With the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission's Interim Report tabled last month, it is now up to various state governments and the federal government to respond quickly to save lives when the next catastrophic fires happen.
Analysis
The Mt Victoria to Lithgow upgrade of the Great Western Highway was conceived for one election campaign and its life may be extinguished with another. It has caused everything from bemusement to misery and has distracted attention from needier causes.
The problem is obvious to anyone who uses public transport — in Sydney or any other major city in Australia. Public transport networks, designed in the 1940s, are straining to service growing cities.
In June, a raft of new legislation was presented to parliament to in effect, outlaw homebirth midwifery in Australia. Indemnity insurance would be a legal requirement for medical practitioners, under a new national registration and accreditation scheme.
In early September, as federal parliamentarians debated whether to end the repulsive government policy of charging refugees for the costs of their own imprisonment in detention centres, damning revelations emerged that Australian navy personnel prevented badly burnt refugees from climbing onto rescue boats.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS), often touted as “clean coal”, has been promoted by the coal industry and governments such as Australia and the US as a way to cut emissions from coal-fired energy generation, in order to avoid dangerous climate change.
Our neighbours recently moved out. They could no longer afford the rent on their small two-bedroom inner-city terrace, so moved away from the city centre to reduce their rent by $100.
Thousands of staff from 16 universities across the country will strike on September 16 for new union collective agreements. The actions follow strikes at the University of New England and Charles Sturt University on September 9 and at Victorian and Tasmanian campuses on May 21.
Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma released the Our Future in Our Hands report to the National Press Club on August 27. It outlined a proposed structure for a new national body to represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Since April this year, a young Cairns couple has faced a nightmare.
Federal resources minister Martin Ferguson responded to the disastrous August 21 oil spill off the north-west coast of Australia by proposing to set up a new investigative body. The September 7 announcement claimed the new body would have the power to investigate such oil spillages and to “stop it happening again”.
On September 8, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) notified the families of the five journalists killed in 1975 at Balibo in East Timor that it had begun an investigation into the killings.
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