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UncategorisedClosing the Gap Between Rudd’s rhetoric on Indigenous Australians and budget commitments
Rachel Siewert | July 1, 2008
Simply throwing money at an issue doesn't get you anywhere if you don't have a plan.
The level of spending committed to Indigenous disadvantage in the budget barely sets the Government on the right road to delivering on the Government's election promise to actually ‘close the gap'. Despite the rhetoric from the Government on closing the gap and their signing on to the pledge to deliver equality of access to services within a decade, the commitment of resources in the 2008 budget does not boost funding nearly enough to achieve this target.
The Government commitment amounts to additional expenditure of around $250 million per year across the entire Indigenous budget (that is, $1.2 Billion in new money over 5 years). But the biggest chunk of that ($666 Million) will be eaten up feeding the NT intervention juggernaut. This is a small percentage of the $450 million needed each year to simply catch up on Indigenous health alone, and a far cry from what is really needed to fix the problem.
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UncategorisedOnline Question Time for Patrick Secker MP, Federal Member for Barker
editor | June 29, 2008Here's where e-Democracy hits the ground running! As part of our exciting new Online Question Time initiative, we're inviting kids from all over Australia to put their elected representatives on the spot, and ask them about the issues that matter to the young people of Australia.
Our next guest is Patrick Secker MP, Member for Barker (South Australia), Liberal Party of Australia. -
UncategorisedCreating Spatial Opportunities
Gary Nairn | June 24, 2008Spatial information and the industry associated with it is something I have been passionate about for a long time. And even today that makes me a little unusual. When I was first elected to Parliament, very few of my colleagues had any real understanding of what spatial information was, let alone any notion that it had the potential to grow into the $12.6 billion dollar industry it is today.
To the majority of parliamentarians and senior government officials a map was something you either had in your atlas at home or in the glove box of the car.
And that is where the spatial information industry was stuck for a while, at least amongst the decision makers in parliament.
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UncategorisedIf parents are the key to the future, what do they need?
editor | June 23, 2008
By Divonne Holmes à Court We're not doing enough to equip parents with the best information to make parenting a little easier and a little less stressful.
One of the most significant events of Kevin Rudd's term in office so far has been the recent 2020 Summit in Canberra. Over a busy two days, hundreds of people spent time together to discuss the best ideas and solutions for our country's future. Some ideas were smarter than others, but one of the most interesting themes to emerge was around prevention. We're all aware that acting now helps avoiding problems later – the 2020 summit discussed that investing in prevention today has a much better long term payoff than waiting for the problem to occur down the line and then trying to cure it.
But looking ahead to the future is hard and planning for it can be even harder. I only started thinking about the future when I became a parent for the first time.
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Collaboration is Key to Keeping Australians Safe Online
Craig Scroggie | June 18, 2008As Web 2.0 technologies and the threat landscape continue to evolve, it’s now more important than ever that both private and public sectors join forces.
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UncategorisedThe path to prosperity through deregulation
Hon. Lindsay Tanner | June 16, 2008A ‘one-in', ‘one-out' approach to new Federal legislation requires that a Minister seeking to impose new regulation must try and find offsetting reductions in regulatory burden.
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UncategorisedAsian Studies and the Myth That One Size Fits All
Warren Reed | June 16, 2008Let's face it, you ever only realise how fundamental your home grammar is when you study another language, especially one from a vastly different cultural or civilization bailiwick.
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UncategorisedEnterprise-ing Web 2.0
Greg Stone | June 15, 2008Interoperability is emerging as the key to making Web 2.0 transferable to the corporate environment.
There have been countless discussions on how consumer expectations set by Web 2.0 are being transferred to the workplace. Based on working with Web 2.0, users increasingly expect to exert more control over their work experiences and to participate in them. They expect business applications to adjust to the way they work, rather than accept a suboptimal experience. This we know.
Ultimately, Web 2.0 is not really about the technology. It's about social networks and users' control of their experience. The way to achieve this movement of power to the end user in the enterprise is through a composite solution that meshes software, services and the web and considers the business user as well as the developer.
Composite applications are the business users' equivalent of Web 2.0 and mash-ups. They provide a mechanism for multiple technology vendors to participate in a solution that, in its simplest form, decouples information from line-of-business (LOB) applications like CRM or ERP and surfaces it in a more usable way.
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UncategorisedA call for maturing our approach to IT security and risk
Gavin Struthers | June 13, 2008
For many businesses, justifying a budget for IT security remains a perennial challenge.
As part of McAfee’s participation in E-security Awareness Week, I’ve spent the last three days talking directly to customers at an Executive Summit we hosted in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and gleaned some of the challenges organisations are currently facing.
In the context of what challenges face CxO’s and security managers when it comes to better securing corporate networks and managing risk, there is a definite sense of this being a "work in progress". Their call was to make the proposition simpler while providing higher levels of protection and compliance.
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UncategorisedKeeping our kids safer online
editor | June 12, 2008
Our kids might understand and recite the safety messages we tell them, but this rarely has much impact on their everyday behaviours.
The cybersafety discussion is more important today than it has ever been. Not simply because of the scare stories that are emerging with ever-increasing frequency (only last Thursday [5 June] we witnessed large numbers of Australians, including at least one teacher and a police officer, identified in the worst type of child exploitation). But more so because, (i) children are changing their use of the Internet; and (ii) their parents are evidently not taking responsibility for the implications that arise from that use.
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Uncategorised
Innate virus protection by applying POLA and Object Capabilities
quagga | June 11, 2008Contrary to the assumptions of most people- it is possible to create computer operating systems and programs that are immune to arbitrary attack by viruses and unauthorised access. In fact the foundational knowledge of how to build such a system has been known and applied for over thirty years. Unfortunately this knowledge has never been […]
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A shift in thinking
Julie Inman - Grant | June 11, 2008While we all have our own safety guidance, coming together to consolidate these messages and working across sectors is critical to making impact with consumers.
