Category: General news

The 10th anniversary of Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance was yet another smashing success at Brisbane Exhibition and Convention Centre on Friday evening last week.

I had been invited by Micah Projects to attend the evening to get a glimpse of what this unique event is truly all about.

It is getting close to 6 pm that evening while I help Katie Bennett set up her photo booth before everyone arrives to eagerly have their photos taken throughout the evening.

After helping out Katie with the photo booth I have a chat with Majella Heraghty from Micah Projects.

She tells me that it is important to think of the Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance not as a fundraiser, but a social inclusion event.

“Micah Project’s relies on donations, grants and full priced tickets sales to ensure the night is accessible to everyone.”

“This allows for the provision of heavily subsidised tickets for some of the most vulnerable members of our society.”

It is still not 6 pm yet, but Lynette Vardy is already eagerly waiting for the doors to open.

She tells me that she has been to every Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance since it was first launched ten years ago.

“Every time I come I have great time.”

The highlight of the night is undoubtedly the dancing Lynette Vardy adds.

Right after 6 pm is when you really notice the popularity of Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance. The foyer of the Plaza Ballroom is full of eager attendees excited to enjoy a night filled with fun and laughter.

Dominic whom has been to Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance since 2010 is back to have yet another amazing evening.

When asked what is so special with the event he replies, “having fun meeting different people and having a good night.”

Robyn Evans and Patty is attending for their first time and they are both excited and looking forward to the evening.

After observing the crowd for a bit in the foyer it was time to head inside the Plaza Ballroom as the big event was about to kick off.

While people were still entering the Plaza Ballroom to find their seats they put on some music before the food was served to keep everyone entertained, which filled the dance floor instantly.

Everyone seemed now to have gotten inside and the eager dancers were asked to find their table as the food would be served while a few welcome speeches were given.

David had again been given the responsibility to be the MC for the night and pulled it of wonderfully.

Uncle Des Sandy welcomed everyone with a lovely speech and introduced Aaron Ruska who did an amazing performance on his didgeridoo.

After the speeches had been given, the dinner eaten and the deserts enjoyed, it was time to loosen those belts and hit the dance floor to music performed by Savvy.

As part of the evening they later arranged the dance floor in four corners, each indicated with balloons in different colours. During this game they play music while people are dancing, and when the music stops you have to be quick and pick which corner you want to be part of. Then a colour is randomly drawn to exclude dancers until there are only two left, who will be the winners of the competition.

Rest of the night Savvy continued to play music and everyone is danced and mingled with each other. Yet another successful Moonlight Magic Dinner dance, leaving everyone with fond memories of this great event.

It is not until you attend the Moonlight Magic Dinner Dance you understand how important this event is and appreciate the positive impact it will have on those attending.

An impact that will last for months, as Mal Causer from Micah Projects told me when I visited Campbell’s club few weeks ago.

Photos by Katie Bennett can be found here.

Brisbane is the only city where the newest $2 coin – the first circulating coin with purple stripes – will be able to be swapped for your change directly from the Royal Australian Mint.

The Mint went onsite at Queen Street Mall on Friday, swapping the new $2 coin for old change. Excitement surrounding this coin was high, with keen Brisbanites tweeting to bring the coin swap to Queensland.

In a hotly contested hashtag competition held on Twitter, there were only two tweets separating Brisbane and Adelaide when the competition closed on Monday 26 August.

“People across Australia have been really excited to get their hands on the new purple-striped $2 coin, so we thought it was only fair that they got to choose which Australian capital city would host the coin swap,” said Royal Australian Mint CEO Ross MacDiarmid.

“When Brisbane emerged as the victors, we knew that the coin swap had to be held in Queen Street Mall to help keep the royal connection, as the coin celebrates the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II,” said Mr MacDiarmid.

The coin swap is likely to bring a boost to Brisbane tourism, with collectors from across Australia keen to get their hands on this coin.

“After the coin swap location was released, we have been inundated with callers from across the country saying that they’re ready to book a flight to Brisbane to get their hands on this coin,” said Mr MacDiarmid.

“These include collectors from Adelaide and Katoomba, so be sure to get to the coin swap early so they don’t all get swapped straight away!”

While there is no standard limit to how many can be swapped, it will depend on how long the line is at the time. The public should keep an eye on Mint’s Facebook page and Twitter feed for any event updates.

This coin was officially launched in June 2013 by the Governor-General of Australia, Her Excellency the Honourable Quentin Bryce AC CVO, as part of the Colourful Change program.

For more information about the coin swap, 2013 60th anniversary of the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II $2 coloured circulating coin or images of this coin please visit www.ramint.gov.au

The crowd was of an age that in dictated they had probably bopped along to Russell Morris on their transistor radio in 1969, I know I did, but the chatter in the queue was about his recent songs with their historical bent and blues framing.

When the band came out and started playing the straight blues number Black Dog Blues I worried that we were going to be deprived of the intimate interaction that Der Spiegeltent potentially offers an audience.

I need not have worried. Mr Morris is an accomplished comedian, twisting tales of his grandmother, tales from his grandmother, acid trips, Molly Meldrum allusions and the characters from Australian history into a stage show that goes beyond patter. It is not often you get a belly laugh at a music gig but I enjoyed more than one.

I found myself looking forward to his next little spiele as each song drew to a close.

That is not to detract from the music. The band is tight, accomplished and steady. As a blues dilettante I am not qualified to deconstruct the musicality of the first half of the show, but it provided a solid basis for the historical context and the powerful characters that are the subject matter of his more recent material. Morris delivers neat vignettes of Les Darcey and Squizzy Taylor that in one case is an ode and the other a bitter footnote. Other songs deal with the gigantic historical framing of the Depression, the Gold Rush and our convict past.

I would have been perfectly happy with a concert based on this material alone but the duties of a rock legend insist that – to quote Mr Morris – we enter the tardis and follow the time lord back to 1969.

I am the real thing, set the scene, inspiring four women to shed the years and dance as we all did 44 years ago, helping the rest of us take the time journey.

Lead guitarist Peter Robinson has a Mick Ronson like command of the rock format and the big finish and delivers it with an ease and confidence that is too joyful to be described as cynicism but so accomplished that you want to challenge him to take it a little bit further. Bass player Mitch Cairns and drummer John Creech round out a solid and joyful, blues and rock outfit.

A string of hits and an encore later, Russell had us in the palms of his capable hands.

“I know you all want to hear the old stuff but we are a working band and are making a new record so we want you to hear the new stuff as well. This is something Peter and I wrote six weeks ago and we think it will be the break out song on the new album.” In a final tease they then launched into Sweet Sweet Love as the final number.

Satisfied as the tent full of baby boomers were, I’m not sure I was the only person in the room who would quite liked to have heard a new number written six weeks ago and had the opportunity to turn it into the next real big thing.

If it had any of the resonance of the historical numbers from Sharkmouth, I’d be paying my 99c to download it legally.

Screening for minor memory changes will wrongly label many with dementia, warn experts

A political drive, led by the UK and US, to screen older people for minor memory changes (often called mild cognitive impairment or pre-dementia) is leading to unnecessary investigation and potentially harmful treatment for what is arguably an inevitable consequence of ageing, warn University of Sydney experts in a paper published in the British Medical Journal today.

A team of specialists in Australia and the UK say that expanding diagnosis of dementia will result in up to 65 per cent of people aged over 80 having Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed – and up to 23 per cent of non-demented older people being labelled with dementia.

They argue this policy is not backed by evidence and ignores the risks, harms and costs to individuals, families and societies. It may also divert resources that are badly needed for the care of people with advanced dementia.

Their views come as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens in New Hampshire next week, partnered by BMJ’s Too Much Medicine campaign, where experts from around the world will gather to discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care.

Paper co-author, Professor David Le Couteur from the University’s Charles Perkins Centre, said dementia is an age related condition and with an ageing global population, it is predicted to become an overwhelming and costly problem.

“Although evidence suggests that only 5-10 per cent of people with mild cognitive symptoms will develop dementia each year, current policy in many countries is aimed at encouraging more widespread and earlier diagnosis of dementia,” he said.

“For example, in the US, the Medicare insurance programme will cover an annual wellness visit to a physician that includes a cognitive impairment test. In England, the government has announced that it will reward general practitioners for assessing brain function in older patients – and has committed to have “a memory clinic in every town and every city” despite no sound evidence of benefit.

“This has led to the development of imaging techniques and tests that are increasingly used in diagnosis, despite uncertainty over their accuracy.

“Furthermore, there are no drugs that prevent the progression of dementia or are effective in patients with mild cognitive impairment, raising concerns that once patients are labelled with disease or pre-disease, they may try untested therapies and run the risk of adverse effects.”

The paper co-authors also question whether ageing of the population is becoming a “commercial opportunity” for developing screening, early diagnosis tests and medicines marketed to maintain cognition in old age.

The desire of politicians, dementia organisations, and academics and clinicians in the field to raise the profile of dementia is understandable, write the authors, “but we risk being conscripted into an unwanted war against dementia.”

Yet they suggest that the political rhetoric expended on preventing the burden of dementia would be much better served by efforts to reduce smoking and obesity, given current knowledge linking mid-life obesity and cigarettes with the risk of dementia.

“Current policy is rolling out untested and uncontrolled experiments in the frailest people in society without a rigorous evaluation of its benefits and harms to individuals, families, service settings, and professionals,” Professor Le Couteur concluded.

Link to PDF article: http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/september/dementia.pdf

Link to published article: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.f5125

Find out more about the conference at: www.preventingoverdiagnosis.net

Read more about the BMJ’s campaign at: bmj.com/too-much-medicine

About the Charles Perkins Centre:  Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease account for half the deaths in Australia and have become epidemics of global proportions. The University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre aims to ease the burden of these diseases by transforming how we eat, work and live. Most initiatives have treated these diseases as medical conditions, concentrating on complex biology at the levels of genes, cells and organs. By contrast, the Charles Perkins Centre brings medical and health experts together with some of the best minds from the arts and social sciences, architecture, business, education, law, engineering and information technology to look at all three conditions together in a bid to reduce their incidence, not just in Australia, but worldwide.

Premier Newman tonight launched OperaQ’s 2014 program at the Spiegeltent on the Cultural Forecourt at Southbank, a hop step and a jump from Westender’s home base on Boundary Street.

Themed Life Less Ordinary, Der Spiegeltent was the perfect venue and the sultry presentation of La Boheme was the perfect tease.

The news of the night though was the announcement that next year’s Brisbane Festival will be the third city in the world to host the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American. An ode to Disney, Warhol and Glass himself, Brisbanites will get to see the piece before it is ever performed in America. It has been commissioned for Philip Glass’ 75^th birthday. It will play in London and Madrid before coming to Brisbane.

In a multi-layered, self-referential and possibly-accidental piece of post-modernism, Premier Newman followed the opening number from Rigoletto, described by OperaQ Artistic Director, Lindy Hume as “a representation of the corruption of power based on the sex parties and plastic surgery-enhanced smile of Silvio Berlusconi.”

A smile had been brought to the Premier’s lips by tenor Rosario La Spina’s description of the opera’s central character as “being able to get whatever he wanted and wanting women, well, pretty much all of the time.”

As is fitting in the Spiegeltent, sex was pretty much the topic of the evening. The characters from La Boheme were in the audience, egging everyone on to indulgent heights of enthusiasm and then burst into Puccini’s romantic opera that climaxed with a snow machine blanketing parts of the audience in white foam.

The well dressed and somewhat formal crowd left highly satisfied, thoroughly titillated and nicely warmed by a glass or two of free bubbly.

The light show at the South bank forecourt is a sight to behold, so even if you cannot afford the dramatic and musical events of the Brisbane Festival, grab the kids, grandma or the dog and take a walk down there on dusk.

Australian Natalie Isaacs (Pictured) Joins Policymakers, Scientists, Businesswomen, Indigenous Leaders, Activists and Environmental Luminaries To Address Climate Crisis

A powerful cohort of women leaders from 35+ countries, including Natalie Isaacs the CEO and Co-founder of 1 Million Women from Australia, will come together in New York later this month to take bold action on climate change and craft a Women’s Climate Action Agenda.

The group includes a compelling mix of business leaders, former heads of state, scientists, government officials, indigenous leaders, activists, teachers, community organizers and culture shapers, who will complete the Women’s Climate Action Agenda at the first International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit, September 20th-23rd. Participants include: Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary to the UNFCCC; Marina Silva, former Brazilian Minister of Environment; Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams; Dr. Sylvia Earle, marine biologist; May Boeve, 350.org Executive Director; Dr. Vandana Shiva and leaders from Global Gender Climate Alliance, UN Women, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), 1 Million Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other grassroots organizations.  (See a full list of Summit delegates here: http://www.iweci.org/summit-delegates )

“We are bringing women leaders together at this crucial time in history because we know that women are uniquely positioned to implement the critical sustainability solutions needed to address the world’s pressing climate challenges,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, co-founder of the International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit.  “Nature will not wait while politicians debate.  Women around the world are facing the impacts of a changing climate every day, and we are coming together to say “enough is enough” and it is time for action that addresses the roots of this crisis and fosters just solutions.

Summit delegates will gather on the eve of Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly session, and as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prepares to release its much anticipated Assessment Report.  The Women’s Climate Action Agenda will build momentum for substantive action on, increased funding for and the meaningful policy changes necessary to address the global climate crisis.

“Actions to date are simply not equivalent to the escalating urgency of the climate crisis. We are headed toward a 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) rise in global temperature over the next decades that will create unprecedented havoc for our children, grandchildren and future generations. Women are no longer willing to stand by when so much is at stake,” said Summit co-founder Sally Ranney. “We know what needs to be done, and mobilized women have the power to do it and to build a much stronger climate action movement. We are gathering in force in order to get climate solutions in place at the speed and scale necessary to make a significant difference,” Ranney added.

Additionally, dozens of communities plan to host ‘Vision Hub’ events to follow the proceedings via live stream (at www.iweci.org) and contribute questions and comments to the Summit delegates from locations around the globe. 

Summit delegates will host a media briefing on September 17th to discuss this unprecedented collaboration and the drafting of the Women’s Climate Action Agenda, and will also host a press teleconference on September 24th following the Summit to detail the outcome of the proceedings. Interviews are available with delegates before, during and after the Summit.  

About IWECI: 

IWECI engages women grassroots activists, Indigenous and business leaders, policy makers and culture-shapers in collaboration. Our goal is to stop the escalation of climate change and environmental and community degradation, while accelerating the implementation of sustainability solutions through women’s empowerment, partnerships, hands-on trainings, advocacy campaigns, and political, economic, social and environmental action. www.iweci.org on Twitter @IWECI