The entitlement of age

This paper argues that Australia\u27s current retirement income system is inadequate for meeting the longevity challenge, does not allow people to sufficiently manage longevity risk, and promotes financial inequality. Introduction Out of the myriad of issues that relate to increased life expectancy and ageing, money looms large. Will people have sufficient private savings to stretch across longer lives? Will governments be able to pay for rising health and welfare expenditure? The prevailing feeling is of uncertainty, not least because people recognise that they are likely to live longer, but also because they don’t have a gauge of just how long tha t is likely to be. This report is concerned with incomes in later life and securing a minimum baseline standard of living for people in that phase. It stems from a normative position that all people in our society are entitled to a good quality of life across longer lives, with a minimum income that keeps them out of poverty. Australians are living much longer than either they or the policy-makers ever contemplated. Not a couple of years longer, but whole decades longer. Private savings and public benefits have to stretch further. For some Australians the prospect of longer lives won’t matter too much. They will float along into retirement as if nothing much changed; their lives will look much the same as they did before. In fact, from their vantage point things look very good indeed. For a whole other group of Australians, the changing conditions are keenly felt. Although the social compact promised them a decent standard of living across their lives, things just didn’t work out that way. This class of Australians is the most financially vulnerable in later years. They are the women who have had children, carers, the long-term unemployed and those who are in part-time, casual or contract work. Their income has been patchy and, when they are earning, it is often below the average wage, meaning that their superannuation payments are sporadic and low. At various times during their lives they have been paid no superannuation at all. They are the people who are more likely to have rented property rather than being homeowners and, while they would have liked to have worked into their 60s or later, they struggle to retain or find work. Unsurprisingly, the amount of superannuation savings which this section of society retires on is not enough to provide an adequate standard of living. Even when you take into consideration that the superannuation system will mature and private savings will accrue across whole working lives, the nature of their circumstances during working life prevents them from saving enough. The result of inadequate private savings is a lower standard of living. But what does this mean in human terms, in the experience of everyday life? It means putting on the heater for only an hour a day in the middle of winter. It means saying no to the invitation to go out for dinner, or to see a film. It means only buying meat or fish once a month. It means putting off that doctor’s appointment, again. This paper argues that the current retirement income system is inadequate to meet the longevity challenge. It does not allow people to sufficiently manage longevity risk and it promotes financial inequality. It is manifestly unfair that people who do not need public money should receive it, through either the age pension or superannuation tax concessions, when others who are more needy are struggling. So, what of it? What does it matter that certain people have less in retirement, when these are the same people who are most likely to have had less all their lives? It matters because our retirement income system was established so that all Australians would have enough for a modest standard of living in retirement. It matters that the system is not fulfilling its aims. A second reason, which informs the former, is that there is a moral basis for saying that vulnerable people should be able to live their later years with a decent standard of living. This is a question of ensuring that all people age with dignity

The Ghost of National Superannuation

The thesis uses the case study of Australian superannuation to examine the conditions for systemic policy change. It tells the history of a modern reform. Long-running debates about superannuation policy have led to the system that Australians know today. A narrative of superannuation emerges, showing that it was a product of long-term institutional continuities, more than existing narratives would suggest. The theory of historical institutionalism is brought to bear to argue that the introduction of Australia's national superannuation system was the evolution of a welfare system whose architecture was established around the time of Australian Federation. Occupational superannuation had existed in Australia since the 1840s, old age pension schemes were introduced in NSW, Victoria and Queensland in the 1890s, and the Commonwealth Old Age Pension was introduced in 1908. The thesis traces the history of debates about public pension financing and the eventual pivot towards Australia's unique state-mandated, private superannuation system based on defined contributions. Throughout this history, the thesis considers the cross-cutting themes of gender coverage, influences on policy makers and risk. The thesis is arranged around the points in time when the introduction of a national superannuation system was considered and legislated by Australian governments. It moves through the 1890s during the old age pension debates; the 1920s and the Royal Commission on National Insurance and National Insurance legislation introduced by the Bruce government; the 1930s and the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act, passed but never implemented by the Lyons government; the 1970s and the Whitlam government's proposal for national superannuation, and then, finally, the introduction of the modern system in 1992 under the Keating government's "Superannuation Guarantee." After years of opposition, following World War II the Australian Labor Party changed its policy to support contributory pensions. The policy rhetoric towards this change began after World War II. Occupational superannuation was radically reconceived and remodelled by labour reformers between the 1970s and the early 1990s, creating a new pathway of policy development and "layering" new elements so that the institution would serve a broad working constituency. During the term of the Hawke and Keating governments, there was a "critical juncture" in superannuation policy but incremental change was occurring too. This points to the limits of institutional theory, in which different modes of change are said to occur at different points in time. The history of superannuation policy is drawn into the present by looking at the period between the introduction of the Superannuation Guarantee in 1992 and 2019. It focuses on the changes in respect of "choice of fund," arguing that heavily politicised debates over choice over superannuation fund were the result of the decision to create a private system of superannuation. The Choice of Fund legislation in 2005 and the MySuper reforms in 2013 that deal with the choice of superannuation fund are examples of policy "layering" and "displacement," reflecting the power struggle between the Labor Party and the conservative parties to control financial flows in the system. This struggle was one which labour actors set themselves up for by establishing superannuation within an industrial framework debate rather than as a government scheme. Why does systemic policy change happen when it happens? Why does reform go in one direction rather than another? Why do political parties introduce policies that their predecessors opposed in the past? These are the fundamental questions with which this thesis grapples

Obstacle-aware Adaptive Informative Path Planning for UAV-based Target Search

Target search with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is relevant problem to many scenarios, e.g., search and rescue (SaR). However, a key challenge is planning paths for maximal search efficiency given flight time constraints. To address this, we propose the Obstacle-aware Adaptive Informative Path Planning (OA-IPP) algorithm for target search in cluttered environments using UAVs. Our approach leverages a layered planning strategy using a Gaussian Process (GP)-based model of target occupancy to generate informative paths in continuous 3D space. Within this framework, we introduce an adaptive replanning scheme which allows us to trade off between information gain, field coverage, sensor performance, and collision avoidance for efficient target detection. Extensive simulations show that our OA-IPP method performs better than state-of-the-art planners, and we demonstrate its application in a realistic urban SaR scenario.Comment: Paper accepted for International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-2019) to be held at Montreal, Canad

Polynomial approximations to Bessel functions

Bessel functions appear in numerous physical problems, and play an important role in many electromagnetic scattering problems. There is no closed form expression for Bessel functions so that approximations suitable for numerical evaluation are necessary in applications. Gross [1] has derived interesting polynomial approximations to the zerothand first-order Bessel functions of the first kind for small arguments, that arise from an integral that occurs in an electromagnetic scattering problem. We study here in detail properties of these approximations. First we extend the analysis in [1] to derive corresponding polynomial approximations for Bessel functions of any integer order. Second we show that as the degree of the polynomial approximation increases, it converges to the Taylor series expansion. Third we compare the accuracy of the polynomial approximations to that of the truncated Taylor series of the same order

C-blox: A Scalable and Consistent TSDF-based Dense Mapping Approach

In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making. Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps from visual sensors providing depth information. However, during operation over longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability. Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a collection of overlapping TSDF subvolumes. These subvolumes are localized through feature-based camera tracking and bundle adjustment. Our main contribution is a pipeline for identifying stable regions in the map, and to fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on a publicly available dataset and simulation engine, and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps. Finally we demonstrate our approach running in real-time on-board a lightweight MAV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, conferenc

Image recovery from irregularly located spectral samples

Recovery of magnetic resonance images from irregular sampling sets is investigated from the point of view of moment discretization of the Fredholm equation of the first kind. The limited spatial extent of the object is known a priori and the sampling schemes considered each have mean density lower than that imposed by the Nyquist limit. The recovery formula obtained has the same form as a standard irregular sampling technique. A practical means of performing the recovery for very large data sets by utilising the block Toeplitz structure of the matrix involved is presented

Improved success rate and stability for phase retrieval by including randomized overrelaxation in the hybrid input output algorithm

In this paper, we study the success rate of the reconstruction of objects of finite extent given the magnitude of its Fourier transform and its geometrical shape. We demonstrate that the commonly used combination of the hybrid input output and error reduction algorithm is significantly outperformed by an extension of this algorithm based on randomized overrelaxation. In most cases, this extension tremendously enhances the success rate of reconstructions for a fixed number of iterations as compared to reconstructions solely based on the traditional algorithm. The good scaling properties in terms of computational time and memory requirements of the original algorithm are not influenced by this extension.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Phase Retrieval with Random Phase Illumination

This paper presents a detailed, numerical study on the performance of the standard phasing algorithms with random phase illumination (RPI). Phasing with high resolution RPI and the oversampling ratio $\sigma=4$ determines a unique phasing solution up to a global phase factor. Under this condition, the standard phasing algorithms converge rapidly to the true solution without stagnation. Excellent approximation is achieved after a small number of iterations, not just with high resolution but also low resolution RPI in the presence of additive as well multiplicative noises. It is shown that RPI with $\sigma=2$ is sufficient for phasing complex-valued images under a sector condition and $\sigma=1$ for phasing nonnegative images. The Error Reduction algorithm with RPI is proved to converge to the true solution under proper conditions

A novel approach to aquatic weed control and habitat restoration using biodegradable jute matting

This technical paper presents results from pilot field trials conducted on the novel use of a biodegradable jute material to eradicate the highly invasive aquatic macrophyte Lagarosiphon major Ridley from Lough Corrib, Ireland. The results demonstrate the ability of the jute material to comprehensively kill L. major and to restore native macrophyte communities to areas of the lake that were previously overgrown with this priority invasive species. To date, eight indigenous plant species (four charophytes and four angiosperms) have been recorded growing through the loose-weave jute fabric. However, no Lagarosiphon has been recorded as doing so. This material has the potential for broader application in the management of nuisance aquatic weeds and in the restoration of native flora extirpated by these alien species

Current status of Ireland's newest invasive species -the Asian clam Corbicula fluminea (Müller, 1774)

The Asian clam Corbicula fluminea was first discovered in Ireland in the Rivers Barrow and Nore in 2010. Scuba diving surveys were the primary sampling method used to determine the detailed distribution of this species in the two rivers. Sustainable populations of Asian clam were present in the tidal freshwater reaches of both rivers. No clams were present upstream of the tidal limit. A maximum density of 9,636 individuals m-2 was recorded in the River Barrow. This paper presents some basic metrics in relation to the populations present in these two connected river systems