Academic literature on the topic 'Credit cards Western Australia'

Downy mildew of grape caused by Plasmopara viticola is a global pathogen of economic importance to commercial viticulture. In contrast to populations in the northern hemisphere, few studies have investigated the population biology, genetic diversity, and origin of the pathogen in Australian production systems. DNA was extracted from 381 P. viticola samples from Vitis vinifera and alternate hosts collected via fresh and herbarium leaves from populations within Australia and Whatman FTA cards from North America, Brazil, and Uruguay. A total of 32 DNA samples were provided from a French population. The populations were genotyped using 16 polymorphic microsatellite markers. Representative samples from within Australia, Brazil, and Uruguay were also genotyped to determine which of the cryptic species (clades) within the P. viticola species complex were present. Our findings suggest the Australian and South American populations of P. viticola are more closely related to the European population than the North American population, the reported source of origin of the pathogen. The Western Australian population had similarities to the South Australian population, and the tight clustering of samples suggests a single introduction into Western Australia. P. viticola clade aestivalis was the only clade detected in Australian and South American populations. Analysis of the Western Australian population suggests that it is reproducing clonally, but additional research is required to determine the mechanism as to how this is occurring.

Potato virus Y (PVY) is one of the main viruses affecting potato in Australia. However, molecular characterization of PVY isolates circulating in potato in different states of Australia has not yet been thoroughly conducted. Only nonrecombinant isolates of three biological PVY strains collected from potato were reported previously from Western Australia and one from Queensland. Here, PVY isolates collected from seed potato originating in Victoria, Australia, and printed on FTA cards, were subjected to strain typing by RT-PCR, with three isolates subjected to whole genome sequencing. All the 59 PVY isolates detected during two growing seasons were identified to be recombinants based on two RT-PCR assays. No nonrecombinant PVY isolates were identified. All the RT-PCR typed isolates belonged to the PVYNTN strain. Sequence analysis of the whole genomes of three isolates suggested a single introduction of the PVYNTN strain to Australia but provided no clues as to where this introduction originated. Given the association of the PVYNTN strain with potato tuber damage, growers in Australia should implement appropriate strategies to manage PVYNTN in potato.

Hospitality businesses in New Zealand are seeing fewer and fewer payments made by cash, as customers opt for the convenience of paying their bill electronically. If customers love the convenience of paying by credit card, who should be responsible for the cost of this convenience – the business or the customer? In a Restaurant Association survey conducted at the end of last year, members overwhelmingly (71%) indicated that the use of cash by customers is declining, with a Mastercard New Zealand survey last year backing this up. This widespread adoption of electronic payment by consumers sees merchants bearing the significant cost of the transaction through their merchant fees. New Zealand merchants pay substantially more to process credit and contactless debit card transactions than their counterparts in Australia and the UK (on average, New Zealand merchants pay merchant service fees of around 1.4%, while in Australia it is around 0.85%, according to estimates by COVEC and data from the Reserve Bank of Australia). Restaurant Association members typically pay even higher – between 1.8% and 2% in fees for each credit card transaction; members say they are charged the same rate for any card type. Forty-two percent have a ‘fixed bundled rate’, although another 26% say they are charged a split rate for credit card and debit cards. Only 5% have an ‘unbundled’ merchant fee, where different types of cards are charged different fees and merchants pay this cost plus an acquiring service fee from the bank. There are undoubtedly advantages for businesses in accepting electronic payments, primarily in the speed of the transaction – particularly with several customers waiting to pay – and the speed in which the payment is deposited into your bank account. However, it comes at a large cost, which is challenging for an industry that runs on very small margins already. One member pointed out in the Association’s recent survey: As the average return in New Zealand is 6% net profit, the banks are effectively charging 1/3 of the profit of the average business, which is diabolical. With technology advancements their costs have gone down but charges have gone up, clearly shown in their bottom line profits. It is a collective monopoly like a lot of big business in New Zealand. (Restaurant Association member) Of our members, 66% say they would switch if they could receive a saving equating to an overall 2.5–5% reduction in the cost of accepting credit cards. Currently though, short of refusing to accept credit card payments, it is difficult to avoid merchant fees. Emerging payment options and growing trends via NFC (Near Field Communication) capable mobile phones (such as ApplePay, GooglePay and Digital Wallets) are now more widely available. Whilst offering convenience and arguably faster transaction speed, these payment methods offer no relief to the fee incurred by a business for acceptance. Alternative payment solutions now exist in New Zealand, but there are few choices. To date, most are aimed at the Chinese market, with payment methods restricted to tourist and student visitors, and immigrants retaining banking capability in their country of origin. The Restaurant Association’s survey indicated that only 24% of members currently accept other payment channels like China Union Pay, Alipay or WeChat. In reality these alternative payment solutions currently only form a small portion of the total volume of transactions a business processes, so will not affect any meaningful reduction in the total costs of cards/payment processing. Surcharging, however, is a way for operators to offset the merchant fee imposed upon them by the banks. Surcharging simply means a charge to cover a merchant’s cost for processing a credit card. They are now being used by increasing numbers of tourism and hospitality businesses. Feedback from member businesses is that there is little reaction or negative feedback from customers. A Restaurant Association member commented on the survey: We added a surcharge to cover the transaction fee on credit cards and have had no complaints. It’s just a matter of cents and gives us an opportunity to explain that we have always worn the cost of the surcharges but this is increasingly difficult. Feedback from some members is that they find the practice unfriendly and others would prefer to incorporate this fee into their menu pricing structure, as this member pointed out: “I don’t care about the cost. It is added into the budgets and is picked up at menu price changes time, so it is paid for by the customer anyway.” Individual businesses need to decide if a surcharge would create tension in the business/customer relationship however, it is reassuring to know that, if a business does decide to add a surcharge, it is becoming a far more mainstream option than it used to be. From a legal standpoint, merchants are required under the Fair Trading Act to ensure representations around their card payment fees are accurate and not misleading. This means if you are being charged a 1.8% merchant fee by your bank, it is not reasonable to apply a 3% credit card convenience fee to your customer. We’ve noticed some merchants prefer to pass on only a portion of the cost with a surcharge – say 1% – as a cost recovery practice. For a $100 bill, that is just a $1 addition to the bill for the consumer. The payments landscape is changing rapidly, and in the future new technology will dramatically change the way we pay and receive payments. In the meantime, the Restaurant Association are developing further information for members around surcharging, with implementation and training for staff. We’ll also continue advocating on behalf of members to ensure the payment system delivers good outcomes for both consumers and our member merchants. Corresponding author Marisa Bidois can be contacted at: marisa@restaurantnz.co.nz

Introduction. Under modern conditions, Ukrainian households are increasingly trying to follow Western models of financial behavior, in which, due to stable laws and monetary-financial system, citizens demonstrate active credit behavior. At the same time, it should be noted that during the recent years the number of users of bank loans in Ukraine, who have overdue debts, has increased rapidly, that cause concern among domestic scientists and practitioners. Purposeof the research is to analyses the modern trends in households’ credit behavior in Ukraine and development of proposals for its rationalization under the current circumstances. Results. Under modern conditions, each household forms its own model of credit behavior, taking into account certain factors, established traditions and beliefs regarding the appropriateness of borrowing funds. However, an important feature of credit dependence of our nationals is still lack of critical analysis of their own financial capabilities due to their inability to resist the natural desire of a person to “live now” and “live well”. The study showed that over the past ten years, from 8% to 16% of the adult population of Ukraine took credits in the banks. Moreover, the Western region is the leader in bank borrowings (with the exception of credit cards), while Kyiv, the North and the East show a higher level of credit card loans. Kyiv and the East are also characterized by higher demand for pawnshops. The Centre is the only region with relatively more frequent use of services of other financial institutions. Also, the practice of providing (obtaining) of so-called non-institutional credits is common among Ukrainian households, when citizens are not only borrowers but also creditors (that is, situations when relatives, friends, acquaintances are borrowing money). Conclusions. Under the context of current financial crisis in Ukraine, the role of the state, local governments, institutions and individuals in rationalizing households’ lending behavior is significantly increasing. Therefore, in our opinion, preventive measures in this sphere should be carried out at the following levels: state, local, banking and financial-credit system, and personally-individual. At the same time, it should be emphasized that these measures will be implemented only if the state provides clear legal regulation of the credit process and establishes trust relations with the population, which will help to minimize the moral and material losses of households and institutional subjects of credit activity.

Vital-statistics data concerning population viability were gathered for four of the rarest orchids in Western Australia using surveys to define population sizes and habitat areas and annual measurements of plant demographics. These orchids were Caladenia melanema, C. graniticola, C. williamsiae and Drakaea isolata from the wheatbelt of Western Australia. This agricultural area has a Mediterranean climate with unreliable rainfall, and is >80% cleared of native vegetation. Surveys with 10–30 volunteers increased population-size estimates by up to 10 times and provided spatial data to define core habitat areas. These areas included most of the individuals of a species, but were only 2–10 ha in size. Within these areas, orchids were often highly aggregated in patches a few metres wide, potentially resulting in a high degree of intraspecific competition. Vital statistics were obtained using 4-m wide and 30–50-m-long transects to measure rates of emergence, flowering, grazing and seed-set for each orchid. Plants emerging at the same position in different years were considered to be the same individual, but most emerged in new positions. Many plants emerged just once in 4 years, and 2–3 years of dormancy was common. Emergence frequencies were used to provide estimates of population sizes that were two or three times larger than suggested by data from a single year. Seed production was typically very low. Grazing by kangaroos and rabbits was most severe for C. melanema, but was greatly reduced by fencing. Severe drought prevented flowering of C. graniticola in the driest year, whereas other species were more resilient. These orchids are likely to persist as long as there are some years where rainfall is sufficient for flowering and seed set followed by a year with adequate rain for seed germination. Populations of all these orchids were stable or increasing, but they are still at high risk of extinction because of the impacts of increasing soil salinity or fire on their habitats. These species are unlikely to spread elsewhere in the highly cleared and fragmented wheatbelt. Intervention by hand-pollination, grazing protection and translocation to new locations is required to mitigate these risks. Results were summarised in vital statistics report cards with thresholds set to inform conservation management for these species. Core habitat maps and vital-statistics report cards should also be valuable new tools for terrestrial-orchid conservation in other biomes.

Research has shown that more young people lack good financial literacy and make poor financial decisions. Financial literacy is not only important for individuals, but also for families, financial institutions, and the entire economy. In this paper, artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support vector machines (SVMs) are used as tools to model the financial literacy levels of young university students across Australia and three Western European countries. The goal was to ascertain the students’ level of financial knowledge in relation to the use of credit card and loan facilities based on a number of input parameters such as age, gender and educational level. Sensitivity analysis is applied to determine the relative contribution of each input parameter to the overall financial literacy model. The experiments show that ANNs and SVMs exhibit promising results and capabilities for effectively modeling financial literacy. Our findings indicate that the main determinants of young people’s level of financial literacy include educational level, length of employment, age, and credit card status – in terms of the use of credit card facilities, and gender, living status and credit card status – in terms of the use of loan facilities.

AbstractA defining characteristic of contemporary welfare governance in many western countries has been a reduced role for governments in direct provision of welfare, including housing, education, health and income support. One of the unintended consequences of devolutionary trends in social welfare is the development of a ‘shadow welfare state’ (Fairbanks, 2009; Gottschalk, 2000), which is a term used to describe the complex partnerships between state-based social protection, voluntarism and marketised forms of welfare. Coupled with this development, conditional workfare schemes in countries such as the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia are pushing more people into informal and semi-formal means of poverty survival (Karger, 2005). These transformations are actively reshaping welfare subjectivities and the role of the state in urban governance. Like other countries such as the US, Canada and the UK, the fringe lending sector in Australia has experienced considerable growth over the last decade. Large numbers of people on low incomes in Australia are turning to non-mainstream financial services, such as payday lenders, for the provision of credit to make ends meet. In this paper, we argue that the use of fringe lenders by people on low incomes reveals important theoretical and practical insights into the relationship between the mixed economy of welfare and the mixed economy of credit in poverty survival.

The ability of an organization to respond to a crisis with agility is vital for business leaders to maintain business continuity. Our paper examined how business owners responded to the challenges caused by the pandemic. Using online surveys for data collection, we investigated a critical agility issue of supply chain risks through understanding the interrelationship of various business capability factors. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) was applied to a sample of 220 participants who were owners of micro, small, and medium businesses in Western Australia. The findings showed that the businesses’ efficiency, financial strength, and flexibility in sourcing affected the businesses’ supply chain risks negatively. More support for labor productivity, asset utilization, waste elimination, financial reserves, portfolio diversification, and credit access needs to be introduced to enhance the resilience of the business supply chain. This paper is novel, as we used the data collected in Western Australia, where the SMEs were still affected by the global supply chain disruption but lacked protracted lockdowns, as had occurred nationally and globally during the COVID-19 period.

Vehicle management may be considered to consist of traffic management, usage control, maintenance, and security. Various regulatory authorities undertake the first aspect, fleet managers will be concerned with all aspects, and owner-drivers will be interested mainly in maintenance and security. Car theft poses a universal security problem. Personalisation, including navigational assistance, might be achieved as a by-product of an improved management system. Authorities and fleet managers may find smartcards to be key components of an improved system, but owners may feel that the need for improved security does not justify its cost. This thesis seeks to determine whether smartcards may be used to personalise vehicles in order to improve vehicle management within a forseeable time and suggest when it might happen. In the process four broad questions are addressed. • First, what improvements in technology are needed to make any improved scheme using smartcards practicable, and what can be expected in the near future? • Second, what problems and difficulties may impede the development of improved management? • Third, what non-vehicle applications might create an environment in which a viable scheme could emerge? • Finally, is there a perceived need for improved vehicle management? The method involved a literature search, the issue of questionnaires to owner drivers and fleet managers, discussions with fleet managers, the preparation of data-flow and state diagrams, and the construction of a simulation of a possible security approach. The study concludes that although vehicle personalisation is possible- and desirable it is unlikely to occur within the next decade because the environment needed to make it practicable will not emerge until a number of commercial and standardisation problems that obstruct all smartcard applications have been solved.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Land administration strategies and processes need to be structured within a broad policy framework, the shape of which will depend on the jurisdiction concerned. A common thread between systems will be the promotion of economic development, social justice and equity, political stability, and environmentally sustainable development. The processes of re-engineering, total quality management, and other management reforms discussed in Chapter 9 were originally designed for use in the private sector so that organizations could respond better to the demands of the market place. More recently, they have increasingly been adopted by public sector administrators who have been forced to respond to the market oriented approach and hence have been required to upgrade land administration systems. In the United States the processes of re-engineering have been packaged under such labels as ‘entrepreneurial government’ and ‘reinventing government’ and were addressed in the National Performance Review (known as the Gore Commission) which had a mandate to ‘re-invent and to reinvigorate the entire national government’. The ideas were picked up by many other governments—from Australia to the UK (Butler 1994), the Netherlands to New Zealand, and Singapore to Sweden-regardless of party or ideology. Although reinventing government means different things to different people, it has generally entailed: 1. restructuring the way government services are organized; 2. developing new strategies and processes for managing government services (for instance, simplifying administrative programmes); 3. empowering the recipients of public services. As with the private sector, a crucial component of reinventing government has been the effective use of information technology (IT). Governments in general have only recently begun to review their national information strategies and to develop new ways in which they deliver services to citizens and businesses. Over the past few years, IT has changed the way that many people live through the creation of new products and services. Examples include the use of credit and debit cards, the ability to withdraw cash from a ‘hole in the wall’ even in a foreign country, the mobile phone and fax machine, and access to information on the Internet. Information technology now makes it possible for citizens and businesses to deal directly with government agencies if they so wish (UK Government 1996).