote a paper called The Autistic Advantage in Academia, which is interesting read. And so Amy does health research, Helen is an independent researcher who does social science research. Pat Um Thompson, the Doyen Pat Thompson, who's uh who's retired now, but supervised 70 PhD students and had like umpteen gazillion dollars in grant money and in education and arts and stuff. So between us, we all had different parts of the puzzle. Like I'd also done commercialization research. So all of us brought these partial things and put it together in a big heap. And that was it taught me a lot. I thought I knew a lot about the topic, but it was just one of those books you write and you go, great, I feel better after I've written that because I learned from all my colleagues as well. So yeah, and we it got reviewed by some project management bros who did not like it because it didn't it doesn't do project management the way that it's taught by the Project Management Institute and those kind of people. And so we ended up making the point that research projects are just fundamentally different to building a building. And I think again, my architecture degree helped me to sort of, you know, to tease that out a little bit in a in a way. So yeah, that's I don't even know what question I'm answering anymore because I got enthusiastic. But yes, that I feel like if I finish and I don't write any more books, I'm pretty happy that was the last one. I'm really happy with it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean it it seems to me just like an essential resource and that there's going to be something in every section that's really useful for those of us who just didn't get that training. But do you think there are some real standouts in in terms of even just really basic project management skills that are commonly missing in in uh researchers? I guess particularly those working in humanities and social sciences.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The stuff around money, I think, is probably the best chapter. Because also like estimating money, accounting for money, it is just especially in the humanities, we tend to sort of like back away from anything because we don't actually deal with large sums of money. I think scientists often have to, they often give them much more money and sort of have to learn to deal with, you know, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. But we often get small sums of money and they freak us out. That's my been my observation anyway. And I sort of understanding who in the university and why the university takes money from you and what they take it for, and also to find yourself not being embarrassed in front of people who are funding you when you don't understand the money piece. Like I learned mostly from Pat in that chapter. I was like, wow, okay, like I've got to step up my money game. I thought I was pretty good. And the there's some sections too about just dealing with other people, and we split that into two parts. So there's like dealing with team members, but there's also dealing with people external to the project and that that internal PR piece that it gets mentioned at several points in the book, but that your manager knowing what you're doing. Like I had one of those chats with my manager today. So next time she's asked, you know, what's in good doing, she knows, like, and she can be an advocate, or if I ask for time or for, you know, a little bit of flex to attend a conference or something. So that's internal PR, they sometimes call it managing up. So the book sort of spans from that really practical stuff around money and managing risk. And then the chapter on ethics um is not the normal chapter that you would expect to see about ethics, and it's such a big topic, it could be its own books. We sort of chewed off an end of it that isn't often discussed, which was quite interesting, I thought.
SPEAKER_02So we'll put a link to the show notes um to that document. Always happy to plug. I have to get a copy because I think I need it. I did study project management in development um in my masters, but it's it's been a while and it's quite a different con it's often a different context.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. I'll send you a copy. I I I've I I'll I'll bring some down next time I'm down, darling. I'll send you a copy.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's delightful, thank you. So another book that you published a while ago now, um, and you sort of were speaking to an aspect of this in relation to kind of cluing up your manager, making yourself visible and your work visible to your manager. But your book is Be Visible or Vanish, and it argues that publish or perish has been replaced in many ways by this pressure to be visible. I wondered if you had a kind of a clear view on what's really driving the shift and some of the ways that it affects researchers and even maybe the research itself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I do wonder if we're w witnessing a bit of a swing back of the pendulum lately. So that book was written or started. I remember writing it during the fires here in Canberra. So that would be, you know, 2020. So it's 19, yeah. Six years when it was being written. And at that point, I remember pulling the chapter about Twitter at the last minute and pr r replacing it with something about the FEDI verse. So that just goes to show you that didn't age particularly well. Um, so I think the the whole sort of social media era, I think just like made universities go a little bit nuts, actually. And I mean, I attribute most of my career to social media, so I'm like I was a fan, but the inshidification of social media has left universities still demanding this impact piece. And that the impact piece was demanded by the government, and they've developed in Australia a set of indicators in in the UK as well. So indicators tend to drive what universities want to do in a kind of neoliberal kind of, you know, austerity logic. We'll give you money if you demonstrate. And then also I think um, like more right-wing governments that wanted to have more say over what academics do in their liter their bedrooms type of thing, you know, like what are you actually studying? Prove it to us that you actually did something. So there was that so there's been a lot of pressures on the institutional side, and then we had this technology, this social media technology that seemed to offer a way for academics to reach different audiences, and this seemed like a nice match. But then with the destruction of Twitter, I refuse to call it, I dead name it, I'm afraid. With the destruction of Twitter, I'm witnessing like a real lack of energy and direction in that push inside universities now, which I'm finding interesting. So they've always really pushed traditional publication metrics on academics, so that's not changed. The pressure was always there. This social media influencer thing was additional pressure. And now but now it's really lessened off a bit. So I still happen to think it's important to be able to talk to a wide range of audiences. But yeah, so it's an interesting time.
SPEAKER_02I think one of the things that I wanted to unpack a little bit further is there's a real difference between a kind of performative visibility or even kind of instrumental networking, you know, connecting with people simply for the sake of being known to them. And the work of really building genuine relationships across institutions but also beyond the academy. And I wonder whether or not there's whether you see a big difference in terms of impact between those two approaches.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I suppose it depends on whether fame's gonna get you where you want to go. Like for some people it does work. Like I think of someone like Mary Beard or someone like that, you know, who who has a TV show and a red raincoat that she walks, stomps around ruins in, and she, you know, that's working for her. It's working for her university. It's working for the public to some extent. Like I'd rather have Mary Beard out there telling me about Romans than that dude who did that Netflix thing who happened to be, you know, talked about aliens. If you notice how it's always aliens that help people in non-white places do amazing things, that there's aliens involved. Must be aliens. Um, so you know, I'm not averse to the whole fame piece, if well, if well used, but I do myself, I try to engage in what you it's a good distinction you're making, very good, where you um you're saying there's relationship building. So for me, the neurodivergence research being a good example. So through the blog, I could just say, hey, I've noticed this thing, anyone interested in it, and see what sort of response I get, you know, on the various channels. Are people interested? Are they picking up what I'm putting down? So I've noticed this thing. What are you noticing? And then I got a massive response to that. And so I was like, okay, this is something people want to see further news about. So then I made a mailing list and now I've got over a thousand people on just that mailing list. So I I did my survey design using help from people on that mailing list and sending them pilot studies to work out what wouldn't work. So if you're sending a survey to people, you want it to be neuro-inclusive. You know, not everyone comes at the question in the same way. And so autistic, particularly autistic people, are very helpful to me in phrasing the question clearly, that kind of thing. So that kind of long-term engagement just makes you research better. And you and you get to where you need to go in a quicker way because you don't make mistakes that you might otherwise wouldn't have made, because you're you're connected with the interested people. You know, we don't use the word stakeholders, we say interested people. We say that all through our project management book. But if you're if you're connected with those people, you're building that relationship. There's also the audience for your work at the end is ready-made because people know you're doing it. So now I'm in the position where people are like, hey, what's happened with that, Inga? Why why so slow? And I say it's done with in my spare time with no money. Also a a big mixed group of people who are all neurodivergent, which is very important to me to collaborate with people. You know, we don't deadlines, you know? Not everyone perceives in the same way. Douglas Adams style. Right. The sound that they make whizzing past you, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think I think both I think both forms are valid, but I I do think if you're just going for fame and you haven't got a reason to want to be there, it does ring a bit hollow. And I don't think pe and this is where you get people who kind of slide into punditry of the most rancous variety, Nielle Ferguson being an example that does for me is a sort of standout example of the that going to not good places.
SPEAKER_02So then you do a lot. And you know, you're talking about doing this in your spare time with no funding. But between directing research development A and you, your own research, your blog, your books, your podcasts, and the teaching that you do both internally and externally, how do you decide what to say yes to? And maybe more importantly, do you have like an approach or a framework for working out what to say no to or to let go of?
SPEAKER_01I have a no-bot. So I have a I have a chord that I give it. I sometimes get I get offers that I find really hard to say no to. So I give it to and it tells me why I should say no. That's very helpful to me because it's very mean and it knows my priorities. My mission at work is I think PhD students are amazing, like, and academics are amazing. Like I think they should be doing their best work. And for PhDs, that means not staying in the PhD longer than you need to. Like get it and get out. And you know, for people who have graduated, it's are you working somewhere where you're really putting your talents to work with all the problems that the world has? And and are you happy in yourself? Are you fulfilled? So my mission is always that, and so that everything gets tested against that. You know, is it is it advancing that principle that it makes things easier? And so it makes it very easy to refuse certain things. For instance, I don't do much peer reviewing, I feel vaguely guilty about it because I know that a lot of my peers are carrying the burden on that. Um, and I must get asked every day to peer review papers. Pretty much all of them bang on in my field. And I say no to almost every single one of those. And I don't do my fair share. So my my root rubric is I only do as many reviews each year as I ask the system for. And this year I'll only publish one peer reviewed paper, if that, because that's where I'm at right now in my life. Uh it's an unusually small amount for me. So I'm only doing two. I've already done them. And everything else is an automatic note, no matter how interesting it sounds. So I sit with some guilt around that. Um You know, so it depends on what your definition of service to your community is, right? I don't see that as a really particularly great use of my time. I might help an individual get a promotion indicator. I've got to balance that off against a podcast that might get 14,000 listens. And some and a bunch of people who need so for on the Reg podcast with Jason, a lot of people have said that's really helped them with their promotion applications, right? Because we talk about the real politic of academia and what you really need to do, like kind of working committees and all that kind of stuff. And so I can help 1,400 people who've listened to a podcast think about their career in a way that will help them get promoted. Or I can do one peer-reviewed paper of a paper that's not particularly good, probably.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And then it starts to look fairly clear-cut.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I find that that's helpful, you know. So what's your mission? Does this move you towards a mission or not? Sometimes I talk about side quests and the main road and the side quest, and you know, you're keeping the main quest in view. And this is a side quest in is this a useful side quest, you know? So sometimes I get asked, I get pulled on to project. So that back to zero paper that I was talking about before. Like that was a real borderline case because they came to me and they said, Oh, will you help us write this paper? And I read their outline and what they already had. And I said, I don't think I can help you. This is already great. Why don't you just like aren't I a peer reviewer? And they were like, Oh no, we're all inexperienced and we sort of feel like we could do with some mentoring, and this is a way to get mentoring from you. And I was like, Oh, okay, you know, right. So there's more than one person getting mentored, so tick. The topic's interesting, tick, you know, and then I said one or two things that um kind of helped them think about it differently. So I thought I thought, oh, tick, tick. So, you know, I slid into that one. I did resist it because initially it didn't look like it was gonna. I think scale is important, right? Like if you've got to spread yourself thin, where can you make the most impact? Which is why I also like doing political work and knocking on doors. Like if I'm gonna spend time with an individual, I'd rather talk to someone at a door and convince them to vote for the environment than I would spend time peer reviewing a thing. So it's not just work. I sound really idealistic and like a kind of person when I say things like that. I don't I don't really think about it too much, to be honest.
SPEAKER_02And full disclosure, that's how we know each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right. So, you know, we do knocking in a green like in the Green's office or something. And then we both had these really like these journeys about whether we can be a member of the party or not, or how it aligns with our values and how our time is best spent. So, you know, you get the struggle more than most people do. But the same thing that draws you to something like political work, the same set of value-oriented framework is much more helpful for making decisions at work. And I've been told so many times to not do that, especially early in my career. So many times was I told not to blog. Lost count. That's a pointless waste of your time and writing energy. I see you writing all those blog posts in God. Are you writing papers? I'm worried about you. I mean, genuine concern. I just ignored it because I don't know. Like I I've worry and I feel Guilty. Like I'm not I don't want to put myself up as a paragon of virtue of these things. I but over time I've realized it's some if advice doesn't isn't consistent with your values and you ignore it, then you don't tend to suffer consequences. It tends to be okay, generally speaking. I have to share something with you. I have to share something with you. So I've been having a terrible time this year. And as part of my terrible time, my sister gave me an evil eye bracelet. I don't know, do you know much about evil eye bracelets?
SPEAKER_02Heard something. Why am I heard something?
SPEAKER_01You're not allowed to buy one for yourself. They are deliberately built so they're a bit shoddy. And the idea is that when it falls off, the evil has passed. Guess what happened, Christy? Just as we were talking, the evil eye fell off. Oh my gosh! Well, that's very exciting. I'm glad because I was getting really sick of wearing it and I was thinking, how can I make this evil eye come off quicker? And then it just came off. Well, that's awesome. Yeah, I know it's weird, sorry. It's weird and superstitious. But anyway, I love it.
SPEAKER_02And I guess on that on that front. Yeah. And I need to move on to my next question, but I'm just so taken with that. But the average academic paper gets not very many reads. How many people read your blog?
SPEAKER_01So every month, probably a hundred thousand encounter something on there. It's got a million words roundabout on it, so and it's got deep searchability. And ChatGPT knows about it. It suggests it. So people are coming through Chat GPT now. There's a lot of people using that for search. So it's it's eaten the blog, and I could kind of feel bad about that. On the other hand, if it helps people discover it, or if it gives them use, even if they never read it, but ChatGPT actually told them something true and useful, then that's my work is done. So yeah, I like it's had over the years way over 10 million reads.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, so like what I mean but you gotta do the papers to uh it gives you credibility and they are good they are good disciplines. So I suppose the one I'm doing at the moment, which is a big statistical piece, it's a really good discipline to sit down, do the analysis, really think about it. Like it does force you to organize your thoughts in a very systematic, logical way. And once I've done that, I can use that for all sorts of other things. Like you've already seen me use it for teaching. So, like behind what I was teaching the other day for the workshop you were in, thanks coming. We had a great time doing that one. That is really informed and it really helps my work when I'm working with academics to be able to sit in front of them and say, Well, you'll believe me because I've got evidence and I'm speaking from my evidence base and I've published that evidence and it's auditable and people can check it, but I don't I see it in that respect, not as a not as a indicator of productivity or quality necessarily. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So if we look into the future, particularly now the evil eye has gone.
SPEAKER_01Past.
SPEAKER_02Yes. What do you hope that you'll be working on in say three to five years time? What's really exciting you right now?
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna leave academia. Yep. So my business partner, Jason Downs, has got a ticking clock. He's got it on his mobile, he's crazy. And you can at any time see his retirement clock. He's counting down the minutes and hours. And I thought he was a bit crazy, but then all this stuff happened and I was like, oh yeah, okay, what uh what is actually next, really? Like, take that seriously. Also, friends have started to retire. So I I suppose I'm seeing all that and thinking, what's next for me? So I can't imagine that I won't be doing something. So I probably will keep my hand in doing my work outside of ANU, you know, going around and doing workshops. But I think I'll be pretty selective. Um, I won't be doing research anymore. I think it's time to make way for the youngs. I might mentor and be, you know, wizen dog crone who says you got that wrong. If someone wants me to do that, like I'm happy to be Emeritus Professor. That that appeals. I'm getting a small dog, um, which I will take for walks. I've taken up knitting again, and I think I'll probably do a lot more volunteering. Um, and I'd like to do more work maybe up in Parliament House. So I'm considering doing a Pathways to Politics course later this year. Not because I want to run, although many people have asked me to run, but because I think I'd like to understand better how people succeed in politics. I'd probably like to be a campaign director, I think, or something like that. I've got I've got some skills there, I think, or just supporting that in some way. I like the kind of um seasonality of political work. Like it it has an on-season and an off-season. So you're very, very busy for a while, and that maybe suits my ADHD side of my personality. I can't imagine I won't be doing something researchy, but I don't want to be one of those people who is still trying to supervise out at the age of 70. So I'm not taking on any more PhD students. Um, I have Jay, he will be my last. And and that'll be a good end. I've had a good trot, and um, I just think we've got to make space. Like I think the one thing that I've experienced from, and I'm just gonna say it, the boomer generation have always been slightly ahead of me, is that they just don't want to leave. They don't want to give up the stage, they don't want to take a bow. And I think there's also a lot of academics who are so wedded to it as their only identity. And I probably have been in that camp myself, so I'm not dissing them. I understand how easy that can be. But I'm looking at the adjacent possible now and going, oh, that looks pretty good actually. And dog walking, knitting things and um convincing people to vote in favour of the environment. Yeah, these seem like good goals to me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Love it. Excellent. All right, so I just want to end, probably should have ended on the future, but I want to end on two handing it back, I guess. Two things for up-and-coming academics. The first relates to your hugely successful podcast, On the Reg, which you co-host with Jason Downs. It's been running for six years in a couple of days. Yes. So I wondered what led you to start the podcast and whether you have any kind of key lessons from those six years that you think would be useful to other researchers who might be thinking about starting their own podcast.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. I love podcasting. It's so fun. We started it because Jason and I used to be member of a Shut Up and Write Group at Pearson and Murphy's Cafe every Friday morning at RMIT in 2008, 2009, 2010-ish, before I moved to Canberra. And uh we'd all chat in the breaks between writing, and Jason and I would get to nerding about what tool we'd discovered that made you do something quicker. And um, and we realized at a certain point that everyone was sitting around us, watching us go yibby, yibba, yibbi, yibba. And then during the pandemic, because it was so lonely, I I did a few podcasts, and then I rang Jason, and Jason and sometimes used to ring me from his car and when he was driving home, and we'd talk for like an hour while he was in traffic because we missed having those conversations. And so then I said, why don't we just record these and do a podcast? He's like, Yeah, right. And so we did that, and we sort of so we built the plane as we flew it, but the original inspiration was actually the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast, which I no longer listen to because they annoy me. But I like the combination of chat and then what you've read and all that kind of stuff. So it kind of we had a basic format. So if you're thinking of starting something, I think it's much easier to do it with someone else and someone you have natural rapport with in chemistry, or to do an interview show like you're doing, you know, because it's very hard just to read to camera, you know, just to do that. Some people I'm a big fan of influencer style fashion videos, as you know, Christy. So um and I admire those people's skills to emote to camera without anyone else there, like they're really talking to you. Like that's but most people don't have that skill set. It's very hard. So find a friend, do it with a friend, and do it for your own sake. I think people can feel a friend chemistry through a podcast and they just enjoy sitting at the table with you. So that that's an easy way to do it. Interviews are hard, like you know, you have to set up and then you have to move, you know, and then the person doesn't have a microphone, and then you know, like so. If I was to give any advice, just make it easy on yourself and talk about something you enjoy talking about with someone you enjoy talking to, and the rest of it takes care of itself also by subscription to Riverside. You figure it out from there. Do I need to do a book on podcasting? Maybe.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, maybe it could be good.
SPEAKER_01Like a little pamphlet.
SPEAKER_02Maybe like text expander style.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Like a tips and tricks.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Jason will be mad because I'm meant to be writing something. Something else. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I do teach it at ANU. I usually get between seven and ten people a year coming to that. And then they get the full force of my enthusiasm. And they're all sitting there like going, okay, crazy. You could scale that up. I think more people would be wanting to learn.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01The video actually, video is easier than you think, is the other thing I'd say. I avoided it for a while because I thought it was hard, but it's actually easier than pure audio. Because when the pure audio is just in your ears, the dog barking is a big bigger problem, right? Video is much more forgiving as a format. Surprise me. And and the production, these tools are set up to go straight to video, like as you can see when we tried to get on. So they've geared them towards that. So you can do a full production of a YouTube video in Riverside really easily. Like including patching over text and patching over images and so don't sleep on video if you're starting out because people will switch off if your audio's bad. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's fair.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you could do a series of YouTubes on podcasting in lieu of a book, just quietly.
SPEAKER_01I could do that. Another project, I'll put it on the list.
SPEAKER_02Alright, so finally, do you have any key tips for other researchers, but particularly focused on ECRs, people who are coming up through today's academic environment?
SPEAKER_01God. I feel like one of those people that says don't do it. And I'm that's a bad, I never want to be that person. Because it it is seven different jobs in a trench coat. It is. It's a very demanding job because you have to be the accounting department, you have to be the marketing department, you have to be the, you know, research department, you have to be records keeping department. So like you do it it is not just one job. Um and it's got more so as the institution has pushed its work that it doesn't want to pay people to do onto you and all your compadres are experiencing the same thing. Um I think so but if you understand that that's what's going on, then you can skill yourself up a bit more easily. I think a lot of things times we're only just offered things to but develop our teaching. And if you think about it from the university's point of view, that's the moneymaker, right? So they're much more invested in your teaching quality than they are in anything else. So if you if you ever see something go by called accounting or budgeting or project management, go to those. But then they're in short supply. Like they don't actually offer stuff like that for academically, which is why Jason and I are making a a small fortune in teaching productivity at least. But there's pr plenty more there that's not been serviced, like finance and things like that. Um, so take on everything that you can. Um and and to and look at, you know, those focus performance documents, those nauseating ones that say where you want to be in five years' time. Like actually fill that in because that forces them to actually, if they commit to it, they're meant to help you. And so if you see that sort of training outside of the university, you can always make the case for them to pay for it. I've had quite a lot of success doing that over the years, just going, well, I said in my performance document that I wanted to do blah and you signed it off. So where's my training? You know. So people need to learn to use the tools of their own oppression.
SPEAKER_02Excellent advice. I'm going to email training next week. So email training for a classic example.
SPEAKER_01Are you getting a priority, whatever they're called? Are they called priority something or other? Sure, it's the email training system. The best training, two things, the best training I've ever gone to. One about email, which is surprisingly helpful about Microsoft 365, and the other one was 18 hours of dealing with difficult people training. It's the very best training. And I I've dealt with many difficult people and helped other people deal with difficult people because of that training. So yeah, more training.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's good Well, Inga, thank you so much for joining us on Laura at the end of the world. It's been fabulous.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's been great. Thank you so much. It's been fun, Christy. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Cool. I am pretty excited about this one because I had my own PhD experience with a thesis whisperer. Back then, there was nothing. There was no guidance, you know, outside the supervisory relationship, and it really depended on what your supervisory relationship was in terms of how to be a baby academic. And I just got so much out of reading that blog. And yeah, just the combination of very relatable, quite funny, but also quite practical hacks and tips and tricks about how to get the PhD done and how to manage the process and get through it with your sanity intact. It's just gold. So I haven't actually met Inger directly, but I'm a bit of a fan. I listened to this as I was on the plane, flying somewhere above the Pacific, and I took, I think, about 14 pages of notes as I was supposed to say to it. So I'm just gonna mention some of the big things that that jumped out at me. So the first point that jumped out at me was what she said about getting rid of the dissertation as the assessment model for the PhD. That kind of resonated with me because I've been thinking about this lot a lot in the age of AI. Like if we get to a point where AI is good enough to do research and pump out a large literature review, and you know, maybe it can't do the empirical work, but maybe it can do a lot of the writing. Like, what does it shift what the value of the PhD will become? And I think universities have been quite slow to the party in terms of giving PhD students some like direct guidance on how whether or not to use AI. So this is a really tricky space. So I've been thinking about that, the value of the process of preparing an assessment. At the same time, I like to think of the PhD as both an apprenticeship and a database. So you learn how to become an academic. You're like an apprentice. If you go into an academic job without having a PhD, I worry that you haven't done that apprenticeship process. And also you don't have the database that you can dip into, like for your for your first book or for or your journal articles. I still dip back into my PhD for some of the theoretical work that I did back then. And so I wonder, though, how can we really achieve those two things? So we're creating academics and we're providing them with a base in which they can go into a job, get loaded up with teaching, but still have a research start in a way that accounts for the diversity of skills and also the disruption that's coming towards us with AI. So that was kind of the first thing I wanted to get your views about. But I might just tap the next point on because it's interrelated, which is she talked also about taking a diverse and a neurodiverse approach to supervision. And this resonated a lot too. It's something I've been thinking about too, in terms of the way that we in law and in the humanities and social sciences supervise students versus in STEM, perhaps where they take more of a lab approach where you have a community of PhD scholars working together and maybe efficiencies around meeting like in a group. Like imagine if we could do our PhD meetings with all our six or seven students in one room at one time. That sounds very efficient. But at the same time, too, we do have to be diverse in how we manage the supervisory relationship because every student is different, including in terms of their neurodiversity, but also culturally. So often I find that the way that I work with a particular student does depend quite a lot on their cultural background and the way that they're used to communicating and being in touch. I have some students that I have a much more formal relationship with, and I have others that like, you know, we catch up on WhatsApp and we yeah, speak on the phone and and and catch up in person more than we have kind of the very traditional kind of formal PhD meetings. And it's sort of something that you adapt depending on what works for the student while also working within our quite prescriptive institutional mandates.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, I I feel torn in relation to the kind of get rid of the dissertation. I can see a lot of strong arguments for it. Some of my thoughts though are we now do have the option of the sort of PhD by publication, which does to some extent enable that. But also um I think that there's a real value in for some topics getting right into the the weeds. And I think it's very hard to do that in short pieces, especially if you haven't first gone through the weeds.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So there is a real difference in the kind of scholarship that people feel comfortable engaging with when they've had the opportunity to really like almost at first mechanically go through well, what does the literature say? What are my methods? Here's my case study, what does that tell me? All right, now here's a discussion. And it's not, it's not the sort of thing that makes a punchy 7,000-word article until all of that has built on itself and there's been a like as you say, that apprenticeship, that learning process. I recognize that doesn't apply to all disciplines, but I do think that there's a real value in doing that and that it's incredibly hard to get the support and the time to do that after the PhD, especially for the first time, because the the learning that happens through it is something that just it needs a lot of patience and it needs a lot of clear air. So I I I recognize that that's not for everyone and that not everyone needs to do that. But leaving the opportunity for that, I think has some real value. Um and I wonder if we can think through the PhD by publication so that it's not so, you know, it was originally created for people who were already academics and were already publishing and didn't have a PhD but needed one for one reason or another, and they could kind of just package up the stuff that they'd done and get it assessed. But then it became a thing that people could do, like fresh. And it I don't think that the format or the rules were really adequately thought through about how to enable that in a way that makes sense to people. And I've seen people get quite stuck in the, well, what do I put first? And how do I make this article self-contained when it's actually part of this bigger project that I haven't actually gone through yet? I haven't set it out, I haven't explained it, I haven't learnt it yet. So I'm not sure that it's yet working for everyone in the way that maybe it could. And then I guess the thing that that I was thinking about is that for some, for many, in fact, PhD students, and I would say particularly for a number of neurodivergent PhD students, the isolation of the PhD, particularly on that single big dissertation kind of mission, is unnecessary and unhelpful. And it affects mental health and it affects completion. And we might not need everyone who uh goes through the humanities or law to join a lab, so to speak, but we could bring in more lab-like opportunities. We could bring in more opportunities for PhD students to work within projects that are actually contributing to the project in a in a really collaborative way. We could do better at recognizing collaborative work as part of PhD work and recognizing that all of the skills around collaboration are PhD skills. And we could be better at just creating peer support networks through the PhD. I know some universities have experimented for a while just around a monthly methods group where people come and and talk together and share work, but do a different focus on different methodologies and methods every week. And even just that sense of community that's built through that has made a difference to the supervisors and to the students. So I do think we could be doing a lot more to bring people together to reduce isolation and to give people more of a sense of common. Purpose, base them in labs, base them in research centres, all of those sorts of things to Yeah, to provide a range or a diversity of options for people depending on what it is that does suit their style and what's going to kind of work for them. And I do think that this should be an ongoing conversation, particularly as you mentioned, when you've got things like AI kind of challenging what it is that we're bringing to the party and and what it is that we see some value in. But there's still something in me that's like, I don't know if I want to get rid of the dissertation entirely, because then are we going to get rid of books too? Like what's yeah, I yeah. So anyway, I I am I'm still thinking that one through.
SPEAKER_00Listening but resisting. Yeah. And I think what you said about collaboration there is really important because it's something I've seen come up in university context too lately, is again this this emphasis on the sole author professor, right? The star professor who writes by themselves, writes big, big theoretical pieces. That doesn't provide some of those opportunities for community and for apprenticeship for PhD students. And I think some of the universities are sort of pushing back on professors co-authoring with their students and and within law faculties. And actually, then you're not you're not showing them how you do this process. And you're also in a lot of those situations, those star professors are still using those PhD students as research assistants, they're just not giving them authorship. So um it's cool to see what's happening in situations where there is community provided for and PhD students do feel like they're part of a research culture and a research centre and the broader university's own academic culture, but most of that is happening, it's very bottom-up. It's happening because particular supervisors are doing it. It's not happening because the university mandates it or requires it. It's sometimes it's the students who are leading it around some of those study groups, too. So, yeah, interesting points. I also really liked what Inga said about having to learn project management. And I need to get her book. I don't have a copy of her book to understand what's in the library, I'm sure, more about that. I have throughout my career been quite shocked about the large external research projects that I have been involved with that have been given to me and my teams without having any project management skills. Like millions of dollars worth of research funding without ever being trained in project management in a university setting. I have some project management training from previous careers, but we are not trained how to do that in academia. And yeah, my partner who works in big construction projects, he's often really shocked at the way that deadlines and milestones are framed and reframed as part of these projects. And I think like Inga, for me, the money has always been the hardest part, managing the money. And a lot of our academic systems, especially in humanities and social sciences, it actually really seem how-bent on making this really, really difficult for us. Because as Inga said, the big moneymaker for the university is teaching. And so our systems are not really designed to support research in that way. We don't have the institutionality. And also with projects, a huge part of it is actually just managing people. And not all academics have good soft skills in terms of managing people and and maintaining relationships. So the more that we can learn about how to be project managers and how to understand that we're managing projects, um, I think the better.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree. I'm I'm really keen. I'm really keen to read the book. I learned about project management. I did a master's in international development, and so obviously, project management is core to that. That there's something very different about that than there is with a research project, and actually that's quite a unique set of skills and challenges, and so I'm really keen to read the book. It kind of also brings up another comment that Inga made, which is the idea that academia is seven jobs in a trench coat. And I I think that goes to the need to learn about project management, but the bizarrness that there's actually not much focus on enabling or supporting academics to learn those skills. And then back to that question of well, what's the PhD for? What are we um creating an apprenticeship for? And I guess this is where I absolutely do see the critique of the single dissertation, because if it is no longer enough for people to just write books as an example, then um or maybe some journal articles that get pulled out of the thesis as this kind of the thing, if there's an expectation of getting grants, of working interdisciplinary, of of you know, joining labs and centres, of project management and of being a you know a public voice, of contributing to policy and impact and all of those things, where is that built into the PhD? And then after the PhD, wh where is it built into early career researcher development? I have noticed, for example, at Monash that there is an enormous amount of training available. And I think that's brilliant. And I think that does answer some of those questions. But no one has more time. Like they don't have additional time to take up all those opportunities than they do at other universities that are lacking those opportunities. And learning to do something efficiently and well can save you time down the track, but accounting for the upfront investment in those train in that training, I think, is something that we still need to kind of keep working through. And the more that it could be part of the PhD program and maybe like a commensurate reduction in what's expected from the thesis component might answer some of those questions.
SPEAKER_00Because that's when you would have more time to do it, is when you're doing your PSD. Theoretically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um because there's also only so many hours that you can just sit at your desk and write by yourself, you know, per day. Like maybe you can only do really six hours of that. So doing a two-hour workshop at the end kind of maybe that's workable. I don't know. But yeah, sort of related to what you were saying then is another point that Inga made that I thought was really interesting was that publish or perish has been replaced by the need to be visible. I can't remember actually how she visible or vanish, I think was her book. And and this is really impact, you know, what we're talking about with impact. And there is a risk with impact, of course, that it can be quite hollow. Like when I when I've been often evaluating projects, interdisciplinary research projects, projects done by um people in the sciences and engineering, they often just say, Oh, we're doing this project about insert technical topic, and then we're gonna have policy impact and we're gonna change all the laws and get all the policies put in place, and that's gonna change the global biodiversity framework, and it's all gonna be great because it's all gonna be taken up because we know stakeholders, etc. And it's like, no, there's more to it. There's there's a lot of power dynamics. There are processes for making law, passing legislation through parliament and getting policies developed, and there are guidelines, constitutional guidelines, all sorts of you know, there's a whole ecosystem of knowledge sets that are relevant to having policy impact, for example. And what's kind of happening at the moment, though, is we're people working in law and political science and other sort of social sciences that that are experts on how you get impact, right? How you get policy impact and community impact. We're kind of no longer like the the favourite cousins that want to get invited along to the party. And there's been a lot of attention to wanting to depoliticize research and keep these very technical projects. And they say they don't policy impact, but it doesn't really matter if they're not, because we don't really want to change anything anyway, because that's too political. And where impact is sort of shifted is away from what I would see as being the ability to actually impact change to a really narrow view of commercialisation. And that's certainly happening in our Toro, where in impact is becoming just commercialisation. Can you get a patent? Can you make money out of it in a in a commercial way? So again, it's reinforcing the dominance of science, uh, technology, general management, and crowding out the space for humanities and social sciences. Um, so those of us who are still doing this work are doing it in our own time with no And there's no easy answer.
SPEAKER_02Like there's literally no easy answer to that, particularly within certain political cycles. But one thing that does occur to me where there does remain space, say political space, for that story to be told, is that we're not always great at telling it. And we're not always great at even say within our own institutions, making it clear that where there's a biodiversity project or where there's a um, you know, a sort of a science-driven project, that that the intention is to have policy impact or legal impact or institutionalization, that we're good partners from the beginning because some of the upfront work, the middle work, and the end work will all be more effective if you bring in people who have some expertise about how embedding things into law reform, making effective policy briefs, liaising with departments and lawmakers, and even thinking through processes of institutionalization, including an analysis of power dynamics and things of that nature. That that there's actual genuine benefit in partnering with us. And I think we don't necessarily sell ourselves very well around that point, but we should I think everyone would benefit. But that also needs law to be, for example, more interdisciplinary. We need to think of ourselves as working alongside the scientists in this thing rather than coming afterwards and doing something as an add-on, but actually working in these teams. And so that it comes back to that kind of idea of what do we what do we see as the role of the academic and how does it work in in today's environment. And when it becomes less about writing a sole-authored journal article or book and more about solving problems with whatever team is necessary to effectively solve that problem, that's a very different conversation and it's a very different picture of how how we engage and the kinds of skills we see as important.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Did you have any other reflections? I think you had 14 pages of notes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, just some little things. What she said about peer reviewing was an absolute revelation to me. She only reviews as many as she writes in a year. I'm like, okay, that I think I'm doing way too much peer reviewing. And I'm trying to cut it back. But yeah, it also reflects the state of the system at the moment. The peer review system is not working properly. She sort of made some reflections about whether it really is an active service. And especially if we feel like we're just part of the industrial publication complex and we're not really having much of an impact on whether research gets published or doesn't get published anymore because the journals just want to publish it all anyway. It does raise a question about the time that it requires for us to do that work and whether it's providing value. So that kind of jumped out at me. And also j just seeing the impact that her blog has had and I guess the kind of snobbish way in which academia points people towards monographs and sole author journal articles and away from joint impactful work like blogging or podcasts. But it was 100,000 people a month that read her blog. Like who can say that about our journal articles? Ever. I mean, you're getting such a wider audience and reaching and helping such a broader range of people that I think it's really important. But she also pointed out there that writing the papers gets you the credibility in order to be able to do that work. So I don't think we're going to give up our day job just yet and just become professional podcasters, even though that would be quite fun. It gives you the credibility or the evidence space from which to spout your views. And it reminded me of that Tim Mitchin quote, love without evidence is just stalking. And writing opinion pieces or doing blogs or podcasts without having any academic work to back it up is kind of just I don't know, someone's stream of consciousness, basically. And yeah, she taught it oh also in terms of the podcast, and we talked about this just a teeny bit today, and it might come up later on again. It will come up later on again. Is I just she talked a bit about doing video with podcasting. And I've been thinking increasingly that maybe we should be trying to do video and I will revisit it later in the episode. Um and then finally, what's after academia? And she talked about kind of wanting to do something else, and it's academia, or like anything, it's like the green dragon. You're always chasing it, and when you finally get there and you've got it, you don't know if that's what you really wanted after all. You wonder what else there is. She talked about making way for other people being really important, and that is really important, but also we're so focused on achieving certain milestones in an academic career. Maybe once you get there, is it is it is it really what you want to be doing, or just want to be walking your dog and like planting trees down in your local wetland. So I think we can all reflect on that and you know, a little bit depressing, but also useful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It was funny when I asked her what's next. And I actually thought it would be focused on like research project or output or or something like that. And she said, Oh, I'm thinking of leaving. And I went Yeah. That's all been left. Of course that's what you say. It was um it was a funny moment and it made so much sense. And there sometimes things happen in life that are very clarifying, and I think that's part of the picture there. And I I guess it it featured in a lot of our planning, Liz, in terms of the well, whenever it is that we retire, and you know, for setting aside the plans for when, what would we like to be able to do in that time? And so then how do we kind of make choices that enable that decision to be possible rather than choices that don't necessarily provide any basis for those um priorities? And that was a really interesting way of thinking, and I found it really useful. On that um video podcasting, I always think I'll have to like put on proper clothes and do my hair.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_02Put some leppy on. I'm sure there are no stick. But yeah. But broadly speaking, I agree. I'm very happy. I'm very happy to do video, and obviously I make videos for my teaching all the time, and I haven't I've have good discipline in not looking back or looking at myself. And also it enables things like captions, which I think are really great for accessibility uh purposes, and people can still download the audio, they can still listen to it. Yeah, yeah, and they can generally provides another another option. So I have no I have no real issues with that other than just needing to engage in more personal maintenance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well Pat Pat said too so I'm gonna talk about his podcast later on, but he mentioned that Riverside does a really great job of editing the video as well. So giving it a go.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_02All right. Well, our next section focuses on the question of what's new in environmental law. In this section, we discuss developments including legislation, judgments, publication, and news. So, Liz, do you have any updates to share?
SPEAKER_00Yes, there are quite a lot of pretty serious legal controversies going on in Altiado at the moment. So I'm just gonna try and paraphrase a few of them because otherwise this is gonna take too long. But in positive terms, first, I have been listening, as I foreshadowed, to two really great podcasts by friends of mine who are also Rutherford Discovery Fellows. And I wanted to do a shout out to them and we'll link to their two podcasts in the show notes. So the first one is Under the Lens, which is an environmental science series that's produced by Bioprotection Altiarua, which is a national centre of research excellence in Aotearoa, um, which is co-led by my friend Amanda Black. And that show explores how ecosystems across Alterua and the Pacific resist, recover, and remain resilient against modern biosecurity challenges. It's called Under the Lens, they do video, and it's on Spotify and everywhere else you might need. They just won a prize for it, or they got nominated. And I think they won a prize at like a national media award or something. So it's really interesting and it's quite funny, and it's like three of them sitting around a table. I I listened to an episode just the other day which was about weeds, and about weeds are a very colonial thing. You know, a lot of the thing like one of the biggest weeds that we have here are rhododendrons, which like all all the English settlers loved rhododendrons. They planted them everywhere and they're now just completely out of control. Agapanthers, there are all these kinds of we want to recreate, you know, Europe or or other parts of the world in our Tearua and brought these plants down here and they've completely taken over. So yeah, that was a cool one. Blackberries. Yeah, blackberries, and and how many weeds you see when you're walking around in the UK? I thought that was interesting. And it's like, oh, but I guess they're not weeds here. I know I found that fascinating. Yeah. How culturally kind of loaded the the idea of the weed is. So anyway, that was a great episode, but they have lots of other really cool episodes. The other one is Pat Savage's podcast called Many Voices, a world music podcast. And he is an ethnomusicologist. He studies Yeah, different cultural approaches to and linguistic approaches to producing music. And he in this series challenges the idea that music is a universal language, and he really tries to highlight and champion non-English music. And he interviews someone on each episode and they share six songs from their respective cultures, and they dive into kind of the linguistic and the scientific and the cultural diversity of music in their place and also globally, and they often to reflect on sort of surrounding social movements or political movements that are relevant to what was happening with music at that particular time. It is a joy to listen to or watch, and um he starts each each episode by getting the person to sing a song, which is really lovely. And he also in the last episode he got his two kids to be the hosts and to interview him. And I reckon that we should get our kids to do that at some point. I think it would be hilarious. So I feel like Leo's gonna be blow up for that, but yeah, so that's also available on Spotify and YouTube, and you know, you can find it everywhere. So I've been chatting to both of those colleagues too about starting a podcast alongside and as part of a research program and kind of how we can improve our reach and the service that we provide to our listeners, I guess. So those are my happy updates, and now I'll follow with my sad updates. We'll link in the show notes to an opinion piece that I put out last week with my colleague David Jefferson about conservation reform in Aotearoa. I had mentioned in early episodes that the government is proposing changes to the Conservation Act to modernise it. There are some pretty serious problems with the reform proposal, and the biggest, most controversial problem with that, the government's actually backtracked on and said that they're not going to proceed with, which was basically privatizing conservation land, enabling conservation land that was deemed kind of surplus to needs to be sold. In order to kind of raise money, because they're confusing private and public goods, like they're not understanding that we all benefit from conservation lands. So the government backtracked on that, but they're still proceeding with some other problematic things, including shifting the Department of Conservation's key functions, giving it a new function, which is economic development of conservation lands, reducing the role of our key institutions, the New Zealand Conservation Authority and Conservation Regional Conservation Boards, which were quite kind of co-governancy, and also limiting the treaty clause in that legislation. So we reflect on that in this op-ed, but we also said, okay, well, if there's been this massive polarizing backlash, which shows a range of values related to conservation lands, we actually need to go back and revisit the values that are underpinning this very charged debate. And a lot of conservation debates are really being underpinned by European preservationist conservation values, what we know as fortress conservation. So we wanted to highlight that and add to the conversation that we need to acknowledge that these are places where human communities are present, where Indigenous peoples have been excluded from their governance, and those areas are still unresolved in terms of handing some of those areas back to Indigenous peoples under their governance. So we've sort of tried to add that to the conversation, which was very much being led by conservation NGOs, you know, recreational interests. We've had a massive reaction to that article. I think a couple of days ago I checked had over 18,000 reads and multiple republications. It's probably over 20,000 by now. We got a lot of support from people, and we also triggered a few people. That wasn't our intention, but ironically, the people we triggered are the exact people who we were trying to say, like, acknowledge your own values here. Like you are bringing a European worldview to this. So that's conservation. In climate change, I mentioned last time about the climate talk case that the government was stopping cases being able to be brought in torque. In relation to climate change. I mentioned that the Environmental Law Initiative had complained to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman has now handed down a report on this, and this report suggests a widespread practice in the Prime Minister's office of hand delivering hard copies of documents so that they can't be subject to freedom of information or official information act requests, and sending correspondence to personal email addresses of staff to stop documents in the public interest being made public. And this particular document, which was basically a range of large emitters writing a legislative proposal to prevent tort action on climate change, was a document that was emailed to the Prime Minister's advisor to their personal email address. And it's quite, or it's almost funny actually, reading the Ombudsman's report where the Ombudsman says they were quite surprised that the Prime Minister's advisor couldn't recall a document where industry wrote a legislative proposal to interfere with the case on foot in the courts. So he said, while I did not find any evidence that contradicts this advice, and I appreciate that the chief policy advisor role has a high workload, I do find it surprising that the former Chief Policy Advisor had no recollection of what was done with the information in the briefings, given that they related to a prominent issue, were provided by high-profile companies, and the wording for the suggested legislative change in the briefing note was ultimately reflected in the proposed changes to the Climate Change Response Act. So, yeah. You would have thought that the legislation would have been pulled immediately, but it hasn't. It's gone before Select Committee now, I think is where that's at. In the meantime, the Climate Change Commission has released its monitoring report of the government's action in relation to our climate mitigation targets. These are our domestic targets for reducing emissions. It also gave an expert reaction on that for the Science Media Centre, which we can link to, but basically drew attention to the fact this report just outlines that the government is not on track to meet its budgets for emissions reductions and that it's reduced funding in particular for Maori for climate action that's been led by Maori. And really that this is in the context of the government making its preference for the interests of large emitters clear. And that case of the Ombudsman is an example of it and the climate tort situation, but we're also seeing it in the disestablishment of the Ministry for the Environment and Resource Management Reform and other things. And really, the the report from the Climate Commission, Hippowarangi, it points out that the government thinks that it's prioritizing economic interests. But by focusing on short-term economic interests, they're creating an economic disaster in the medium to long term for businesses and households. And really, we are not going to be able to adapt to climate change if we don't make these emissions reductions. Potentially in good news, the government's also released a draft of its reform of the Climate Change Response Act. And that is including a requirement for local councils to develop local adaptation plans and develop flood risk maps. So that's quite good. Yeah. Originally we were expecting to get a Climate Adaptation Act. We've been waiting for that for years, and it's not going to be its own legislation. It's going to be built into the mitigation legislation. But but various people have come out and said, okay, but you're just giving councils another thing to do and you're not funding them. And it's in the context of councils already being generally restructured. We have local government reform going on at the moment. So link to another piece from EDS about that. The last thing that I want to mention, and I'm going to try to get through this quickly, resource management reform has finally come back from Select Committee. And it's it's worse. It's the bill is now worse than it was before it went into Select Committee. The government has also snuck in a few of its own amendments that weren't announced before the public consultation and didn't go to select committee. And the most egregious of these is the scrapping of Manafukahono Adohe agreements. So Manafukahono Adohe is something that I've published on in the past, are collaborative governance arrangements, agreements that are agreed and developed between local councils and local indigenous peoples. They are a really fantastic mechanism to, in order for councils to collaborate with people who are indigenous people living in place very connected to the local issues that are happening there. They have not caused any problems in the past. They are just starting to be developed in lots of ways. They were only introduced in 2018. The previous version of the bill included a provision saying that the existing Manafla Kahunu Adohe and ones that had already been initiated and were in the negotiation process would be carried forward into the new system. But the government has just intervened in the process and added a provision to say that they won't carry over. So that's basically undermining agreements that have already been resourced, negotiated, and agreed. It's like it's wrong from a constitutional perspective and a regulatory standards perspective, but it's also wrong from a contract law perspective. It's interfering with agreement making between councils and local indigenous peoples. So I think it's really, really wrong. A range of people are upset. But Minister Bishop, the minister responsible for RM reform, told the press conference after he announced these changes on Monday, Federated Farmers, which is our large agricultural lobby group, told us to remove Manafakaruhe, and we have delivered on that.
SPEAKER_03Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00When's your election? Uh November. November. But you know, who who is our government accountable to? There are a range of other issues with the bill, some of which I have posted on online. This statement, the removal of the precautionary principle better reflects the government's intention that planning decisions should be proportionate and evidence-based even when information is uncertain. So That's contradictory. That's the inverse. Like that's literally what the precautionary principle does. Removing it doesn't do that. That doesn't make any sense. It retains first in, first serve permitting for water, which is extremely problematic. It's creates a run on water rights. It's the worst. And the catchments that we're really worried about, they're already fully over-allocated. They've also interfering with the treaty principle, uh clauses. One of the good things that was in the bill was it was trying to establish environmental limits and environmental bottom lines. They're out now. The select committees remo recommended them to be removed because it needs to be more workable in practice. And we have to balance environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Yeah, they they've retained these regulatory relief provisions, which basically means that if local council regulate on heritage, sites of significance to Māori, outstanding natural features, or indigenous biodiversity, amongst other things, if they regulate those and those impact the private property rights of landowners, they have to pay compensation. So it's going to have this incredible dampening effect on regulation by because why would councils do it if they're going to then have to pay compensation and maybe get sued? Yeah. And on climate change, they've taken climate change out, they're saying the negative effects of greenhouse gas emissions are already managed through the Climate Change Response Act and the emissions trading scheme, which if you heard my earlier updates, you would know is not the case. So removing them from the planning system avoids duplication, provides greater certainty. The Parliamentary Commission of the Environment sent a scathing letter to all ministers and is suggesting that it gets sent back to the Select Committee. He's raising the sorts of issues that I've raised and also other issues with it that I won't go into, but he generally is not confident that this legislation will enable the protection of the environment, and it is the main piece of legislation that manages the impacts of development on the environment. So I won't go on longer about it, but yeah, it's it's not over yet, but the next stage is third reading. So then we possibly have a change of government and then they might reverse it again, which would be like the third level of reversal of this reform proposal.
SPEAKER_03So yuck. What about you, Christy? Got any output?
SPEAKER_02I have a handful. I I won't I won't go on for too long, but one that I did want to mention is what's known as now known as the Hard Truths case. Yes. So this was launched in late June this year by 10 Australians who have filed a formal legal communication. It's known as a communication with the United Nations Human Rights Committee against the Australian government. So this is the same receiving body and the same format as the Daniel Billy case, for example, known as the Torres Strait 8 case. So the committee is the international body that's responsible for monitoring how countries meet their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or the ICCPR, which is a foundational human rights treaty that Australia has ratified. And importantly, that Australia's ratified Optional Protocol 1, which is to enable these individual communications. Number of rights that are raised under this communication would probably fit even better under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. But just like in the Daniel Billy case, that's not an option for Australians because Australia has yet to ratify the optional protocol for ISESCAR. And so we don't yet have the capacity for the UN body that oversees that covenant to receive individual communications from Australians. So even though they've ratified the covenant, they're really not interested in enabling accountability. So the claimants in this hard truths communication include traditional owners, firefighters, teachers, disability advocates, and pretty much all generations, these young people, parents, and grandparents represented. And many of our listeners will recognise the lead applicant, which is Professor Anne Polina, who's a Nikanawara woman and the chair of the Madawara Fitzroy River Council. So, Liz, you and I have worked with Anne on a number of different projects, particularly relating to the rights of the Madwara. And Anne and I recently co-authored a book chapter on Indigenous ontology and international law, where we're sort of looking at the way, particularly that Indigenous peoples have been, in fact, reshaping international law from below and taking sort of challenging its really fundamentally Western ontological foundations. And yet again, I think this is an example of that very kind of engagement. Anne was also a keynote speaker at the LaSans conference that you organized last year, Liz. And we featured her conversation with Gerard Albert and Dr. Erin O'Donnell on the podcast earlier this year. People will kind of have a feel for the sort of work that Anne's been doing. And as soon as I saw it, I thought, oh, of course, Anne's the leader can hear it. It's so consistent with her just incredibly inclusive mission to make the world a better place for everybody. So at the heart of the case is what they're calling a glaring inconsistency in Australian climate policy. I don't think this should be news to anyone. Effectively, the government is taking steps to reduce emissions within our borders and is making a lot of international statements about its, you know, commitments in this regard. But it's continuing to approve and subsidize massive coal and gas development, which are going to export those exact emissions overseas. In fact, 80% of Australia's emissions are what is known as scope three, which is essentially that they're burned and create those emissions outside of our borders. But what is contributing to them is the fact that we're digging up the fossil fuels that that create those emissions here in Australia. And without the approvals, that couldn't be happening. It's really common when this goes to court in Australia for the mining corporation or the government itself to use what I really like to call what's often known as the drug dealer's defense. Yeah. Which is, well, if we didn't do it, someone else would. And there's often the argument that we have clean coal and that if we didn't provide it, then dirtier coal would be burned otherwise. What I actually find really reassuring is that one of our biggest markets was China. And that's where they would often talk about the fact that China had dirtier coal. We have this clean coal. So in fact, we're actually making things better, not worse, by supplying China. And then China just completely transitioned massively across to green renewable energy. And we're like, we don't need your coal. So I think it really highlights that actually these scope three emissions are very much coming from Australia. And it's not that others are waiting in the wings to create them otherwise. We're actually displacing green development and renewable energy. And we we need to start taking ownership of the impact. Australia is one of the world's largest exporters of fossil fuels today. And coal is by its very nature dirty. Like, you know, you cannot let the word the concept of clean coal is an absurdity. It is. I mean if you're how people should just be embarrassed to even utter it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So the legal argument in this communication is that climate harms don't stop at borders. We all know we share the one atmosphere. And that by fueling global warming through these exports, the government is violating everyone's fundamental rights. And they've really relied on three main rights: the right to life under Article Six, the right to family and the home, and the right right to culture, particularly for First Nations peoples. And these all featured in the Daniel Billy communication. But this case is linked to the ICJ Climate Advisory Opinion. And it is the first international case which has kind of come after that advisory opinion, which had its one-year anniversary yesterday.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so they are relying on many of the statements that were made in the opinion, which was really that the governments do have a legal duty to prevent significant harm to the climate system. And also they completely dismiss this argument that governments aren't responsible for scope three emissions. And so that really should change the sort of the landscape. To be fair, Australian domestic courts have started to reject this argument as well. And the the Waratah Coal case, for example, just they sh I think that Her Honour spent one sentence saying, Yeah, I don't buy that. So that was really lovely to see that we're really moving past that idea. But the ICJ confirmed that really that this is an obligation of governments and that that that in fact this would be an internationally wrongful act to continue to approve coal and gas extractive development. So what they're asking for is that the government stops subsidizing coal and gas companies, that they develop a credible plan to phase out fossil fuel exports, and that they pause all new approvals for coal and gas exports until that plan is in place. Professor Polina has um a sort of an individual testimony within this communication, and she's talking about the foreseeable consequences of a warming climate and that and that this relates to the failure of governments to protect people and country, with of course people being part of country. I think it will be very interesting to see how the committee responds to the communication. I think we've already seen through the Daniel Billy communication that they're very open to these sorts of arguments. And in fact, they went and heard evidence on country for that communication, and I'm hoping that that will take place again. I think it's a really interesting strategy the way they've chosen ten claimants who represent so many different walks of life, people who have lost family members, housing, and colleagues to bushfires, people whose disability is being dramatically exacerbated, or the the sort of the symptoms of their disability are being dramatically exacerbated by extreme heat and other aspects of the climate crisis, and a whole range of other particular perspectives, which should make for a really rich response to the communication.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
unknownCool.
SPEAKER_02On a domestic legal front, but very much related to all of those themes, is a climate-safe housing case, which is being run partly by the Human Rights Law Center and their climate justice program. But they're representing a group of public housing residents in the remote Aboriginal community of Papania. And they're bringing a really key legal action in the federal court against the Northern Territory government, who is really the only available housing provider in that community, for failing to provide housing that is actually safe to live in during extreme heat. They are seeing and this dramatic increase in extreme heat events due to the climate crisis. So what is very interesting there is that because the Northern Territory doesn't have any form of Human Rights Act, and because Australia at the national level doesn't either, they're actually grounding their cause of action in contract. They're effectively saying that it is a breach of contract to be providing housing that is not habitable and that's not going to be habitable in a warming world. This definition of habitability, which is being explored through the case in this instance through contract, also applies in a human rights context. Habitability is a feature of the right to adequate housing. Um, and this interrelationship is also obviously relevant to the right to a healthy environment. And I think that this uh movement will take different forms in different parts of the country depending on what other kind of causes of action are available. We've also been having a conversation around the fact that while we haven't had a lot of luck with torts in Australia, the Sharma decision and the Pabo Pabe uh case, which is being appealed, but so far the issue really there has been finding a duty of care. Yeah. And the courts have basically found in these instances that no duty of care was owed. In relation to these issues around climate-safe housing, where the government is the landlord, the duty of care, it's it's established. There's really no controversy. And in fact, this could be a really interesting avenue to start to open up torts within the climate justice space.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I did chat with the solicitor in the Papania case about whether or not they'd considered torts. And he said that they had and they actually really had wanted to go down that path, but the evidentiary burden was much higher. And in fact, contract's very straightforward. So for this instance, to support their clients, which at the end of the day is their main goal, contract was the best cause of action. But they had very deeply explored torts and could see some really fruitful avenues there too. So that's a really interesting space to think about. I I do seem to have a theme here. The other case, and I've brought this up a number of times, but there are several cases going to challenge this Woodside gas extension. But this week in the federal court here in Melbourne has been the case, which is the Australian Conservation Foundation, but also Friends of Australian rock art against the Minister of Environment and Water and also Woodside. So I've mentioned before that this gas plant sits in the middle of this ancient Marajika rock art, which contains over a million petroglyphs, which are over 50,000 years old. It's incredible cultural heritage, obviously for traditional owners, but really everyone should be incredibly protective of this amazing cultural heritage. And it is the first known depiction of the human face. Imagine even vaguely for a moment considering putting that at risk. Yeah. And I do think you cannot begin to understand how this could even be something that would be thought of, let alone approved, without thinking that that racism is part of it. It's really confronting when you think about it. So the Friends of Australian Rock Art basically say that in approving the extension, especially out to 2070, the minister really failed to consider how this was going to affect the rock art, but also the economics of the kinds of things that this incredible heritage can bring to the area and to the area rather than to Woodside to be shipped off elsewhere, which is what gas will do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that is inconsistent with national heritage management principles, which were designed to protect the the art. I mentioned previously that some reports had been done around the potential impact, and there was extensive evidence of ministerial pressure to actually take out statements that were critical and that were indicating that there was some real uncertainty about how well they could be protected and offset. So I I would have loved to actually sit in court this week to hear it, although I imagine that the Woodside were giving evidence early this week. I imagine that would have been a little bit distressing as well. But I just had too many other too many other things on. So I'll still be watching the developments of that case with a lot of interest. So Liz, what are you working on? What's coming up on the horizon?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing lots of research. So lots of reading, writing, planning, because research doesn't really just happen. You have to plan for it, you have to prioritize. My reading pile is growing, and I have been like emailing lots of things to myself, and there's a massive pile in my inbox of things that I need to read, including your Castle Creek paper. It actually, I just got my reminder for the next thing I'm doing after this recording session, which is read all the things that are in your inbox and move them. into a better system. Also on Sunday, I'm going to see Professor Mike Stevens deliver the Jim Gardner Memorial Lecture, which is something that happens that the Canterbury History Foundation puts on. And he's going to talk about Naitahoo history, our local Ewi or tribe. And his his talk's called Making Culture Count, Nytahu and the Politics of Perpetuity. So I'm really looking forward to coming along and you know hearing more about Nytahu telling their own histories. Yeah and that's really it other than the research. So what about you, Christy, what have you got coming up?
SPEAKER_02Well, one thing that I don't so much have coming up but I did want to mention in relation to your breeding issue is that a couple of weeks ago, I had been looking for a little while, but a couple of weeks ago Paul, my partner, spotted a not particularly attractive but comfortable small couch in a local op shop. And so we went and bought it and it just fit into the back of our um car. We've got a gearly so it's relatively big at the back. And I took it to campus and put it in my office. And it and as I hoped it has already made a difference because I then have articles or or other reading matter that I put on my iPad and I find it really hard to read front to back an article, a sort of a longer piece at my desk. But now I slipped off my shoes and I curled up on this couch in my office and I've started reading again. I'm working on two main projects at the moment. One is around climate safe housing. So you've heard a little bit about that already, but I'm working with Canberra Community Law around some issues that they have seen there in relation to climate safe housing and with some students doing some research on that as well. And as part of the Climate Justice Lab that I co-lead with some other colleagues, we are going to hold a a one-day workshop in September where we're going to have some practitioners and some academics who are working on this space because we've realized that actually there's a lot of issues coming up now with the impacts of climate in Australia. Yeah and the way that um housing, particularly public housing but also low income housing is is really not resilient to these issues. Yeah, yeah. And that really there's some legal things that could make a difference to protecting people's rights in that space. And then the other work that I've been doing I've mentioned before is around water theft and we are organising an another kind of a a workshop towards the end of the year where we're hoping to get regulators and traditional owners and other people working in this sort of water theft space into a room to try to kind of keep that conversation going as well. And those are the main two things that I've kind of got on my horizon and that I'm kind of putting a bit of thought into at the moment.
SPEAKER_00Yeah I noticed when I reshared your water theft paper there's a bit of interest from various sort of local practitioners and policymakers here in Altearua as well. And I yeah I still need to read the paper but I wanted to sort of think through what it might mean in terms of our system which is slightly different. Like we don't have water markets in the same way but we do have allocations. And I think that we just don't really track and monitor it very well in terms of the theft that is probably going on. But I yeah I'm looking forward to reading that. Yeah so before we wrap up we just wanted to say if you do enjoy the show please consider leaving us a review in Apple Podcasts or sending a link to your friend or just get in touch with us privately via the send us a text button at the top of the show notes. And if you specifically had any feedback as to whether you would like us to move to a video and audio model please do let us know.
SPEAKER_02Yes and that's all from us. Before we go I want to thank you all for joining us for this episode of Lore at the end of the world and for getting all the way to the end. I know they're not short episodes. You can find the notes from each episode at lore at the end of the world one word at buzzsprout.com and you can find both of us on LinkedIn under our names and on Blue Sky. Liz is there under the username prof mac.bsky dotsocial and I'm there under one word christyclark.bsky social. Thanks Christy bye thanks Liz bye bye
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