Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Geraldine Doogue
Geraldine Frances Doogue is an Australian journalist and radio and television host. After graduating from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts, Doogue intended to train as a schoolteacher, but instead decided to apply for a cadetship at The West Australian newspaper, she worked for The Australian, spent several years in the United Kingdom as London correspondent for Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers. ABC executives were so impressed with Doogue's on-air presence during an interview with the Four Corners program, she was offered a hosting role on Nationwide. In 1985 she and Richard Morecroft co-hosted The National, the ABC's short-lived experiment with a nationwide hour-long nightly news service, combining news and current affairs, with Max Walsh and Richard Carleton as chief reporters, she worked at TEN-10 Sydney from 1988 to 1989 as co-presenter on Eyewitness News with Steve Liebmann, on commercial radio with 2UE returned to the ABC in 1990. Doogue was the host of Radio National's Life Matters program for 11 years.
She received a United Nations Media Peace Prize and two Penguin Awards for her role in ABC TV's coverage of the Gulf War. She was the host of Compass on ABC TV from 1998 to 2017. Since 2005, she has hosted the Saturday Extra programs on Radio National. Doogue was married to Tim Blue to ABC executive Ian Carroll, who died from pancreatic cancer on 19 August 2011, she and Carroll had two stepchildren. Her elder daughter with Tim Blue, Eliza Harvey, is an ABC journalist, married to Adam Harvey, a son of journalist Peter Harvey. 2 Penguin Awards for excellence in broadcasting United Nations Media Peace Prize Churchill Fellowship for social and cultural reporting Profile at the Australian Women's Register Presenter Profile - Saturday Extra
Stephen Duckett
Stephen John Duckett is an economist and health services manager who has occupied leadership roles in health services in both Australia and Canada. He is the program director of Health at the Grattan Institute. Stephen Duckett was born in Sydney and educated at Woollahra Public School and Fort Street High School, he subsequently studied economics at the Australian National University and health administration at the University of New South Wales. His academic contributions have been recognized by the University of New South Wales by the award of a higher doctorate, Doctor of Science, by election as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2004 and of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2015. Duckett worked as an academic in the School of Health Administration at the University of New South Wales from 1974 to 1983, he was an active public commentator supporting Australia's Medicare scheme, worked with a number of non-government organizations such as the Australian Council of Social Service and the New South Wales Council on the Ageing.
His research examined aspects of hospital administrationHe worked in the Victorian health system for a number of years from 1983 including as Regional Director and subsequently Director of Acute Health for the Victorian Department of Health and Community Services, in the latter role he was responsible for introducing case mix funding to Australia. This was the first major application of this approach to hospital funding in a publicly funded health systemDuckett was appointed Departmental Secretary to the Australian Government Department of Human Services and Health on the recommendation of Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1994 and served in that role until the change of government following the 1996 federal election. From 1996 to 2005 he worked at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia as Professor of Health Policy, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and, for part of that period, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Teaching. During this period he continued research on aspects of hospital economics and published a book on the Australian health care system.
Duckett served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Brotherhood of St Laurence and of Bayside Health. He was recruited to Queensland Health in 2006 in the wake of the Dr Death scandal, to lead improvements in quality and safety as Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for Healthcare Improvement. Duckett was hired by the provincial government of Alberta in the spring of 2009 as President and Chief Executive Officer of its newly created health "superboard", Alberta Health Services with a significant reform agenda.. Duckett took up his duties on 23 March of that year. Shortly after his appointment, the provincial government imposed a significant budget cut on Alberta Health Services. Implementation of these cuts by Alberta Health Services was controversial. On 20 November 2010, Duckett came under scrutiny for televised remarks to the media following a high-level meeting about the situation in the province’s emergency rooms. During the aired segment, Duckett refused to answer questions by reporters waiting outside the meeting room, using the excuse he was eating his cookie and that another person had been designated to make comments.
He issued an apology noting that he had not felt comfortable as a non-elected official being asked to respond to the comments of other, officials. He has subsequently stated that he had been instructed by the office of Alberta Premier Stelmach not to make any comments. On 24 November 2010, following political intervention, the chairman of the Alberta Health Services Board announced that, by mutual agreement, Duckett would vacate his role. Both parties felt that his ability to continue in his duties had been "compromised". Three members of the Board of Directors of Alberta Health services resigned. On 29 July 2011, based on the terms of his contract, Duckett was paid one year's salary as severance pay. After leaving Alberta Health Services, Duckett worked as a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, published a book about the future of the health care system in Canada, he returned to Australia in 2012 and helped to design Australia's new activity based funding arrangements.
In late 2012 he joined Grattan Institute, a domestic public policy think tank based in Melbourne, as head of its Health program. He has since published reports identifying improvements to be made in pricing for Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and ways to improve paying for hospital care, he has published on improving access to primary care in rural and remote Australia. Https://web.archive.org/web/20091002192215/http://www.albertahealthservices.ca/251.asp http://www.albertahealthservices.ca/ http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/sundayreader/story.html?id=e39baa8a-a1af-4cbe-aaa7-ef610c0e0627&p=1
Economic globalization
Economic globalization is one of the three main dimensions of globalization found in academic literature, with the two others being political globalization and cultural globalization, as well as the general term of globalization. Economic globalization refers to the widespread international movement of goods, services and information, it is the increasing economic integration and interdependence of national and local economies across the world through an intensification of cross-border movement of goods, services and capital. Economic globalization comprises the globalization of production, markets, organizational regimes, institutions and labour. While economic globalization has been expanding since the emergence of trans-national trade, it has grown at an increased rate due improvements in the efficiency of long distance transportation, advances in telecommunication, the importance of information rather than physical capital in the modern economy, by developments in science and technology.
The rate of globalization has increased under the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, in which countries cut down trade barriers and opened up their current accounts and capital accounts. This recent boom has been supported by developed economies integrating with developing countries through foreign direct investment, lowering costs of doing business, the reduction of trade barriers, in many cases cross-border migration. While globalization has radically increased incomes and economic growth in developing countries and lowered consumer prices in developed countries, it changes the power balance between developing and developed countries and affects the culture of each affected country, and the shifting location of goods production has caused many jobs to cross borders, causing some workers to change careers. International commodity markets, labor markets, capital markets make up the economy and define economic globalization. Beginning as early as 6500 BCE, people in Syria were trading livestock and other items.
In Sumer, an early civilization in Mesopotamia, a token system was one of the first forms of commodity money. Labor markets consist of workers, wages, income and demand. Labor markets have been around as long as commodity markets; the first labor markets provided workers to grow crops and tend livestock for sale in local markets. Capital markets emerged in industries. Globalization is about interconnecting people around the world beyond the physical barrier of geographical boundaries; these advances in economic globalization were disrupted by World War I. Most of the global economic powers constructed protectionist economic policies and introduced trade barriers that slowed trade growth to the point of stagnation; this caused a slowing of worldwide trade and led to other countries introducing immigration caps. Globalization did not resume until the 1970s, when governments began to emphasize the benefits of trade. Today, follow-on advances in technology have led to the rapid expansion of global trade.
Three suggested factors accelerated economic globalization: advancement of science and technology, market oriented economic reforms, contributions by multinational corporations. The 1956 invention of containerized shipping, along with increases in ship sizes, were a major part of the reduction in shipping costs; the GATT/WTO framework led participating countries to reduce their tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. Governments shifted their economies from central planning to markets; these internal reforms allowed enterprises to adapt more and exploit opportunities created by technology shifts. Multinational corporations reorganized production to take advantage of these opportunities. Labor-intensive production migrated to areas with lower labor costs followed by other functions as skill levels increased. Networks raised the level of geographical mobility; this dynamic worldwide system and powerful ramifications. On 27 October 1986, the London Stock Exchange enacted newly deregulated rules that enabled global interconnection of markets, with an expectation of huge increases in market activity.
This event came to be known as the Big Bang. An intergovernmental organization or international governmental organization refers to an entity created by treaty, involving two or more nations, to work in good faith, on issues of common interest. IGO’s strive for peace and deal with economic and social questions. Examples include: The United Nations, The World Bank and on a regional level The North Atlantic Treaty Organization among others. International non-governmental organizations include charities, non-profit advocacy groups, business associations, cultural associations. International charitable activities increased after World War II and on the whole NGOs provide more economic aid to developing countries than developed country governments. Businesses participate in globalization in a number of different ways. Many businesses now have international supply chains; some engage in international outsourcing to low-wage countries, which involves the contracting out of a business process and operational, and/or non-core functions to another party.
Multinational corporations have business operations in multiple countries, either because they want to sell goods and services into the local market, or because a given country has advantages like natural resourc
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania. Its name refers to an urban agglomeration of 9,992.5 km2, comprising a metropolitan area with 31 municipalities, is the common name for its city centre. The city occupies much of the coastline of Port Phillip bay and spreads into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley, it has a population of 4.9 million, its inhabitants are referred to as "Melburnians". The city was founded on 30 August 1835, in the then-British colony of New South Wales, by free settlers from the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837 and named in honour of the British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. In 1851, four years after Queen Victoria declared it a city, Melbourne became the capital of the new colony of Victoria. In the wake of the 1850s Victorian gold rush, the city entered a lengthy boom period that, by the late 1880s, had transformed it into one of the world's largest and wealthiest metropolises.
After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as interim seat of government of the new nation until Canberra became the permanent capital in 1927. Today, it is a leading financial centre in the Asia-Pacific region and ranks 15th in the Global Financial Centres Index; the city is home to many of the best-known cultural institutions in the nation, such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the National Gallery of Victoria and the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building. It is the birthplace of Australian impressionism, Australian rules football, the Australian film and television industries and Australian contemporary dance. More it has been recognised as a UNESCO City of Literature and a global centre for street art, live music and theatre, it is the host city of annual international events such as the Australian Grand Prix, the Australian Open and the Melbourne Cup, has hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Due to it rating in entertainment and sport, as well as education, health care and development, the EIU ranks it the second most liveable city in the world.
The main airport serving the city is Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia, Australia's busiest seaport the Port of Melbourne. Its main metropolitan rail terminus is Flinders Street station and its main regional rail and road coach terminus is Southern Cross station, it has the most extensive freeway network in Australia and the largest urban tram network in the world. Indigenous Australians have lived in the Melbourne area for an estimated 31,000 to 40,000 years; when European settlers arrived in the 19th-century, under 2,000 hunter-gatherers from three regional tribes—the Wurundjeri and Wathaurong—inhabited the area. It was an important meeting place for the clans of the Kulin nation alliance and a vital source of food and water; the first British settlement in Victoria part of the penal colony of New South Wales, was established by Colonel David Collins in October 1803, at Sullivan Bay, near present-day Sorrento. The following year, due to a perceived lack of resources, these settlers relocated to Van Diemen's Land and founded the city of Hobart.
It would be 30 years. In May and June 1835, John Batman, a leading member of the Port Phillip Association in Van Diemen's Land, explored the Melbourne area, claimed to have negotiated a purchase of 600,000 acres with eight Wurundjeri elders. Batman selected a site on the northern bank of the Yarra River, declaring that "this will be the place for a village" before returning to Van Diemen's Land. In August 1835, another group of Vandemonian settlers arrived in the area and established a settlement at the site of the current Melbourne Immigration Museum. Batman and his group arrived the following month and the two groups agreed to share the settlement known by the native name of Dootigala. Batman's Treaty with the Aborigines was annulled by Richard Bourke, the Governor of New South Wales, with compensation paid to members of the association. In 1836, Bourke declared the city the administrative capital of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, commissioned the first plan for its urban layout, the Hoddle Grid, in 1837.
Known as Batmania, the settlement was named Melbourne in 1837 after the British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, whose seat was Melbourne Hall in the market town of Melbourne, Derbyshire. That year, the settlement's general post office opened with that name. Between 1836 and 1842, Victorian Aboriginal groups were dispossessed of their land by European settlers. By January 1844, there were said to be 675 Aborigines resident in squalid camps in Melbourne; the British Colonial Office appointed five Aboriginal Protectors for the Aborigines of Victoria, in 1839, however their work was nullified by a land policy that favoured squatters who took possession of Aboriginal lands. By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy Europeans held all the pastoral licences issued in Victoria and became a powerful political and economic force in Victoria for generations to come. Letters patent of Queen Victoria, issued on 25 June 1847, declared Melbourne a city. On 1 July 1851, the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales to become the Colony of Victoria, with Melbourne as its capital.
The discovery of gold in Victoria in mid-1851 sparked a
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism. Called Western democracy, it is characterised by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, a market economy with private property and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for all people. To define the system in practice, liberal democracies draw upon a constitution, either formally written or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. After a period of sustained expansion throughout the 20th century, liberal democracy became the predominant political system in the world. A liberal democracy may take various constitutional forms as it may be a constitutional monarchy or a republic, it may have a presidential system or a semi-presidential system.
Liberal democracies have universal suffrage, granting all adult citizens the right to vote regardless of ethnicity, sex, or property ownership. However some countries regarded as liberal democracies have had a more limited franchise and some do not have secret ballots. There may be qualifications such as voters being required to register before being allowed to vote; the decisions made through elections are made not by all of the citizens but rather by those who are eligible and who choose to participate by voting. The liberal democratic constitution defines the democratic character of the state; the purpose of a constitution is seen as a limit on the authority of the government. Liberal democracy emphasises the separation of powers, an independent judiciary and a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Liberal democracies are to emphasise the importance of the state being a Rechtsstaat, i.e. a state that follows the principle of rule of law. Governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure.
Many democracies use federalism—also known as vertical separation of powers—in order to prevent abuse and increase public input by dividing governing powers between municipal and national governments. Liberal democracy traces its origins—and its name—to the European 18th-century known as the Age of Enlightenment. At the time, the vast majority of European states were monarchies, with political power held either by the monarch or the aristocracy; the possibility of democracy had not been a considered political theory since classical antiquity and the held belief was that democracies would be inherently unstable and chaotic in their policies due to the changing whims of the people. It was further believed that democracy was contrary to human nature, as human beings were seen to be inherently evil, violent and in need of a strong leader to restrain their destructive impulses. Many European monarchs held that their power had been ordained by God and that questioning their right to rule was tantamount to blasphemy.
These conventional views were challenged at first by a small group of Enlightenment intellectuals, who believed that human affairs should be guided by reason and principles of liberty and equality. They argued that all people are created equal and therefore political authority cannot be justified on the basis of "noble blood", a supposed privileged connection to God or any other characteristic, alleged to make one person superior to others, they further argued that governments exist to serve the people—not vice versa—and that laws should apply to those who govern as well as to the governed. Some of these ideas began to be expressed in England in the 17th century. There was renewed interest in Magna Carta, passage of the Petition of Right in 1628 and Habeas Corpus Act in 1679 established certain liberties for subjects; the idea of a political party took form with groups debating rights to political representation during the Putney Debates of 1647. After the English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1689, which codified certain rights and liberties.
The Bill set out the requirement for regular elections, rules for freedom of speech in Parliament and limited the power of the monarch, ensuring that, unlike much of Europe at the time, royal absolutism would not prevail. This led to significant social change in Britain in terms of the position of individuals in society and the growing power of Parliament in relation to the monarch. By the late 18th century, leading philosophers of the day had published works that spread around the European continent and beyond; these ideas and beliefs inspired the American Revolution and the French Revolution, which gave birth to the ideology of liberalism and instituted forms of government that attempted to apply the principles of the Enlightenment philosophers into practice. Neither of these forms of government was what we would call a liberal democracy we know today (the most significant differences being that voting rights were still restricted to a minority of the population and slavery remained a legal instituti
Steve Bracks
Stephen Phillip Bracks AC is a former Australian politician and the 44th Premier of Victoria. He first won the electoral district of Williamstown in 1994 for the Labor Party and was party leader and premier from 1999 to 2007. Bracks led Labor in Victoria to minority government at the 1999 election, defeating the incumbent Jeff Kennett Liberal and National coalition government. Labor was returned with a majority government. Labor was elected for a third term at the 2006 election with a reduced majority. Bracks is the second-longest-serving Labor premier in Victorian history, only John Cain Jr. served for a longer period. The treasurer, John Brumby, became Labor leader and premier in 2007 when Bracks retired from politics. Steve Bracks was born in Ballarat, he is a Lebanese Australian. His family became Roman Catholic. Bracks was educated in Ballarat at St Patrick's College and the Ballarat College of Advanced Education, where he graduated in business studies and education, he became a keen follower of Australian rules football.
From 1976 to 1981 Bracks was a school commerce teacher at Ballarat. During the 1980s he worked in local government in Ballarat and as Executive Director of the Ballarat Education Centre. While in these positions he twice contested the seat of Ballarat North in the Victorian Legislative Assembly for the Labor Party. In 1989 Bracks was appointed statewide manager of Victorian state government employment programs, under the Labor government of John Cain Jr, he became an adviser to both Cain and Cain's successor as Premier, Joan Kirner. Here he was able to witness from the inside the collapse of the Labor government following the economic and budgetary crisis which began in 1988; this experience gave Bracks a conservative and cautious view of economic management in government. Following the defeat of the Kirner government by the Liberal leader Jeff Kennett in late 1992, Bracks became Executive Director of the Victorian Printing Industry Training Board, he quit this post in 1994 when Kirner resigned from Parliament and Bracks was elected for Kirner's seat of Williamstown in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where he lived with his wife Terry and their three children.
One of his children is Australian model. Bracks was elected to Labor's front bench, as Shadow Minister for Employment, Industrial Relations and Tourism. In 1996, after Labor under John Brumby was again defeated, he became Shadow Treasurer. In March 1999, when it became apparent that Labor was headed for another defeat under Brumby's leadership, Brumby resigned and Bracks was elected Opposition Leader. Political observers were unanimous that Bracks had no chance of defeating Liberal premier Jeff Kennett at the September 1999 election: polls gave Kennett a 60% popularity rating. Bracks and his senior colleagues campaigned in regional areas, accusing Kennett of ignoring regional communities. In response, voters in regional areas deserted the Kennett government. On election night, much to its own surprise, Labor increased its seat count from 29 to 41, with the Liberals and their National Party allies retaining 43, three falling to rural independents. With the Coalition one seat short of government, the election was to be decided in Frankston East, when the death of incumbent Peter McLellan forced a supplementary election.
That supplementary election was won by Labor on a large swing. The independents agreed to support a minority Labor government, making Bracks the first Catholic Labor Premier of Victoria since 1932. Former leader Brumby, appointed Treasurer, was regarded as a major part of the government's success, he and the Deputy Premier and Minister for Health, John Thwaites, the Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, were regarded as the key ministers in the Bracks government. Following a pre-1999 election commitment to consider the feasibility of introducing fast rail services to regional centres, in 2000 the government approved funding for the Regional Fast Rail project, upgrading rail lines between Melbourne and Ballarat, Bendigo and Traralgon. However, in 2006 the Victorian Auditor General noted that in spite of $750 million spent, "We found that the delivery of more frequent fast rail services in the Geelong and Bendigo corridors by the agreed dates was not achieved. In total, the journey time outcomes will be more modest than we would have expected with only a minority of travellers to benefit from significant journey time improvements.
These outcomes occur because giving some passengers full express services means bypassing large numbers of passengers at intermediate stations along the corridors."On 14 December 2000, Steve Bracks released a document outlining his government's intent to introduce the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001. The major criticism of Bracks's first government was that their insistence on consultation stood in the way of effective, proactive government. Bracks, according to critics, achieved little, lost the excitement of constant change, characteristic of the Kennett years; the talents of some of the more junior ministers in the government were questioned. Bracks got through his first term without major mishaps, his popularity undiminished. Labor won the 2002 election in a landslide, taking 62 seats out of 88 in the Legislative Assembly—only the third time in Victoria's history that a Labor governm
