The structural behaviour of concrete at elevated temperatures

Imperial Users onl

Conservation Reserve Program Participation and Acreage Enrollment of Working Farms

Among Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) participants, there is a distinction between farm households using the program to ease out of farming and those using the program to augment production receipts. We find evidence that factors other than farm profitability and environmental factors may influence program participation of farmers who continue agricultural production. Program payments and farm size positively correlate with the amount of land enrolled in the CRP, and characteristics of participants in land retirement and working-lands CRP components are similar.Environmental Economics and Policy,

The Challenges Faced by Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations from the ’67 Referendum to the Current National Partnership on Closing the Gap

This seminar discusses three major periods of Aboriginal policy involving Aboriginal community-controlled service organisations. In the first period considered, Aboriginal people in the Kimberley were able to leave the Native Welfare period behind following the 1967 referendum that allowed the Commonwealth to fund Aboriginal progress. The limits to their liberty on missions and cattle stations were progressively removed and they entered the ‘self-determination’ era. This seminar first looks at the heyday of Aboriginal community-controlled organisations that followed from this. From the mid-70s to the mid-90s Aboriginal people across Australia took control of their own destiny through their own resource agencies, medical and legal services, land councils, art centres, language centres, and through national elected advocate bodies, culminating in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). The start of this seminar will draw on Patrick’s own experience in the early 80s, and use photographs of the period, to show how Kimberley community-controlled organisations expressed Aboriginal self-determination in extremely impoverished circumstances, and kickstarted much of the Aboriginal infrastructure we see today. Since the mid-90s the Commonwealth has backtracked on its commitment to self-determination. ATSIC was abolished in 2005. This was a landmark in the second, neo-liberal, period that the seminar considers. Kimberley community organisations were made to compete with other service providers under contract to government, and under much more intrusive control. The seminar will discuss how community-controlled organisations have adapted to retain their commitment to self-determination in this challenging environment, and emphasise their continuity and history in contrast to the constantly churning government workers that they answered to. Finally, the seminar will look at new hope on the horizon, with both the Commonwealth and the States recommitting themselves to service delivery through Aboriginal community-controlled organisations. This has been negotiated by a relatively new national representative body that has tended to fly under the mainstream radar – the Coalition of Peaks. Members of the Coalition of Peaks sit on the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, together with ministers of all governments and a representative of local government. The Joint Council oversees the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The National Agreement commits to using Aboriginal organisations for its programmes. The new CTG targets are themselves an improvement on the old model, but importantly are to be delivered within a new framework that re-sets the relationship of Aboriginal people with governments. The Coalition of Peaks has at least equal representation on the Joint Council and contributes one of the co-Chairs. The new Closing the Gap targets were negotiated by the Coalition of Peaks and include structural changes to the way that services are delivered. One important structural change is the commitment to re-build the Aboriginal community controlled sector and channel increased funding through it to achieve Closing the Gap targets. The final part of this seminar will discuss these recent developments and consider whether they herald a new period of Aboriginal self- determination

Refused Service: ‘Closing’ Kimberley Aboriginal Communities

In November 2014 Premier Colin Barnett announced the imminent closure of up to 150 of Western Australia’s 274 remote Aboriginal communities. Most remote Aboriginal communities are in the Kimberley. This seminar will look at the history of these communities, how they got to be where they are, and what government promises were made that must now be broken in order to force Aboriginal residents to abandon them. The seminar first takes issue with the terminology of ‘closure’. Aboriginal remote homelands are not government facilities, they are communally-owned private property. They cannot simply be closed, but they can be denied service. They will be denied service as a result of cost shifting by the Federal government to WA, breaching a thirty-year compact. This seminar discusses the state and federal programmes and agreements that established most Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley about thirty years ago in order to redress colonial dispossession. The WA government’s intention to deny services to many remote communities will be traced back to the Federal government’s changes to its agreement with the states following the abolition of ATSIC in 2005, and the failure of the WA government to adjust to this. The seminar concludes by placing the servicing of remote communities in the broader national context of equitably servicing the entirety of remote and rural Australia, particularly through the funding of local government