Housing policy in remote Indigenous communities: how politics obstructs good policy

Abstract

When it comes to issues of housing policy, remote Indigenous housing often presents the extreme case. The failures of housing policy are most acute in remote Indigenous Australia, but despite the need to learn from the policy mistakes of the past, there has been little detailed analysis of the policy history. Through documentary and empirical analysis, we show that policies have either failed to be adapted to cultural and geographic contexts or, when they have been culturally responsive, they have lacked attention to the complexities of service delivery. Despite differences in policy settings, the long view is one of the normalization of Indigenous communities, although research points to the need for culturally appropriate arrangements. We argue that rather than politically motivated short-termism, governments need to develop a medium- to long-term approach that approaches policy solutions incrementally, builds capacity within the state and Indigenous communities, and is based on the evidence.     

An evaluation of the Burford Katz short cut technique for deriving input-output multipliers

This paper is concerned with extending understanding of short cut approaches to deriving regional economic multipliers. It focuses on the work of Burford and Katz. Seven regional input-output tables are analysed using the Burford Katz formula. Rules of thumb are developed to assist the regional analyst in making decisions on the appropriateness of applying short-cut formulae in order to estimate input-output multipliers when no input-output table exists.     

Employment Loss in a Steel City — did we get it Wrong?

Abstract

In an earlier paper in this journal, Mangan and Guest (1983) used standard input-output analysis to predict job losses in Wollongong following the restructuring of the steel industry. Events have shown that these estimates were biased upwards. In this paper, given the benefit of hindsight, we re-examine our previous study and highlight one particular deficiency in input-output analysis which may have helped produce the inflated estimates. Our conclusions have significance for input-output modelling in general.     

Beyond the Normative: Low Income Private Renters' Perspectives of Housing Affordability and Need for Housing Assistance

Housing need in Australia has typically been measured using a normative measure of the percentage of income spent on housing costs. However, this normative measure has tended not to correspond with the level of need as measured by the applications for housing assistance. This article reports on a research project commissioned by the Queensland Department of Housing in 2001, examining how low income private renters view their housing situation, with a particular focus on affordability. The Department wanted to better understand the reasons for why people apply for assistance, and how helpful normative affordability analyses are in describing and finding responses to housing need. The findings challenge the conventional wisdoms, dominant discourses and research standards which are commonly used and applied about affordability and housing need. In particular, the research raises serious questions about relying on quantitative analysis alone to appreciate the complexity of housing needs and the potential demand for assistance.     

Joint scheduling and virtual topology design for sliding periodic traffic

Two possible approaches can be considered for solving the virtual topology design problem for periodic (multi-hour) traffic demands. The first approach attempts to design a static topology that can accommodate all the traffic variations over time. The second option is to determine an appropriate series of virtual topologies to accommodate the different traffic loads at different times. This can lead to some savings in terms of the number of transceivers needed, but it requires the use of costly reconfigurable switching equipment. So, strategies for stable virtual topology design have received considerable attention in recent years. However, all the works reported in the literature so far, focus on the fixed window scheduled traffic model, where the start and end times of the demands are known in advance. In this paper, we propose a new integrated approach using the more general sliding window model, for jointly scheduling the demands in time and designing a logical topology that can accommodate all the scheduled demands. The goal is to a find a suitable static topology that can handle fluctuations in the offered sub-wavelength traffic load, without requiring the use of reconfigurable optical switching equipment. We first present a comprehensive integer linear program (ILP) formulation for designing a cost-efficient, stable logical topology for time-varying demands, and then propose an integrated heuristic algorithm capable of handling larger networks. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approaches, not only compared to holding time unaware models, but also over the traditional fixed window model.     

News: EPA reassessment finds as much as 20 times less cancer risk from PCBs

Science.     

An Efficient Map Method for Processing Multistate Logic Trees

A comterm map method permits machine computation of the probability of occurrence of the event associated with the output for each logic gate of a multistate logic tree. The method is general and applies to any tree configuration, except where feedback occurs from higher to lower gates. Any state of two or more mutually exclusive component states may be used one or more times as primary inputs to the logic gates. The method usually requires much less memory than a minterm or Karnaugh map method by providing map space for only those selected components called ``common.'