Tough fire season warning

Queensland firefighters face a “challenging” bushfire season amid forecasts of worse-than-usual conditions, but the government says they will do all they can to reduce the risk.

Fire crews were last night fighting 10 bushfires across the state, including one burning at the rear of houses in Brisbane's northwest and seven around the Townsville area.

Two aircraft water bombed the slow-moving bushfire in the Brisbane suburb of Keperra, after the blaze started about 2.30pm, but authorities said there was no immediate threat to properties.

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Efforts to control the blazes came as the Bureau of Meteorology warned the Bligh Government of a higher fire risk this season due to vegetation growth caused by the big wet over summer.

Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts said authorities would continue to carry out controlled burns to reduce the risk as much as possible.

“This year's bushfire season presents particular challenges for our fire authority,” he said.

“Extensive flooding and sustained rainfall across the state earlier this year has contributed to a substantial build-up of grass and vegetation.

“This grass and vegetation is now starting to dry out and, combined with increasing temperatures, provides the ingredients for a higher than normal bushfire risk.”

Mr Roberts said a number of large vegetation fires had broken out across the state in recent months, but were extinguished with minimal damage to property.

He said the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service worked with councils and other state government agencies to minimise the bushfire risk.

More than 350 planned burns had been carried out so far this year covering 400,000 hectares, he said.

Authorities would look at further backburning but this would depend on weather conditions.

“However I am confident that the QFRS is working hard to minimise the risk of vegetation fires in communities across the state,” Mr Roberts said.

The fire risk warning came as part of a seasonal weather briefing to Ms Bligh and her cabinet colleagues yesterday.

The bureau told cabinet Queensland could experience above average rainfall and cyclones this wet season, along with a higher number of severe thunderstorms in southeast Queensland.

The briefing comes in the wake of the last brutal storm season, which delivered flooding to large parts of the state over summer and brought the devastating Cyclone Yasi to north Queensland in February.

Ms Bligh said the state would be prepared for a heavy tropical wet season.

“We do have a more positive outlook this year than we had at this time last year,” she said.

Bureau Queensland senior official Bruce Gunn told reporters an average of three to four cyclones formed over the Coral Sea each storm season, and a "little more than that" was expected to form this time.

They would not all necessarily reach the coast.

Mr Gunn stressed it was an early seasonal forecast and predictions would become more accurate closer to the season.

However, Mr Gunn said it was clear from forecasts at a similar time last year that Queensland would face an "exceptional" storm season.

Ms Bligh, who has previously faced claims the government did not do enough to prepare after the bureau's warning in October, said the advice had been taken seriously.

The flood inquiry's first report, released last month, recommended the government lower the Wivenhoe Dam by 25 per cent of its normal full supply level if forecasters predicted a similar or worst wet season than 2010/11.

Ms Bligh said she did not see a need to pre-emptively lower Wivenhoe Dam's capacity this year, but the government would continue to monitor the situation.

She committed to implement all of the flood inquiry's state government-related recommendations.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Public philanthropy just not a given

 

Peer leadership is key to painting a new image for public bequests, writes Wendy Frew.

A ripple of excitement spread through the room at the National Gallery of Victoria last month when the gallery's director, Gerard Vaughan, unveiled its latest and most expensive acquisition, an exquisite example of Italian Renaissance art.

At a Sotheby's auction in London in July the NGV had paid $5.2 million for Correggio's Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, thanks to the generosity of one of its trustees, businessman Andrew Sisson. Sisson said the painting's beauty and ''humanistic'' qualities made him ''go weak at the knees''.

Much has been made of how Sisson funded the purchase: he sold his investment company, Balanced Equity Management, for a reported $30 million in June, when the strong Australian dollar would have made it a crime not to sell.

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What wasn't so obvious at the press conference was the value of Sisson's public act of giving.

Wealthy Australians still aren't big donors to worthy causes and when they do give, they often do it anonymously. Millionaire entrepreneur Dick Smith lashed out at his peers last week for what he described as their ''utterly selfish'' attitude towards philanthropy, threatening to ''out'' them if they didn't start donating money to worthy causes.

For those who do donate, there is a push to encourage them to do so publicly. One of the greatest exponents of public philanthropy, David Gonski, says no one should underestimate the benefits of public giving, whether it be to an art gallery, university or hospital.

''The concept of peer leadership works in anything,'' says Gonski who, as chancellor of the University of NSW, asks the university's benefactors to make their donations public. He cites investment banker and Museum of Contemporary Art chairman Simon Mordant and his wife Catriona, who went public with their $15 million pledge towards an extension of the MCA when it seemed other donors, including federal and state governments, were backing away from the project.

''When Simon Mordant, a well-known and well-respected banker, came out and said he would give $15 million to the MCA, I think there would have been about 100 or more people who work with Simon who would have said to themselves 'If Simon is doing that I am going to give something','' Gonski says.

There have been some signs of change, especially in booming Western Australia, where mining magnate Andrew Forrest announced last month he was giving $3 million to the state art gallery's acquisition fund, and $3.7 million in shares to the state's four major performing arts companies.

Convincing benefactors to shed the cloak of anonymity is just one of the issues facing the philanthropic sector, says Gonski, who has chaired the Australia Council, is a former president of the Board of Trustees at the Art Gallery of NSW, and is chairman of the Sydney Theatre Company, among other arts and business appointments.

Philanthropists have become much more sophisticated, bringing business practices such as triple-bottom-line accounting to the sector. The challenge for charities, Gonski says, is to make sure they can match that sophistication.

''The giver requires much more, and rightly so. People used to assume the money they gave to an [arts or medical] organisation would be used properly. The new philanthropist is as careful with their giving as they are with how they make their money.

''You need people who can work out what donors want, work out how they can best donate to your organisation, how you keep them up to date and then make sure you achieve the result you have promised them.

''The old days of ringing up the chairman's wife and expecting them to give money are gone.''

Those looking for money may also have to start thinking out of the box. With corporate sponsorship appearing to have plateaued and many donors more comfortable with projects they are sure will work at the box office, some arts organisations are turning to grassroots fund-raising.

Sydney Festival is financing the development of a new indigenous theatre project for next year's festival by asking 60 people to become ''associate producers'' who each donate $5000 to help develop the show. In return, associate producers receive regular updates on the project's development.

Much of the work being done by Artsupport Australia, established in 2003 to increase cultural philanthropy, and operating under the auspices of the Australia Council, is aimed at encouraging people to leave money to the arts in their wills.

Artsupport's director, Louise Walsh, says its research shows many potential arts donors don't realise that arts groups are charities and need bequests.

''They are untapped in Australia,'' Walsh says. ''Some people think [talking about your will] is a taboo subject but there are subtle ways of going about it … and you don't need to spend a lot of money on it.'' It can be as simple as mentioning established bequests in arts newsletters.

One of the most successful innovations in the philanthropy sector has been the private ancillary funds, which sprang from 1999 tax reforms. A PAF is a trust with tax-deductible status, and which can attract a variety of other tax and duty concessions. Donors like them because gifts can be spread over several years, trustees have considerable control over the fund's objectives, and they can be used to perpetuate the name of an individual or family.

Grants to cultural organisations from such funds grew from $761,000 in the 2001-02 financial year to $9.58 million in 2007-08 , thanks to support by people such as Gonski and work done by Artsupport.

Walsh says ''things are changing'' but the latest figures show that as at 2005, only 2.3 per cent of total donations were going to the arts.

''We have to change the culture. We have been at it for eight years and we still have a long way to go.''

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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'Sextortion' case: hacker gets 6-year sentence

LOS ANGELES – A Southern California man has been sentenced to six years in prison for infiltrating computers belonging to women and teenage girls where he found sexually explicit photos and threatened to put them online unless they provided him with more.

In sentencing Luis Mijangos, 32, of Santa Ana on Thursday, US District Judge George King called the crimes a form of cyber-terrorism and warned other hackers they will meet stiff penalties for ruining people's lives.

"Society has to understand that if you engage in this type of behaviour, it's no joke," King said. "You are going to jail and going to jail for a long time."

Mijangos, who pleaded guilty to one count each of computer hacking and wiretapping in March, grimaced when King handed down the sentence. Tears began to well in his eyes. Earlier, he apologised for what he had done.

"To all the victims I want to say that I'm sorry," said Mijangos, a Mexican citizen, from his wheelchair. "I'm ready to do the right thing and stay out of trouble."

Authorities said Mijangos sent malicious software disguised as popular songs or videos to his victims' computers that also were unwittingly sent by women and teenage girls to their friends and family. In all, Mijangos unlawfully accessed and could control more than 100 computers.

He read their emails, watched them through webcams without their knowledge and most damaging was his discovery of nude photos they had taken of themselves. Mijangos then threatened to post the images online unless his victims were willing to provide more racy photos or videos to him or if they went to police, according to court documents. He also posed as some of the victims' boyfriends to convince them to send him nude pictures.

Mijangos eventually followed through on his threat in at least one instance by posting naked pictures of a woman on her friend's MySpace page.

The 35-year-old woman, identified only by her initials GM, spoke at the sentencing, describing the torment inflicted upon her by Mijangos. The woman, who works as an auditor, said Mijangos threatened to release more photos to her employer and that each time she signed onto her computer at work, he would harass and threaten her.

"He haunts me every time I use the computer," she said. "You don't have to be in jail to feel trapped."

She added she no longer trusts anyone and will not pay her bills online or have conversations online.

Prosecutors sought a seven-year prison sentence for Mijangos, while a probation report recommended a two-year term. The maximum he could have faced for the two counts he pleaded guilty to was 10 years.

King said he saw the severity and sophistication of Mijangos's "personal crime wave" and the fact that the defendant decided to funnel his talents as a computer programmer to get sexually explicit material for his personal gratification.

"A lot of people suffered and suffered greatly in a real sense because of his actions," King said.

In arguing for leniency, deputy federal public defender Firdaus Dordi said his client wasn't the one who created the photos nor the virus that infected the computers.

Dordi also pointed out the medical condition of Mijangos, a paraplegic who was struck during a drive-by shooting when he was a teen. The gunman was never caught, Dordi said.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Pride before the Falls

A rift between the Kooks and the Arctic Monkeys hasn't healed and both are set to play at the same Australian festival.

The feud began in 2007, when Luke Pritchard, lead singer with Brighton band the Kooks, claimed Alex Turner, of Sheffield's Arctic Monkeys, tried to sabotage his guitar leads.

Pritchard didn't take the attack too lightly. He retaliated, kicking Turner in the face.

In 2008 the fight went public, with abuse and vindictive comments flying between them in the British tabloids and online music blogs. In May 2008, while filming the video for their single Do You Wanna, Pritchard claims he tried to reconcile with Turner. ''I tried to patch things up with Alex … but he just turned his back and walked away. I suppose they are quite arrogant,'' he later told The Daily Mirror.

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Four years on and both bands are set to headline this summer's Falls Festival in Victoria and Tasmania. But the water is not yet under the bridge, the Kooks say.

''That band is very strange,'' lead guitarist Hugh Harris tells S. ''They are quite difficult people really, aren't they?

''We're a similar age … a lot of people find it quite interesting to compare us but they're not friendly.''

Yet when asked whether there is now competition between the bands, Harris nonchalantly replies: ''Sometimes, not always - it's not my kind of thing to get involved. If I wanted to compete, I would have become a sportsman. I don't really care what other bands think about each other.''

Of course, this is not the first time high-profile musicians have clashed. In the US, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain openly criticised Pearl Jam as ''commercial sell-outs'' in 1992, before his suicide in 1994 (they did, however, reconcile before his death). In the mid-1990s it was Brit-pop band Oasis v Blur after they both released a single on the same day in 1995.

In 2009 the outspoken Lily Allen told Elton John to ''f--- off'', saying: ''I am 40 years younger than you and have my whole life ahead of me,'' in front of a shocked audience at London's GQ Men of the Year Awards.

Closer to home, Powderfinger's Bernard Fanning was not impressed when, in 1999, Ben Lee boasted his album, Breathing Tornados, would be the ''greatest Australian album of all time''. Fanning famously called Lee a ''precocious little c---''.

Falls organisers say they are ''unaware'' of the Kooks' and Arctic Monkeys' colourful history. But they assure S a Sheffield v Brighton brawl is unlikely as the bands are to swap between the Lorne and Marion Bay festival sites. ''The only time they'll be near each other will be in the air,'' a spokeswoman says.

Perhaps that's not such a bad idea.

The Kooks album, Junk of the Heart is out on Friday. Arctic Monkeys and the Kooks will play at the Falls Festivals in Lorne (sold out) and Marion Bay. See fallsfestival.com for details.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Seeing Sydney anew

Artist TOM CARMENT has been mistaken for a fisherman, a parking officer and a tree while painting, but there's no confusing the city in which he works.

When you've lived in a city for a long time, it becomes signposted with memories - a street corner where you had a certain conversation, a house whose exterior you painted, a picnic spot.

I feel a compulsion to depict these places, my surroundings, the way I see them. But at times it's hard to keep a fresh vision of that which is most familiar.

Although I use two small rooms at home to store papers and pictures, my real studio is kept in two backpacks.

The larger one is for oil paints and holds a plywood box I've made for my wooden palette. For small oils I work on wooden panels, often scavenged from the drawer sides of old wardrobes and, for larger oils, I stretch primed linen.

The smaller backpack, which travels with me nearly all the time, carries my drawing and watercolour gear.

Like this, I can adapt to my mode of travel: foot, bicycle or car and, within minutes, set up to attempt a picture of something that catches my eye. Occasionally I paint on two card tables pushed together, but most of the time I sit or squat on the ground with my gear spread out beside me. By sitting fairly still and low to the ground, things start to happen around me. Out in the bush, goannas wander past and birds land suddenly at the edge of my palette. Once, in Centennial Park, a dog rushed up and lifted its leg on my back.

In February this year, outside Whyalla, a redback spider bit me behind the ear.

Occasionally people think I'm doing something else, not painting. When I used to paint from a rowboat, fishermen in tinnies would drop their anchors nearby. They could see me, bent over in my boat and assume I was gutting my catch, having found a good spot.

One evening last year, on the corner of Cleveland and Elizabeth streets, I was standing between the parked cars, the best spot to draw the three-storey boarding house above Abdul's Restaurant. A thickset man rushed up to me, shouting and waving his arms: ''Stop! I'll move it!'' He thought I was writing up a parking ticket.

For two months this year I couldn't paint, my right arm in a sling after my bike hit a hole and I smashed my shoulder on the road down to Nielsen Park. I was going there to do another watercolour of people in the pool of shade under a banksia.

After that I had to slow down, accept my temporary disability. I went for long walks, sorted my papers and rediscovered the local library. I realised the world wouldn't fall apart if I didn't paint every day, even though I missed doing it.

People stood up for me in the bus.

I returned to art slowly by filling three pads with line drawings. A few weeks later I chiselled the dry blobs of oil paint off my palette and squeezed out new ones, wet and shining. With enthusiasm, I put my gear into a backpack with extra shoulder pads and returned to the cliffs and beaches of the eastern seaboard of the city. In the winter light I painted apartments crowded like lemmings at the precipice, winter seas, Coogee in the rain. And I thought that perhaps, by slowing down, by having dawdled around Sydney with almost no purpose, I was able to see it anew.

This is an edited extract from the exhibition catalogue, Places I've Been, New Paintings and Drawings 2009-2011. The exhibition is at Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern, until September 24.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Spring has sprung with new zoo babies

Spring has sprung quite literally at Taronga Zoo.

An endangered Francois langur monkey, seven koala joeys and a glossy black cockatoo chick (the first at Taronga in seven years) have all been born in recent months.

Many of them are taking advantage of the warmer weather to make their first entrance into the world, the zoo said in a statement yesterday.

The birth on August 20 of the male Francois langur monkey, named Tam Dao, is a particularly welcome addition as his species is critically endangered.

Only 1000 Francois langurs - also known as Francois leaf monkeys - are known to exist in the wild, and Taronga is the only zoo in Australasia to care for the Asian species.

Another young male, Kei-co, was born this year.

Meanwhile, Taronga's koalas have been busy this breeding season, giving birth to seven joeys.

Some of the young, which are born the size of a grain of rice, are still tucked up in their mother's pouches.

But a few proud mothers - Maggie, Wanda and Freya - are showing off their infants.

"We've had quite a baby boom in the zoo this year, which is fantastic," Taronga Zoo spokeswoman Danielle McGill said.

"The warmer spring weather means the animals are getting a lot more active, and a few of the young are beginning to poke their heads out of their mother's pouch."

Taronga's wildlife hospital is also busy at this time of year, caring for newborn animals who have been left orphaned.

A seven-month-old red kangaroo joey and a mob of little possums are being raised by carers who mind them 24 hours a day.

Zookeeper Megan is as busy as a new mum, bottle-feeding the female joey every four hours and carrying her around in a little backpack.

Two of the young possums were brought to the hospital after they were found in their dead mother's pouch after she was hit by a car.

They too are cared for 24 hours a day by a dedicated zookeeper, Bobby-Jo, and Swiss has the distinction of sporting the world's tiniest splint after she fractured her wrist.

The zoo has also bred a glossy black cockatoo chick, which is the first of its kind for seven years at the zoo.

The youngster was hatched by first-time mother Gloucester.

"It is fully feathered now and really quite beautiful," Ms McGill said. "Now is a lovely time to get down to the zoo and watch the animals as they get more active in the warmer weather."

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Work bonus changes

The strategy To maintain my age pension even though I'm working part-time.

Can I do that? There are limits but from July 1 the government has made it easier for seniors to do part-time work without losing some of their pension.

The new rules effectively allow you to average your earnings over a year and will be of most benefit to pensioners who only work for part of the year - such as the often-quoted retiree Santas. You'll now be able to earn up to $6500 from employment in a year before losing any of your pension.

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How does it work? Under the old rules, 50 per cent of the first $500 of employment income earned in a fortnight was exempt from the Centrelink income test. The first $250 is now exempt and any unused amount is stored to offset any future employment income you earn.

In her budget summary, the director of Strategy Steps, Louise Biti, used the example of Colleen, an age pensioner who earns $300 a fortnight from a part-time job. Under the old rules, half of that amount - $150 - was exempt from the income test while the other $150 would have reduced her pension entitlement. Now the first $250 is exempt and so she is assessed on just $50 - leaving her with more age pension.

As the maximum exemption of $250 hasn't changed, no pensioners will be worse off as a result of the change. But many earning less than $500 a fortnight will be better off.

How does the averaging work? Think of it as a bank where any unused entitlement you have each fortnight is squirrelled away for future use. So if you don't earn any employment income in a particular fortnight, $250 is ''banked'' to offset against future employment income.

Centrelink uses the example of Angela, who has a current work bonus balance of $350. The next fortnight she earns $200. After applying the $250 bonus, the full $200 she earned is exempt from the income test and $50 is added to her work bonus balance, bringing it to $400.

The following fortnight Angela earns $550. That is reduced to $300 by the $250 work bonus, then to nil by drawing on her work balance ''bank'', which now has a balance of $100.

In the third fortnight, Angela earns $600. The $250 work bonus reduces that to $350 and drawing on her ''bank'' wipes out another $100. But as Angela has now used up all her entitlements, the remaining $250 is included in the income test and will reduce her pension entitlement for that fortnight.

In another example, Joe works during Christmas as a part-time Santa and earns $600 a fortnight. This is the only work he does all year. By the time Joe starts working this year, he will have built up a work bonus balance of $2250. His $600 fortnightly income will be reduced to $350 by the normal work bonus and to zero by deducting $350 from his work bonus ''bank''. His pension won't be affected. After working for six weeks, his ''bank'' will have been reduced to $1200 but will start to increase by $250 a fortnight again as he is no longer working.

Do I lose my bank if I don't use it? The balance can be carried forward to future years but has a maximum limit of $6500.

Do I have to do anything to claim the bonus? No, Centrelink will automatically apply the bonus to any earnings you declare. But you do still have to notify Centrelink of the full amount of any employment income you receive. Centrelink says the bonus only applies to employment income and doesn't include income from other sources such as investments, super, self-employment income and leave payments.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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The extreme stargazer's guide to the cosmos

AS A teenager, Bryan Gaensler gazed at the heavens from the backyard of his Sydney home, fascinated by a light that had suddenly appeared in the night sky.

It was February 1987, and a distant star in the constellation of Dorado had ended its life suddenly in a massive explosion, so bright that it was visible to the human eye.

Gaensler had been a fan of astronomy since he was a child, and seeing this supernova strengthened his resolve to pursue a career studying the universe, he says.

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''I was able to spot it [the supernova] every night until it gradually faded away over the next few weeks. It was a huge thrill to know that the light that was entering my eyes had begun its journey in an unimaginably violent detonation 170,000 years earlier,'' Gaensler recalls.

Gaensler, an Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney and director of the Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics, recounts this teenage experience in his new book, Extreme Cosmos, which takes the reader on a tour of the most extraordinary features of our universe.

Among his insights into the brightest, heaviest, fastest and hottest celestial bodies are descriptions of a neutron star so magnetic it would wipe data from a credit card 100,000 kilometres away, a star that is 1500 times the size of our sun and another star moving at about 2.5 million kilometres an hour.

When he was very young, Gaensler imagined his main preoccupation as an astronomer would be to discover new stars. And his first stellar find - in 1994 - was a big thrill, he writes.

''I sat quietly for a few minutes, alone with my discovery, cherishing the fact that there was something out there that only I knew about.'' But he later realised the main aim of those who study the universe is to try to understand how it works.

We live in a rather insalubrious spot in the cosmos to do this, on a small planet orbiting an ordinary star in a quiet suburb of the Milky Way, he says. And, clever though humans are, our brains evolved to help us survive as hunter-gatherers rather than comprehend the unimaginably large numbers that are needed to describe the complexity of the cosmos.

This makes it all the more remarkable that, in a little more than 100 years, people have learnt so much about the 13.7 billion-year history of the universe since the Big Bang.

The largest structure found so far is the Sloan Great Wall a ''colossal filament of thousands of galaxies'' that stretches for 1.4 billion light years.

And the fastest object measured - the Oh My God particle - was detected in the United States 20 years ago. It is thought to have been a proton, travelling at almost the speed of light, which is just over a billion kilometres an hour.

Supernovae, such as the one Gaensler saw as a teenager, are bright. But gamma ray bursts are 100 to 1000 times more luminous, and the record setter occurred in 2008. It was easily visible to the eye for about 30 seconds, even though it came from 7.5 billion light years away - meaning it occurred even before our sun and earth were born.

Even though much has been learnt, each new find raises more questions, says Gaensler, a former Young Australian of the Year. ''There is an endless road of discovery and delight ahead. The golden age of astronomy is only now just beginning.''

  

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Think small, for that is the way of the future

FROM the back of an old Arnott's van, he screened the first ever television broadcast in Australia during the Queen's royal tour in 1954. Fifteen years later, he ran tracking stations for NASA and provided the signal that relayed man's first landing on the moon.

But it is nanoscience that has John Hooke more excited than ever about communications in Australia.

The largely untapped science of manipulating matter on an incredibly microscopic level has the potential to change everything from the size of the internet to the resilience of sunscreen. Yesterday, Mr Hooke, a former chief executive of Amalgamated Wireless Australasia and a director of BHP and Channel Ten, donated $5 million to form the Australian Institute of Nanoscience within the University of Sydney's school of physics.

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''Why did the astronomers look out to space? I think this is a similar process; looking in, exploring new frontiers, ever smaller, the excitement of discovering,'' he said. ''This just seems a whole new world and the applications of nanotechnology seem to be limitless. I think it's the most exciting thing to happen in science, certainly in my lifetime.''

Mr Hooke's father would be especially proud. After joining Amalgamated Wireless Australasia in its first year, Sir Lionel Hooke brought the first radio to Australia, the first television, the first transistor and optic fibres.

AWA was a name as iconic as Vegemite to some Australians, said the head of the school of physics, Professor Clive Baldock. Their York Street office was once the tallest building in the country.

Sir Lionel transmitted Dame Nellie Melba from his home in Brighton to Parliament House to convince the federal government to license radio broadcasting. On Sir Ernest Shackletons's fateful crossing of the Antarctic in 1914, Sir Lionel was the wireless operator whose morse code messages saved the expedition, trapped in an ice field for eight months.

His son is now looking to the next communications revolution.

''When we started transistors in this country, a lot of us couldn't identify where it was all leading,'' he said. ''We didn't know whether you'd have a transistor in your washing machine or your iron or whatever but we just knew it had a huge future and I think this is the same thing but on a much bigger and more important scale.''

The institute will further world-leading research by the school of physics into quantum computing and photonics, such as reducing the energy to run the internet.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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Invest in children of knowledge revolution

It's annoying the way business people keep slipping the words ''going forward'' into almost every sentence and it was even worse when Julia Gillard kept repeating the slogan ''moving forward'' in the last election campaign. But I have to admit they've got the right idea: we do need to keep our minds focused on the future and what we need to do to secure it.

The world keeps changing and we must respond appropriately to that change. Most of us feel threatened by change, and it's only human to want to resist it. The temptation is to try to preserve things as they are, rather than adjust to the way they will be.

As we wonder what to do about the threat to our manufacturing industry, it's tempting to see that threat as temporary. We're in the middle of a resources boom which has lifted the value of our dollar to a level which could wipe out some of our industry. But the boom won't last long and, if we're not careful, we could find ourselves high and dry: no boom and a big chunk cut out of manufacturing. What do we do then?

This is a serious misreading of our situation. What we're dealing with isn't just another of the transitory commodity booms we've experienced many times before. It's a historic shift in the structure of the global economy as the Industrial Revolution finally reaches the developing countries. The two biggest countries in the world, China and India, which were also the biggest economies before that revolution, are rapidly industrialising and within the next 20 or 30 years will return to their earlier position of dominance.

Does that sound temporary to you?

As part of their urbanisation and industrialisation, those countries - and the Vietnams and Indonesias following in their wake - will require huge quantities of iron ore, coal and other raw materials. Not for several months but for several decades. Much of what they need will be coming from us. That says it's likely to be many moons before our dollar falls back to the US70¢ levels our high-cost manufacturers are comfortable with.

The other side of the re-emergence of China and India is the global shift of all but the most sophisticated manufacturing from west to east. This is a disruptive trend affecting all the developed economies, not just us. All the rich countries are having to find other things to do as their manufacturing migrates to the poor countries.

This, too, is not a process that's likely to stop, much less reverse itself. So it's not a question of hanging in until the world comes back to its senses and things return to normal. The day will never come when we're able to reopen our steel mills and canning factories.

It's a question of whether we dig in and try to prevent our economy changing, or we adapt to our changed circumstances and move into areas more suited to a rich, well-educated, highly paid economy.

In truth, we're making so much money from our sales of raw materials to the developing countries that we could afford to use a fair bit of that income to prop up our manufacturers. That wouldn't make us poorer, just less prosperous than we could be (though keeping labour and capital tied up in manufacturing would mean a lot more immigration and foreign investment to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding mining sector).

And the fact is that, throughout most of the 20th century, we diverted a fair bit of our income from agriculture and mining to subsidising our then highly protected manufacturing sector. This may help explain why so many people - particularly older people - are so ready to do whatever it takes to stop factories being closed. It's the traditional Australian way of doing things: passing the hat.

But what's the positive, future-affirming alternative? What else can we do?

Embrace the newer revolution in the developed world, the Information Revolution. While the poor countries are becoming manufacturing economies, the rich countries are becoming knowledge economies.

The knowledge economy is about highly educated and skilled workers selling the fruits of their knowledge to other Australians and people overseas. It covers all the professions and para-professions: medicine, teaching, research, law, accounting, engineering, architecture, design, computing, consulting and management.

Jobs in the knowledge economy are clean, safe, value-adding, highly paid and intellectually satisfying.

The developed economies are fast becoming ''weightless'', as an ever smaller proportion of income and employment comes from making things and an ever increasing proportion comes from providing services. Some of those services are fairly menial, but the fastest growing categories involve the highest degrees of knowledge and skill.

Employment in Australian manufacturing has been falling since the 1980s. It's sure to continue falling whatever we do to try to prop it up. By contrast, since 1984 total employment has grown by almost three-quarters to 11.4 million. Get this: all of those 4.8 million additional jobs have been in the ''weightless'' services sector.

Notwithstanding our future increase in the production of rural and mineral commodities, our economy - like all the rich economies - will continue to lose weight. The real question is whether the services sector jobs our children and grandchildren get will be at the unskilled or the sophisticated end of the spectrum.

And that depends on how much money and effort we put into their education and training. We've gone for the past two decades underspending on education and training at all levels, falling behind the other rich countries.

If we've got any sense, we'll use part of the proceeds from the resources boom to secure our future in the global knowledge economy.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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