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Aboriginal university enrolments double, but barriers still exist
By Nicole Precel
Aboriginal enrolments to university have doubled in the past decade, but financial challenges result in many Indigenous students abandoning their studies after their first year.
Warumungu and Warlmanpa man 23-year-old Ethan Taylor is one of the success stories. He is headed from Melbourne University to Oxford to study political philosophy on a fully funded Charlie Perkins scholarship and is hoping to become an academic.
Ethan Taylor is an Aboriginal student who has received a Charlie Perkins scholarship to go to Oxford.Credit:Simon Schluter
“[Political philosophy] is one of the last fields to get decolonised,” Taylor said.
Between 2010 and 2020, Aboriginal student enrolments have essentially doubled in bachelor, postgraduate and postgraduate research respectively from 7605 to 15,290, from 1285 to 3330 in postgraduate studies and 423 to 751 in postgraduate research.
In the same period, Aboriginal enrolment has also increased as a percentage of all enrolments from 0.92 per cent to 1.41 per cent, according to the Department of Education, Skills and Employment.
The dropout rate is still higher for non-Indigenous students, but is declining. In 2010, Indigenous students had an attrition rate of 25.46 in their bachelor degrees compared with 13.72 for non-Indigenous students.
In 2019, it dropped to 19.45 compared with 15.52 for non-Indigenous students.
Minister for Education Jason Clare said fewer than 10 per cent of First Nations Australians aged between 25 and 34 have a university degree.
“I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on your postcode, your parents, or the colour of your skin,” Clare said.
Read more here.
Deputy Commissioner resigns after inquiry airs lewd comments
By Cloe Read
Queensland police deputy commissioner Paul Taylor has resigned after lewd comments made at conferences with the top brass were aired during an inquiry on Thursday.
The Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Queensland Police Service Response to Domestic and Family Violence on Thursday heard that two officers had made comments at two conferences earlier this year, attended by some of the highest-ranking officers in the state.
Regional Queensland police Deputy Commissioner Paul Taylor. Credit:QPS
In one instance, a superintendent shouted “did she shut her legs on you?” to the master of ceremonies at a conference attended by about 100 QPS staff.
Taylor, the deputy commissioner for regional Queensland, based in Townsville, sent an email to QPS staff on Friday admitting he was involved in the second, unrelated, incident, where he referred to a friend as a “vagina whisperer” in a speech.
He said he would immediately resign after 45 years in the QPS.
“Yesterday, an incident I was involved in at a conference was brought to the attention of the Commission of Inquiry into QPS Responses to Domestic and Family Violence. I am devastated about the impact this has had on the reputation of the service because it does not reflect my values, nor those of the organisation,” he wrote.
“It was never my intention to offend anyone and I am deeply apologetic for the harm it has caused.
“I was remorseful immediately after the incident, and the Commissioner addressed the matter with me soon after.”
Read more here.
Investing in workers critical to solving healthcare squeeze, says Cochlear boss
By Emma Koehn
Cochlear chief executive Dig Howitt says Australia needs training and immigration policies that allow skilled workers to flow into the healthcare sector that continues to bear the brunt of two years of border closures.
Howitt told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that as virus case numbers fall across the world, disruptions look set to ease, but noted that Australian hospitals also felt the strain over the past year.
“When the number of infections goes up and when people are going into hospital for COVID and intensive care rises, then it does put pressure on hospitals and on elective surgery,” he said.
Cochlear CEO and president Dig Howitt said he expected a stronger second half of 2023.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
As health systems face fatigue more than two years into the pandemic, Howitt said Cochlear was seeing shortages of nurses and anaesthetists in a number of different countries. He added that while there was no one solution for solving staffing shortages, greater investment in developing the pipeline of future healthcare workers was critical.
“Whether that’s [through investing in] training facilities or through immigration, depending on the country, it’s important.”
He said after two years of closed borders, it was “critically important” that Australia reviewed whether its immigration and education systems were set up to ensure enough skilled workers were available in sectors like health and engineering.
Read more here.
Australian hens to remain in battery cages for another 14 years
By Latika Bourke
Australian egg producers will be allowed to use battery cages until 2036 in a decision animal welfare organisations say will consign 55 million hens to a life of suffering.
The Department of Agriculture released new animal welfare standards for the poultry industry this week, which for the first time set an end date on the use of battery cages.
Battery hens in NSW.Credit:Simon Alekna
Hens kept in battery hens occupy a cage area less than the size of an A4 paper, meaning they cannot stretch their wings, perch, scratch or nest as is normal behaviour for chickens.
Three quarters of OECD countries have either banned or begun phasing out battery cages. The EU first voted to ban the cages in 1999 and along with the UK, ended their use in 2012.
New Zealand phased out battery cages this year along with 10 states in the US, which have either banned them or begun phasing them out.
The new Australian standards, the result of seven years of negotiations between government and industry, allow the use of battery cages until 2036.
Of the 167,000 public submissions, 99 per cent demanded the use of battery cages be ended.
“The standards are underpinned by a review of the relevant scientific literature, recommended industry practice and community expectations,” the department said.
Agriculture Minister Murray Watt backed the new standards saying they balanced science with animal welfare.
Read more here.
ABS data released today shows 698 million chickens were slaughtered across Australia in the year to June 2022, the most since records began in 1966.
Row over Australian-born Kiribati judge intensifies in dramatic court hearing
By Michaela Whitbourn
A legal row over moves by the Kiribati government to deport an Australian citizen and senior Kiribati judge who is married to the country’s opposition leader has intensified after a New York-based lawyer acting for the government said the decision of the executive should be treated with “maximum deference”.
Lawyers for Australian David Lambourne, a former solicitor-general of Kiribati who was appointed to its High Court in 2018, successfully applied to the country’s Court of Appeal last Friday for an urgent order releasing him from immigration detention pending a further court hearing.
Kiribati High Court Justice David Lambourne, right, pictured in 2019 with Sir John Baptist Muri, a former chief justice of the High Court of Kiribati. The Kiribati government has been seeking to deport Lambourne.Credit:Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute
The parties returned to court on Friday. Sydney barristers Perry Herzfeld, SC, and Daniel Reynolds acted for Lambourne and argued deportation notices issued to him by the government were invalid.
“It seems to be suggested that neither we nor the court is entitled to know why the [Kiribati president] ... decreed Justice Lambourne to be a risk to security and the court must give utmost deference to that assessment,” Herzfeld said, in reference to submissions for the government made by US lawyer Ravi Batra.
“There’s no doctrine in the English law, which applies in Kiribati, of maximum deference or utmost deference to a decree of [the president].”
Lambourne is a long-time resident of Kiribati and lives with his wife, opposition leader Tessie Lambourne, in the nation’s capital, South Tarawa.
Read more here.
Labor MP Walt Secord to quit NSW politics after bullying allegations
By Alexandra Smith
Embattled NSW Labor MP Walt Secord will leave parliament ahead of the next election amid bullying allegations that threatened to become a rolling issue for the opposition.
Secord, who was a staffer for both former NSW premier Bob Carr and prime minister Kevin Rudd, released a statement on Friday confirming that he would not seek preselection for the upper house.
NSW Labor MP Walt Secord.Credit:James Brickwood
NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has been under pressure to take decisive action against Secord, after bullying complaints against the former frontbench MP emerged the same day as the damning Broderick report.
The landmark report revealed a toxic workplace culture in Macquarie Street, where almost one-third of respondents to the review had experienced bullying in parliament in the past five years.
After anonymous complaints were aired last Friday, Secord released a statement identifying himself as the subject for those complaints, acknowledging he could be “too blunt and too direct” and apologising for any offence he had caused.
“If any parliamentary staff members feel that my conduct in the workplace was unprofessional and caused offence or distress and was unacceptable, I unreservedly apologise,” he said.
Secord stood down from the shadow frontbench on Monday.
This week, Minns revealed several colleagues had raised concerns over Second’s behaviour with him over the weekend following the Broderick report.
Read more here.
Emails between property developer and premier made public
By Rachel Eddie
New Zealand’s climate fight is threatening its sheep stations
By Serena Solomon
Horehore Station, a sheep and cattle farm, sprawls across 4,000 acres on New Zealand’s North Island, its jagged expanse of uneven hills and steep gullies blanketed in lush green grass.
It is good, productive farmland, despite the rugged landscape. But it soon won’t be a farm anymore.
The land’s owner, John Hindrup, who bought it in 2013 for 1.8 million New Zealand dollars, sold it this year for $NZ13 million, or $11.8 million. His windfall came courtesy of a newly lucrative industry in New Zealand: Forestry investors will cover the property in trees, making money not from their timber, but from the carbon the trees will suck from the atmosphere.
The meat and wool industry is New Zealand’s second-largest exporter.Credit:Fiona Goodall/Getty Images
“If you told me this two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Hindrup, 67, said of the land’s skyrocketing value.
So-called carbon farming has become a key element of New Zealand’s drive to be carbon neutral by 2050. Under a market-based emissions trading program, companies in carbon-intensive industries must buy credits to offset their emissions. Many of those credits are purchased from forest owners, and as the credits’ price has soared, forestry investors have sought to cash in by buying up ranches.
The emissions trading program is New Zealand’s most powerful tool to reduce greenhouse gases. But the loss of ranch land to carbon farming could threaten one of its most iconic industries and change the face of idyllic rural areas. Farmers and agriculture experts have voiced concerns that sheep and cattle ranching, a major employer in many communities and one of the country’s top exporting sectors, is bound for a significant decline.
“We’re talking about a land-use transformation beyond anything that we have seen probably in the last 100 years,” said Keith Woodford, an honorary professor of agriculture and food systems at Lincoln University in New Zealand who is also an industry consultant. “It is a big change in land use, and we just need to be sure that is what we want.”
Read more here.
Everything is more expensive - so where’s the pay rise? - Please Explain
Cost of living… three words that are dominating discussions in lounge rooms, boardrooms and the halls of Parliament.
This week you could be forgiven for thinking the biggest issue facing Anthony Albanese’s government was untangling the secret ministries mess left by his predecessor, Scott Morrison.
But this week we also had new figures on wages and unemployment bringing back into sharp focus the key challenges for not just Albanese, but ordinary Australians.
Senior economics correspondent Shane Wright joins host Chris Paine on today’s episode of Please Explain.
AGL profit slides as board rethinks the power giant’s future
By Nick Toscano
Power giant AGL has reported a sharp fall in underlying profit after facing a turbulent year including volatile wholesale electricity prices, coal-fired generator outages and a campaign by billionaire investor Mike Cannon-Brookes that blew up the company’s plans to demerge.
While bottom-line earnings increased to $860 million for the year, AGL’s underlying profit, the figure most closely watched by the market, plunged 58.1 per cent to $225 million and fell short of analysts’ expectations.
AGL’s power stations are the country’s biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.Credit:Paul Jones
The result caps off a disastrous year for AGL, the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, after a shareholder revolt forced its board to abandon long-held plans to split off the company’s carbon-heavy coal-fired power stations from its clean energy and energy retailing division.
Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire co-founder of software developer Atlassian and a clean-energy investor, amassed a significant stake in AGL and launched a successful push to convince other shareholders to reject the proposed demerger, which he argued would create two smaller companies with less capacity to invest in accelerating the retirement of its coal power assets.
AGL’s coal-fired power stations account for about 8 per cent of Australia’s overall carbon emissions. Its Loy Yang A generator in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley is presently not due to close down until the mid-2040s, despite intensifying pressure from the United Nations and AGL’s own shareholders for companies to stop burning coal in the 2030s in order to avert catastrophic levels of global warming.
After AGL’s demerger collapsed in May, the board announced the resignations of managing director Graeme Hunt, chairman Peter Botten and independent directors Diane Smith-Gander and Jacqueline Hey.
Remaining board members are now conducting a “strategic review” into the future of the 180-year-old utilities giant, which is due to report back by the end of September.
Read more here.
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2022-08-19 07:48:57Z
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