Australia

Just a heads up for those who feel like doing something for the day but haven't been focusing too much on the calendar.

Two-thirds of people want more transport funding to go into walking, cycling and public transport.

The decline in cycling probably shouldn't surprise us.

In the past 40 years, the percentage of children who walk or ride to school has dropped from 75% to 25%. Furthermore, cycling receives only about 2% of transport budgets.

As well as the three transport priorities, we can of course take many more actions that would help increase walking and cycling.

These measures include: boosting housing density, beautifying our neighbourhoods, programs to build people's confidence and skills to walk and cycle, such as beginners bike tours, and more frequent public transport.

As the Northern Territory government announces $20 million in domestic violence funding, one Darwin shelter is being forced to cut back staff hours due to budget constraints.

Electrical Trades Union boss Troy Gray says campaign to continue the activity will now expand

Exclusive: Guardian Australia obtains legal letter that appears to cast doubt on some of the state’s key justifications

Just in case anyone is wondering why things like MYOB are not working currently...

Multiple services recovering after power/cooling issue - Australia East

Impact Statement: Starting at approximately 08:30 UTC on 30 August 2023, a utility power surge in the Australia East region tripped a subset of the cooling units offline in one datacenter, within one of the Availability Zones. While working to restore cooling, temperatures in the datacenter increased so we proactively powered down a small subset of selected compute and storage scale units, to avoid damage to hardware.
Multiple downstream services were impacted, with targeted communications being distributed via Azure Service Health. Impact to services is limited to Australia East, except for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) which has impact in both Australia East and Australia Southeast due to a dependency in the former. If your workloads are protected by Azure Site Recovery or Azure Backup, and you need critical services back online before all services in this datacenter are fully recovered, we recommend either to initiate a failover to the recovery region or recover using Cross Region Restore. Note that any new allocation requests for the Australia East region will automatically avoid the impacted scale units.

Current Status: We are in the final phases of restoring core services, and expect that the vast majority of remaining impacted services should be back online in the next hour. After restoring power and stabilizing temperatures, all network infrastructure and 99% of storage services are back online. All premium disk storage has fully recovered, we continue to work towards mitigating the final remaining storage devices. The vast majority of underlying compute services are back online, with more than 99% of Virtual Machines (VMs) that were impacted now back online and healthy.
While many customers and services have already recovered, we are now prioritizing our investigations with the remaining downstream impacted services. We expect that these remaining services should be back online and healthy within the next hour. Further updates will be provided in 60 minutes, or as events warrant.

*This message was last updated at 20:47 UTC on 30 August 2023 *

A report from the Northern Territory Ombudsman has recommended a ban on spit hoods in police custody — currently in place for children — be extended to adults.

Thought we might give a weekly random thread a go for random national discussions. I don't want this to compete with the major city daily threads, hence we will start off weekly. This is just a place to have a chat about something which you might not want to do a full post about.

With the Voice to Parliament Referendum date announced to be October 14 2023, this thread will run in the lead up to the date for general discussions/queries regarding the Voice to Parliament.

The Proposed Constitutional Amendment

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Past Discussions

Here are some previous posts in this community regarding the referendum:

• The Voice referendum official Yes/No pamphlets
• Linda Burney says there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by supporting the Voice
• Families distressed after 'highly misleading' video used by anti-Voice campaigners goes viral
• The Indigenous Voice to Parliament – separating fact from fiction | 7.30
• 10 questions about the Voice to Parliament - answered by the experts
• The yes pamphlet: campaign’s voice to parliament referendum essay – annotated and factchecked
• Fact-checking for the "No" referendum pamphlet was not compulsory

Common Misinformation

• "The Uluru Statement from the Heart is 26 Pages not 1" - not true

Government Information

• Referendum question and constitutional amendment
• voice.gov.au - General information about the Voice

Amendments to this post

If you would like to see some other articles or posts linked here please let me know and I'll try to add it as soon as possible.

1. Added the proposed constitutional amendment (31/08/2023)
2. Added Common Misinformation section (01/07/2023)

Discussion / Rules

Please follow the rules in the sidebar and for aussie.zone in general. Anything deemed to be misinformation or with malicious intent will be removed at moderators' discretion. This is a safe space to discuss your opinion on the voice or ask general questions.

Please continue posting news articles as separate posts but consider adding a link to this post to encourage discussion.

Anthony Albanese continues to reject calls to make even a sanitised version of the assessment public

Leo Hardiman has spoken at length to a Senate inquiry about how his complaints about a massive freedom of information backlog were ignored by OAIC leadershipFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

In six months, the state’s parliament has voted to override its own Human Rights Act, not once but twice.

Many of us are now dressed head to toe in plastic.

A textile derived from the same non-renewable source as takeaway containers, has grown to make up more than half of the clothes bought in Australia.

Polyester is durable, cheap, and dries quickly. It’s also easy to print patterns on.

It’s commonly used by itself or as a blend with other textiles. It’s used for gym clothes and sports uniforms, party dresses, work attire, and many cheap fast fashion items.

And every purchase is taking an environmental toll.

One Australian study by RMIT found a single 100 per cent polyester T-shirt has a carbon footprint — from creation through to when you dump it in the bin — equivalent to 20.56 kilograms of CO2 emissions (CO2e).

That’s equivalent to driving 140 kilometres. Buy just six tops, and that gets you all the way from Melbourne to Sydney.

So, what’s involved in getting a T-shirt from a fossil fuel, to the one you might be wearing right now? Here’s its journey along the supply chain.

Former Liberal MP, who is undertaking a six-month ultramarathon around Australia in support of the referendum, says he’s ‘incredibly disappointed this has become a political issue’ ‐‐------------- The article is full of some really good quotes, including

“I’ve come across communities drinking bore water all their lives and then they need dialysis at an early age, kidney failure, when all they need is a filtration system on their water, but nobody’s listening – instead government is dishing out buildings for them they don’t need,” he says “These people have been neglected for such a long period of time. Everything we have in place just isn’t working. It’s not addressing the early mortality rate, more Indigenous people in the prison system, health and infrastructure needs. It makes sense that we need a different approach.” “I’ve heard things said by politicians that they want more detail – that’s just a lie, they know they create the detail, as part of the processes the Australian people will vote on,” he says. “Then it’s up to the politicians to nut that out in the parliament, what the detail is and then vote on it and get good policy in place. I’ve said to Coalition members, ‘Why not let the Australian people decide, then you can argue to the nth degree when it gets to the parliament’ – but they’re just being antagonistic.”

Some compelling insight. Mad props to this guys!