Saffin continues to help NSW North Coast bring home the regional development dollars

Media release Friday, 4 March 2011:

Saffin urges councils to fine tune community projects for RDA-NR

PAGE MP Janelle Saffin has urged local councils and organisations to start fine tuning community projects to maximise their chances of winning a share of the Australian Government’s $1.4-billion Regional Development Australia Fund.

Ms Saffin has welcomed Federal Minister for Regional Australia Simon Crean’s announcement that the Regional Development Australia Fund was open for business and was receiving applications for the first allocation of funding from July 1 this year.

Mr Crean yesterday in Canberra told Regional Development Australia-Northern Rivers (RDA-NR) Chair Ian Tiley that only applications that had the backing of his RDA committee would be considered in a competitive, merit-based assessment process.

Ms Saffin said this meant local councils and organisations needed to clearly demonstrate that projects would boost economic development, create local jobs and lift the quality of life in local communities across the Northern Rivers.

“Late last year, I put a number of priority projects before RDA-NR for serious consideration, and I know councils have been fine tuning these and other worthy projects to get them to the next level, she said.

Priority projects for Page included $9.7 million for major refurbishment of Lismore City Hall; $4.5 million towards Ballina Shire Council’s $8.5-million Pyrolysis Demonstration Project to produce renewable energy and biochar from green waste; $2.9 million for Kyogle Museum and Art Gallery, incorporating a library extension; $2.5 million for Queen Elizabeth Park Redevelopment, Casino; and $1.5 million to Treelands Drive Community Centre Extensions, Yamba.

Ms Saffin also has committed to working with Clarence Valley Council and State Member for Clarence Steve Cansdell to secure a skate park for young people in Iluka.

Guidelines for the Regional Development Australia Fund, to be allocated over five years, can be obtained by emailing regionalgrants@regional.gov.au with RDAF Interest in the subject line.

A total of $350 million of the Fund has been set aside for disaster relief in regional communities, assessed on the same criteria as the rest of the Fund.

Earth Hour, 8.30pm Saturday 26 March 2011 - will you be switched off?

From its debut in one city in one country in 2007 – Sydney, Australia – when 2.2 million individuals turned their lights off to take a stand against climate change, Earth Hour has become a truly global movement, embracing 128 countries and territories in 2010.

In four short years, Earth Hour has grown into the largest environmental campaign in history.

2011 marks a new phase for the initiative. The new campaign creative, 60+, will position Earth Hour 2011 as an hour of celebration where the community comes together and makes a pledge to do more to help the planet.

Sign up at earthhour.org.au

What political hypocrites!

What a week I picked to return home.

Today Tony Windsor decides that the Gillard Government made a mistake in announcing its plan to introduce a carbon price. "In a blunt warning to the Government, Mr Windsor accuses it of making strategic mistakes in the timing of the tax announcement, "putting the cart before the horse" because of "pressure from the Greens", and says a key reason Australians appear to have baulked at the plan is because it is too vague." Hello? Isn’t Saint Tony on the multi-party committee which recommended a carbon price mechanism to the government, didn’t he agree to the announcement of same ("Mr Tony Windsor and Mr Robert Oakeshott, have agreed that the proposal should be released for community consultation"), attend the joint press conference and the next day release his own media blurb in support of this announcement? As today’s prime example of political hypocrisy this about face takes some beating.

Yesterday Pauline Hanson was sprung registering as an Upper House independent candidate on a group ticket in the March 2011 NSW state election. Aw, the luvvie of the far-right must be running out of pin money and needs to top up the bank account. After all this has worked for her in the past – 3 weeks minimum campaigning and maximum reimbursement as an unsuccessful candidate to the tune of $150,000. This latest tilt at campaigning (which sees Hanson change both her mind on “goodbye forever” and the state in which she lives) garners her the title of über political hypocrite also.

On the importance of opinion polls

The Australian 7 March 2011

Click on image to enlarge

Something the media works hard to make us forget about most opinion polls………

@wolfcat Wolf Cocklin

One thing to remember about the polls there is not an election next week.. so they don't actually matter.

Feeling unwell? Take two aspirin and stay away from NSW hospitals

While bureaucrats are happily busy preparing to collate personal health information (supplied to them by everyone from doctors through to chemists and optometrists) in order to satisfy Federal Health Minister Roxon’s unnatural desire for a great big database on Australian citizens, this is one of the computer systems from which this data will be drawn. It is said to be installed in 59 hospitals having an estimated 80 per cent of all NSW public hospital beds.

The Sydney Morning Herald 7 March 2011:

THE computer system that runs emergency departments in NSW hospitals is compromising patients' care, according to the first systematic review of the troubled project that found it was crippled by design flaws.

The FirstNet system allows treatment details and test results to be assigned inadvertently to the wrong patient, according to the review. It is based on a technical study of the software and interviews with directors of seven Sydney emergency departments.

The system is so compromised it should be scrapped, a specialist doctors' group said yesterday.

Difficulties retrieving patient records could delay treatment, and the system - on which $115 million has been spent - automatically cancelled pathology and radiology requests if the person was transferred from the emergency department without checking whether these were still needed, according to the study by Jon Patrick, the director of the University of Sydney's health information technology research laboratory.

Sally McCarthy, the president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said Professor Patrick's findings confirmed that the system, loathed by doctors and nurses, was unsuitable for its purpose.........

The project, part of a 10-year electronic medical records plan intended to make patient histories, X-rays and test results accessible from any hospital in the state, had proceeded too fast - apparently because of contractual obligations - for clinicians' feedback to influence it, Dr McCarthy said.

The potential for records to be linked to the wrong patient raised a serious risk they would be given incorrect treatment, she said, and the inability to compile multiple patient records into reports meant doctors could no longer evaluate new treatments or disease epidemics. "Simple audits and research projects are just impossible now," she said.

Really inspires confidence doesn’t it?

These difficulties are not confined to large metropolitan areas as this 2010 quote from the North Coast Area Health Service indicates:

In response to the difficulties our small sites experienced in using FirstNet, NCAHS continues to work with HSS to develop a FirstNet work flow for small rural sites.

Little appears to have changed since the 2009 implementation of this e-health software on the NSW North Coast.

If the reader happens to live in communities covered by the Hunter Urban Division of General Practice this sick software system is probably informing e-discharge summaries etc. forming part of the data collection trial run currently underway in the Newcastle and Hunter Valley region.

Building on these shifting sands, on 1 March 2011 Roxon’s baby, the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), awarded IBM a $23.6M dollar contract to develop nation-wide authentication system for electronic health records.

Facebook allows freedom of speech to degenerate into abuse

Once again Facebook is being used to support persons currently before the courts and, in this example the language used is beyond colourful.

Names have been redacted before the following comment is displayed here on North Coast Voices:

Wouldn't Justice Wood of Royal Commission fame (sic) cry into his wig if he knew about all the police corruption in the valley. These police are crims in blue - *****, thief, liar, *****, liar, woman basher, racist, *****, liar, kid basher, racist, *****, liar, racist, *****, liar, racist, kid basher! I'm not too well *****, liar, racist, incompetent . *****, liar, kid basher, racist. I WANT TO BE ELECTED ***** should buy all the scum bottle openers. REDNECK! Such is life NED

When is Facebook Inc going to take some responsibility for allowing pages containing such content to remain online?

The more things change the more they stay the same when it comes to gender inequality

It would be comfortable to say “Could only happen in America” when reading this study, which indicates that it is not only developing countries which favour male children. However one cannot escape the thought that the finding of this study might easily be mirrored in Australia.

Do parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the maritalstatus, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely to marry. Strikingly, we also find evidence that the gender of a child in utero affects shotgun marriages. Among women who have taken an ultrasound test during pregnancy, mothers who have a girl are less likely to be married at delivery than those who have a boy. Second, parents who have first-born girls are significantly more likely to be divorced. Third, after a divorce, fathers are much more likely to obtain custody of sons compared to daughters. These three factors have serious negative income and educational consequencesfor affected children. What explains these findings? In the last part of the paper, we turn to the relationship between child gender and fertility to help sort out parental gender bias from competing explanations for our findings. We show that the number of children is significantly higher in families with a first-born girl. Our estimates indicate that first-born daughters caused approximately 5500 more births per year, for atotal of 220,000 more births over the past 40 years. Taken individually, each piece of empirical evidence is not sufficient to establish the existence of parental gender bias. But taken together, the weight of the evidence supports the notion that parents in the U .S. favour boys over girls…….Our findings are important for several reasons. First, regardless of how one interprets ourfindings on family structure and fertility, we show that child gender matters. The results on the educational and economic outcomes indicate that the negative effects on children living in families where the first-born child is a girl are substantial. While our findings indicate that some o fthe negative consequences of a first-born daughter affect younger siblings of both genders, girls are overall more likely to be exposed to these negative effects. Moreover, if there is evidence of parental sex bias in family living arrangements and fertility decisions, it may be indicative ofother ways in which parents treat boys and girls unequally. For example, even in families where the parents are married, parents who prefer boys may give less attention and nurturing to their daughters. They may also devote fewer financial resources to their education and health. In this sense, our results are related to the existing literature that documents an unequal intra-household allocation of resources. [The Demand for Sons, GORDON B. DAHL University of California, San Diego, and NBER and ENRICO MORETTI University of California, Berkeley, and NBER,2008]