Rights and wrongs of Australian government asylum seeker policy

Worldwide, no fewer than 50 million people a year are now fleeing dangerous and often life threatening situations in their countries of origin (UNHCR, 2014c). As one part of this movement, thousands risk journeys through dangerous waters hoping to obtain asylum in Australia. However, Australian Government policies adopted since 2013 aim to ensure that no asylum seeker nor any of the 3,500 detainees held in offshore detention centres will ever be settled on the mainland. To this has now been added a declaration that none of the recent refugees or 6200 asylum seekers waiting in Indonesia in centres run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will gain entry (Whyte, 2014a). These immigration policies differ dramatically from those adopted in earlier decades that produced the country’s decidedly multicultural identity. This article reviews these changing perspectives of Australian governments and communities within the context of international obligations and expectations; the experiences of those directly involved in border policing practices and in detention centres; and the attitudes of national media. Relations and conflicts among the interests of the different parties are discussed and the scope for less punitive responses to the plight of asylum seekers is examined. The authors then focus on alternative processes to better address the interests and objectives of legitimately interested parties by processes which successively examine, optimise and reconcile the concerns of each. In so doing, they aim to demonstrate that such methods of sequential problem solving can respond effectively to the multiple concerns of the many significant stakeholders involved in increasingly significant global issues, whereas recourse to such single-goal, top-down programs as are expressed in the government’s current determination to “Stop the boats” at all costs are unlikely to prove sustainable.

Mathematical modeling for improved greenhouse gas balances, agro-ecosystems, and policy development: Lessons from the Australian experience

If the land sector is to make significant contributions to mitigating anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in coming decades, it must do so while concurrently expanding production of food and fiber. In our view, mathematical modeling will be required to provide scientific guidance to meet this challenge. In order to be useful in GHG mitigation policy measures, models must simultaneously meet scientific, software engineering, and human capacity requirements. They can be used to understand GHG fluxes, to evaluate proposed GHG mitigation actions, and to predict and monitor the effects of specific actions; the latter applications require a change in mindset that has parallels with the shift from research modeling to decision support. We compare and contrast 6 agro-ecosystem models (FullCAM, DayCent, DNDC, APSIM, WNMM, and AgMod), chosen because they are used in Australian agriculture and forestry. Underlying structural similarities in the representations of carbon flows though plants and soils in these models are complemented by a diverse range of emphases and approaches to the subprocesses within the agro-ecosystem. None of these agro-ecosystem models handles all land sector GHG fluxes, and considerable model-based uncertainty exists for soil C fluxes and enteric methane emissions. The models also show diverse approaches to the initialisation of model simulations, software implementation, distribution, licensing, and software quality assurance; each of these will differentially affect their usefulness for policy-driven GHG mitigation prediction and monitoring. Specific requirements imposed on the use of models by Australian mitigation policy settings are discussed, and areas for further scientific development of agro-ecosystem models for use in GHG mitigation policy are proposed.

Estimating the potential impact of entry fees for marine parks on dive tourism in South East Asia

Marine reserves are increasingly being established as a mechanism to protect marine biodiversity and sensitive habitats. As well as providing conservation benefits, marine reserves provide benefits to recreational scuba divers who dive within the reserve, as well as to recreational and commercial fishers outside the reserve through spill-over effects. To ensure benefits are being realised, management of marine reserves requires ongoing monitoring and surveillance. These are not costless, and many marine reserve managers impose an entry fee. In some countries, dive tourism is major income source to coastal industries, and a concern is that high entry fees may dissuade divers. In this paper, the price elasticity of demand for dive tourism in three countries in South East Asia – Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia – is estimated using a travel-cost model. From the model, the total non-market use value associated with diving in the area is estimated to be in the order of US$4.5 billion a year. The price elasticity of demand in the region is highly inelastic, such that increasing the cost of diving through a management levy would have little impact on total diver numbers.

Authorisation management in business process environments: An authorisation model and a policy model

This thesis provides two main contributions. The first one is BP-TRBAC, a unified authorisation model that can support legacy systems as well as business process systems. BP-TRBAC supports specific features that are required by business process environments. BP-TRBAC is designed to be used as an independent enterprise-wide authorisation model, rather than having it as part of the workflow system. It is designed to be the main authorisation model for an organisation. The second contribution is BP-XACML, an authorisation policy language that is designed to represent BPM authorisation policies for business processes. The contribution also includes a policy model for BP-XACML. Using BP-TRBAC as an authorisation model together with BP-XACML as an authorisation policy language will allow an organisation to manage and control authorisation requests from workflow systems and other legacy systems.

Digital literacy in theory, policy and practice: Old concerns, new opportunities

The increasing ubiquity and use of digital technologies across social and cultural life is a key challenge for educators engaged in helping students develop a range of literacies useful for school and beyond. Many young people's experience of communication and participation is now shaped by almost constant engagements with digital technologies and media, as well as with global digital cultures. This increasing access and use has given many young people the opportunity to engage deeply with global media cultures via popular music, television and film franchises, the worldwide computer games industry, or countless other subcultures that connect fans and interested others from around the world via the internet. 'Digital literacy' is often the term associated with the ability to traverse these, and other, online and offline worlds; the notion has long been synonymous with the idea that digital technologies now mediate perhaps a majority of our social interactions. These forms of engagement with the world have important implications for educators and school systems which have historically recognised only a very narrow set of legitimate literacies.

You're hot, then you're cold: Creative industries policy making in Australia

Much compelling evidence has emerged over the last two decades demonstrating the importance of Australia’s creative industries. In 2014, the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that culture is ‘big business’ in this country. Yet despite this, interest by policy makers at all levels of government has been intermittent, at best. This chapter gives a brief history of policy development, and offers a number of reasons for why policy and politics have not focussed more resolutely on Australia’s creative economy. It finishes with a discussion of Australia’s ‘unfinished agenda’, one which demands attention not only by government, but also industry and higher education, if we are to properly meet both the challenges and opportunities before us.

Submission to the draft Migration Assurance Policy - Improving the transition to the fixed-line national broadband network review

The rights of individuals to self-determination and participation in social, political and economic life are recognised and supported by Articles 1, 3 and 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966.4 Article 1 of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s Resolution on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights on the Internet of July 2012 confirms individuals have the same rights online as offline. Access to the internet is essential and as such the UN: Calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the Internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries (Article 3) Accordingly, access to the internet per se is a fundamental human right, which requires direct State recognition and support.5 The obligations of the State to ensure its citizens are able, and are enabled, to access the internet, are not matters that should be delegated to commercial parties. Quite simply – access to the internet, and high-speed broadband, by whatever means are “essential services” and therefore “should be treated as any other utility service”...

Estimating the parameters of stochastic volatility models using option price data

This article describes a maximum likelihood method for estimating the parameters of the standard square-root stochastic volatility model and a variant of the model that includes jumps in equity prices. The model is fitted to data on the S&P 500 Index and the prices of vanilla options written on the index, for the period 1990 to 2011. The method is able to estimate both the parameters of the physical measure (associated with the index) and the parameters of the risk-neutral measure (associated with the options), including the volatility and jump risk premia. The estimation is implemented using a particle filter whose efficacy is demonstrated under simulation. The computational load of this estimation method, which previously has been prohibitive, is managed by the effective use of parallel computing using graphics processing units (GPUs). The empirical results indicate that the parameters of the models are reliably estimated and consistent with values reported in previous work. In particular, both the volatility risk premium and the jump risk premium are found to be significant.

Governance and regional planning outcomes: Using governance indicators to support a policy implementation approach

Regional planning faces numerous decision making uncertainties related to the complex interdependencies between urban and regional centres. Questions about how to achieve sustainable planning solutions across regions are a key uncertainty and relate to a lack of information about the actual achievement of outcomes as proposed by the objectives of a plan. Regional plan implementation and its impact on environmental, social and economic outcomes have been little explored within Australian urban and regional planning research. Despite a desire to improve the conditions across Australian regions, ambiguity persists regarding the results of regional planning efforts. Of the variables affecting regional planning, scholars argue that governance has a significant impact on achieving outcomes (see Pahl-Wostl 2009). In order to better analyse the impact of governance, we propose a set of governance indicators to examine decisions across regional planning institutions and apply this to governance models across Queensland’s regions. We contend that these governance indicators can support a more rigorous assessment of the impacts of governance models on plan implementation and outcomes. We propose that this is a way to better understand the relationship between planning and outcomes across urban and regional areas.

Submission to House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics Inquiry into Home Ownership

This paper empirically examines the effect of current tax policy on home ownership, specifically looking at how developer contributions impact house prices. Developer contributions are a commonly used mechanism for local governments to pay for new urban infrastructure. This research applies a hedonic house price model to 4,699 new and 25,053 existing house sales in Brisbane from 2005 to 2011. The findings of is research are consistent with international studies that support the proposition that developer contributions are over passed. This study has provided evidence that suggest developer contributions are over passed to both new and existing homes in the order of around 400%. These findings suggest that developer contributions are thus a significant contributor to increasing house prices, reduced housing supply and are thus an inefficient and inequitable tax. By testing this effect on both new and existing homes, this research provides evidence in support of the proposition that not only are developer contributions over passed to new home buyers but also to buyers of existing homes. Thus the price inflationary effect of these developer contributions are being felt by all home buyers across the community, resulting in increased mortgage repayments of close to $1,000 per month in Australia. This is the first study to empirically examine the impact of developer contributions on house prices in Australia. These results are important as they inform governments on the outcomes of current tax policy on home ownership, providing the first evidence of its kind in Australia. This is an important contribution to the tax reform agenda in Australia.

Making apartments affordable: Moving from speculative to deliberative development

Urban planning policies in Australia presuppose apartments as the new dominant housing type, but much of what the market has delivered is criticised as over-development, and as being generic, poorly-designed, environmentally unsustainable and unaffordable. Policy responses to this problem typically focus on planning regulation and construction costs as the primary issues needing to be addressed in order to increase the supply of quality, affordable apartment housing. In contrast, this paper uses Ball’s (1983) ‘structures of provision’ approach to outline the key processes informing apartment development and identifies a substantial gap in critical understanding of how apartments are developed in Australia. This reveals economic problems not typically considered by policymakers. Using mainstream economic analysis to review the market itself, the authors found high search costs, demand risk, problems with exchange, and lack of competition present key barriers to achieving greater affordability and limit the extent to which ‘speculative’ developers can respond to the preferences of would be owner-occupiers of apartments. The existing development model, which is reliant on capturing uplift in site value, suits investors seeking rental yields in the first instance and capital gains in the second instance, and actively encourages housing price inflation. This is exacerbated by lack of density restrictions, such as have existed in inner Melbourne for many years, which permits greater yields on redevelopment sites. The price of land in the vicinity of such redevelopment sites is pushed up as landholders' expectation of future yield is raised. All too frequently existing redevelopment sites go back onto the market as vendors seek to capture the uplift in site value and exit the project in a risk free manner...

What’s law got to do with it?: Medical negligence, causation and the use of policy

In a medical negligence context, and under the causation provisions enacted pursuant to Civil Liability Legislation in most Australian jurisdictions, the normative concept of “scope of liability” requires a consideration of whether or not and why a medical practitioner should be responsible for a patient’s harm. As such, it places a limit on the extent to which practitioners are deemed liable for a breach of the duty of care owed by them, in circumstances where a legal factual connection between that breach and the causation of a patient’s harm has already been shown. It has been said that a determination of causation requires ‘the identification and articulation of an evaluative judgement by reference to “the purposes and policy of the relevant part of the law”’: Wallace v Kam (2013) 297 ALR 383, 388. Accordingly, one of the normative factors falling within scope of liability is an examination of the content and purpose of the rule or duty of care violated – that is, its underlying policy and whether this supports an attribution of legal responsibility upon a practitioner. In this context, and with reference to recent jurisprudence, this paper considers: the policy relevant to a practitioner’s duty of care in each of the areas of diagnosis, treatment and advice; how this has been used to determine an appropriate scope of liability for the purpose of the causation inquiry in medical negligence claims; and whether such an approach is problematic for medical standards or decision-making.

Influence of Measured Characteristics on Price Received for Merino Wool from the Traprock Area of Southern Queensland

In this study of a commercial wool clip sold in the years 1991/92-1996/97, the effect of wool characteristics, (staple length, staple strength, fibre diameter, position of break, vegetable matter, hauteur, yield and coefficient of variation of staple length) on price was explored together with their effect on the ratio of price received per lot to the average weekly price (1994/95 basis) for clean wool of the same fibre diameter. Fibre diameter and where the point of break occurred had the most effect on price. As hauteur, staple length and yield increased, so did the price ratio but it decreased as the percentage of vegetable matter and the coefficient of variation of the staple length increased. The ratio of proceeds if all wool had been sold at average weekly market price, to proceeds if all wool had been 21µm or less, indicated little financial advantage over the six-year period as most sale lots were under 22µm. To raise the proceeds of sale above the proceeds estimated using average market price for each lot, the analyses suggested that hauteur, staple length and its coefficient of variation, could be considered, in addition to fibre diameter, when sourcing wethers for purchase. Animal production for a consuming world : proceedings of 9th Congress of the Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies [AAAP] and 23rd Biennial Conference of the Australian Society of Animal Production [ASAP] and 17th Annual Symposium of the University of Sydney, Dairy Research Foundation, [DRF]. 2-7 July 2000, Sydney, Australia.