Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on
What difference could an extra 2 hours in your day, make to your business?
Are you staying ahead in your industry or is your business technology making you a dinosaur?
No matter what business you’re in, you need to adapt and evolve in your business evolution or become extinct. Do you remember when you first learnt how to use email? And where would you be without it now? The best way to have the advantage over your competitor, is to get to the finish line first yet still maintaining your professional integrity.
At this event, you will learn:
– simple technology that allows you to access your office anywhere
– techniques you can immediately adopt into your business to save you time
– inexpensive ways to protect your website
– methods to stay on top of a busy workload
DID YOU KNOW: On average, professionals spend up to 37 percent of their work week checking emails (that’s roughly 13 hours) — many of them unnecessary ones.
This Free event will be held on Thur 27 July – 5:15pm for 5:30pm start at Smartnet Computer Services, 28/8 St Jude Court, Browns Plains, QLD
Clear your schedule on Saturday 12 July. Melbourne fuzz-rock trio Pretty City is playing at The Bearded Lady in West End. Your ears will never forgive you if you miss out on these guys.
Named after the awesome bourbon Bearded Lady the trio has picked the perfect place in West End to play their tunes. The Bearded Lady will offer a kick-arse setting for their fuzz-rock sound.
I usually don’t listen to this kind of music, but I know great music when I hear it. It’s the kind of music that puts a smile on your face and makes you bob your head and think, ah yeah, give me some of that bourbon and lets rock!
So you better have cleared that schedule on Saturday 12 July, mate. All I want to see on it is Pretty City at The Bearded Lady. Your weekend can’t get much better than that — good music at an awesome bar in the best suburb in Brisbane.
Professor Eves, QUT School of Civil Engineering and The Built Environment.
The stigma of buying in a flood-prone suburb after the 2011 Brisbane floods was short-lived for middle and high-value homes with property prices rebounding within 12-months, a QUT study has found.
Property economics expert Professor Chris Eves, from QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty, studied the short-term impact of the 2011 flood on the Brisbane residential housing market and found flood fear had a minimal on-going effect on property prices, with low-value suburbs being the exception.
“What we found was that because people in the higher-value suburbs (St Lucia, Bulimba) had the means to repair immediately, the market didn’t see flooding as much of a detriment compared to low-value suburbs (Goodna, Oxley), because the visual impact of damaged homes was removed,” Professor Eves said.
“So the stigma of the flood wore off very quickly.”
Professor Eves’ study looked at residential sales and rental listings as well as property prices immediately following the 2011 Brisbane floods and his findings have been published in Natural Hazards.
“The only sector that did not show a decrease in median house prices three months after the flood, was the flood-affected medium-value suburbs (Fairfield, Graceville), which actually saw an increase of about $23,000 in the median house price,” he said.
“This can in part be explained by the fact that most of the medium-value properties experienced overland flood, with only limited in-house flooding which was more of a nuisance than costly, and the physical evidence was more quickly able to be removed.”
Professor Eves said the biggest drop in property prices after the 2011 floods was in the lower-value suburbs where buyers, mostly investors, saw an opportunity to grab a bargain.
“The median house price in the low-value flood-affected suburbs dropped 22.7 per cent in the three months immediately following the flood with a greater number of flood damaged homes sold,” he said.
“This is most likely because in the low-value suburbs, owners may not have had the means to repair their properties so selling at a reduced price was the only option.
“And for buyers, who were mostly investors, the lower price even with adding on the repair bills made good economic sense given the potential future rental returns.”
Professor Eves said in some of the low-value suburbs, to this day there were still many properties unrepaired.
“This unrepaired damage continues to have a visible impact on these low-value suburbs such as Goodna and an effect on property prices,” he said.
Professor Eves said while there was an immediate spike in rental prices after the floods due to an increase in demand from flood-affected residents wanting to remain close to their properties, within six months the rents and demand had returned to normal trends.
“Within the first week after the floods there was a significant drop in availability for rental accommodation, with a reduction of about 50 house rentals alone in both non-flood and flood-affected lower value suburbs,” he said.
Professor Eves said previous long-term studies had found disasters such as major floods had resulted in up to a 35 per cent difference in value between flood and non-flood affected properties.
“This was not the case in post the 2011 Brisbane flood,” he said.
Professor Eves said the study showed the floods had an immediate impact on the number of properties being offered for sale after the flood but after two to three months the number of listings for sale in the flood-affected suburbs increased in a similar trend to non-flooded suburbs, although volumes were lower.
Key findings of the study:Sales listings: Flood and non-flood affected suburbs showed decreased sales listings between January 2011 and September 2011, at which point both saw an increasing trend in sales listings.
Rental listings: There was an immediate decrease in rental availability after the flood. From September/October 2011 rental availability increased for medium to high value flood and non-flood affected homes. Listings for low-value flood-affected properties spiked faster in June 2011.
Prices: Prices in flood and non-flood affected suburbs dipped immediately after in the first quarter after the floods, but continued to steadily rise for the following three quarters. The exception was in the medium-value flood affected properties which saw an increase in value in the first three months.
Aldi West End opens in Montague Rd today, July 2nd
Aldi’s 337th Australian store opens in Montague Rd West End today. The supermarket chain specialises in providing a limited range of goods at prices well below that of traditional supermarkets.
The company is busy emphasising the positives which it bills as a ‘smarter shopping experience’. Fundamentally, the benefits to the community boil down to employment opportunities for some locals and an alternative to the Coles Marketplace.
Aldi has completely failed though, to engage in the community consultation that it has trumpeted as a key part of its entre into the market. Depending on your point of view, the general controversy about a wall of 12 and 15 storey apartments along the river either protects Aldi from specific attention or makes it more critical than ever, that they engage the community.
Westender put a series of concerns to them, including the impact of bringing more shoppers to an already crowded 4101, the creation of a new shopping precinct without any infrastructure investment, parking and employment issues.
Requests from West End Community Association were referred to the customer service department who politely declined to queries that “do not concern customer service”. Westender again offered the company the opportunity to break the Catch 22 and respond publicly to those community concerns. We have received a standard press release singing the praises of the supermarket and celebrating the liberation of West End from the Woes of Coolworks duopoly.
Many Westenders will no doubt welcome the opportunity to exercise more consumer choice, even if it does nothing to reduce food-miles, free farmers from enslavement to the supply chain or create a more integrated community on the Kurilpa Peninsula.
As your urban voice, Westender will continue to endeavour to place your concerns on the table and enable dialogue between those shaping the physical environment in which we live, work and study.
Tybalt and Mercutio cross swords in the market square
Kenneth McMillan’s Romeo & Juliet has not been seen in Australia before. That it is now here in Brisbane, with some of the British superstars occasionally in lead roles, is due to the hard work and vision of Queensland Ballet Artistic Director, Li Cun-Xin. Life-long dancer and corporate juggler, Master Li has set out to create a world class ballet company here in Brisbane.
Romeo & Juliet is the physical expression of that plan, writ large. Audiences love it.
Powerful dancing, riveting acting, brilliant staging, and compelling music, combine to immerse audiences in the emotional sweep of Shakespeare’s most famous work.
McMIllan’s choreography was daring in 1965 and remains powerful fifty years later. As you would expect of an Englishman it is faithful to the bard’s text but as a young man at the height of his creative powers, McMillan brought new expression to a classic art form. He was not afraid to bring the sex implicit in the work right into the fore or to send up some of the sillier parts of the discipline.
Mercutio’s extended death scene is almost parody, a precursor to Monty Python’s Black Knight twenty years later. THe3 choreography of the sword play is part-musical, part theatrical and part vaudeville. By contrast, the parting-is-such-sweet-sorrow scene simply and powerfully evokes the impossibility all new lovers face when separating after that first, mind-blowing bonk. We have all been there and Prokofiev’s score and Macmillan’s choreography carry us of into those tender memories. The Bard had a way with words, Macmillan and Prokofiev do it with human bodies.
Prokofiev’s 1940 score had challenged the Russian Ballet and won acclaim with audiences for twenty five years before Macmillan got the chance to reshape Leonid Lavrosky’s production thanks to a boycott of the British by the Russians. His rendition was further blessed by Nuryev and Fontaine, who only danced it because of internal politics in the British ballet scene. As is often the case, this rich series of accidents brought a masterful work to the pinnacle of success.
The sets and costumes we see at QPAC’s Lyric Theatre have been loaned by the Birmingham Ballet. They are sumptuous, classical and stunning. This is the technology of ropes and canvas or an earlier era refined and preserved in the arts.
Australian audiences, on the whole, are grateful for the opportunity to catch up on culture that has not been readily accessible here. We are such stickler’s for tradition that we plan to keep the Queen on our coins even if the Brits do not.
Of course, that does not satisfy everyone.
The diamond and sapphire empress grew up on Goethe and finds Romeo and Juliet’s obsession with romantic love somewhat puerile. As a Lifeline support worker she knows that suicide usually has more to do with money and terrible guilt than unrequited love, whatever teenagers flooded with hormones might feel.
MacMillan also assumes a certain familiarity with Shakespeare, almost evoking key phrases familiar to English speakers with his staging. In some instances the lack of words creates problems for newcomers to the tale. Why does Juliet recover from her vial of poison, when Romeo does not? What is the threat from her parents that makes it important to feign death in the first place?
Another friend and contemporary dance teacher was disappointed by the emphasis on tradition and the constraints on artistic freedom which that enforces.
Regular readers of Westender know that I love contemporary art forms that push the envelope. Shadowlands remains my favourite work of the year, so far. Regardless, the middleclass evolutionary in me wants to maintain a healthy respect for the classics and build on, rather than knock down the centuries of discipline that have gone into refining them.
Master Li’s strategy appears to be a combination of bringing the world’s best here, challenging and developing our local talent and building the framework on which a new generation might build creatively.
It is a strategy appropriately tuned for the current Government’s penchant for the corporatisation of the arts and the top-down delivery of culture. A survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution and the boardrooms of Australia’s finance sector, one can assume that Master Li will trim his sails as he must.
The Queensland Ballet is in good hands. Now, let’s bring down the ticket prices.
Chayan Sarkar with APSA Executive Chairman Michael Hawkins
This year, a new initiative called the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival (BAPFF) will take over the Brisbane International Film festival (BIFF), that was run by the Queensland government through the Screen Queensland for over 22 years.
Screen Queensland has agreed to support Brisbane Marketing in its endeavors to start marketing a new film festival called BAPFF, which will be run in conjunction with the APSA to showcase the best of APSA and the best of Asia-Pacific filmmakers and culture.
The eight year old Asia-Pacific Screen Awards, which is readily acknowledged as the highest accolade for films in the Asia pacific region, is headquartered in Brisbane and is an initiative of the Brisbane City Council.
APSA Executive Chairman Michael Hawkins believes that BAPFF will strengthen APSA’s profile both in the Asia Pacific region and locally while providing an opportunity for business ventures particularly as the host city of G20 summit.
“People wanting to invest in Brisbane want to be comfortable that their culture is understood, recognized and respected. Therefore the BAPFF is providing a platform for cultural exchange and is particularly important to educate Brisbane people about the cultures from abroad,” Mr. Hawkins explained.
“We are focusing on great movies that tell stories of cultural diversity and stories of different countries,” he said.
“We’ll have great content from India, China, Korea, Japan and other power houses of the Asia-Pacific film making industries. Each of those cultures will be very well represented while our jury president this year is the Iranian filmmaker and 3 time APSA winner, Asghar Farhadi”.
Whilst speaking about the endeavors of the BAPFF, Mr. Hawkins also acknowledged his support for the various film festivals from the Asia Pacific region, and especially commented on the success of the first independent, Indian International Film Festival of Queensland (IIFFOQ) which will be concluded at QUT on 2nd July, 2014.
A jury headed by Mr. Martin Brown, the lead producer of the movie Moulin Rouge that won the Golden Globe for Best Picture of 2001, will be selecting the winners for the Indian film festival.
This year, the IIFFOQ showcased a wide variety of acclaimed independent Indian films, including the movie Vihir (The Well), an Amitabh Bachchan production, which received a standing ovation at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Mr. Chayan Sarkar, a filmmaker, is the man responsible for organizing Mr. Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic 2011 visit to QUT to receive his Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his contribution to global creative industries, and is also responsible for developing the Indian Film Festival.
“This year’s film festival is the beginning of a wonderful cultural transaction between the Queensland government and India. We hope to carry on this tradition on a larger scale in the coming years, to introduce Australians to the profound treasure chest of Indian cinema,” Mr. Sarkar said.
Mr. Sarkar’s latest venture ‘The Sleeping Warrior’, depicts the subtle connection between Hindu spirituality and the Australian Aboriginal spirituality, and has won many accolades from critics and the Aboriginal community, but is yet to be released in Australia.
