Latest Story
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Maintain the pressure on regulatory reform
John Tucker | May 15, 2009Better regulation is about informed choice between regulatory options.
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WiFi & the NBN
Dave Sag | May 14, 2009Why is WiFi so open in the rest of the world but so closed in Australia?
I am not about to argue that the Government’s proposed National Broadband Network is a waste of money because everyone these days is going WiFi, that’s just crazy talk and the many punters who have been expressing that opinion clearly know nothing about the issue at all.
The NBN is about data to the home and the office, WiFi is for roaming around within the home, the office or, in this case the train. Yes I am writing this post from a train in the UK. The bandwidth is not what you’d call broadband but it’s good enough that I can say hi to my wife via iChat before she hits the hay back home.
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Friends with Budgets
Raz Chorev | May 13, 2009In business, as in life, friends are more accesible than strangers.
Friendship is fundamental to the Chinese approach to doing business. Most Westerners will do business for a while, before becoming friends. The Chinese take the opposite approach: there’s slim chance of doing business, if you’re not friends first!
So how can we learn from the Chinese to start building our network of friends we may be able to do business with?
People are fed up with the cold calling approach to sales, and the power of traditional advertising is diminishing. Introductions are the first step. If you can find a common contact and ask them to facilitate the connection your success rate will be a lot higher.
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Focusing on Risk
patrickcallioni | May 11, 2009Regulation in fields such as health and policing has evolved thanks to risk management standardisation, so too should financial regulation.
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Broadband Reform: Getting it right
madepercy | May 11, 2009Australia could learn from Canada what a meaningful public consultation on broadband reform looks like.
The Commonwealth’s decision to build the National Broadband Network (NBN) provides an opportunity to fix the policy failures of the last two decades. Despite liberalising the telecommunications industry in the early 1990s, Australia fell well behind similar nations such as Canada in the deployment and take-up of broadband services by the early 2000s. Many believed that Telstra was responsible for the slow deployment and adoption of broadband, but recent statistics suggest otherwise. On many counts, Australia and Canada are on par for average prices and speeds, but at June last year, Australian households were still 12% behind their Canadian counterparts.
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Jobs Not Synonymous with Careers
Raz Chorev | May 11, 2009I can't promise that you won't have to start from scratch to define your job, but I can promise you it will be worth the effort.
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Forward with fairness for asylum seeker policy
Kerry Murphy | May 8, 2009A shift in the language reflects a more reasoned approach to the issue of asylum seekers.
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Anti-Discrimination
Hani Montan | May 6, 2009Education, and understanding history is essential to combatting racial discrimination
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Why the Financial System Matters
patrickcallioni | May 5, 2009The economy is like a game of musical chairs, and when the music stops, we don't want crooks and cheats to be the only ones who can find a seat.
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Jobless families need work
Jessica.Brown | May 5, 2009An economic downturn should be no excuse to lose the ground we have already won in reducing the number of jobless Australian families.
Despite Australia coming off the back of a remarkable economic boom and enjoying historically low unemployment rates, in late 2008 almost one in eight Australian children lived in a family where no parent worked. Unbelievably, this figure is actually a marked improvement: family joblessness reached its peak in the mid 1990s when more than one in six children lived in jobless households.
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The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library
David.Westgate | May 4, 2009This is one library where you won't be told to ssshhhhh!
Sometimes you hear about ideas, which whilst so simple are yet so smart that you think to yourself why hasn't someone done this before? The Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library is one such idea.
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Broadband Reform: Be Heard
sally.rose | May 4, 2009A major hindrance to the effectiveness of government-run public consultations is that most of us often have no idea just how much we actually care until it's too late.
