Tag Archives: Australia

Love, Equality and a Small Island

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There’s a little place right down the bottom of Australia called Tasmania. It’s the tiny island that everyone always forgets about when they draw a map of Australia, and it’s the state that Australians love to publicly ridicule for being a little bit backwards when it comes to, well, everything.

But this week, Tasmania surprised us all when it became the first Australian state to have parliament formally pass a motion in support of same-sex marriage. Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim summed up the motion by eloquently stating “we should value difference and diversity, and devalue discrimination”. Not a bad motto to live by.

There’s absolutely no legislative force behind the motion, primarily because marriage is legislated by the federal government in Australia, but it is arguably a very important gesture. To put the motion into context, homosexuality in Tasmania was only decriminalised in 1997. That’s right, 1997.

The same-sex marriage debate has saturated the Australian media and political debate for most of the year, and there has been an outpouring of commentary on the issue encompassing everything from the ridiculously detailed to just plain ridiculous.

The debate has illustrated that despite a considerable amount of Australian law mandating that there should be no discrimination against sexual or gender minorities, there is still considerable political reluctance to afford same-sex couples the same symbolic rights as heterosexual couples.

Recent polls have shown that up to 68 per cent of Australians are in favour of formalising same-sex unions, which is a pretty good indicator that the politicians are (shock-horror) out of step with the will of the Australian community.

I’d say that most of the 68 per cent of Australians that support marriage equality understand that the debate is not about religion or the institution of marriage, it’s actually about community and our democratic choices.

In a democratic secular society, if we are all going to participate equally in the community, then we all need to be able to exercise the same choices. And the choice to get married to someone that you love regardless of gender seems like a pretty damn important choice to me.

Bike Share in Melbourne Lacks Traction

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About 12 months ago, the City of Melbourne introduced a new bike share program for the Melbourne community. Based on similar highly successful programs in places like London, Montreal and San Francisco, the program provides easy access to 100 bikes at 10 stations across the city.

But one year on, rider numbers have fallen well short of expectations and debate is currently raging in Melbourne about the long-term viability of the program. It seems 25,000 Melbournians will happily turn out for a city parade to congratulate Australia’s first Tour de France winner Cadel Evans, but only about 250 per day actually want to get on a bike themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I think bike share programs are an awesome idea. I spent an amazing week in Montreal cruising around on a Bixi bike, and there are numerous successful examples of bike share programs across the world that are both utilised and adored by local communities.

So why is Melbourne different? Firstly, it’s got to do with helmets. Helmets are compulsory in Australia and the fine for not wearing one while cycling is hefty. So you’d think that helmets would be available to rent with the bikes right? Wrong. Australian law also mandates that if a helmet is rented, an inspection and sterilization must be completed after each rental, which is clearly not going to happen.

As a result, share-cyclists either need to rent a helmet from a bike rental store, or buy one from vending machines located near the bike stations. The other option of course is to carry a helmet with you on the off-chance that you might want to cycle, along with a spare pair of trainers in case you need to go running, and a clean pair of underpants in case you get hit by a bus.

Critics of the program have also suggested that the city might have put the cart before the horse in creating the program, and that the money should have first gone into providing safe cycling infrastructure in the city before we start providing the bikes.

Melbourne isn’t an easy place to cycle – bike lanes are few and far between, and where they do exist they are narrow, un-segregated and prone to random disappearance when the roads get too narrow.  Throw in trams, hook turns and generally inconsiderate drivers, and riding in Melbourne can seem like a bit of a suicide mission.

But regardless of the issues, I prefer to live in a city that supports bike-sharing than one that doesn’t, and hopefully the program is at least educating the Melbourne community about the ease and efficiency of using bikes for short trips. Now if we could just get Le Tour guys using these bikes, maybe their popularity would increase…

Hacking for Humanity: Random Hacks of Kindness

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What are the first words that jump into your mind when you think of a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank?

If you’re like me, the first few words that entered your mind aren’t publishable on such a mild-mannered blog, and the subsequent words mostly started with evil.

But a few weeks ago, I was forced to re-evaluate my position when I was invited to Random Hacks of Kindness Melbourne.

According to the slick press release I received, Random Hacks of Kindness is a global community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation challenges. The initiative began as a collaboration between all the organizations listed above, aimed at solving humanitarian issues through technology (and no-doubt with a secondary aim of looking less evil).

As part of hacking competition events across the world, coders from various organizations, industries and backgrounds work directly with subject matter experts from the emergency management sector to find solutions to ‘problem areas’ in disaster management technology.

When I did a bit of research into Random Hacks of Kindness I quickly realized that some of the solutions that have come from past hack-a-thon events have been good. Seriously good.

Last year, Random Hacks of Kindness was responsible for the refinement of the Google PersonFinder app that ended up being used extensively in both the Japan and New Zealand earthquakes, and was also behind the development of FoodMovr – a geo-location app that connects businesses that have excess food with organizations that help feed the needy.

As part of the Random Hacks of Kindness Melbourne event that I was lucky enough to attend, coders worked on everything from an app that allows users to create customized disaster plans, through to the development a unified platform for aggregating public alerts from all emergency services in Australia.

This event not only gave the Melbourne developer community a chance to give back and work on rewarding projects, it also provided much-needed innovation for the Australian disaster management sector, which is notoriously behind the eight ball when it comes to technological innovation.

In a year when stories of hackers stealing credit card numbers and crashing websites are abundant, it was pretty amazing to see some of Melbourne’s best IT minds working together on projects that directly benefit the community in some incredible ways.

And it made me hate Google a little bit less. Just a little bit though.

Social Media and the Zombie Apocalypse

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Would you turn to the social media community in a crisis?

If the apocalypse landed on your doorstep tomorrow, where’s the first place you would go for information? Would you turn on the TV? Would you locate your home emergency kit and power up your battery-operated radio? Or would you be on Twitter in seconds searching #Armageddon?

The rise of social media as a powerful crisis communications tool has been demonstrated liberally lately – be it the use of ushahidi after the Haitian earthquake, Facebook during the Australian floods or Twitter as a driving force in the Egyptian revolution.

But what is sometimes forgotten is that for emergency organisations, the rise of social media has meant some fundamental changes in the way official sources communicate with the public during a crisis. The time window for communicating emergency information has shrunk considerably, which is a big deal for government organisations used to working at the speed of…well…government.

But it’s not all negative. One of the most game-changing aspects of social media is the ability for emergency organisations to communicate unedited messages to the community during disasters and emergencies. The average grab in a television news bulletin is about nine seconds long, which isn’t a lot of time to get important emergency and community safety information into the public sphere.

One of the most popular social media initiatives adopted by emergency services during the Australian floods earlier this year was uploading full media conferences to Facebook and You Tube. The feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive – people appreciated being able to act as their own news editors rather than relying on the media to filter the information on their behalf.

The second game-changer is that never before have emergency warnings and information had so much reach. Twitter particularly has moved away from the ‘social’ aspects of social media, and has reshaped as a kind of virtual megaphone for information sharing.

The social media community, in all its glory and horror, is incredibly keen to share. Emergency warnings, evacuation advice, road closures, donation information, shelter locations – social media isn’t just a messenger, it’s an amplifier. This willingness to share information is pretty damn exciting for emergency communicators like myself, whose main goal in life is to disseminate emergency information as far as possible, as quickly as possible.

These initiatives might sound like simple stuff, but in a sector as structured and traditional as emergency management, they are giant steps. Ready or not, social media has found a place in disaster communications.

Laughter: Medicine for People and Communities

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Every year in autumn (which is Australian for fall), hundreds of comedians descend on Melbourne for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Renowned as one of the top three comedy festivals in the world, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is Australia’s biggest cultural event, with attendance of over 500,000 and box office takings of close to $11 million last year.

In a country where most people think ‘culture’ is the half-time entertainment at a football game, the Comedy Festival has proved to be resilient and fashionable reminder that Australia has a vibrant cultural realm that is often overlooked.

Since its creation in 1987, Melburnians have embraced the Comedy Festival with vigour, love and a healthy dash of schadenfreude. Why? Because as a community, we love to laugh. We love watching comedians nail an awesome show that leaves the audience in fits of laughter, and in a uniquely Australian way, we also love watching them crash and burn.

But regardless of the source of our laughter, the one thing that always strikes me about the comedy crowds that line Melbourne streets on crisp autumn evenings is just how great everyone looks. Smiles are wide, cheeks are glowing and shoulders are loose. That’s right – our love of comedy actually makes us healthier people.

Laughter is credited with numerous health benefits, encompassing everything from mental wellbeing to circulation. So next time you’re considering going out to see a movie, why not go see a comedian instead? Not only will you be supporting artists in your local community, you can also expect the following health benefits:

  1. Mental Wellbeing. Laughter releases endorphins, meaning it’s physically impossible for your brain to create feelings of anxiousness, anger or sadness when you’re laughing.
  2. Reduced Tension. Laughter relaxes your entire body, relieving tension and stress and relaxing your muscles for up to 45 minutes.
  3. A Healthy Heart. Laughter improves the function of blood vessels, which helps protect against heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems.

Special bonus fact: even fake laughter is good for you. Fake laughter gives you 80 per cent of the positive health benefits of real laughter. This is seriously good news if like me, you have a boss who has a seemingly endless collection of dad-jokes, or you’ve ever had to sit in a cubicle next to John Horn.

Australia’s Gumboot Army

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Natural Disasters and Building Community

As I’m writing, communities in northern Queensland, Australia, are waiting for the onslaught of what is predicted to be Australia’s most severe cyclone. This afternoon, authorities upgraded the cyclone to a category five, putting it on par with Hurricane Katrina and instilling terror into communities of usually unflappable Australians.

The path of the cyclone is expected to cross the very towns that, less than a month ago, were devastated by Australia’s worst flood disaster in recorded history. Floods that killed more than 20 people, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.

In the past two weeks the state of Victoria has also seen some of the worst floods in living history, which I have experienced first hand as part of my job – to say the least, work has become more of a lifestyle than an occupation lately.

Driving North from Melbourne into rural Victoria, it’s difficult not to be struck by the sheer destruction that water can cause. Instead of the lean threads of wheat and barley and occasional canola crop that usually adorn Victoria’s fertile plains over summer, a brown, dirty haze has descended over everything.

The aerial photos show an enormous ‘inland sea’ stretching kilometers across, but they don’t capture the gloom. Paddock after paddock lies dead, and strewn across these paddocks at regular intervals are twisted lines of posts strung with filth-clogged wire: farm fences in memory only.

These natural disasters are misery on a grand scale, and for those of us in the shelter of cities, it’s difficult to imagine how depressing things must be for those who live, breathe and work this land.

But out of all this destruction, a curiously and touchingly Australian phenomenon has been born.

Nicknamed the ‘Gumboot Army’, more than 60,000 people have registered to volunteer as part of the clean up efforts – one of the highest numbers of volunteers the Australian Red Cross has received at any one time.

People thousands of kilometers away in other states bought plane tickets and descended on Queensland, and for many days the highway into Brisbane was gridlocked by cars packed full of brooms, gumboots, buckets, spades, and eager hands.

The army has worked tirelessly for weeks now, removing ruined furniture from homes, scraping mud out of people’s living rooms, re-fencing shattered farming boundaries, helping, leading and listening. Eschewing the ‘every man for himself’ mentality that tends to follow natural disasters, Australians instead have been united in their compassion, spirit and sense of community.

For a long time, folklore and rhetoric here have spoken of the ‘Australian spirit’ – a vague and ethereal concept that tends to lack a little in practical application. Even though it sounds cheesy, the physical elements of nature that Australia has faced over the past month have tested the moral elements of our own nature, and I think we might have passed.

Jilly’s Christmas in Australia!

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My Three Favourite Things Are:

1. Timing

Being a super competitive person, my favourite thing about Christmas in Australia is that we get it before pretty much everyone else in the world.  Being just west of the International Date Line, Australia is the sixth country to wake up to Christmas day, and the five that come before us are pretty much Australian anyway (like New Zealand). Western Canada on the other hand is so far behind us that I’m pretty sure that by the time Christmas makes it to Vancouver it’s already New Year’s Eve here.

2. Vibe

Having Christmas in Summer means the holiday period comes at a time when Australia is at its most vibrant and alive. Schools are out, the long summer vacation is beginning, it’s incredibly hot, and the cities are buzzing with music festivals and community events.

3. Cultural Confusion

My childhood Christmas memories are a blur of mosquitoes, sunburn, prawns, backyard cricket, beaches, mangos, snakes, barbeques and camping. Yet despite these quite obvious signs of Summer, Australians still decorate our houses with snow-covered reindeer and suffer through having the oven on for four hours to bake a turkey when it’s 40 degrees Celsius outside. It may be a little confused, but it’s a lot of fun.

Oprah Does Australia

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[Editor's Note: this is the first post from Jilly Jane Charlwood, who is "in regional Victoria managing flood media and is absolutely under the pump at work" - she will continue to contribute to our team from down under]

"Australia: I'm coming for you!"

When it comes to national days, Australia has some proud ones. We have ANZAC Day in April when we celebrate the heroics of Australian troops in the battle of Gallipoli in World War One. Then there’s Australia Day in January when we all have a day off work to thank Captain Cook for accidently stumbling across Australia in 1788. But something tells me that all our national days will pale in comparison with tomorrow, when Australia gets Oprah.

That’s right, tomorrow the most powerful marketing force in North America, possibly the world, will touch down in Sydney, closely followed by 300 audience members and an entourage numbering 250. It is the first, and likely only, time that the Oprah show will be filmed and broadcast from outside of the United States.

For eight days, the Sydney Opera House will become the ‘Oprah House’, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge will reportedly be adorned with a giant ‘O’ in honour of the great Ms. Winfrey.  Oprah and her posse will film two shows in Sydney, followed by a whirlwind tour of some of Australia’s most significant landmarks. Oprah has also professed her desire to spend time with a ‘genuine Australian family in a real Australian community’. As opposed to all the pretend Australian communities out there I suppose.

In the lead up to Oprah’s arrival, reception in the ‘real’ Australian community has been mixed. When Victoria’s new Premier-elect Ted Baillieu was asked about his thoughts on Oprah’s imminent arrival, he  commented that he didn’t know the specifics of Oprah’s trip, but predicted that she’d “make a lot of noise”. No arguments here. Critics of the trip claim that the $6 million of tax-payer funds financing the spectacle could well have been better spent elsewhere.

Tourism Australia on the other hand is treating Oprah’s arrival with pomp, ceremony and gravity  akin to the second coming of Christ. And rightly so.

Australia celebrates the arrival of Oprah...or one of the other supercool holidays down under.

The Oprah show is currently broadcast in 145 countries across the world, with an average viewership of 7 million people per episode in the United States alone. Australian economists have predicted that the show is likely to lead to at least $100 million worth of international exposure for Australia as a tourism destination, along with increased interest in everything from Australian property to Australian clothing brands.

Since the global economic crisis, things have been lean in Australian tourism. We’re a great country, but the fact is that we’re really a very, very long way away. A few years ago, Tourism Australia spent $180 million dollars on an international tourism campaign based around Australian bikini model Lara Bingle standing on a beach asking potential tourists “So where the bloody hell are you?”. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t Australia’s most successful tourism campaign. In comparison, spending $6 million on one of the world’s most influential entertainers seems like a positively conservative financial decision.

Sure, changing the name of an iconic Australian landmark for marketing purposes might seem slightly OTT, as Oprah herself would say. And looking to a multi-billionaire from Chicago to determine what defines a ‘real’ Australian community might be a little unseemly. But for now, I am suspending my cynicism and will look forward to getting another day off work next year when ‘O Day’ joins our list of significant national holidays.

Can your community survive the end of the world?

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Over the past few weeks my colleagues and I have been chatting on and off about our apocalypse plans.  If the end of the world came, would we be ready?  What would happen to the communities we live in and work in?  The apocalypse is an extreme scenario where lots of things would have to go really, really wrong.  But what if gas prices dramatically increased?  Or the power went out?  Or extreme weather hit?  Or tap water was no longer potable?  Could you still do the things that you normally do? Get to where you needed to go?  And if days turned into weeks or months, how would you adapt to the change?

Governments and communities are starting to chart plans to minimize the impact and bounce back as quickly as possible from a failure in our current system (like fuel, water, food) or a traumatic event (like extreme weather, natural disaster, or, like our neighbours to the south are always fear mongering about, a terrorist attack).  This kind of planning is called Resilience Planning.  It’s a hybrid between traditional emergency planning (that lays out the steps to take in an emergency) and sustainability planning (that is visionary long-term planning that aims to improve and balance our social, cultural, environmental and economic priorities).  Resiliency planning is about not only identifying the potential future threats and getting us ready for specific vulnerabilities we may encounter over the long-term, but also about having communities of people that are better able to face any future threat.  It’s about making sure that we’re flexible enough to handle whatever the future might throw at us by having the skills and tools available in our communities.

On the government side, some of the best examples of resilience planning that I’ve seen are coming from Australia.  And it is driven by necessity.  Australians are already facing the impacts of Climate Change in a way that Canadians still aren’t.  In Melbourne in January 2009 (their summer), record high temperatures caused electrical blackouts, rail systems shutdowns, fires that threatened lives and property, water consumption tripling while storage levels dropped to 1/3, and drops in soil moisture that wiped out part of the urban tree canopy.  Since then, a collaborative study by the City of Melbourne and Victorian Department of Transportation (their state government), talks frankly about balancing the “Australian Dream” with realities like climate change in a way that Canadians aren’t.  They recognize that the way communities are built and connected (because in this study the focus is on transportation and urban design) needs to change to prevent repeats of disasters like they faced in January 2009.  However, what they’ve been building for generations isn’t going to change overnight and a great deal of focus is on how to retrofit what they already have by developing urban corridors and productive suburbs.  While in Canada we’re starting to talk about the resilience of our communities, it lacks the same bluntness and urgency as Australia.  But at least the conversation is starting.

On the community side, a grassroots movement called Transition Towns is spreading to North America from the UK.  They are focused on building a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and economic contraction.  At the core of their movement is the belief that “if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.”  In addition to the usual public education campaigns and partnerships with existing groups, Transition Towns form groups to look at all key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc.) and how they can adapt to a future that might be quite different from our current reality.  When it comes to resilience, they are teaching the skills that a generation or two most communities had, like growing and preserving food, making clothes, and building with local materials.  While the realities they acknowledge are more negative than a lot of us are used to hearing about, they maintain that a positive vision of the future is a necessity in the face of change.

So am I ready for the end of the world?  I don’t think so.  While I may hoard tomatoes I don’t have stores of water, firewood, guns, etc. that I’d likely need if the apocalypse ever came.  But I also don’t think the odds of a full apocalypse are likely.  Maybe it is just because I’m a hopeful person but I also think that between the baby steps we’re already taking toward resilience and amazing adaptability of humans, we’ll be mostly OK.  We might not be as comfortable as we are now and our lifestyles will have to change, but it won’t be the end of the world.

Jilly Charlwood – Well-Mannered Winner

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Who are you?

I am Jilly Charlwood. Jilly Jane Charlwood in fact, a name that seems to provide John Horn with an endless source of amusement. As if Horn is any better as a name than Jilly-Jane. I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and I have just returned to Melbourne after an 18 month working holiday in Vancouver.

What do you do for fun?

I surround myself with people who are more intelligent than me. There’s nothing in life more fun than learning from friends.

What is your favourite community and why?

Eltham in Victoria, Australia, where I was lucky enough to grow up. Eltham is about 30 kilometres North-East of Melbourne, and is a ‘green wedge’ community that provides under-developed, environmentally sound living space within the Melbourne suburban region.

Eltham started its life as an artists’ colony and has managed to retain its hippy sensibilities by developing a reputation for art, culture, environmental activism and strong community spirit. The house I grew up in had no fences separating neighbouring properties, we lived next door to one of Australia’s most renowned landscape artists and in 1986 a rare breed of butterfly long thought to be extinct was discovered in a nature reserve at the end of our street.

It’s just that kind of place.

What is your superpower?

Kick-arse manners.

How do you use it to build community?

A little bit of etiquette goes a long way in developing relationships with people. Much more than knowing which bread plate is yours at a group dinner, good manners are a quiet reminder to one another that we are all human, and that humans respond to being treated with respect. And from left to right it’s BMW – bread, meal, wine. Easy!

My Three Favourite Things About Jilly Are…

1. Cubicle Connectiveness. For seven glorious months I was lucky enough to sit next to Jilly Jane in our open-concept UBC office. She was and is an absolute delight in every single way. Jilly knows how to work hard, fast and smart, so she motivates the people around her by walking the talk. Speaking of talk, if you’re bugging her – which I may or may not have done once or twice or seven-hundred-thousand times – she is happy to assertively apply her kick-arse manners in a way  that makes “shut the hell up” sound like a really, really happy Feist song. Jilly also gets what she wants by striking an important balance between politeness and assertiveness (again with the manners). She is wicked-smart. And, finally, at least once a week I asked her for updates on her three favourite things about [INSERT RIDICULOUS THING HERE] or “who would win in a fight: a beaver or a kangaroo?” and, well, she always provided exceptionally thoughtful answers and/or ones that were just as stupid as the questions themselves.

2. Australian Vegetarianism. Have you heard of the term “throw another [insert giant piece of meat here] on the barbie!”? Well, it kinda sorta reflects Australia’s carnivore culture. And our friend Jilly exists as an ardent vegetarian within such a cultural landscape. Also, she happily shares recipes, ideas and impact-of-meat-on-the-planet stories in very, very intelligent ways. Speaking of Australia, the Daily Gumboot now has an Australian Correspondent!!! We can all look forward to Jilly’s first post as this blog’s community truly reaches epic global status!

3. Competitiveness. Jilly. This was the best GTKYC that we’ve ever done. Because you’re the best. YOU WIN!!!

SPECIAL BONUS REASON: We’re still great friends after the following goodbye scenario at the UBC Bus Loop:

Jilly: “Well, John Horn, it’s been great working with you. Thanks again for the drinks.”

John: “No problem, Jilly. Thanks for the memories. I’ll never see you again.”

[INSERT AWKWARD SILENCE HERE]

Big hugs exchanged.

Jilly: “Bye…”

John: “Stay classy. Have a great trip. Like I said, I’ll never see you again.”

Exeunt. [Editor's note: this exchange is still referred to by Ms. Charlwood as "the worst goodbye from all of my friends in Canada and, possibly, in the history of the world."

…as told by John Horn