Misunderstanding or Misdirection?: Whistleblower Protection in Queensland

In his report into corruption in Queensland, Fitzgerald listed whistleblower protection as a necessary part of a strong governance regime. "What is required is an accessible, independent body to which disclosures can be made, confidentially (at least in the first instance) and in any event free from fear of reprisals." It was one of the reforms studied by the Electoral and Administrative Review Committee, the report of which resulted in the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1994 (WPA). The need for whistleblower protection was supported by all sides of Parliament. The Premier, Wayne Goss, in his Second Reading Speech on the Public Sector Ethics Bill , said that that Act and the WPA would form a package with the former outlining required behaviour and the WPA encouraging staff to report wrongdoing. The WPA was subsequently passed and has remained virtually unamended for over a decade. Such consistency is either an indication of skilled drafting and effectiveness or the fact that the Act has been neglected. It is the hypothesis of this paper that the latter is the case. This hypothesis will be tested by examining the sincerity and diligence with which the Act has been treated during, and following, its passage.

Likelihood-maximising frameworks for enhanced in-car speech recognition

Speech recognition in car environments has been identified as a valuable means for reducing driver distraction when operating non-critical in-car systems. Likelihood-maximising (LIMA) frameworks optimise speech enhancement algorithms based on recognised state sequences rather than traditional signal-level criteria such as maximising signal-to-noise ratio. Previously presented LIMA frameworks require calibration utterances to generate optimised enhancement parameters which are used for all subsequent utterances. Sub-optimal recognition performance occurs in noise conditions which are significantly different from that present during the calibration session - a serious problem in rapidly changing noise environments. We propose a dialog-based design which allows regular optimisation iterations in order to track the changing noise conditions. Experiments using Mel-filterbank spectral subtraction are performed to determine the optimisation requirements for vehicular environments and show that minimal optimisation assists real-time operation with improved speech recognition accuracy. It is also shown that the proposed design is able to provide improved recognition performance over frameworks incorporating a calibration session.

Fabricating reconciliation : Howard's forgettable speech

In this chapter, John Howard’s policy speech to The Sydney Institute, a conservative think tank, on October 11, 2007 as the Australian Prime Minister of the day, is analysed within the frame of discourse analysis to make visible how the speech works in old ways to dress up neoliberal policy as new and reformist. Taking centre stage, Howard pointed to concrete steps undertaken to achieve what he called a “new reconciliation.” This cynical manoeuvre, which put reconciliation back onto the election agenda (after it was earlier derided for its divisive and muddle headed symbolism), constituted a “neoliberal quickstep” (Reiger, 2006) or quickfix of sorts. The speech was also used as a place to reintroduce the Northern Territory Intervention, which at the time was purported to be a response to child abuse and Indigenous community dysfunction.