Out of the frying pan and into the fire for NSW & Qld regional newspapers?

In June 2016 when APN News & Media announced that it was selling its faltering Australian regional newspaper operations to News Corp, staffing levels at APN east coast regional newspapers had long ago been pared to the bone.

Now News Corp is also embarking on yet another round of staff reductions and work practice changes across its mastheads.

The Guardian, 11 April 2017:

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian tabloids are making the majority of their photographers and subeditors redundant in a radical cost-cutting move designed to keep the ailing newspaper business afloat.

The director of editorial management, Campbell Reid, said the restructure of the traditional newsroom was needed to “preserve in print and excel in digital”.

The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the Courier-Mail are set to lose dozens of staff each – the Queensland masthead alone will cut 45 – although the company is not revealing the total number of job losses.

The announcement follows a cost-cutting drive in December which saw 42 journalists, artists and photographers made redundant in a bid to slash $40m from News Corp.

Last week the Gold Coast Bulletin was told it had to lose 10 jobs, and sources said dozens of people had been quietly made redundant already this year across all the mastheads.

News Corp said the old model of staff photographers would be retired for a “hybrid model, consisting of a core team of photographic specialists, complemented by freelance and agency talent”.

At a meeting at Sydney’s Holt Street headquarters, the Daily Telegraph editor, Chris Dore, told staff the photographers would lose their permanent status but may be hired back as casuals and freelancers.

Staff at the Herald Sun were told News Corp “is in a fight for its life”.

There was no mention at the meeting of the company’s financial losses which are behind the move. In February News Corp posted a second-quarter loss of $287m and cited impairments in the Australian newspaper business as a key factor. The Australian editors were summoned to the US for a meeting about making substantial cuts to operations.

News described the changes as a modernisation of the newsroom which would “simplify in-house production and maximise the use of available print technology for print edition production”.

“Like every other business today, we have to identify opportunities to improve and modernise the way we work to become more efficient,” Reid said.

According to Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, 11 April 2017:

Management also flagged significant changes to work practices with earlier deadlines, greater copy sharing across cities and mastheads, and journalists taking up more responsibility for production elements and proofing their own work, which has journalists concerned about already stretched news gathering resources and maintaining the editorial standards of their mastheads.

                                                                              

Australia has the highest rate of land clearing in the developed world, according to the Dept. of Intergenerational Theft

https://youtu.be/9DBf40a3tLc

Australia has a land mass of 149,50,000 km² or est. 14.94 billion hectares.

According to the FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, GLOBAL FOREST RESOURCES ASSESSMENT 2015 the following figures are fact:

In 2015 only 16.2  per cent of Australia’s land mass was forest and another 32.7 per cent had another form of tree cover.

There are now only 5 million hectares of primary forest remaining in this country and we are losing an est. 201,600 hectares of this type of forest each year, principally due to commercial logging.

Mangroves now cover only 913,000 hectares of coastal land.

Introduced species tree cover, presumably for commercial forestry and orchards, totalled 1.02 million hectares in 2015.

Gotta love First Dog!

First Dog on the Moon

Quotes of the Week

The president doesn’t want to shoot this hostage [ObamaCare], but Democrats should be calling him up and begging him not to shoot the hostage. They should be grateful for the chance to negotiate a deal in which he merely cuts off all the hostage’s fingers. After all, who is the public gonna blame for the hostage’s murder: the people who loved it, or the guy with the gun shouting all of this through a bullhorn? [Journalist Eric Levitz writing in New York magazine on 12 April 2017]

It’s almost as if Centrelink set out to design the worst system possible. It’s as if the department worked at finding the most vindictive and imprecise arrangements through which to pursue the people it is supposed to serve, then put out a tender to see if they could be made more cruel. [The Saturday Paper, editorial, 15-21 April 2017]

Every man and his dog may soon have access to your personal medical history if you live in Australia

A federal government digital medical information storage and retrieval system, which will eventually contain information on every person permanently residing in Australia and which was hacked even before it publicly went online, is now going national – and it still has significant privacy problems.

The Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2017:

THE private health records of Australians can be accessed by more than half a million people under the latest bungle with the $2.2 billion electronic My Health Record.

News Corp Australia has learned that the privacy settings on the government’s computerised My Health Record, which lists every medicine a patient takes and records every medical visit and procedure, are automatically set on “universal access”.

This means every registered health practitioner in the nation — 650,000 people — can view them, not just the family GP, unless the patient specifically requested to opt out.

Occupational therapists working for an employer, doctors working for insurance companies, a dietitian, an optometrist or a dentist or their staff can view the record and see if individuals have a sexually transmitted disease, a mental illness, have had an abortion or is using Viagra.

“Potentially your employer’s occupational therapist can look at your record and get information they really shouldn’t be getting access to, its confidential data,” says former AMA president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal who was a government consultant on the My Health Record.

The bungle came about because the record was originally set up as an opt in system and when people set up their record they were given the option to set a PIN number to protect the information and determine who got to see it.

Nearly four million people set up a My Health Record under the opt in system but doctors weren’t using it because four years after it was established 83 per cent of Australians still did not have one.

Last year the Turnbull Government trialled turning the failed record into an opt out system.

One million people in the Nepean Blue Mountains area of NSW and Northern Queensland were given a record unless they opted out.

News Corp has now learned only 147 of these one million Australians automatically given a record under the trial set up a PIN number to protect their health information.

“147 My Health Records created in the trials have access controls set to restrict which healthcare providers can see the record, or have controls restricting access to certain documents in the record,” the Department said.

“This equates to 0.0151 per cent of My Health Records automatically created in the trials. This is consistent with the rates of access controls set by those who have opted to register for a My Health Record,” a spokeswoman for the department said.

The My Health Record lists a person’s medications and allergies, doctors can upload a health summary about the person’s health problems, eventually the system will include X-ray results, pathology results, hospital discharge summaries and other data that for the first time can be shared between medical practitioners.

The privacy problem is about to affect everyone because two weeks ago state and federal health ministers agreed to give every Australian a My Health Record unless they opt out.

This decision was made even though the results of the original opt out trial have never been made public.

And it means the health records of every Australian will soon be on open access.

The Australian, 27 March 2017:

Companies bidding for the Medicare digital payments system have been given the option of proposing a new identity card to protect against fraud and improve system capabilities.

As the federal government pushes ahead with electronic health records, in anticipation of a digital health revolution, The Australian has learned the Department of Health has made identity management a key part of the new payments system and left it open to companies to propose alter­natives.

Companies may suggest alternatives to the green Medicare card — which holds no data, just a magnetic strip and numbers for indiv­iduals whose information is stored in a database — and forms of identity for veterans’ affairs, aged care and related payments.

It would be the biggest shift since the Howard government proposed the Australian Access Card, a broad-function smartcard that attracted privacy concerns and comparisons to the ill-fated Australia Card of the 1980s and was dumped by the incoming Rudd government.

A departmental spokeswoman emphasised that there was no proposal for a new identity card under moves to develop a new digital payments system.

“While the Depart­ment of Health has not been prescriptive, the presumption is that the Medicare card and number will continue to be the basis for identification,” she said.

The option for a new identity management solution came after health ministers decided on Friday that the My Health Rec­ord system would be opt-out, making electronic medical records compulsory for all Australians unless they said otherwise, despite trials of that model having yet to report.

Australian Doctor, 27 March 2017:

Australian health ministers have officially agreed to a national opt-out model under which every patient will have a MyHealth Record created for them by default.

Yet precisely when the model will be rolled out remains to be seen.

Federal, state and territory health ministers met in Melbourne on Friday, where, according to a communique, they agreed "to a national opt-out model for long-term participation arrangements" in the My Health Record system.

The agreement precedes the release of findings from two pilot trials of opt-out enrolment systems, in North Queensland and NSW's Blue Mountains, which included nearly one million patients.

A little history…….

News.com.au, 11 September 2016:

THE man who led the dumped UK digital health record system has been put in charge of Australia’s bungled $1 billion e-health record and is being paid as much as the Prime Minister to fix it.

Former journalist Tim Kelsey will be paid a total remuneration package worth $522,240 a year, almost the same as Malcolm Turnbull and just shy of the $548,360 paid to the Chief of the Navy and more than the Chief Scientist, the head of the Fair Work Commission and the Inspector General of Taxation, a remuneration tribunal determination reveals.

The former NHS executive is an interesting appointment as CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency because he was in charge of the UK digital health records scheme Care.data dumped by the UK’s National Health System in July.

The Department of Health stated that Mr Kelsey is uniquely suited to the role because of his experience with data and digital platforms in health and personal privacy.

The Care.data scheme to store patients’ medical information in a single database suffered multiple delays and was then scrapped after major problems emerged over patient confidentiality.

It was similar to Australia’s My Health Record that Mr Kelsey will now oversee.

And some Americans still believe Donald Trump has a high IQ?

When US President Donald Trump began receiving his intelligence briefings in January, his team made a request: The president, they said, was a visual and auditory learner. Would the briefers please cut down on the number of words in the daily briefing book and instead use more graphics and pictures? [The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April 2017]

Clarence Valley councillors bite the bullet in order to save the local government area from threat of a state government-imposed administrator

Mayor: Jim Simmons    

A/General Manager: Ashley Lindsay                                                                                                                           

LOCKED BAG 23 GRAFTON NSW 2460

Telephone: (02) 6643 0200

Fax: (02) 6642 7647

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 19, 2017

Making the Clarence Valley Council financially sustainable

CLARENCE Valley Council has voted to introduce a range of measures to improve its long-term financial position and help it meet the NSW Government’s Fit for the Future benchmarks.

The measures include applying for a special rates variation of 8% each year for three years, including an estimated rate pegged limit of 2%. The cumulative impact would be a rise in the  general rate of 25.9%, which would be retained permanently in council’s rate base. Council will also implement a host of savings measures totalling more than $8 million over four years.

Acting general manager, Ashley Lindsay, said a special rates variation, if approved, would raise an additional $7.08 million over three years.

“These measures will improve our financial position by more than $15 million over four years,” he said.

“None of this will be easy. No-one wants to pay more rates and we don’t want to charge them, but the harsh reality is the only alternative to a special rates variation is deep cuts to, or the elimination of, many of the services council provides and the community expects.

“We have been told by the Office of Local Government we need to have a balanced operating result by 2021.

“The cost-cutting measures we will introduce result in the loss of the equivalent of 24.5 full time staff positions, cuts to a range of services and better cost recovery on others. We have done everything possible to keep rate rises to a minimum.”

At the council meeting on Tuesday night, Cr Andrew Baker said that in 2012 the NSW Government’s TCorp identified the need for council to make efficiency savings and introduce a special rates variation.

He said that since then he and fellow councillors had tried to find ways to make the council financially sustainable without the need for a rates variation.

“I’m certain that each councillor that is here today was elected with an ambition to not increase the rates, to not cut services, to not cut employment, to not reduce facilities and amenities, to not increase debt and to provide responsible governance,” he said.

“Council has individually and collectively examined, debated, challenged and examined again every suggestion in every possible way to deliver on those noble aspirations of no rates increases, no service cuts, no employment reductions, no reduced facilities and amenities, and no more debt.

“While I can’t see how we can avoid a rates increase, I can say we have all made a big attempt to do just that.

“We’ve exhausted the discovery of all options and examined the possibilities and variations; we’ve called for and listened to expert advice, numerous reports and finance models. Some advice we have accepted and some we haven’t.

“We’ve looked for the best outcomes and least pain for our residents and ratepayers.”

Cr Peter Ellem said councillors had no choice but to put their hard hats on and make unpopular decisions to meet the State Government's Fit for The Future benchmarks to become financially sustainable by the end of the current four-year term, and indeed, for the decade thereafter.

“It is the shared responsibility of the nine duly-elected councillors, and not that of a financial controller or administrator, to adopt a draft package of job cuts, to be made in full consultation with the United Services Union, efficiency savings, and regrettably rate increases, to be put up for community consultation,” he said.

Mr Lindsay said council would seek the views of the community before reaching a final decision on a special rates variation application and some of the efficiency measures, and would consider a report at its May meeting on a schedule for community engagement.

Release ends. 

UPDATE

The Daily Examiner, 20 April 2017:

A pre-election survey by The DEX pinned four councillors against the SRV and only two, Cr Debrah Novak and Cr Greg Clancy, remained true to their word……

Cr Toms said voting for the SRV was a hard pill to swallow.

"I made declarations that I wanted better financial management and I wouldn't support the SRV and I wouldn't support excessive rate increase," she said.

"But I've had to change that position.

"When I had that position, I truly meant it... but now I have a lot more information and after a full day with the Office of Local Government (I have changed my mind)."

Cr Toms said despite the community backlash, the councillors had to make the decision.

"It's easy to criticise, people think we do the wrong thing, but the reality is that the councillors make the best decisions they can," Cr Toms said.

"I did change my mind over the SRV and that was also a very difficult decision to make, but I have to make it and I do believe I didn't have a choice."

The adopted recommendation included a detailed report which outlined that from 2017/18 to 2019/20, the council would make $15,566,987, which is more than the council's total debt of $15,343,127. The rates rise is to be rolled out 8% each year over three years which will amount to an expected total of $7.8million in revenue to come from the SRV.

Seven of the nine councillors voted for the SRV recommendation.

It will go to community consultation at the May council meeting……..

Cr Peter Ellem said the council had no choice but to make the unpopular decision.

"I believe that it is the shared responsibility of the nine duly-elected councillors, and not that of a financial controller or administrator, to adopt a draft package of job cuts, to be made in full consultation with the United Services Union, efficiency savings, and regrettably rate increases, to be put up for community consultation," Cr Ellem said.

"As a new councillor I am wiser because we have demanded and recently received more detailed information on the operational side of things, and greater clarity from the Office of Local Government."

Cr Ellem said fixing the $15million "black hole" which the new council has inherited from a "clunky forced amalgamation" needed addressing.

"My personal preference would be for the SRV component of this suite of measures to be lower than the 8% per year, but when we consult with ratepayers and residents in coming months it will become clear that a lower SRV will mean deeper cuts to local jobs and valued, if not cherished, services," he said.

Echoes of the unfortunate term of a contentious general manager linger

On 22 May 2014 North Coast Voices posted mention of Clarence Valley Council's refusal to follow the Information Commissioner's recommendation to allow a staff member access to information in a report on his conduct (which found no corrupt conduct), when in February 2014 at Item 14.005/14 they unanimously agreed to change the wording of the existing April 2013 Privacy Management Plan so that it appears to significantly depart from the Model Plan supplied by the NSW Division of Local Government.

This week the NSW Court List contained mention of this case before the NSW Industrial Relations Commission on 3 May 2017:

Francis Jon Hallam v Clarence Valley Council

  

Yes, the allegedly destabilizing element may have been removed from Clarence Valley Council but the ripple effect flows on.