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الجمعة، 31 يوليو 2015
Qatar Goodwood Festival: Glorious silks add extra glamor to Ladies Day
One of Britain's most glamorous horse racing festivals was given an extra dash of color and style by some of its nation's top designers on Thursday.
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U.S. 'Mob Museum' to open exhibition on FIFA scandal
World football's governing body is remaining tight lipped over a new exhibition charting its recent scandals.
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Beijing to host 2022 Winter Olympics
The Chinese city becomes the first to host both the Summer and Winter Games.
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الخميس، 30 يوليو 2015
'Four birthdays' player joins Newcastle United
He's the player with "four birthdays," but age is proving no barrier to the progress of Chancel Mbemba Mangulu, who signed for English Premier League club Newcastle United from Belgian club Anderlecht Thursday.
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Billionaire enters race to succeed Blatter at FIFA
Could a South Korean billionaire automotive magnate be the man to drive reform at the top of world football?
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Why Australia’s Digital Identity is now at a crossroads
It’s less than a month since Paul Shetler arrived in Australia as the chief executive of the Cabinet mandated Digital Transformation Office, but he’s already on a rapid fire a roadshow to muster support from federal and state bureaucrats alike.
The big picture is simple enough: the Australian government needs to get digital fast and people need to have the same high quality of unified and seamless user experience offered by the likes of Uber and Amazon.
“We are makers, we are doers. And our goal is to have Australia become the best in the world at providing digital public services,” Shetler tells a crowded room in Sydney at an Adobe event.
“We think that can happen. The scope of ambition is, I think, relatively unique and the backing we have had has been fantastic …we are really stoked by this and quite excited.”
New South Wales Finance, Services and Property Minister Dominic Perrottet, who is in the audience and speaking next, is excited too.
Less than 10 minutes after Shetler delivers a rousing speech that talks-up a single government customer interface for all tiers of government, Perrottet drops a bomb that Service NSW is launching its own online customer account – more or less the equivalent of myGov for NSW.
It’s something Shetler clearly wasn’t expecting, not least because of the clear potential for the kind of divergence in standards – this time on digital identity – that has resulted in disparate and incompatible information silos for decades.
For some in the room it looks like he’s days into the job and the cracks are already appearing.
Shetler takes the announcement in his stride, but it’s what happens next that’s more intriguing.
The immediate backchannel talk from New South Wales is that the development and announcement of the state’s digital account has been has been coming for months, but it’s certainly not mutually exclusive.
Moreover, now that Canberra has finally installed its own digital change agent and chief cat herder, there’s a lot more to work with in terms of certainty and commonality going forward.
There’s also clearly an appreciation from both sides that an online replication of Australia’s infamous rail gauge fiasco needs to be avoided in everyone’s interests.
Shetler’s boss, federal Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has for more than a year been championing the myGov account and digital credential as the major leap forward in connecting federal services online.
As revealed by Government News last year, Turnbull has been clear from the outset that there needs to be commonality on digital transactional standards for government, saying in September 2014 that he was willing to extend myGov not just to state’s but to councils.
“We want everybody to have access to one, single digital mailbox which we will make available to all governments for free – I mean state and local – so that there is greater and greater incentive for people to interact with government digitally,” Mr Turnbull said at the time.
(The same speech also effectively threw any ambitions within Australia Post of becoming a national government digital credential monopoly for profit under a bus.)
What’s changed since then is that NSW, more than any other state, hasn’t been waiting around for Canberra to get its act together on the digital front as Perrottet and Service NSW set about reforming service delivery there to a digital first, single touch user experience.
“The Service NSW online platform was launched in 2013, following extensive customer research and identifying simple and easy to use functions. The digital account is an extension of this platform which has proven to be a great success with customers and is highly regarded by the government sector,” a spokesperson for Service NSW told Government News.
“The digital account design and development teams researched the customer experience, privacy and security standards of similar government and private sector digital accounts, including myGov, to learn from their experiences and identified best practice and additional functionality that could be incorporated into the design of the account.”
Importantly, it’s understood there’s firm push from NSW for some sort of contestability in terms of the ideas and standards behind the delivery of digital services. The rationale is that it’s not just about getting up the best quality products and services, but ensuring that they also fit together well so they are transportable.
To be fair, Perrottet has from the outset pushed cross-jurisdictional sharing and system access, especially in the area of procurement reform and technology.
The immediate and big question that now arises is whether two potentially disparate government digital account services from NSW and Canberra can learn tango in the foreseeable future, a synergy that would let common users can securely hop between federal and state accounts in the one session.
Obvious use cases for interoperable digital credentials between federal and state governments, and logically councils aren’t hard to find. Just take the myriad of concessional entitlements that now require over the counter verification. Think concessional public transport fares for job seekers or discounted council rates and other state services for pensioners.
And there could yet be hope.
Government News understands discussions are already underway between Canberra’s Digital Transformation Office and the NSW government about how to leverage both rollouts to share information and verified credentials across all three tiers of government.
The vision seems to be there, even if the mechanics are evolving. Speaking in Sydney, Shetler puts it this way:
“We should be able to provide a framework for citizens’ relationship with government as government; not a relationship with this agency, that department, this state, that locality and then fragmenting it all. Something more holistic,” he says.
“That’s actually what people want… If we can do that across channels we’ll be doing something much more ambitious than any other country.”
Shetler is also adamant that Australia is not alone in its challenges in reforming service delivery, saying the push is part of “a worldwide movement.”
“It would be foolish not to learn and share,” he says. “Taxpayers have paid for our work. They should be able to reuse it. We should also be able to share our patterns and our code with other countries, that further reduces cost and increases commonality.”
Another factor working in Shetler’s favour is that when it comes to nutting out interoperable standards for transactions – which is what digital identity really credentials enable – he has strong form.
As the former head of interface applications and product innovation at SWIFT – the body that sets the standards that underpin the global interoperability for financial instruments like credit and debit cards – there’s a better than usual chance he can negotiate his way through Australia’s administrative and political morass of competing interests.
“The goal is to get to that point where people have a relationship with government, not state, not city, not federal,” Shetler says. “I think people are thirsting for it. People want that.”
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الأربعاء، 29 يوليو 2015
Survey says 72% against NSW council mergers
An online survey conducted as part of an Upper House inquiry into NSW local government reform has found that 72 per cent of people don’t want their council to merge.
The numbers are a bleak result for NSW Premier Mike Baird’s Fit for the Future agenda, with 75 per cent of the 795 respondents saying they did not believe amalgamations would improve the financial sustainability of their council and 73 per cent saying they believed council’s services would be compromised if a merger went ahead.
As well, just under two-thirds were unimpressed by the methodology used by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) that will ultimately determine whether councils have the scale and capacity to stand alone or if they should instead merge with their neighbours come October.
But while two-thirds supported local government reform, 74 per cent of people opposed forced amalgamations, even if IPART said these were necessary.
However, the online survey was voluntary and the age profile ended up being skewed towards older people. Only 6 per cent of respondents were under 30, while a whopping 41 per cent were over sixty. Respondents aged 45 to 59 made up one-third of all of those who replied.
Of course, it could be argued that the over sixties are relatively heavier users of council services. They are also, perhaps, more likely to oppose council amalgamations.
Greens MP and Local Government Spokesperson David Shoebridge said the results showed that the community was not convinced by the government’s push to create larger councils.
“This non-partisan survey confirms that the government has no community support to force council mergers on unwilling communities,” Mr Shoebridge said.
Mr Shoebridge argued that NSW Local Government Minister Paul Toole had not explained the basic features of the government’s reform agenda, such as how big councils had to be, how many councillors they would have and how they would ensure that local voices were heard?
“Communities can’t even get a straight answer from the Minister on whether or not local council elections will be held in September next year,” he said.
“This lack of frankness from the government is reflected in the suspicion survey respondents show regarding the Fit for the Future agenda.
“When the government gives them no answers, communities are rightly concerned that Fit for the Future will come at a real cost to their local services, council performance and local identity.”
“Even the Chief Executive of Local Government had to publically admit this week that she had no evidence to support the notion that forced amalgamations produce lower council rates.”
Key survey findings were:
– 72 per cent of survey respondents did not support their local council being amalgamated
– 73 per cent believed council services would be compromised by amalgamations
– 75 per cent did not believe amalgamations would improve financial sustainability
– 75 per cent thought the current size of their council was appropriate
– 60 per cent do not believe that IPART’s assessment methodology is valid or reliable
The full survey results can be found here:
The last of five public hearings by the General Purpose Standing Committee 6, takes place on August 24.
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Australian airports to be hit by mass strikes Monday
Airports across Australia are bracing for long delays on Monday 3rd August after the nation’s main public service union warned members at key agencies including Immigration and Border Protection will again walk-off the job amid an escalating industrial row with the Abbott government.
The authorised rolling four hour strikes by the Community and Public Sector Union will hit international airports for the second time in just over a month as the fallout from stalled negotiations spreads across key government transport infrastructure.
The show of force by the CPSU comes as the union continues to accuse the government of trying to deliberately force down take-home pay for many public servants, especially those who were formerly with Customs, by around $8000 a year by removing longstanding allowances and entitlements.
The intensity of staff anger over pay and conditions – which are now in bargaining – stands in sharp relief to the prominent role the new Australian Border Force and Immigration authorities have in applying the government’s get tough policies on people arriving in or near Australia illegally.
The CPSU is once again capitalising on the high standing which the Abbott government places on frontline staff.
“Public sector workers on our borders undertake important, difficult and sometimes dangerous jobs on behalf of our community. They deserve better than the Abbott Government’s attack on their rights, conditions and take home pay.”
However the union stressed that any of its members “who have essential national security, counter-terrorism and specialist biosecurity hazard roles in DIBP and the Department of Agriculture will be exempt from taking action.”
Meanwhile, the CPSU has also mounted a massive leafleting campaign, distributing more than a million flyers at key public contact points to spread its message.
There is also understood to be growing disquiet and unease in part of the Coalition over the government’s tactical approach to public service pay bargaining now that the row has dragged on for more than a year with the biggest agencies still holding out.
A major frustration is that an opportunity to deplete union ranks of members through apathy, attrition by striking low wage growth deals has been squandered by more ambitious bids to dial back enterprise agreement deal to as close to zero as possible.
One risk for the government is that efforts to play hardball and string-out talks could backfire if Australia’s stubbornly low economic growth and inflation rate pick up. A major part of the justification for many of the offers now on the table has been that inflation has and will remain low and that bigger pay increases cannot be justified.
Employment and Public Service Minister Senator Eric Abetz remains a key target for the CPSU who are now labelling him as a major irritant in negotiations.
Ms Flood said the more Mr Abetz talked about excessive pay claims “the angrier these workers get.”
“They are facing massive cuts to their current pay packets but the Minister won’t even meet and discuss this dispute with their union,” Ms Flood said.
However Senator Abetz said that it was counterproductive for the CPSU to organise industrial action “in support of its claim for a 12 per cent pay rise which is utterly unrealistic and would cost the jobs of 10,000 public servants.”
“The Public Service and the Australian people understand the difficult financial circumstances that we face as a nation and therefore the offers that are on the table are reasonable in all the circumstances,” Senator Abetz said.
“We are in a very low inflationary environment and I’d encourage the CPSU to take a more responsible stance.”
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Bryan bros. tip to Serena to win Slam
CNN's Patrick Snell talks to tennis champions and identical twins Bob and Mike Bryan about what it takes to balance tennis and family.
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Woods confident he can 'turn the tide'
Tiger Woods believes he is not far away from finding some good form.
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Platini enters FIFA presidential race
European football chief Michel Platini will stand for FIFA's presidency, he announced Wednesday.
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Speedy Bolt back to form in London
Usain Bolt claims American sprinter Justin Gatlin is unlikely to beat his 100 meters record -- and if he does, Jamaica's world and Olympic champion insists: "I'll break it back."
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الثلاثاء، 28 يوليو 2015
How governments can learn from retail disruption
Products like Netflix and Spotify mean consumers are accustomed to accessing services simply and on-demand.
Kathleen O’Brien spent 11 years working for iconic shoe brand Nike but these days she is selling the big picture of how digital retail disruption is going to hit governments big and small.
As Industry Principal of Public Sector Hybris, a subsidiary of German software juggernaut SAP, she is helping the Department of Human Services with its Digital Transformation Strategy and Hybris is beginning to work with other public sector clients such as Auckland Council and Fire and Rescue NSW.
Ms O’Brien says that although Australian government departments and agencies are generally doing a good job engaging digitally with citizens there is a large body of knowledge that can be leveraged from the private sector. In particular, government can learn from how the retail sector has reacted since the massive digital disruption it has seen since the nineties, whether from web browser, Google search, Ebay, PayPal or Kindle.
“Everything transformed by consumers taking the driver’s seat and raising their expectations of how they interacted in the retail world,” Ms O’Brien says.
“Government needs to understand that people creating that disruption are also creating the disruption in government. They want the same consumer grade experience and they don’t want it to be hard any more.”
People have got used to buying products and services in three clicks, supplying information once only and using their Smartphones to carry out transactions and they expect governments to have caught up and be offering a similar experience.
“Everything has become very streamlined and on demand, whether it’s Spotify or Netflix, and the one thing that doesn’t quite come up to scratch is government services.”
It’s not for want of trying, says O’Brien. She says Australian government is willing to innovate and has already made substantial in roads.
“We as citizens are much more demanding and governments realise it. They still don’t feel like they have the capability to actually deliver it,” she says.
“The key learnings are going mobile first, realising that people are on a number of devices and want to interact with them, not overloading people with apps but delivering content responsively.”
It is an area she says that DHS is focused on, making the digital interactions that people have with the department simple and intuitive, with the goal of having 80 per cent of all transactions online. Responding to users’ criticisms that have been levelled at DHS mobile apps, she said although getting apps right was important, a fully responsive website first which citizens could access with any kind of device was the crucial building block.
The endgame, says O’Brien, is to have a situation where the various agencies are almost invisible to the citizens interacting with them. It is a world of personalised experience, where an individual’s situation is known, e.g. the system knows that the person logging in is a pensioner, a student or a part-time worker with two children, and they are presented only with relevant information and content.
But although government faces many similar challenges to the private sector, Ms O’Brien admits that the public sector is grappling with a much greater degree of data and process complexity.
“Data silos make it really impossible to take advantage of the new technology and [to] be able to do some of this personalisation and take advantage of guided processes. These data silos are in the way of making things possible to support a transition to an omni-channel experience.
“The sheer number of legacy applications in government agencies are quite challenging, although it’s also a problem in the private sector.”
She says the public sector needs to “let go” of data silos and even tear down political structures within organisations in some cases and work with software and implementation partners to produce a strategy, advice many agencies are following as they work on their Digital Transformation Strategies.
Ms O’Brien will be speaking about how government can better engage citizens at the Technology in Government conference in Canberra, which is on August 4 and August 5.
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Britain's first female Chef d'Equipe
This year, the British Jumping team got a new Performance Manager, Di Lampard, a self-proclaimed horse lover and the first female Chef d'Equipe in British equestrian sport.
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Britain's first female Chef d'Equipe
This year, the British Jumping team got a new Performance Manager, Di Lampard, a self-proclaimed horse lover and the first female Chef d'Equipe in British equestrian sport.
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Will cannabis lamps help England roll Australia?
Could lights previously used to grow cannabis help England roll over Australia in one of cricket's greatest rivalries?
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NFL team hires first female coach
Another barrier has been broken in the NFL -- and for women in sports.
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Football legend 'will seek FIFA presidency'
European football chief Michel Platini is ready to stand for FIFA's presidency, a UEFA official has told CNN.
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Putin: Sepp Blatter deserves Nobel Prize
Embattled FIFA President Sepp Blatter deserves a Noble Prize for his work leading world soccer's governing body, according to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
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FIFA reforms: What happens next?
Monday signals not only the real start of the race for the FIFA presidency, but also a significant day for the man in charge of reforming world football's governing body.
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F1 star to take driving lessons
He may be a rising star on the Formula One circuit, but Max Verstappen is spending his summer break taking driving lessons.
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F1 star to take driving lessons
He may be a rising star on the Formula One circuit, but Max Verstappen is spending his summer break taking driving lessons.
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الاثنين، 27 يوليو 2015
Campaign against funeral rip-offs launched by consumer protection agencies
Consumer protection agencies, including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), have launched the Avoid a Funeral Rip-off campaign, in partnership with the National Indigenous Consumer Strategy Reference Group, in an attempt to combat the exploitation of indigenous people by unscrupulous funeral industry players.
It’s an important area to address given the mounting evidence of consumers being duped by predatory lending through pre-paid funeral plans and funeral insurance. Indigenous communities, which their higher mortality rates and lower life expectancies, can be particularly at risk from these schemes.
People may be lured to pay over the odds for funerals, sometimes using their Centrelink benefits via Centrepay. If payments are missed or a funeral director goes broke, consumers can lose all of the money they have paid so far and contracts can be difficult to break if a person changes their mind or moves house.
ASIC’s Money Smart has developed the ‘Paying for Funerals’ booklet for consumers which outlines the different ways to plan and pay for a funeral.
The booklet and website encourage people to find out what cover they may already have towards funeral expenses, for example through superannuation, health insurance or Centrelink, and if they have none, to consider alternatives to pre-paid plans such as their own funeral savings plan or buying funeral bonds from friendly societies or life insurance companies.
The information provides a list of questions to ask when considering various funeral products, including finding out the rules on withdrawing the money, account fees and charges, premiums and the consequences of missed payments, interest rates and whether cover is expenses only.
ASIC Deputy Chairman Peter Kell said he hoped the information would help people chose a funeral product that was the most affordable, appropriate, and suitable to their needs.
‘We recognise that planning for a funeral can be a difficult process,’ Mr Kell said.
“The main aim of this campaign is to provide indigenous consumers with the knowledge they need to make an informed choice if they’re thinking about purchasing a funeral savings or insurance plan.
“Indigenous consumer advocates and legal groups regularly tell ASIC that a lack of understanding and knowledge about the features and range of funeral products leads to consumers signing up to products that are expensive and do not suit their needs,” he said.
Labor Senator Doug Cameron has spoken in the past about how some funeral companies have preyed on indigenous people to directly access their Centrelink payments through Centrepay.
He said in indigenous communities there was evidence of the use of Centrepay “to get people on to funeral plans and getting them to sign up to two or three funeral plans.”
The campaign is not just about education. Compliance officers from Australia’s consumer protection agencies will be reviewing contracts for a range of funeral products and scrutinising claims made in advertising and promotions.
ASIC has pledged to take action where misleading or deceptive conduct has been identified by funeral insurance providers and Mr Kell said the Commission would “not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement and regulatory action to lift standards” and ensure better outcomes for consumers.
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NSW local government reform blasted in public hearing
NSW Premier Mike Baird faces off with councils during the first public hearing into local government reform.
Local councils and academics have ripped into the NSW government’s execution of its grand plan to create fewer, super councils in the first of five public hearings into local government reform which got underway yesterday.
The General Purpose Standing Committee 6 has been tasked with scrutinising NSW Premier Mike Baird’s controversial Fit for the Future (FFTF) agenda, which has been hotly opposed by many of the state’s 152 councils, who view it as an attempt to force council mergers by imposing unrealistic deadlines and narrow criteria.
Yesterday’s speakers included Local Government NSW President Keith Rhoades, who took the government to task on its methods and argued that there was no evidence to suggest mergers could drive down rates, deliver better services, economies of scale, or improved infrastructure.
He told the inquiry that Queensland and Victoria councils raked in more revenue from rates after council amalgamations (Queensland in 2008 and Victoria in 2012), compared with NSW councils the same years. Revenue from rates was 14 per cent higher in Queensland and nearly 40 per cent higher in Victoria, he countered.
“The argument that bigger is better lacks evidence and is in fact contradicted by a larger body of research and real life experience that challenges that proposition,” Mr Rhoades said.
“Not only is there a distinct lack of evidence to support the government’s claims, there is also hard evidence that forced amalgamations are strongly opposed by residents and ratepayers.”
Representatives from Marrickville Council argued that the government had failed to adequately consider factors such as service quality and scope or consumer satisfaction levels when judging their Fit for the Future applications because of its obsession with scale and capacity in order to push through mergers.
Other speakers included Professor Graham Sansom, who headed the Independent Local Government Review Panel (ILGRP), which set out options for local government reform in a 2013 report.
Professor Sansom’s written submission to the inquiry criticised the government – and councils – for once again turning the serious issue of councils’ long-term survival into a reductive argument about ‘forced’ mergers, without addressing the underlying issues that needed to be fixed.
“The way Fit For The Future has been presented – especially the very substantial financial incentives it includes – and the way local government has responded, have brought us back to another heated debate about so-called ‘forced’ council amalgamations. That is both unfortunate and unnecessary,” he said in his written submission.
Professor Sansom said the ILGRP’s report had been misrepresented and poorly understood and that only 61 of the 144 councils required to submit a FFTF proposal were covered by the ILGRP’s ‘preferred options’ [not recommendations] to merge, the remainder requiring no change or the merger option given equal weight.
“The ILGRP did not argue that amalgamations are a panacea to the problems facing local government. It favoured a mix of some amalgamations – where appropriate and justified – and increased regional cooperation and resource sharing,” his submission said.
Instead he argued for a broad package of policy changes to precede or accompany any boundary changes, including improvements to councils’ revenue bases and borrowing arrangements, better resource sharing, stronger regional organisations and better governance.
Professor Sansom cautioned the NSW government against rushing the process and of being over-reliant on using the size of councils to predict their strategic capacity.
He said there should be restrictions on the NSW government’s “currently unfettered right to impose amalgamations and boundary changes more or less at will” and advocated full community consultation, more careful analysis of the options and greater impartiality from both sides, including a stronger, more independent Boundary Committee.
The Upper House inquiry, which will be chaired by Paul Green from the Christian Democratic Party, will examine the costs and benefits of council mergers for residents and businesses and their potential impact on rates, infrastructure investment, community representation and local employment.
Crucially, it will also look at how well the process of declaring whether a council is fit or unfit for the future has been managed, including the criteria used to assess financial sustainability, submission deadlines and benchmarking.
The inquiry will also assess the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal’s (IPART) role in the process, which has been criticised by the NSW Greens for having a “a politically biased formula” and of adding little independent value.
Areas the committee will examine are:
• The NSW Government’s Fit for the Future reform agenda
• IPART’s role in reviewing the future of local government in NSW
• The costs and benefits of amalgamations for local residents and businesses
• The financial sustainability of NSW local government, including measures used to benchmark local government compared with measures used to benchmark State and Federal Government in Australia
• The performance criteria and associated benchmarks used to assess local authorities in New South Wales
• The scale of local councils in New South Wales
• The appropriateness of the deadline for ‘Fit for the Future’ proposals
• The evidence of the impact of forced mergers on council rates drawing from the recent forced amalgamations, especially in Queensland
• Evidence of the impact of forced mergers on local infrastructure investment and maintenance; municipal employment and aggregate redundancy costs
• How forced amalgamation will affect the specific needs of regional and rural councils and communities, especially in terms of its impact on local economies
• The role of co-operative models for local government including Joint Organisations, Strategic Alliances, Regional Organisations of Councils, and other shared service models, such as the common service model.
There were 160 written submissions to the inquiry, the deadline for which has now closed, and the last public hearing is on August 24.
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First Australian medical cannabis clinical trial greenlighted in NSW
NSW will be the first Australian state or territory to conduct medicinal cannabis clinical trials for terminally ill adults with cancer after Premier Mike Baird gave the go-ahead to researchers at UNSW.
The NSW Government has committed $9 million to support medical cannabis clinical trials but there is no mention yet when trials treating children with severe epilepsy will begin, something Mr Baird pledged to explore last year.
The drug can be used to treat a wide range of conditions, including muscle spasms caused by epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, chemotherapy-induced nausea, Crohns disease and poor appetite caused by HIV.
University of New South Wales’ Chief Investigator Associate Professor Meera Agar – who has led several research studies into the management of terminally ill patients – will lead the research team and focus on how medicinal cannabis can improve poor appetite and appetite-related symptoms, such as nausea, in terminally ill adult cancer patients in their final stages of life.
The first part of the trial will be held at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital in early 2016 and involve about 30 patients with the goal of discovering whether cannabis can be successfully inhaled as a vapour, what its side effects are and the frequency and size of the ideal dose, with initial results expected by the end of 2016.
Part two of the study could see it rolled out to major NSW regional and metropolitan hospitals with a larger number of patients. The next step will be for the research team to seek review and approval of the trial by a Human Research Ethics Committee.
Associate Professor Agar said the trial would evaluate two types of cannabis products – vaporised leaf cannabis and a pharmaceutical.
“It will be undertaken in two parts, and will assess the potential ability of cannabis to alleviate distressing symptoms including fatigue, low appetite, altered taste and smell for food, low mood, weight loss, nausea, insomnia and pain relief,” Professor Agar said.
“This will add to the existing body of evidence based research to help better understand and evaluate the potential benefits that medical cannabis products may have for terminally ill patients.”
Mr Baird said the first trial would be critical to better understanding how role medical cannabis could alleviate symptoms and pain in terminally ill patients.
“We do not want patients or carers having to play pharmacist – that is why it is so important to explore the safest and most effective ways we can deliver compassionate care and improve the quality of life,” Mr Baird said.
“Our trials will help to position NSW at the forefront of world-class research in this area and explore how we can complement the existing palliative care treatments and therapies patients receive.”
There is growing cross-party support for medicinal cannabis in many Australian states and territories after many sick people have publicly told their stories of how it has helped them control pain, nausea and seizures.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Victoria Premier Dan Andrews have both publicly backed the NSW trials Victoria and Mr Andrews has indicated he would work in partnership with NSW next year to run them, including those targeting children with serious epilepsy.
The ACT Legislative Assembly is currently considering the Greens’ draft bill to legalise medicinal cannabis, with a report expected to be ready before July 2016, while Tasmania is holding its own parliamentary inquiry into legalising medical cannabis, reporting at the beginning of 2016.
But although medicinal cannabis researchers and campaigners support clinical trials they have warned that the reality of it becoming available to seriously ill people could be many years away.
Troy Langmann is the founder of Tasman Health Cannabinoids, a company that has been trying to secure a research and development (R&D) license to grow medicinal cannabis in Tasmania and Norfolk Island. He told Government News earlier this year:
“Any positive steps are encouraging but it worries me that they may wait five years to allow this very safe medication to be distributed more widely. We know it’s safe, side effects are minimal and people prefer it over many currently prescribed medications, which in many cases are nowhere near as effective as cannabis,” Mr Langmann said.
“[Cannabis] is a complex medication – it contains over 500 different compounds and can be used for a huge variety of conditions, from depression to cancer.
“It’s just not feasible to do individual clinical studies to determine what it should be used for, for the sake of satisfying a peer reviewed study, when there is a desperate need for this medicine now.”
While NSW might be Australia’s pioneering medicinal cannabis state Australia is years behind other countries in researching and legalising the drug.
Cannabis is allowed for medical use in countries including 36 US states, France, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Chile, the Czech Republic and in Israeli hospitals and nursing homes.
The post First Australian medical cannabis clinical trial greenlighted in NSW appeared first on Government News.
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IOC chief fears 'suspicion being shed on clean athletes'
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Paul Smith: Life lessons of a cycling super fan
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Digital Transformation of government worth $20.5bn for Australia: Deloitte
It’s a big number call likely to prompt Finance departments across the nation to reach for their calculators.
Australian taxpayers could realise economic benefits of more than $20.5 billion over the next decade if Australia’s three tiers of government manage get their act together on digital transformation according to sponsored research by forecaster Deloitte Access Economics.
The consultancy has reckoned that the estimated net benefit of the disruptive trend almost every minister is namedropping is worth “1.3 per cent of annual Gross Domestic Product or approximately $880 in net benefits per Australian citizen or $2,000 per household.”
A major part of the mammoth saving stems from a huge cost reduction that can be realised by moving government transactions from face to face and snail mail channels to online execution.
Launched by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the Digital government transformation report estimates online transactions for government now cost around 40 cents a pop versus a personal interaction that incurs a cost of almost $17.
That makes personal service more than 40 times more costly than clicking.
Phone transactions and interactions are estimated to cost $6.60 a piece, making them 16.5 times more expensive, while postal transactions chalked-up a cost of $12.90 a piece according to Deloitte – hardly a stamp of fiscal efficiency.
“Of the estimated 811 million transactions at the federal and state levels each year, approximately 40 [per cent] are still completed using traditional channels. If this figure could be reduced to 20 [per cent] over a ten-year period, productivity, efficiency and other benefits to government worth around $17.9 billion (in real terms) would be realised along with savings in time, convenience and out-of-pocket costs to citizens worth a further $8.7 billion – and all at a cost of $6.1 billion in new ICT and transitional arrangements,” Deloitte said.
The numbers may sound huge, but as anyone in banking will tell you, volume figures need to be viewed in proportion.
For example BPAY has publicly estimated its payments volume for the financial year to June 2014 was 331 million.
And in an eerie coincidence, BPAY’s base transaction charge (before banks add their margin) is also 40 cents.
When you start looking at higher volume and lower value payment card transactions, the volumes are much, much bigger.
The Australian Payments Clearing Association, which keeps official tabs on how money changes hands, puts the monthly number of debit card transactions (think eftpos) at 350.6 million for 2015 with credit cards transactions coming in at 179.2 million a month for the same period.
Perhaps one of the most telling trends in the 74 page Deloitte Access Economics think piece, which was commissioned by software stalwart Adobe, is that the cost of conducting government transactions face could be tracking-up sharply over previous estimates from previous years.
Part of the justification for the Howard government bringing in EasyClaim – which electronically puts Medicare refunds directly into people’s bank accounts from point of sale terminals at a doctor’s surgery – was the estimated $10 processing price tag for an over-the-counter cash refund.
Using that $10 figure as a very rough benchmark, it seems that in less than 10 years the cost of a face-to-face transaction for a government agency could be up more than 50 per cent given it’s now estimated to be $16.90.
One driver for that rise is likely to be quite logical. As officials at the Department of Human Services have previously observed in public presentations, it’s the straightforward and easy transactions that migrate to online channels first, thus leaving counter staff to deal with more complex, challenging and time consuming matters to resolve.
Another challenge for government agencies that are now digitising their services is ensuring that they have a plan in place for if and when online channels misbehave or are knocked out of action. Both the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Human Services have this year felt the heat of customer anger thanks to hiccups in processing online or phone-based transactions.
The Deloitte Access Economics report also has some cold comfort for public servants already looking over their shoulder for the next round of jobs cuts.
Under the heading of “Transitional and redundancy costs” the consultancy says that there is “potential to reduce staff time required on traditional activities by roughly half for 50,138 government staff over ten years.”
“There may be some costs required to smoothly transition 2,507 individuals each year into new job roles in Australia,” the report says, noting a redundancy cost as one option.
“Based on the current average annual salary for these various roles, it will cost the government roughly $16.9 thousand in redundancy costs per individual or an annual cost of $42.4 million for ten years. This is a net present value cost of $318.7 million for government,” the report says.
It notes that as New South Wales has illustrated, retaining and retraining staff in new digital roles is also a firm option, but one that carries some training costs.
The post Digital Transformation of government worth $20.5bn for Australia: Deloitte appeared first on Government News.
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