Consular conundrum: the rising demands and diminishing means for assisting Australians overseas

Australians are travelling more than ever. In 2012, they took more than eight million trips overseas, more than double the number a decade ago.  Public expectations of the assistance government can provide when travellers encounter trouble are rapidly rising, fuelled by intense media and political attention given to high-profile cases. These rising demands on Australia’s consular service are becoming increasingly difficult to meet. How can DFAT manage the increased consular workload in a tight fiscal environment, without neglecting Australia’s other foreign policy priorities.Key findings:Rising international travel, combined with changing traveller demographics, activities and destinations, are increasing the burden and complexity of the consular workload. Media attention on prominent cases tempts politicians to override departmental protocols and consular service charters to provide higher levels of attention and service, bidding up the level of service Australians expect when they encounter trouble overseas.This comes at a time when DFAT’s resourcing is already stretched to the limit from decades of bipartisan neglect. Diverting scant resources to consular work compromises the department’s overall responsibilities.With demands on the consular service continuing to rise, solutions must be found. Government should increase funding for consular services, in particular through a ‘consular levy’, either on the cost of a passport or on an airline ticket

Lowy Institute poll 2015

This poll investigates Australian attitudes to military participation in Iraq, the role the Government should play in the upcoming international climate negotiations, views on foreign investment in real estate, feelings about nations such as China and Indonesia, and attitudes to a range of foreign leaders. Overview After a year marked by an unusual intensity in Australia’s interactions with the world, the 2015 Lowy Institute Poll includes findings from a mix of new questions together with established tracking questions on some of the critical issues of our time. In this year’s Poll, we asked Australians about risks to Australia’s security such as terrorism and the risk of military conflict in our region. The Poll investigates attitudes to military participation in Iraq, the role the Government should play in the upcoming international climate negotiations, views on foreign investment in real estate, feelings about nations such as China and Indonesia, and attitudes to a range of foreign leaders. In the eleven years of the Lowy Institute Poll, our goal has been to broaden and deepen the debate about Australia’s foreign policy, based on real data on how Australians think about the world. The 2015 Lowy Institute Poll continues this tradition, with a fascinating set of new results. Key findings This year’s Poll has recorded the lowest feeling of safety among Australians, and the sharpest decline in optimism about the nation’s economic performance in the world, in our 11-year polling history. A majority (69%) see Islamic State as a high risk to Australia\u27s security, and 69% support Australia’s military participation in Iraq, while only 20% think it makes Australia safer from terrorism in the future. The Poll has recorded the third consecutive rise in Australians’ concern about global warmin

2015 Lowy Institute polling: Indonesia and the death penalty

Overview: New polling commissioned by the Lowy Institute following the executions in Indonesia of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran last week suggests that Australians have a strong preference for a restrained diplomatic response from the Australian Government. ‘Private diplomatic protests’ are the course of action most Australian adults would prefer their Government to take, with 59% agreeing with this approach when presented with five potential Government responses following the execution of an Australian citizen overseas. Only a minority (42%) say that Australia ‘should recall Australia’s ambassador’, despite the Government announcing the recall of Australia’s Ambassador to Jakarta last week and his subsequent return to Australia on 4 May. There is scant support for suspending Australian aid projects (28% agreeing) or suspending military and law enforcement cooperation (27%). The least supported action is for applying trade sanctions (24% agreeing).  Attitudes have shifted very little since Lowy Institute polling on this question earlier in the year, with the exception of the preference for private diplomatic protests (down from 73% support before the executions) and for recalling Australia’s ambassador (up from 33% before the executions). &nbsp

Parachute Engineers in Combat, Ortona 1943: A German Perspective

In late 1943, Allied forces were fighting their way up the Italian peninsula. It was tough going. Broken terrain hindered the advance and well-armed, well-led German defenders fought for nearly every river corssing, hill, and village. On 6 December, Canadian troops, operating on the far right of the Allied line, began to cross the Moro River on the Adriatic coast, battling north through a series of small towns, farms, and ravines. First Canadian Infantry Division under Major-General Chris Vokes, pushing up the coastal highway, met bitter resistance at “The Gully,” a natural feature just north of the Moro. After being driven from this objective, German troops of the 76th Panzer Corps, including two elite parachute battalions, prepared to defend the ancient coastal town of Ortona, whose stout buildings provided scores of excellent defensive positions. The Canadians attacked nevertheless and spent the Christmas season in a bloody house-to-house struggle against determined opposition. By 27 December, with German troops retreating northward, the Canadians had prevailed, though at heavy cost. The Loyal Edmonton Regiment suffered 172 casualties at Ortona, the Seaforth Highlanders 103. Other units’ losses in and around the town, including those of the 12th Armoured Regiment Three Rivers Regiment, brought total Canadian casualties during the battle to 350. While there are numerous Canadian accounts of the battle of Ortona, there are few accounts in English of the fighting from the German perspective. Recently the Canadian War Museum acquired a copy of the following memoir through the good offices of Alex MacQuarrie of HSN Linguistic Services, Ottawa. The narrative, translated by Mr. MacQuarrie, is written by Parachute Combat Engineer Carl Bayerlein (Service No. L25475), 3rd Platoon, 3rd Company, 1st Parachute Combat Engineer Battalion, 1 Parachute Infantry Division. It covers the period of 10–27 December 1943 and consists of two parts: a day-by-day diary account, and a somewhat longer summary, based on the diary entries, but compiled in the early 1990s. The edited version that follows is drawn from the summary account

A hidden Markov model-based acoustic cicada detector for crowdsourced smartphone biodiversity monitoring

In recent years, the field of computational sustainability has striven to apply artificial intelligence techniques to solve ecological and environmental problems. In ecology, a key issue for the safeguarding of our planet is the monitoring of biodiversity. Automated acoustic recognition of species aims to provide a cost-effective method for biodiversity monitoring. This is particularly appealing for detecting endangered animals with a distinctive call, such as the New Forest cicada. To this end, we pursue a crowdsourcing approach, whereby the millions of visitors to the New Forest, where this insect was historically found, will help to monitor its presence by means of a smartphone app that can detect its mating call. Existing research in the field of acoustic insect detection has typically focused upon the classification of recordings collected from fixed field microphones. Such approaches segment a lengthy audio recording into individual segments of insect activity, which are independently classified using cepstral coefficients extracted from the recording as features. This paper reports on a contrasting approach, whereby we use crowdsourcing to collect recordings via a smartphone app, and present an immediate feedback to the users as to whether an insect has been found. Our classification approach does not remove silent parts of the recording via segmentation, but instead uses the temporal patterns throughout each recording to classify the insects present. We show that our approach can successfully discriminate between the call of the New Forest cicada and similar insects found in the New Forest, and is robust to common types of environment noise. A large scale trial deployment of our smartphone app collected over 6000 reports of insect activity from over 1000 users. Despite the cicada not having been rediscovered in the New Forest, the effectiveness of this approach was confirmed for both the detection algorithm, which successfully identified the same cicada through the app in countries where the same species is still present, and of the crowdsourcing methodology, which collected a vast number of recordings and involved thousands of contributors.</p

Using hidden Markov models for iterative non-intrusive appliance monitoring

Non-intrusive appliance load monitoring is the process of breaking down a household’s total electricity consumption into its contributing appliances. In this paper we propose an approach by which individual appliances are iteratively separated from the aggregate load. Our approach does not require training data to be collected by sub-metering individual appliances. Instead, prior models of general appliance types are tuned to specific appliance instances using only signatures extracted from the aggregate load. The tuned appliance models are used to estimate each appliance’s load, which is subsequently subtracted from the aggregate load. We evaluate our approach using the REDD data set, and show that it can disaggregate 35% of a typical household’s total energy consumption to an accuracy of 83% by only disaggregating three of its highest energy consuming appliances

Analysing the Impact of Natural Hazards in Small Economies: The Caribbean Case

This paper analyses the impact of natural disasters in the Caribbean. The economic impact of natural disasters in the region has been significant, resulting in widespread destruction of the productive economy. This paper presents the main macroeconomic impact of disasters, e.g., a deteriorating fiscal balance, a collapse of growth and a worsening external balance, as a consequence of damage resulting from the event. By making special reference to the small-island developing state nature of many countries in the region, valuable lessons of the impact of such disasters on the capital stock can be learnt, particularly as the interruption of production of goods and services can be particularly devastating in an environment where few large sectors (agriculture, tourism) dominate the economic landscape.natural disasters, Caribbean, diversification, trade, environment