Russian GP: Bottas wins first ever F1 race

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Joshua stops Klitschko to win epic heavweight bout

Anthony Joshua cemented his status as the world's premier heavyweight with a 11th-round stoppage of Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley Stadium Saturday.

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Heavyweights Joshua and Klitschko ready to rumble

When Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko face off in front of a record-breaking 90,000 fans at Wembley Saturday, there will be a difference of 50 fights and 314 rounds between them.

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Why showjumping is making waves in China

The Longines Global Champions Tour & Global Champions League come to Shanghai. Thousands are expected as equestrian events are still new to mainland China.

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Canberra school cleaning company guilty of Fair Work Act breaches

PACER Plus: a ray of sunshine in a gloomy trade world

 

By Charles Pauka

To misquote Mark Twain ‘reports of the death of developments in the international trade agenda have been greatly exaggerated’ with the recent announcement that Australia has successfully concluded negotiations with New Zealand and 12 Pacific Island countries in Brisbane to implement the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations Plus (PACER Plus).

Australia was a party to the original PACER for some time but the development of PACER Plus has taken longer than anticipated and most recently a prospective date for completion of negotiations of June 2016 did not come to fruition. However, these types of negotiations rarely run to an exact timetable and the announcement comes at a welcome time, even though the deal has been struck without Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Fiji who had earlier withdrawn from the negotiations due to their reservations on what economic benefits would actually be delivered to them. It is not clear whether the deal would allow for PNG and Fiji to join before the final agreement is entered into. Interestingly the absence of PNG and Fiji from the deal does not appear in the press release by our Trade Minister.

The specific details of the agreement have yet to be released ahead of signing in Tonga in June.  However, according to the press release from the Minister of Trade:

“PACER Plus is a landmark agreement covering goods, services and investment. It will remove barriers to trade, including tariffs, increasing the flow of goods and investment in the region, generating growth, jobs and raising living standards.  This agreement will drive economic growth and raise living standards in our region.”

Read more here.

This story first appeared in Transport and Logistics News. 

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Target Sydney and Melbourne public sector jobs, not Canberra

 
Will Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce succeed in herding public servants out of Canberra?

 

The recent controversy surrounding the relocation of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) away from Canberra to Armidale and the National’s push to force government departments to justify why they should remain in Canberra has helped reignite debate around regional development.

So too has intensifying anxiety around house prices in Sydney and Melbourne and the rising despair of first home buyers and renters, which federal Treasurer Scott Morrison has indicated will be a cornerstone of his May Budget.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, whose New England electorate takes in Armidale, and National’s Deputy Leader Fiona Nash have led the charge to eject cadres of Canberra’s public servants into the regions, despite the APVMA relocation failing the government’s own cost-benefit analysis and being fiercely opposed by most of its workers and the National Farmers’ Federation.

More than 80 per cent of APVMA staff, many of whom are highly specialised scientists, have refused to up sticks for Armidale. APVMA’s chief Kareena Arthy quit the agricultural chemicals agency one week ago for a job as Deputy Director-General of Enterprise Canberra, rather than move.

But Nash and Joyce won’t let go.

Ms Nash has said that regional Australians “have just as much right to a government career as Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra residents”.

“The fact is most moves of government departments to the regions will save money on rent and rates. It’s also fact the vast majority of employees in government departments don’t need to visit the Minister’s office in Parliament House,” Ms Nash said. “Indeed two thirds of Australian government jobs are already outside Canberra, many of them in Melbourne and Sydney.”

Sydney University Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell, a political economist who has written widely on regional development, says targeting public sector jobs in Canberra is a furphy when Sydney and Melbourne are the most overheated.

Prof Stilwell says Canberra’s creation back in the early 1900s as the nation’s independent capital city, was designed to decentralise economic activity away from Sydney and Melbourne.

“It was a counter magnet for the overdevelopment of the eastern seaboard. Frankly [moving jobs out of Canberra] just doesn’t make sense to me,” he says.

Creating Canberra was “socially legitimate and long-term and did not involve politicians pork barrelling for their own electorate”.

The critical mass of public servants in Canberra allows for interactions between agencies, knowledge clusters and greater staff mobility.

Australian National University Emeritus Professor of political science John Warhurst agrees that Canberra is the wrong target for decentralisation.

“It is actually the best Australian example of decentralisation to the bush that there is. It is a bush capital. The Nationals should be proud of this national achievement rather than try to undermine it,” he wrote, in a piece for Fairfax yesterday (Thursday).

“Furthermore, Canberra is still quite a small city, dependent on public service employment.”

Prof Stilwell says APVMA’s relocation looks especially ill-advised since it is not backed up by the Ernst and Young cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the government and foisting the move on staff was unlikely to be popular.

“It is very disruptive for anybody. Many people have already invested in homes and have kids in schools. Not that Armidale is a backwater. It’s great for education and affordable real estate prices that are much more attractive than our overstressed capital cities.

“If this [move] can’t work, maybe there is something wrong with the process. Shifting around the federal public service is just not really addressing the problem.”

Prof Stilwell says that what is needed is a coherent strategy backed by all three tiers of government with state government leading the way to address the overcentralisation in Sydney and Melbourne, “that’s where the action needs to be”, he says.

While he won’t be drawn on which state government departments or agencies should go bush, he says he would target relatively autonomous, footloose agencies that were not linked into a political cluster where staff needed to interact.

There has already been some decentralisation, such as moving the ATO to Gosford.

But he says it takes political will to plan decentralise jobs and growth and this kind of co-operation and nation building has not happened since Whitlam’s national regional strategy in the 1970s, which bit the bullet after three years when Malcolm Fraser was elected.

“It’s not pie in the sky, it just hasn’t happened for a long, long time in Australia. It needs to have cross-party support or it will get switched on and off when the government changes.”

He says this vision has never been reinstated, other than the Building Better Cities program under the Hawke government and led by Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe.

A national strategy would need to be underpinned by research to investigate long-term, sustainable policy options alongside a willingness to invest in rural and regional infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, public housing and roads.

“State governments have to be the leading agencies but they’re not going to do it unless there’s a national plan because otherwise they are in competition with each other.”

The government should also focus on enticing private businesses to the regions, not just the public sector.

For example by offering preferential payroll tax rates, developing industrial parks, building public housing and other infrastructure such as fast rail links between state capitals, with stops on the way to develop two or three regional centres in each state.

“It’s a complex process. They just need time to get everyone used to the idea, get everyone committed so that eventually it develops its own inevitable momentum. While it’s a [political] football and controversial it’s not going to tick any of the boxes of economic viability,” Prof Stilwell says.

Regional development has received further attention with the transplantation of the UK City Deals program to Australia, where capital investment is funnelled into particular regions around cities with targets for infrastructure and growth.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull known to be a fan of the project and early Australian cities deals have already been signed for Townsville, Launceston and Western Sydney.

Regional development must be addressed because the consequences of not pursuing it are high: unequal distribution of jobs, wealth and growth and loss of social connection in regional areas on the one hand; congestion, inflated house prices and environmental degradation for city dwellers on the other.

“It’s a win-win, when it is done well,” Prof Stilwell adds.

The Productivity Commission’s initial report Transitioning Regional Economies says that regional development should be pursued in the light of the end of the mining boom, the slow growth of agriculture jobs due to technology and rising productivity and manufacturing sector shrinkage to make regional areas and their people more resilient.

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85-year-old is the unlikely star of Britain's cycling revolution

An 85-year-old is the unlikely star of Britain's cycling revolution.

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NFL Draft 2017: How it feels to be picked for the pro ranks

They will walk in the footsteps of giants as they descend Philadelphia's Rocky Steps to a life in the NFL.

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How faith is helping take Wanyama to the top

Tottenham Hotspur's Victor Wanyama will wake up on Sunday and he will pray.

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The making of Andy Murray

If the pinnacle of Andy Murray's career so far took place on the pristine green courts of Wimbledon, the world No. 1 owes much of his success to the rugged, red clay of Barcelona.

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Sharapova wins on return after doping ban

Her serve was on. She ripped returns for winners, celebrating with a clenched pumped fist.

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Health confronts ghosts of failed govt IT projects in Medicare payments rebuild

Can Health exorcise the ghosts of failed past government IT projects?

 

 

There is a graveyard bigger than Rookwood Cemetery filled with the cadavers of failed government IT projects and haunted by the ghosts of scope creep, budget blowouts, frustrating delays and second rate outcomes.

It is a fate the Department of Health (DOH) will be dearly hoping it can avoid as it pushes ahead to completely reimagine its 30-year-old IT payments system, a system which underpins Medicare, aged care and veterans’ payments and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

The project is still in its early stages. The Request for Information (RFI) went out in March this year as the government gathers as many ideas as it can from tech companies of varying sizes to design, deliver and integrate its digital payments platform, a project that will have multiple phases over the next five years, while keeping its procurement options open.

Vendors are likely to be salivating at the chance to score a lucrative, long-running contract which has about the highest public profile there is for a federal government IT project, perhaps surpassed only by the Department of Human Services’ $1 billion, seven-year Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT), due for completion by 2022.

But it will not be easy money. It is not a straight forward task to disentangle the current system, which has over 200 applications and 90 databases and supports more than 600 million payments worth approximately $50 billion every year.

The Health Department cannot afford to slip up because if it does it will do so very publicly. The multi-million dollar transformation is an endeavour that will affect around 99 per cent of Australians who use the digital payments platform in one way or another.

CEO of business management company Holocentric, Bruce Nixon, who has worked with government clients such as the ATO, NSW Transport Management Centre, Sydney Water and IP Australia, says now is the right time to do it, before the labyrinthine system gets even more complicated.

“It’s pretty exciting and it is long overdue. It’s a good time to be doing it with new technology available,” Mr Nixon says.

“It is very difficult to integrate everything into the application so there are more and more layers on top and they become more and more complex and unwieldy.

“There does come a time where it makes sense to overhaul the system and replace it with something more modern that allows changes.”

Time is also limited so DOH has little choice but to act. Gary Sterrenberg, CIO of the Department of Human Services, which manages health payments for DOH, has said in the past that the current system has only about three years left before it is totally cactus.

There is no doubt that DOH needs to get on with it but it needs to do it well. 

Critical to the project’s success, says Mr Nixon, is building expertise and loyalty in-house, rather than shifting the burden and responsibility onto systems integrators, although he says external contractors will be needed and they will bring in fresh ideas.

“You should bet on your own people. Open their knowledge. Bring them into the project as early as possible and keep them involved all the way through,” he says.

“Be upfront about how it’s going to work in the future, the ramifications. It de-risks the project.”

Doing this helps prevent cost overruns and scope creep, as well as skilling up staff, and ensures that the people who know and understand the processes the system is built for are more involved in the project.

It makes it more likely that the system can incorporate any necessary changes to payments further down the track too.

“There are always going to be policy changes and political influences. Transformation is ongoing and it is hard to change if you don’t have in-house skills and knowledge,” Mr Nixon says.

It is the people at the coalface processing payments – not systems integrators – who have this knowledge.

“You need to leverage these skills and engage these staff in the process, rather than relying on systems integrators,” he adds.

Integrating the technical into the operational demands a thorough knowledge of current processes and assessing desirable outcomes, along with building in the flexibility to adjust systems to reflect future changes.

It requires drilling down and looking at how payments are made, defining the tasks workers must do, the rules and obligations they are working under, and thinking about how these integrate into the IT system.

Mr Nixon says it is important to examine what can be done better and the expectations Australians have of the system, for example, of being able to make mobile payments.

“The Department should make sure it takes control of the whole transformation initiative. This is a very complex system that has been around for a long time with a huge amount of transactions that are very important to get right.

“You need to start change management from the early days, not at the end, identify current processes, system capabilities and your future vision.”

He suggests building a model to simulate the processes and how things will work, “sort of like a business GPS”.

Mr Nixon says there are lessons to be learned from other IT disasters, whether from Australia or overseas, cautionary tales worth heeding by governments before they blow billions and incur the wrath of ordinary Australians when the systems they rely upon seize up.

“It’s worth being wary of past failures,” he says.

Probably one of the most spectacular domestic IT failures occurred when Queensland Health set out to replace its ailing payroll system in 2006. When the system eventually went live in 2010 thousands of workers were underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all and Queensland taxpayers were left with a $1.2 billion bill for a project that was initially supposed to be a $6 million contract.

The meltdown was primarily due to the organisation’s failure to clearly set out its business requirements or to spell out how it should be delivered and what outcomes were expected. Unrealistic deadlines exacerbated the sloppy planning.

All this set the scene for massive scope creep and proved to be a headache for contractor IBM, which had to deal with multiple requests for changes.

Another epic fail was the Victorian MyKi public transport smartcard, where costs ballooned to $1.5 billion and dragged on an extra seven years, taking nine years instead of two. The ensuing storm of complaints from the public over charges and refunds only amplified the damage done.

The then Victorian Labor government underestimated the project’s complexity and failed to monitor the contract properly.

DOH will be fervently praying that it does not enter the annals of similarly disastrous IT projects and instead gets it right. 

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Brazilian keeper convicted of murder ordered back to jail

The Brazilian goalkeeper who was convicted of murder but released on a technicality in February, has been ordered back to jail.

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The mystical side of New Zealand rugby

CNN World Rugby explores the mystical side of rugby in New Zealand.

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When manga and golf collide

Might the key to curing your slice lie in the age-old Japanese art form of manga?

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Xavi: 'My dream is to coach Barcelona'

He's the player who has always been one step ahead of the opposition.

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Why is this Englishman on a coin?

He's already been gifted three acres of land and a Companion Order of Fiji -- but now Ben Ryan, hailed as a national hero after guiding the Fiji sevens team to the country's first Olympic medal, has been commemorated on limited-edition currency.

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Muslim boxer inspires others

For this teen passionate about boxing, her fight to go toe-to-toe with an opponent goes far beyond the ring. She's fighting for the right to compete in her hijab.

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101-year-old Indian sprinter wins gold

It is a remarkable, late-blooming career. Man Kaur only started running at the age of 93, but the 101-year-old stole the show at the World Masters Games in New Zealand by winning 100m gold in 74 seconds.

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Sharapova's comeback leaves women's Tour divided

Maria Sharapova is coming back to tennis after a 15-month doping ban, attracting global media attention yet splitting opinion on the women's tennis Tour.

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Why do racehorses love the beach?

Training horses can be a tough, exhausting business, so what better than a ride to the seaside?

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Boston Celtics' Isaiah Thomas: 'Mentally and emotionally I'm not here'

Isaiah Thomas' shoulders heaved. He sat on the Boston Celtics sideline at TD Garden, sobbing.

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Michael Phelps reveals darkest moment

Olympic legend Michael Phelps talks with CNN's Coy Wire about his life after swimming.

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The art of being an F1 photographer

It's one of the toughest jobs in sports photography -- capturing Formula One drivers as they hurtle around a race track at 200 mph. CNN talks to one of motorsport's most accomplished photojournalists.

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'Messi the greatest ever,' says Barca goalkeeper

Barcelona's goalkeeper Marc-André Ter Stegen has hailed teammate Lionel Messi as the "greatest ever" footballer after the Argentine scored the 500th goal of his career -- a last-minute winner over rivals Real Madrid on Sunday.

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'Abusive' Nastase suspended from tennis

Ilie Nastase may have retired from tennis 32 years ago, but he appears to be still more than living up to his old nickname "Nasty."

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Messi makes history, Twitter erupts

A last-minute winner, a Lionel Messi masterclass, a change in order at the top of Spain's La Liga -- last night's El Clasico had it all.

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Man Utd fans electrocuted watching game

At least seven people were killed in southern Nigeria on Thursday night when an electric cable fell on a house where soccer fans gathered to view a match on TV.

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Morgan vs. Lloyd -- US stars face off

It is a battle within a battle. A clash between Europe's elite clubs and the coming together of two of US soccer's finest players. It's Manchester City versus Lyon -- and Carli Lloyd versus Alex Morgan.

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Meet the man who built an MMA empire

Chatri Sityodtong is a self-made millionaire who once lived on $4 per day. Now he owns Asia's biggest MMA brand.

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Can Serena return to the top?

It is July 2008. Five months have passed since Kim Clijsters gave birth to her first child, and the Belgian is back on the tennis court for the first time.

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WADA criticized over handling of Sakho doping case

The World Anti-Doping Agency has been criticized for its handling of Liverpool defender Mamadou Sakho's positive doping sample a year ago.

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F1: The art of the two-second pit stop

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Tiger Woods out for six months

The saga of Tiger Woods back problems continues.

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Arrest made in Borussia Dortmund bus attack

German prosecutors say the man responsible for last week's bomb attack on the bus carrying the Borussia Dortmund soccer team had bought options in the club's stock before the attack, hoping to make a profit from the carnage if share prices fell as a result.

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What elite athletes can teach us about pregnancy

Serena Williams confirmed Wednesday that she is pregnant with a due date in the fall. In a Tuesday post on Snapchat, she suggested she is exactly 20-weeks pregnant, which would mean she was a good two months into her pregnancy in January when she competed in -- and won -- the Australian Open.

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Hospitality industry reacts to 457 visa scrapping

By Vanessa Cavasinni, editor Australian Hotelier

 

Hoteliers and the wider hospitality industry are on edge, as they await more details in regards to the Federal Government’s 457 visa replacement.

Yesterday (Tuesday), Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the scrapping of the 457 visa program, stating: “We are ensuring that Australian jobs and Australian values are first, placed first.

During the press conference, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, announced that 457 visa will be replaced with two alternate visas, that do not foster as much agency for permanent residency.

“What we propose is that under the Temporary Skills Shortage Visa short-term stream there will be a two-year visa, with the options of two-years, but there would not be permanent residency outcomes at the end of that.

“In relation to the medium-term stream, which as the Prime Minister pointed out, is targeted at higher skills, a much shorter skills list, that will be for a period of four years, can be applied for onshore or offshore, and it’s a significant tightening of the way in which that programme operates.

According to the Department of Immigration, in 2014 cooks represented the third-largest usage of the 457 visa, after software/application programmers and general practitioners and residential medical officers.

The AHA has called on the Government to ensure that the needs of the hospitality industry are met within the new visa program.

“The hospitality industry is growing at unprecedented rates at the present and the demand for skilled labour is at all-time highs with this complete transformation of Australia’s hotel industry,” said AHA CEO, Stephen Ferguson.

Indeed, the Government’s own Australian Tourism Labour Force Report estimated that the tourism and hospitality sector will require an additional 123,000 workers by 2020, including 60,000 skilled positions.

“Australia’s hospitality sector has responded with a wide range of training and career development programs, but with such a rapid increase in tourism it is impossible to meet the demand for skilled labour in the short-term through local channels, especially in regional and remote Australia.”

With the exact details of the new Temporary Short- and Medium-Term Visa programs, yet to be revealed, most hoteliers are withholding judgment at this stage, but a few were wary of the additional strain the scrapping of the 457 visa would place on finding kitchen staff.

“I am still waiting to hear the finer detail about the announcement from Turnbull so as to fully understand the implications of this for the hospitality sector. But on face value, it does not seem to be founded in a sound consideration of the facts attributable to the current skills shortages being experienced in the hospitality sector,” opined Christian Denny, licensee of Hotel Harry and The Dolphin.

For Angela Gallagher, group general manager of Gallagher Hotels, the replacement of the 457 visa program will create another hurdle in finding quality staff.

Read more here.

This story first appeared in The Shout. 

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Launched: first Australian satellites in 15 years

UNSW-EC0, built by UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research and one of the three Australian satellites launched overnight.

 

By Anthony Wallace

Australia is back in the space race, following the launch of three miniature satellites. At 1am Sydney time on Tuesday 19 April 2017, three Australian research cubesats blasted off for space as part of a NASA mission to resupply the International Space Station.

The event marked the first launch of an Australian-built satellite for 15 years. It is also the nation’s first foray into cubesats for a host of new applications, from scientific discovery to remote sensing and satellite navigation.

The Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida Tuesday night. 
Photo: NASA

The trio of Australian cubesats is part of the international QB50 mission, consisting of 36 small satellites known as ‘cubesats’. Each instrument weighs about 1.3 kg each and is about the size of a shoebox. The combined effort will carry out the most extensive measurements ever undertaken of the little-understood thermosphere, a region between 200-380 km above Earth. This usually inaccessible zone helps shield Earth from cosmic rays and solar radiation, and is vital for communications and weather formation.

Twenty-eight of the QB50 satellites, including the three Australian cubesats, were aboard the Atlas 5 rocket when it launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida overnight. The three Australian cubesats are UNSW-EC0, built by UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER); INSPIRE-2, by the University of Sydney, UNSW and the Australian National University; and SuSAT, by the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.

Read more here.

This story first appeared in Spatial Source. 

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Move over Pokemon, new app draws kids back to urban parks

 
A scene from the new smartphone app Magical Park.

 
Local councils in Australia and New Zealand and an NZ games developer have hit upon a brilliant way to use mobile phones to draw children to play in urban parks again.

A new free smartphone app has unleashed the augmented reality game Magical Park, targeted at kids aged six to 11, which encourages children and their families to explore a magical fantasy world in their local park.

In the game children can interact with fairies, dragons, kittens, dinosaurs and aliens and complete missions, like finding dinosaur eggs, using their phone or tablet camera.

The game is positioned in a selected large, flat park space in the shape of a virtual circle, which holds the game content kids can play.

The idea was born during last month’s Parks Week celebrations, where 47 Australian councils and 19 NZ councils put their heads together to find a way to kick kids off the sofa and into the great outdoors, interacting with their families at the same time.

The project is a partnership between The Parks and Leisure Australia, the New Zealand Recreation Association and Kiwi game developer Geo AR Games.

Magical Park attracted over 24,000 park visitors during Parks Week, with an average of 1069 number of game sessions played per day and participants running an average of 1.45km per game.

Families across Australia and New Zealand spent more than 1,200 hours playing Magical Park together.

Councils pay a subscription fee for the app, which is geo-located to a specific park. The app will only open in a designated park area. The families find out about the app via the council or through signs put up in the park by their council.

The hotspots for gaming activity were Heywood Park in Unley, Perth; the Wilson Botanic Garden in the City of Casey, Melbourne and Westward Park in Clarence Valley Council in NSW.

Teresa Turner, New Plymouth District Council’s Recreation and Culture Manager, praised the app.

“I think what really appealed was that families could do this together – parents and kids both could hunt for dinosaurs and fairies and swap stories about their experiences after.”

GEO AR Games CEO Melanie Langlotz said: “Augmented reality is a powerful tool to get kids engaged and we have had a lot of queries from schools, who would like us to develop educational content.

“We have another product on our road map, which will eventually allow kids to upload their own 3D models and build their own worlds and games to share with their friends in their local park.”

Brian Eales, Principal from the Clive Primary School in New Zealand voted the trial a success.

“Magical Park opens up a whole new dimension for children linking the engaging world of devices and the great outdoors.

“It allows for the creative use of devices and mathematical concepts while maintaining physical activity. It can strengthen the tuakana teina relationship when older students work with young students.”

 

 

Sue Wilson, Assistant Principal from the Pomaria Primary School in Henderson, Auckland agreed it had had a positive effect on children’s learning, increasing in both writing and oral language skills.

While some councils are looking at bringing Magical Park back for the school holidays, permanent Magical Parks are set up in Heywood Park in the City of Unley and Rhodes Park in Kwinana.

Magical Park is the second augmented reality app from Geo AR Games. The company also developed Sharks in the Park, which brought an underwater world to kids in parks across New Zealand in 2016.

For more information visit www.magicalpark.net

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Barca great Xavi reveals his 'Ultimate Player'

Barcelona legend Xavi Hernandez played with Lionel Messi for over a decade, once saying "there is no heir" to the Argentine's throne.

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F1 stars donate to stricken teenage racer

A tragic motorsport accident has been met with a heartfelt and generous response by Formula One stars including Jenson Button and Max Verstappen.

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