Does the social inclusion discourse add value?

The election of a national Labor Government in 2007 saw ‘social inclusion’ emerge as Australia’s overarching social policy agenda. Being ‘included’ has since been defined as being able to ‘have the resources, opportunities and capabilities needed to learn, work, engage and have a voice’. Various researchers have adopted the social inclusion concept to construct a multi-dimensional framework for measuring disadvantage, beyond poverty alleviation. This research program has enabled various forms of statistical modelling based on some agreement about what it means to be ‘included’ in society. At the same time it is acknowledged that social inclusion remains open and contestable and can be used in the name of both progressive and more punitive programs and policies. This ambiguity raises questions about whether the social inclusion framework, as it is presently defined, has the potential to be a progressive and transformative discourse. In this paper we examine whether the Australian social inclusion agenda has the capacity to address social inequality in a meaningful way, concluding with a discussion about the need to understand social inequality and social disadvantage in relational terms.

Threshold concepts in property education : a case study

First year Property Economics students enrolled in the Bachelor of Urban Development at QUT are required to undertake a number of compulsory subjects, alongside students undertaking studies in other disciplines. One such common unit is ‘Stewardship of Land’, an interdisciplinary unit that introduces students to the characteristics of land and land tenure with a focus on land use and property rights. It covers a range of issues including: native title, land contamination, heritage values, alternative uses, the property development process, impact of environmental and social factors, and the management of land, both urban and regional. Teaching such a diverse content to a diverse audience has in previous years proved difficult, from the perspectives of relevance, engagement and content overload. In 2011 a project was undertake to redevelop this unit to reflect ‘threshold concepts’, concepts that are “transformative, probably irreversible, integrative, often troublesome and probably bounded” (Meyer & Land, 2003) . This project involved the development of a new set of underlying concepts students should draw from the unit, application of these to the unit curriculum, and a survey of the student response to these changes. This paper reports on the threshold concepts developed for this unit, the changes this made to the unit curriculum, and a preliminary report on survey responses. Recommendations for other educators seeking to incorporate threshold concepts into their curricula are provided.

Reconceptualising mega project success in Australian Defence : recognising the importance of value co-creation

Recent literature in project management has urged a re-conceptualisation of projects as a value co-creation process. Contrary to the traditional output-focused project methodology, the value creation perspective argues for the importance of creating new knowledge, processes, and systems for suppliers and customers. Stakeholder involvement is important in this new perspective, as the balancing of competing needs of stakeholders in mega projects becomes a major challenge in managing the value co-creation process. In this study we present interview data from three Australian defence mega projects to demonstrate that senior executives have a more complex understanding of project success than traditional iron triangle measures. In these mega defence projects, customers and other stakeholders actively engage in the value creation process, and over time both content and process value are created to increase defence and national capability. Value created and captured during and post projects are the key to true success.

Space management in Malaysian government property: A case study

Cost implications related to the physical resources such as land and building in organisation is significant. Management entity of government or private sectors has often ignored the importance and the contribution gained from the physical resources towards their organisation. This source is a precious asset that can generate income if properly managed. This paper aims to explore the current trends in space management internationally, both from the government and private sector perspectives. A case study is conducted to study the level of effectiveness of space management in one of the government institutions in Malaysia. The findings from the case study will be compared with the current international trend of space management. The study will enrich the current understanding of space management in government properties, as well as to compare the level of space management effectiveness of government properties in Malaysia with the international trends and proposed suggestions to improve current practices of space management of Malaysian government’s properties. Keywords:

In focus : the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth)

Australia has new national legislation - the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) and the Personal Property Securities Regulations 2010 – which commenced operation on 30 January 2012. Previous personal property securities legislation was very complex, with more than seventy pieces of legislation in the states and territories, and more than forty registers. This reform package is the culmination of a process that began many years ago and various drafts have been the subject of much investigation and consultation. This legislation rationalises previous laws and bring about substantial changes to this area of law. This paper seeks to explain the principal changes and their implications.

Outline of the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth)

Australia has new national legislation - the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) and the Personal Property Securities Regulations 2010 – which commenced operation on 30 January 2012. The policy objectives of the new legislation are to increase certainty and consistency and to reduce complexity and cost. To achieve this, the legislation treats like transactions alike, by focusing on substance over form, and so removes distinctions between security interests which have been based on their structure. Differences based on the location or nature of the secured property and the debtor’s legal form, as an individual or company, have also disappeared. We now have one single national scheme and one national electronic registration system for all security interests throughout Australia. The Act applies to security interests in tangible and intangible personal property, including those based on some form of title retention which are not security interests under the general law. This legislation rationalises previous laws and bring about substantial changes to this area of law. This paper seeks to explain the principal changes and their implications.

Intellectual Property and Joint Ventures

Following upon the success of the 2nd edition published in 2005, this new edition not only updates its predecessor but also adds considerable new material in consequences of changes in the law generally and commercial approaches to financing joint ventures in particular. Of special note are the following: Financing of Joint Ventures has been completely re-written with considerable additions to take account of the new legislative regimes such as the Personal Property Securities, the impact of climate change legislation, specifically carbon pricing with additional material on structuring generally and particularly in relation to large joint ventures with governments through Public Private Partnerships. A new Chapter called Resources Joint Ventures undertakes a thorough analysis of a typical resources joint venture and is heavily cross referenced into the chapter on Default which has also been updated. International Joint Ventures now includes additional material on structuring and dispute resolution. Joint Ventures and the Competition and Consumer Act has been substantially re-written to take account of 2009 legislative amendments on cartel conduct, and the impact of changes wrought by the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. All other chapters and material has been updated to accommodate other legislative changes and new case law over the seven years since the last edition.

Queensland property legislation update

This article discusses the legislative changes introduced by the new Government in Queensland in 2012 and their impact on property transactions. The changes generally relate to the government’s mandate to reduce red tape in property transactions as well as election promises to reintroduce the stamp duty reduction for the purchase of a home and wind back the previous government’s changes to the lot entitlement provisions of the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997.

The significance of the resident’s knowledge management in managing the residential property

Most commonly, residents are always arguing about the satisfaction of sustainability and quality of their high rise residential property. Often, all the shortcomings and weaknesses will be blamed on the developers without considering the lack of knowledge management from the residents themselves. It is important, therefore, to show that knowledge management of the residents should be taken into account in relation to the satisfactory and the quality of the high rise residential property. This paper aims to discuss the resident’s knowledge management level of the high rise residential property in showing that resident’s knowledge management is really important to maintain the property at least. To evaluate this situation, the questionnaire surveys are being conducted. The paper analyses and structures the social science research on the importance of knowledge as a resource. The survey evidence demonstrates that, the resident’s knowledge management level was highly related in having high quality and sustainable high rise residential property in Johor Bahru.

Current speculation in costing approach for Malaysian residential construction

The construction industry has been under pressure for many years to produce economical buildings which offer value for money, not only during the construction phase, but more importantly, during the full life of the building. Whole Life Cycle Costing (WLCC) is a relatively new concept for the construction industry especially on residential development and particularly for Malaysia. Discussing the speculation in using WLCC for the Malaysian residential constructions is the aim for this paper and it is one of the research questions on my research. This paper also wants to gather more speculation that may involve through others experienced. Basically, this paper is written to facilitate the current or future individual which will involve in residential property development sector with a new sensible approach to what at times seems impressively confusing especially in simplifying the operations and maintenance services and rehabilitation as well.

Teaching new product development to design led innovation

Recently many international tertiary educational programs have capitalised on the value design and business can have upon their interception (Martin, 2009; Brown, 2008; Bruce and Bessant, 2002; Manzini, 2009). This paper discusses the role that two teaching units – New Product Development and Design Led Innovation – play in forming an understanding of commercialisation needed in today’s Industrial Design education. These units are taught consecutively in the later years of the Bachelor of Industrial Design program at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. In this paper, each teaching unit is discussed in detail and then as a conglomerate, in order to form a basis of knowledge students need in order to fully capitalise on the value design has in business, and to produce a more capable Industrial Design graduate of the future.

Does weaker copyright mean stronger creative industries? Some lessons from China

We review the theory of intellectual property (IP) in the creative industries (CI) from the evolutionary economic perspective based on evidence from China. We argue that many current confusions and dysfunctions about IP can be traced to three widely overlooked aspects of the growth of knowledge context of IP in the CI: (1) the effect of globalization; (2) the dominating relative economic value of reuse of creative output over monopoly incentives to create input; and (3) the evolution of business models in response to institutional change. We conclude that a substantial weakening of copyright will, in theory, produce positive net public and private gain due to the evolutionary dynamics of all three dimensions.

Value management in infrastructure project design : unlocking the project team’s creativity

Value Management (VM) is a proven methodology that provides a structured framework using supporting tools and techniques that facilitate effective decision-making in many types of projects, thus achieving ‘best value’ for clients. It offers an exceptionally robust approach to exploring the need and function of projects to be aligned with client’s objectives. The functional analysis and creativity phases of VM are crucial as it focused on utilising innovative thinking to understand the objectives of clients’ projects and provide value-adding solutions at the early discovery stages of projects. There is however a perception of VM as just being another cost-cutting tool, which has overshadowed the fundamental benefits of the method, therefore negating both influence and wider use in the construction industry. This paper describes findings from a series of case studies conducted at project and corporate levels of a current public funded infrastructure projects in Malaysia. The study aims to investigate VM processes practised by the project client organisation and evaluate the effects of project team involvement in VM workshops during the design-stage of these projects. The focus of the study is on how issues related to ‘upstream’ infrastructure design aimed at improving ‘downstream’ construction process on-site, are being resolved through multi-disciplinary team consideration and decision-making. Findings from the case studies indicate that the mix of disciplines of project team members at a design-stage of a VM workshop has minimal influence on improving construction processes. However, the degree of interaction, institutionalized thinking, cultural dimensions and visualization aids adopted, have a significant impact in maximizing creativity amongst project team members during VM workshop. The case studies conducted for this research have focused on infrastructure projects that utilise traditional VM workshop as client’s chosen VM methodology to review and develop designs. Documents review and semi-structured interview with project teams are used as data collection techniques for the case study. The significant outcomes of this research are expected to offer alternative perspectives for construction professionals and clients to minimise the constraints and strengthen strategies for implementing VM on future projects.

Data transformations in custom digital workflows : property graphs as a data model for user-defined mappings

This paper describes the use of property graphs for mapping data between AEC software tools, which are not linked by common data formats and/or other interoperability measures. The intention of introducing this in practice, education and research is to facilitate the use of diverse, non-integrated design and analysis applications by a variety of users who need to create customised digital workflows, including those who are not expert programmers. Data model types are examined by way of supporting the choice of directed, attributed, multi-relational graphs for such data transformation tasks. A brief exemplar design scenario is also presented to illustrate the concepts and methods proposed, and conclusions are drawn regarding the feasibility of this approach and directions for further research.

Design minds : an online design education platform for non-designers to enact cultural change

Education in the 21st century demands a model for understanding a new culture of learning in the face of rapid change, open access data and geographical diversity. Teachers no longer need to provide the latest information because students themselves are taking an active role in peer collectives to help create it. This paper examines, through an Australian case study entitled ‘Design Minds’, the development of an online design education platform as a key initiative to enact a government priority for state-wide cultural change through design-based curriculum. Utilising digital technology to create a supportive community, ‘Design Minds’ recognises that interdisciplinary learning fostered through engagement will empower future citizens to think, innovate, and discover. This paper details the participatory design process undertaken with multiple stakeholders to create the platform. It also outlines a proposed research agenda for future measurement of its value in creating a new learning culture, supporting regional and remote communities, and revitalising frontline services. It is anticipated this research will inform ongoing development of the online platform, and future design education and research programs in K-12 schools in Australia.