As a way of kickstarting the year, Tony Boyd and Michael Smith of the Australian Financial Review decided to survey some of Australia’s top CEO’s from banking, resources, media, property, insurance, infrastructure and retail to find out their predictions for 2015. The questions asked are Continue reading What our top CEO’s think about sustainability, energy and women in the workplace.
Wikepedia is a wonderful tool that most of us have come across in our day to day lives. It is the new information tool of the masses, regulated and edited by the Wikemedia Foundation staff, and society at large. We use it for research and more often than not, to settle arguments – confounding friends and enemies with unbelievable facts and weird wisdom. Continue reading Why Wikipedia isn’t just for winning arguments and last minute reports
In August this year, The Federal government released the Forrest Report, a policy doctrine of sorts delivered by Andrew Forrest to inform Prime Minister Tony Abbot’s approach to indigenous affairs in Australia. The response to the content of this report has been mixed; some hailing it as a comprehensive work that will evolve the place of indigenous Australians in our society, whilst others have called it an ignorant and idealistic document that ignores evidence-based research. Two months on, Sustaining People looks at the impact of Australian business on the indigenous community, and what is being done, and what could be done better. Continue reading The Forrest Report: Closing The Gap?
“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic monumental changes.”
Merely a quote from character Sam Seaborne, of the critically acclaimed US political drama The West Wing, this sentiment nevertheless rings true as the most promising way to lift a society out of the quagmire of poverty and ill-health.
Currently, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) people are severely under-represented in local and private education programs, with only around 10% of aboriginal children graduating from high schools nationally. Research from the last decade shows that ASTI students are often disadvantaged due to language barriers in early conceptual development and a mismatch between cultural beliefs and national education values. Indeed, by the time they start year one, 60% of ATSI children are behind developmentally. Later, at a university level, adjusting to socio-economic challenges in a predominantly non-ATSI student population can prove extremely difficult. Continue reading CSIRO invests $28.8 million in Indigenous Education
JFK got it right when he spoke those immortalised words, signifying that diversity should be a way of celebrating similarities and using cultural differences to build a brighter future for the global community. Of course he was talking about banning nuclear weapons, but the sentiment is one that translates well into our contemporary setting. Diversity is now more than ever, an important rhetoric to shape the way that Australians do business now and in the future.
A new report released by the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA) states that people of Asian descent are not being represented fairly or equally in the workplace. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Index of Australian Social Trends records that 9.6% of the Australian population comes from East, Central or Southern Asia; the DCA’s new Cracking the Cultural Ceiling Report launched yesterday in Sydney reveals that Continue reading Redesigning the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’
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