Newspoll has not reported on its more-or-less usual three-weekly schedule, but the usual weekly Roy Morgan should be along later today, followed by the usual fortnightly Essential Research poll tomorrow. In other developments:
• Simon Birmingham, Shadow Foreign Minister and Senate Opposition Leader, announced last week he will retire from parliament by the end of the year. As well as creating a vacancy for his South Australian Senate seat, his departure has resulted in the Senate leadership going from a leading moderate to a factional conservative in Western Australian Senator Michaelia Cash.
• Labor in Tasmania has confirmed its Senate ticket will be headed by Left faction incumbent Carol Brown followed by Right-aligned newcomer Richard Dowling, adviser to state Labor leader Dean Winter and former director of public policy with Meta. Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports Jessica Munday, Left-aligned secretary of Unions Tasmania, withdrew after recognising she lacked support, but now hopes to fill the casual Senate vacancy created by Anne Urquhart’s looming bid for the lower house seat of Braddon. Munday was subject to a party disciplinary process earlier this year after featuring a poster for Labor-turned-independent member David O’Byrne in her yard during the March state election campaign.
• Lachlan Leeming of the Daily Telegraph reports three candidates have nominated for preselection to succeed retiring Nationals member David Gillespie in Lyne: former Berejiklian-Perrottet government minister Melinda Pavey; Alison Penfold, senior adviser to Gillespie; and Forster-based accountant Terry Murphy.
• Hawkesbury councillor Mike Creed has been preselected as Liberal candidate for the Sydney fringe seat of Macquarie, held for Labor by Susan Templeman on a post-redistribution margin of 6.3%.
• The flurry of legislation the government was able to pass through the Senate last week did not include its campaign finance reform bill, which was pulled from the notice paper after a failure to land an agreement with the Coalition. Michelle Grattan at The Conversation reports the Liberals sought to “insert a potential legal time bomb” in the form of a provision that would likely mean the entire bill would be invalidated if the High Court found against any of it in the seemingly likely event of a High Court challenge. The Liberals also pushed for higher donation caps and disclosure thresholds and less generous caps for peak bodies, being specifically concerned about the ACTU. The responsible minister, Don Farrell, says consultations will continue over summer, seemingly with both the Coalition and the cross-bench.
Australia is still far from catching up to the levels of migration expected before the pandemic, a new study from the Australian National University has shown.
Before Covid, net migration was projected to hit about 300,000 by 2025. But the study, led by migration hub director Alan Gamlen, found that net overseas migration may still be 82,000 people short of that number.
Gamlen used a projection of growth from net overseas migration using Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for the period 2013 to 2019, and found that 168,000 fewer people were added to the population from 2019 to 2024, relative to the long-term trend.
Bit of a difference to pied pipers and FUBARS stories.
New thread.
Socrates says:
Wednesday, December 4, 2024 at 9:06 pm
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Unfortunately this problem is difficult to resolve in the structure of engineering degrees. There is an international treaty for recognition of engineering degrees to which Australia is a signatory. This specifies the skills and knowledge engineers are expected to gain in a degree. There is a lot of content required and not much room left for options even in a four year degree. In some signatory countries (e.g. France) engineering is a five year course.
I agree there is a need to update engineering course to reflect advances in science and technology. I have had some involvement in the content of courses in my field. But it is time consuming to achieve, the work done unpaid by volunteers from the professional body like myself, and government has largely washed its hands of it.
I am impressed you did a philosophy course. I consider it very relevant to engineering.
For once I agree with FUBAR, considering what engineers do the undergraduate engineering course is way too narrow. Ok you need to prove they can handle technical mathematics, but how many engineers actually use the stuff they learnt in control theory. Be a great post-grad course for those interested. Do they yet have any portion of the course devoted to project management, managing teams, budgets, tenders, all the stuff that happens int he real world.
People are complaining that we don’t have enough engineers to make the projects needed happen, not that there is a shortage of widget designers.