Is Australia’s housing crisis self-inflicted? If so, then we need a series of reforms to reverse it
The best long-term solution to the structural problems of the rental crisis is to build more public and/or affordable housing.

Make renting more Sustainable. Increase rent assistance or look at rental caps, similar to countries in Europe and some US states, long term tenancy agreements with incentives for all parties to the agreement.

Build to Rent
The Build to Rent property sector is growing in Australia – this new class of housing is focused on providing high quality purpose designed and built rental stock, creating an additional housing choice for Australian renters with greater security and service.

Build to Rent developments are typically owned by institutional investors for the long term and the owner could be the developer/ongoing building manager. The format provides tenants with the flexibility of renting with the security of home ownership.

Build-to-Rent developments are usually large-scale residential properties specifically designed, built and managed for long-term ownership and rental.

Social Housing
In the 40 years between 1981 and 2021 the percentage of all Australian households living in social housing (i.e. state owned and managed public housing or community managed housing) has ranged from 4.9 per cent in 1981 to 3.8 per cent in 2021. Such a drop in the proportion of social housing raises the question of has Australia achieved the balance right, and also just what is the right level of social housing for Australia?

In 2018 Statistics Canada said 628,700 Canadian households, more than one in ten renter households nationally (13.5% of 4,652,500), were living in social and affordable housing.
In New Zealand, as of 30 June 2021, there were 74,337 public housing households. This equates to 4.0% of households living in social housing.

In England (in 2018) 17% of households (3.9 million) lived in social housing, while the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development publishes that 1.2 million households live in public housing, which is 0.98 per cent of all housing.

The Future Industries eXchange for Entrepreneurship (FIXE) is a strategy to grow the culture of entrepreneurship in South Australia; a nexus for connecting and building the ecosystem and a showcase of South Australian people, businesses and ideas.

The FIXE ethos is to accelerate South Australia’s economic growth and prosperity; to capture the entrepreneurial spirit in South Australia and see more South Australians become successful entrepreneurs, attract more interstate and overseas entrepreneurs and future industries to start and grow in South Australia.

Government investment in Lot Fourteen is expected to catalyse further private sector investment in Edinburgh Defence Precinct, Technology Park Adelaide/Mawson Lakes, Osborne Naval Shipyard, Tonsley Innovation District and The Waite Research Precinct.

The Osborne Naval Shipyard will deliver Australia’s Future Frigates and Future Submarines programs, other major naval projects, and hosts some of Australia’s leading maritime companies. South Australia has its roots in the construction, upgrade, full-cycle docking and life-of-type extension of the Collins class submarine, the construction and delivery of three Hobart class Air Warfare Destroyers, the continuous build of major warships, including two Arafura class Offshore Patrol Vessels, nine Hunter class frigates and a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines that will be built at the Osborne Naval Shipyard.

Edinburgh is the home of RAAF Base Edinburgh, Defence Science and Technology and major defence companies, with major capabilities in research, development and manufacturing.

RAAF Base Edinburgh is the home of P-8A Poseidon aircraft, Triton unmanned aircraft system, special purpose electronic warfare aircraft, the Jindalee Operational Radar Network and space surveillance systems.

Adelaide is South Australia’s cosmopolitan coastal capital. Its ring of parkland on the River Torrens is home to renowned museums such as the Art Gallery of South Australia, displaying expansive collections including noted Indigenous art, and the South Australian Museum, devoted to natural history.

The city's Adelaide Festival in March is an annual international arts gathering with spin-offs including fringe and film events.

The Art Gallery of South Australia is home to one of Australia’s great art collections. The collection comprises of over 45,000 works of art spanning from Australia, Europe, North America and Asia and includes one of the most important collections of Indigenous art as well as the only dedicated Islamic gallery space in Australia.

A lush and green oasis in the heart of Adelaide, Adelaide Zoo is the second oldest zoo in Australia and represents a significant part of South Australia’s heritage and social history. With over 2,500 animals calling Adelaide Zoo home, visitors turn adventurers as they explore their way through the jungle-like botanic gardens.

Adelaide Waste and Recycling Centre is a state of the art resource recovery centre and waste recycling facility.

Advanced Waste to Resource Processing is the alternative available to South Australia to decrease waste to landfill and stop ocean waste disposal. AWRP solutions are proven technologies that recover valuable materials for reuse and repurpose or produce energy from waste.

Opportunities for stormwater and wastewater capture and reuse at the local, neighbourhood and regional scale will also be supported.

Better stormwater management is needed to ensure our natural waterways, linear parks and green open spaces are enhanced to keep stormwater where it falls.

GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) is a state-of-the-art language processing AI model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text and has a wide range of applications, including language translation, language modelling, and generating text for applications such as chatbots. It is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Its most common use so far is creating ChatGPT - a highly capable chatbot. To give you a little taste of its most basic ability, we asked GPT-3's chatbot to write its own description as you can see above. It’s a little bit boastful, but completely accurate and arguably very well written.
In less corporate terms, GPT-3 gives a user the ability to give a trained AI a wide range of worded prompts. These can be questions, requests for a piece of writing on a topic of your choosing or a huge number of other worded requests.

With its 175 billion parameters, its hard to narrow down what GPT-3 does. The model is, as you would imagine, restricted to language. It can’t produce video, sound or images like its brother Dall-E 2, but instead has an in-depth understanding of the spoken and written word.

Artificial intelligence can be applied in agriculture. Data collected from sensors can be converted by artificial intelligence into information to support farm planning and monitoring, to manage crops, herds and land, through to determining management decisions for individual plants and animals.

AI is being incorporated into agricultural robots, to interpret sensor data, and support pest control, crop growth, fertiliser and water management, planting and harvesting, history and prediction.

The potential benefits of AI for the defence industry are substantial. AI can help soldiers make better decisions in complex and rapidly evolving situations by providing them with real-time information and insights on the battlefield.

AI can also automate routine tasks such as logistics, freeing up soldiers and officers to focus on more critical tasks.

AI can be used in human–machine teams to improve efficiency, increase combat power and achieve decision superiority, while lowering the risk to personnel.

We believe that AI has an important role to play in the healthcare offerings of the future. In the form of machine learning, it is the primary capability behind the development of precision medicine, widely agreed to be a sorely needed advance in care. Although early efforts at providing diagnosis and treatment recommendations have proven challenging, we expect that AI will ultimately master that domain as well. Given the rapid advances in AI for imaging analysis, it seems likely that most radiology and pathology images will be examined at some point by a machine. Speech and text recognition are already employed for tasks like patient communication and capture of clinical notes, and their usage will increase.

The greatest challenge to AI in these healthcare domains is not whether the technologies will be capable enough to be useful, but rather ensuring their adoption in daily clinical practice. For widespread adoption to take place, AI systems must be approved by regulators, integrated with EHR systems, standardised to a sufficient degree that similar products work in a similar fashion, taught to clinicians, paid for by public or private payer organisations and updated over time in the field. These challenges will ultimately be overcome, but they will take much longer to do so than it will take for the technologies themselves to mature. As a result, we expect to see limited use of AI in clinical practice within 5 years and more extensive use within 10.

It also seems increasingly clear that AI systems will not replace human clinicians on a large scale, but rather will augment their efforts to care for patients. Over time, human clinicians may move toward tasks and job designs that draw on uniquely human skills like empathy, persuasion and big-picture integration. Perhaps the only healthcare providers who will lose their jobs over time may be those who refuse to work alongside artificial intelligence.

AI in manufacturing brings offers streamlining and automation of complex processes. AI technology can effectively take control of data processing and input, that would otherwise require manual human labour.

Unlike humans who require breaks and holidays to rest, software including artificial intelligence can work 24/7. It can perform tedious, repetitive jobs without running the risk of burnout or fatigue.

AI tools can process and interpret vast volumes of data at a rate the human mind can’t compete with. This can include tracking, measuring, and monitoring inventory, machinery, and output.

AI has the capability to reduce human errors and reveal anomalies that would otherwise be missed. It’s a powerful tool when detecting quality defects and facilitating predictive maintenance of machinery.

Modelling geological formations underground is challenging due to the lack of direct visibility and cost of exploratory sampling. AI algorithms are being applied to improve geological estimations, fusing together a variety of dense and sparse data from different sources.

AI is being used in maintenance prediction and response, accident and injury avoidance, environmental impact including ventilation, pollution and water management, and autonomous vehicle management.

Apollo Care brings best-practice frameworks for care provision and governance, staff culture, quality and compliance oversight and technology development to deliver exceptional resident experiences and improved business performance. Our communities enjoy the benefits of large-scale efficiencies and specialist expertise at a local level.

Apollo takes on the governance, compliance, administration and financial support for each facility that joins the Alliance, while aiming to ensure that each operator preserves its not-for- profit status, brand and connection to the local community – in effect, ‘de-risking’ the business of residential care.

The ARM Hub is an agile world leading technology centre in robotics and design-led manufacturing.

Headquartered in Brisbane, the ARM Hub provides access to a network of research institutions, facilities and smart commercial companies in the region.

Innovation strategies, frameworks and implementation plans for effective cutting-edge solutions in health, industry 4.0, education, organisational psychology, human capital and workplace productivity.

The group supports the emergence of ‘Consumer Directed Care’, a personalised ‘continuum of care’ model, that is now legislated (in Australia) for both disability services (NDIS) and in-home aged care.

‘Consumer Directed Care’ is our entree into ‘Value Based Care’ and Australia’s global healthcare differentiator. Getting it right, means systemic entrenched leadership across Asia-Pacific for at least the next 2-3 generations.

This new model of healthcare, whist initially disruptive, will help drive new 21st century population health practices and the underpinning next generation of assistive technology. ‘Industry 4.0’ business models and technologies will be at its core.

New systems will emerge that have our citizens with comorbidity and chronic health conditions at the centre. Rapidly converging demands will align our population health, aged care, disability services, technology and education providers into a new alliance focused on co-designing highly personalised and practical solutions from the outset.

Capacity building will be a key principle progressing along the illness, wellness and fitness spectrum.

"Maximising opportunities from new, growing and strategically important industries including renewable energy and the digital and care economies will be critical to boosting productivity, sustaining full employment and ensuring our cities and regions thrive."

The most significant structural shift of the past 20 years has been the rise of the services sector. The growth in the health and care economy has been an important part of this trend."

• The health care and social assistance sector has more than doubled in size over the past 20 years, rising from 10 to 15 per cent of the workforce and now employs more than 2 million people. Employment in the sector is projected to grow by 15.8 per cent over the next five years.

• Labour shortages in the care workforce are already acute and expected to worsen with a projected shortfall of 286,000 care workers by 2050. Low pay and challenging conditions, partly as a result of high workloads and staff absences related to COVID-19 and influenza, have led to higher staff turnover.

• The care workforce is also highly feminised. Around 9 in 10 aged care workers are women and a high number of workers come from migrant backgrounds.

Africa is a diverse continent of great dynamism and economic potential. Australia is committed to supporting African nations as partners for regional and global stability and a rules-based international system that delivers economic growth, security and human development. We have a vibrant African diaspora who are making a valuable contribution to our relations with the African continent.

We also have strong and growing trade and investment connections with Africa.

Australia's two-way goods and services trade with Africa was valued at $9.6 billion in 2021. Our largest export is wheat, valued at over $900 million in 2021, with the majority going to South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, and Sudan.

The Australia Africa Chamber of Commerce (AACC) is a national organisation that is dedicated to facilitating trade with Africa.

We also facilitate trade missions to and from Africa and offer access to both African and Australian business & investment opportunities.

The AACC will accelerate Australia's export business to Africa through the identification of business opportunities, and by matching these to Australian industries in target markets, including: education, agribusiness, mining, tourism, energy, green tech and manufacturing.

Email us here: support@australiaafrica.com to express your interest.

AIB was established to convert business opportunities and leads to profitable commercial outcomes.

Many opportunities have been identified by AIB for B2B engagements in key industry sectors including Agribusiness, information and Communication technologies, Education and Skills Development, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Smart manufacturing, Infrastructures, Hydrogen and Renewable Energy and Critical Mineral.

AIB has been specifically created to effectively focus on opportunities that achieve B2B commercial outcomes, generating financial benefits for all parties, individuals and corporate to acquire financial benefits.

AIB is prepared to work with any individual or organisation that wishes to go for a profitable deal. Protocols for business engagement have been prepared to accept this opportunity to create personal and corporate wealth through profitable business outcomes.

AIB will focus in taking it to the next level from promotion and engagement to converting deals. AIB will be used to manage the deal flow and end to end facilitation of business between India and Australia and improve brand image of both countries, in both countries.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/australia-india-business-aib/?viewAsMember=true
Email: enquiryRT@aib.net.au

Is Australia’s housing crisis self-inflicted?

If so, then we need a series of reforms to reverse it

The best long-term solution to the structural problems of the rental crisis is to build more public and/or affordable housing.

Reform incentives that give more advantages to investors over owner-occupiers.

Reform on “no cause” evictions, where landlords can kick tenants out for no reason and make it within reason.

Make renting more Sustainable! Increase rent assistance or look at rental caps, similar to countries in Europe and some US states, long term tenancy agreements with incentives for all parties to the agreement.

The list goes on and we plan to have some robust conversations within this group that focus on solutions rather than the cause!

In Kindness

Allan 'Big Al' Connolly
Founder - Kommuniti HQ
Managing Director - The Whealth Group
Co-Chair - WA Alliance to End Homelessness,
and Lived Experience of Homelessness Expert
M: +61 411 468 337
W: bigalconnolly.org
E: admin@bigalconnolly.org
LI: linkedin.com/in/bigalconnolly  

AusAgritech is shaping the future of Agritech in Australia and its contribution to the Australian economy. Agritech is a standalone sector which applies technology to the agri-food supply chain, and contemporaneously crosses over into energy, water, sustainability, environment, climate, industry and emissions reduction.

Our world leading Agritech sector is on the frontline enabling on-farm and supply chain adoption of technology, as well as building a clean, green and sustainable future. It is the cornerstone of transforming the way we farm, how the supply chain operates, drives a world leading export reputation and is a key enabler of sustainability and climate adaptation through the development of commercial and scaled applied technology solutions.

The Agritech industry powers Australia when it strives to reach its national level agricultural productivity, export, sustainability and digitilisation goals.

We exist to bring the Agritech ecosystem to the table to grow a vibrant sector.

The Australian Cobotics Centre is funded via a grant from the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Industrial Transformation Research Program, and its industry and university partners.

The centre is a multidisciplinary and multi-industry collaboration with partners from a range of industries including medical devices and steel making and academics from different universities (and disciplines including Engineering, Business, Health and Design.

Our core values reflect who we are and how we approach our work. Everything we do is EPIC: • Excellent – World leading research with transformational outcomes for industry. • People-centric – Positive, inclusive and supportive people building a workforce for the future. • Innovative – Forward thinking solutions created for industry through interdisciplinary research. • Collaborative – Multi-sector and multi-disciplinary expertise unified in a shared goal to improve the Australian manufacturing industry.

Our vision is to transform the Australian manufacturing industry and increase global competitivity through the deployment of collaborative robots.