Harmony Day on March 21 is the annual celebration of Australia’s diversity. More than 25 000 Harmony Day events have been staged since it began in 1999.

In launching the campaign, Senator Lundy said Australia was a proud sporting nation and the MCG was definitely a theatre of dreams for many young people.

“In 2012, Harmony Day will celebrate the important role sport plays in bringing Australians from all walks of life together to share in a common passion with the message, ‘Play, engage, inspire’,” Senator Lundy said.

“This year’s theme pays tribute to the positive and unifying influence of sport in our proudly sport-loving multicultural nation.

“The diversity of the sports we love in this country is a reflection of the diversity of the Australian people. Every sport also possesses the unique capacity to forge communities, foster acceptance and overcome social boundaries.

“As Australians we’re all members of a team – we are a team of more than 22 million people from almost every corner of the globe. It is our individual differences and our ability to make those differences work and find a common ground that makes Australia a great nation.

“With this sporting theme in mind, it is fantastic to be working with Cricket Australia to be launching the event this year before the second T20 match between Australia and India at the MCG.”

Harmony Day is about community participation, inclusiveness and respect and is a day where activities and celebrations help people learn and understand how Australians of diverse backgrounds live together.

“From today, celebrations across Australia in childcare centres, schools, community groups, churches, business, federal, state and local government agencies will provide a lead-up to Harmony Day on March 21,” Senator Lundy said.

“Last year, we had more than 6200 different events across Australia – the largest celebration of the event yet – and this year is shaping up to be even bigger.

“I hope all Australians will join with us to celebrate our diversity on Harmony Day, March 21, and remember ‘Everyone Belongs’!”

The Government believes it is important the public service continues to play its part in delivering savings to the Budget given tight fiscal conditions.

The Government expects agencies to continue to meet the efficiency dividend without resorting to forced redundancies.

We know the Liberal Party likes to boast about sacking 12,000 workers:

“For a start, 12,000 public servants in Canberra will be made redundant over a two-year period immediately upon us being elected.” HOCKEY – Q&A – 27 JUNE 2011

However we expect agencies to create savings in areas including: reductions in the use of big consultancy firms and contractors; replacing travel with the use of virtual meeting facilities; reductions in agency spend on hospitality and entertainment; minimising media and advertising expenditure; reductions in printing and publication expenditure, and more efficient and consistent delivery of training.

The future figures for wages and salaries used by the Canberra Times do not account for new policies that may be agreed to by government in future budgets. Adjusting for this would change the projections.

The figures also do not reflect the Government’s expectation that agencies meet the Efficiency Dividend from non-salary expenditure. This means in future years the wage and salary figures are expected to increase at the expense of non-wage and salary departmental expenditure.

Unlike the Liberals, we believe that a strong public service is essential to support the community and deliver critical government programs.

The strength of Australia is our people, their humility and kindness, their willingness to lend a helping hand to those in need of support. The Gillard Government is recognising the extraordinary contribution made many Australians in our communities through the People of Australia Ambassador’s Program.

The 40 People of Australia Ambassadors, appointed by the Prime Minister, are outstanding Australians who work to bring people together and build bridges of understanding and respect.

Communities thrive when people are encouraged to participate and share a common future. The inaugural program reflects the strength of leadership throughout our communities and our capacity as a nation to welcome people and make them feel part of our community.

The program is a practical way to recognise the valuable role local citizens play in strengthening their communities and building bridges of understanding and respect. Through the program the Ambassadors will have an opportunity to promote the value of their work and provide advice to government and the independent Australian Multicultural Council.

The program is about recognising the positive impact many outstanding Australians are having on the ground.

All the ambassadors have their own stories and their contributions are diverse. However, they share in common a drive to make a difference and bring people together.

Through their efforts People of Australia Ambassadors have engaged countless young people through sport, helped thousands of young students overcome language barriers, and created volunteer organisations that draw on the strength of the community to help people settle in Australia to name a few. Their contributions are substantial.

If you’re an AFL fan you would know one of the 40 ambassadors selected, Harry O’Brien, who plays for Collingwood.

It was an honour to meet Harry O’Brien, at Gosch’s Oval in Melbourne yesterday and hear more about the AFL multicultural sports program and the many community activities he is engaged with.

Everyone knows Harry is a remarkable player on the field, but off the field he gives back to the community.

Harry is a wonderful role model who actively works to make a difference. We need more people like him. His conviction and his passion for making a positive difference is empowering young people and inspiring them to reach for their full potential. 

In fact, all 40 of our Ambassadors are great role models in their own way, to find out more about the program click here or vist the AMC site. 

Or check out these videos and listen to some of their stories:

Pastor Brad Chilcott
Jennifer Barrera
Dr Tien Nguyen
Ahmed Dini

PRIME MINISTER

PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY FOR IMMIGRATION AND MULTICULTURAL AFFAIRS

 

PEOPLE OF AUSTRALIA AMBASSADORS

Harry O'Brien, Kate Lundy and the Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the People of Australia Ambassador launch

Prime Minister Julia Gillard today congratulated 40 Australians who have been recognised for their outstanding work in building strong and cohesive local communities.

The 40 local champions have been independently selected as the new People of Australia Ambassadors following hundreds of nominations from the public.

Australians were encouraged to nominate inspirational people who have helped to build bridges, promote inclusion and strengthen ties in their communities.

The Prime Minister and Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Kate Lundy announced the new Ambassadors in Melbourne today.

They were joined by football champion and new Ambassador Harry O’Brien, who is actively involved in the AFL’s own Multicultural Program and engaged in a variety of community projects.

The Ambassador program is a key initiative of the Gillard Labor Government’s multicultural policy, The People of Australia, announced last year.

The 40 Ambassadors now have a new platform to promote their good work and share their ideas and initiatives that can help inspire others.

The Gillard Government recognises good work that is happening in our communities and that good work deserves to be championed at the national level.

The new Ambassadors will be able to provide advice to Government and the Australian Multicultural Council if they wish.

Their contributions will help assist and strengthen the Government’s multicultural policy.

The Ambassadors have been recognised for the real impact they are having on the lives of many Australians – from bringing kids together through sport, to helping small business owners from diverse backgrounds get up and running.

The inaugural Ambassador program speaks to the strength of our Australian communities and our capacity as a nation to welcome people and make them feel part of our community.

The 2012 Ambassadors’ term commences today and ends on 30 December 2012.

Further information on the Ambassadors is available at http://www.amc.gov.au/ambassadors/ambassadors-2012.htm

LIST OF PEOPLE OF AUSTRALIA AMBASSADORS

Australian Capital Territory

Sam Wong AM

Northern Territory

Ms Sascha McKell

Mr Kevin Kadirgamar

New South Wales

Sister Diana Santleben

Mr Ali Reza Yunespour

Dr Cen Amores

Ms Ricci Bartels

Mr Susai Benjamin JP

Mr Jeremy Jones AM

Ms Vivi Germanos-Koutsounadis

Mr Lawrence Dimech OAM, JP

Ms Carmen Lazar

Mrs Jenny Siv Phan Tew

Mr Samir Yousif

Dr Tien Manh Nguyen OAM

Queensland

Mrs Adele Rice

Mr Daniel Zingifuaboro

Mr Warren McMillan

Dr Farvardin Daliri OAM

Mr Umesh Chandra

South Australia

Pastor Brad Chilcott

Ms Dorinda Hafner

Mrs Claudia Cream

Ms Denise McEvoy

Ms Elizabeth Ho

Tasmania

Mr Fayia Isaiah Lahai

Mrs Sajini Sumar

Victoria

Mr Harry O’Brien

Ms Melissa Barbieri

Mrs Elleni Bereded-Samuel

Mr Deepak Vinayak

Mrs Jennifer Barrera

Ms Marion Lau OAM, JP

Mr Chap Chow

Mr Phong Nguyen

Mr Ahmed Dini

Mr David Nyuol Vincent

Western Australia

Ms Maria Grazia Saraceni

Ms Zeliha Iscel

Mr Salim Youssef

As part of the National Year of Reading in 2012 the first National Year of Reading initiative – ‘Our Story’ – is already underway with every state and territory around the country voting on a shortlist of six books each. The aim is to find one book from each state and territory which will form a collection that, when read together, describes the Australian experience.

The list of eight winning titles and the start of Australia’s biggest book group for the National Year of Reading will be announced at a special event at the National Library of Australia in February.

For more information about what will be happening in the ACT during National Year of Reading and ACT Ambassadors visit http://www.library.act.gov.au/

ACT Ambassadors for the National Year of Reading 2012

• Katy Gallagher – ACT Chief Minister and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services (Primary Ambassador)
• Simon Corbell, MLA – Attorney General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development
• Kate Lundy – Federal Senator for the ACT
• Jackie French – Author
• Marion Halligan – Author
• Jack Heath – Author
• Tania McCartney – Author
• Omar Musa – Spoken Word Artist
• Jess Bibby – Captain, Canberra Capitals
• Canberra Roller Derby League
• Phil Davis – Greater Western Sydney Giants
• Grace Gill – Canberra United
• Matt Toomua – ACT Brumbies
• Mark Carmody – Weather presenter, ABC News
• Louise Maher – Drive Presenter, 666 ABC
• Rob Paxevanos – Host, Fishing Australia
• Scotty and Nige, FM 104.7 Breakfast Presenters
• Jack Waterford – Editor at Large, The Canberra Times
• Mark Sullivan – Managing Director, ACTEW AGL
• Rod Little, Chairperson of the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body (ATSIEB)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video Transcript

Kate Lundy (Senator for the ACT): We’re at the launch of the Year of Reading, it is next year 2012 and this is the Chief Minister and she is the official Ambassador for the Year of Reading. So what do you like to read?

Katy Gallagher (ACT Chief Minister): I like to read when it is not for work, read for pleasure, nice stories not horrible stories or sci-fi or anything too heavy, as I get plenty of that for work.

Kate Lundy: We have worked out that we have incompatible reading tastes. So what is your favourite kind of novel?

Katy Gallagher: Stories about real life. Interesting stories about interesting people. But again, not too heavy. I don’t like any tragedies, I don’t like any violence, I don’t like any make believe. There is lots of it around like that.

Kate Lundy: Were you shocked to find out about the literacy rates in launching this today?

Katy Gallagher: The latest data says that about one in three Canberra adults don’t have a level of literacy that lets them lead a successful life. I think that is really shocking because you wouldn’t think a place like Canberra, a relatively well educated community would have levels like that. But it is not that hidden, so part of next year is really about raising awareness, encouraging people to read and really putting the effort in the early years with this.

Kate Lundy: Well hopefully we can inspire a lot more people to take up their favourite book and read something new perhaps in 2012.

A range of local charities are set to benefit from the sale of a house in Franklin which is being built and auctioned for charity.

Chief Minister Katy Gallagher today launched the Franklin Charity House project which involves a new charity partnership between the Land Development Agency (LDA) and the Master Builders Association of the ACT (MBA).

The partnership will result in a house being built at Franklin and the funds from the sale of the house being distributed to local charities.

The charities to benefit from the funds raised from the sale of the Franklin Charity House are:

• the YWCA who will use the funds to help meet the needs of older single retired women;
• YouthCARE – offering a range of services to homeless youth;
• Canberra Men’s Centre – helping men regain a valued place in society;
• Innana – an agency specialising in crisis accommodation for women and children; and
• Toora Women – providing accommodation and support services for women

Video transcript: 

I’m here outside the LDA building in Canberra and I’ve just been to the launch of the Franklin Charity House.

This is a fantastic project where the Master Builders Association (MBA), Classic Construction and a heap of other companies from the building and construction industry have contributed to building a house which will be sold and the profits distributed to really worthy charities here in Canberra.

The charities themselves include Innana, YouthCare, Toora Women, the Canberra Men’s Centre and the YWCA, five charities that all work towards reducing homelessness and supporting families and people in need.

It is a fantastic cause, if you would like to find out more about the Franklin Charity House you can go to www.franklincharityhouse.org.au

Many thanks to the Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher who launched the House today. We did it inside because we were worried about the rain and the whether being not so good. It didn’t rain but now it is formally launched and I certainly encourage people to go to the website to find out more about this fantastic Canberra project.

As a normal part of the Public Sphere analysis stage, we look at both the data and the communities who have contributed. The data analysis is where we find the ideas, peer review, case studies, sentiment, emerging themes and other content from the participating community. Community analysis is where we look at the network of contributors, what sectors they are from, how they interrelate, and the context of who they are. This helps us understand the context of the contributions.

We constantly look for and experiment with tools to achieve both of these analysis goals. There are many data analysis tools out there. We have experimented with Opinion Watch from NICTA, Leximancer, Wordle and some data visualisation tools.

And we have a role too. As the convenors of a Public Sphere consultation, our job is to curate the contributions into a first iteration of a report in a useful and readable format. It is this draft report that is opened up to wiki edits and peer review feedback by the participating community.

With regard to community analysis, there aren’t a lot of quality tools we’ve found that give us the flexibility to define and interact with metadata about the communities who have participated. In two Public Spheres, we heavily used Palantir, a computer forensics tool that visualises the networks created through the digital conversation within social networks as part of the Public Sphere. This tool demonstrates one way that you get to know the community of participants in relation to each other and their contributions. Please check out the video below to see the ways we used this tool in the Digital Culture Public Sphere.

Many thanks to Leximancer and to Palantir for their support in the Digital Culture Public Sphere, and particularly to Palantir for putting this excellent video together.

Tools like these will be increasingly important to understanding the breadth and substance of contributions in public consultations, particularly when using online and digital environments. The analysis can paint a picture of the representativeness of contributions, identify gaps in the contributing community, build understanding of the context around ideas put forward, and ideally, help us be able to identify when a consultation is being gamed, providing an important check and balance to the process.

Please add to the comments, and let us know any tools you’ve been playing with in this space that would be interesting to try at the next Public Sphere.

Kate and Pia

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcript:
(voice over by Andrew Lampert)

In August 2011, Australian Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, issued a discussion paper seeking public input to the National Cultural Policy.

This policy will present a 10 year strategy vision for the arts, cultural and creative endeavours in Australia.

The Office of Senator Kate Lundy, in collaboration with the Office of Minister Crean, ran a Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation to gather public input to this policy, and used Palantir to integrate and analyse the contributions from across a range of media.

The aim was to illicit visions for success from relevant sectors on the digital culture landscape and also to seek specific ideas for how to reach these goals.

Using Palantir, we integrated contributions that people made to a range of sites including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, the Public Sphere wiki, and IdeaScale, a site for posting and voting on ideas.

Let’s take a look at how we import this data into the Palantir platform.

Here we’ve got a spreadsheet containing information about the people who registered to attend the live Public Sphere event. We simply drag and drop this onto the Palantir workspace to begin importing this data.

Next, we map the spreadsheet columns to properties and objects in the dynamic ontology, which represents the conceptual model that’s been defined for the Public Sphere event.

In this case we’re mapping properties like names, emails addresses and digital culture sector affiliations to people objects so we can model the contributions from different sectors and different people across media types.

The result of this process is a collection of people objects that represent the people who registered to attend the live event. These people objects have properties associated with them. The email addresses, names and digital culture sector affiliation we just saw.

Having seen one way we can load data, let’s take a look at an overview of all the data that was contributed during the Public Sphere consultation.

The object explorer application gives us a top down view of the almost 6000 contributions across the different media types.

Within the object explorer, the timeline helper gives us a temporal look at this data. We can also explore it and slice it by contributions to specific media sites. We can see for example small numbers of contributions to YouTube and Facebook, a larger number of blog comments and wiki edits, and a peak of IdeaScale votes towards the end of the consultation period once ideas had come to fruition.

The largest peak on the graph represents more than 2000 tweets that were registered during the live event on October 6th.

One of the challenges when gathering contributions from different sources is to identify those contributions that were actually from the same person, even when that person has used different user accounts with different names across these different systems.

Palantir provides entity resolution tools that can be used to help with this process. These rule based approaches can be used to merge user accounts which share an email address or a name, or any other properties, into a single underlying person entity.

Further manual resoltuion can also be done to allow tacit knowledge and human intuition to be used to further resolve different user identities that represent the same undelying person.

Now that we’ve resolved our user accounts to the underlying people, we can begin to explore the contributions from each sector of the digital culture landscape.

These sectors are defined as digital arts, film and animation, media and music, games development and cultural institutions and big picture contributions that cut across these sectors. One way to approach this sector analysis is to begin with the people entities, that is, the people who have made contributions.

The first step is to map each person into the sector or sectors that they represent. 18% of contributors attended the live event and explicitly provided this information at registration.

For everyone else we must analyse the available information to determine which sectors they represent. We can do this a number of ways. One approach is to use the text cloud help that shows frequent terms that occur in the profile information that’s associated with people who contributed.

We can use this information to identify and group users. For example, those who mentioned galleries, library collections, museums or archives in their profile are likely to represent the cultural institution sector.

This grouping of matching users can then be manually checked to make sure that the sector information that is assigned to each person is of high quality. Another approach is to look at the domains associated with people’s email addresse. Many cultural institutions for example have readily recognisable email domains that make it relatively easy to identify contributors from those institutions and again to allocate them to the relevant sector.

There are of course many other ways of analysing the data.

Once we’ve analysed and allocated sectors to the people who contributed, we can then search from our contributing people to find all the documents and ideas that they’ve contributed. The links on this graph represent the authoring links, that is, the links between a person and the contributions that they’ve made across the different sites.

We can safely remove the orphan nodes from this graph. These represent people who for instance have registered for the live event but have not attended, or at least have not contributed to any of the digital sources.

The remaining set of people represent everyone who made a contribution to the various digital sites from which data was contributed during the Public Sphere consultation.

Defining this set of users allows us to drill down on only the active contributing users when we start exploring contributions across the different sectors.

We begin by histograming the properties of all users who contributed and we can see the sector affiliations that we’ve previously associated with people.

We can drill down on any specific sector, for example, cultural institutions, and then look at the documents that were contributed by people representing this sector.

We can see more than 1500 contributions were made from the cultural institutions sector, and can timeline these across the Public Sphere consultation period to explore temporal patterns in the data.

The most obvious peak is that of around 900 Tweets during the live event on October 6th, and this pattern correlates with the larger pattern of all contributions across all sectors.

We can repeat this process for the other digital culture sectors. For example here we’re showing it for the digital arts sector, and again we can timeline the results and see there is a similar distribution of contributions across the period with a peak of Tweets during the live event.

Our final analysis will explore the Tweets contributed during the consultation period, and focus in on those during the live event.

We’ll begin by exploring the proportion of retweets to novel tweets, and we can use a filter in the workspace to achieve this. We can organise the results and see the relative proportion of tweets verses retweets. Across the consultation period 43% of Tweets were retweets.

Next using our timeline helper, we can provide a temporal filter that allows us to focus in on just the tweets from the period during the live event on Thursday the 6th of October.

From here we can search around to retrieve the linked entities, that is the people who represent the authors of these Tweets. This will allow us to discover who was Tweeting during the live event.

Of the 556 people who Tweeted with the #publicsphere hashtag, 65% did so during the live event. When we lay out the graph, we can see some dense clusters representing people who’ve Tweeted many times.

Our histogram helper can help us identify the top three tweeters during the live event. In this case, Kathryn Greenhill, Fee Plumley and Pia Waugh.

Thanks for watching this presentation about how Palantir was used to analyse contributions to the Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation.

He brought along the ‘box’ (NTU) that people will get when they subscribe to a retail service provider (think ISP) delivering their service (voice and/or internet) on the NBN.

Dan also explained the structure of access and transit networks that NBN Co are building across Australia, putting into context the construction program of the network in our community here in Gungahlin.

Construction is organised through Fibre Serving Area Modules, or FSAMs. Each FSAM is about 2 to 3 thousand homes. In Gungahlin, there have been two FSAMs announced, covering Ngunnawal and Amaroo mostly. You can see a map of the first 2 FSAMs (the first 5000-6000 premises) being built on the Gungahlin map linked on the NBN site.

The footprint for the next FSAMs and the rest of the Gungahlin region will be available will be early next year.

The good news is that the NBN Co. announcement in October not only confirmed that 20,800 premises (the Gungahlin region) are in the time frame for commencement in the next 12 months, but that FSAMs should take around 12 months, on average, from start to switch on.

This means that it is reasonable to expect all Gungahlin region residents to be switched on progressively over the next two years.

Dan Flemming also canvassed the implications of the Telstra deal and what that meant for the build here. People who came to the last meeting will recall that the agreement with Telstra was still being finalised. With that all sorted out, Dan was able to give good information about the Points of Interconnects (PoIs) and the use and access to Telstra exchanges and conduit etc.

He confirmed that some Telstra infrastructure will be used here, including space in the Crace exchange and access to the existing underground conduit as examples. Silcar, the construction company, were also represented at the meeting and hence available to answer questions about the different phases of construction.

Of great interest is the maps for the next FSAMs to be started. Dan made it clear that these maps won’t be released until the detailed design work for each one is completed. He reckoned the next FSAM maps (for the interest of long suffering Palmerston, Nicholls, et al) should be available in February or March.

Below is a short video where I chat to Dan about NBN in Gungahlin.

I took some questions from last night and will post responses in the coming days. Please post any other outstanding questions you have about NBN in Gungahlin and I’ll endeavour to get you answers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcript:

Senator Lundy:

I’m with Dan Fleming, the head of construction at NBN Co. It’s a big day for Canberra because NBN Co will be presenting to the Gungahlin Community Council Meeting tonight. Dan, tell us what you’re going to be saying at the meeting.

Dan Fleming:

We’re going to come and explain what really the NBN rollout for the next 12 months means for the residents of the Gungahlin community. We announced in October a rolling 12 month plan, and we’ll explain really what that means.

Senator Lundy:

It’s great news because of course in October we heard that there were some 20,800 people that would be serviced by the NBN started in that 12 month plan, so can you just give us a bit more idea of timing and what’s actually going on out there at the moment.

Dan Fleming:

Yep, sure. We announced that 20,800 premises would be commenced within the next 12 months, now we do that in a very controlled way, in a series of modules, and we’ve agreed with the contractors that will be doing the work when they’ll be doing those modules. So what it means is that when we start a module, it takes about 12 months to start and complete that module and start connecting customers.

So if we start 20,800 premises in the next 12 months, in the subsequent 12 months we should finish those 20,800.

Senator Lundy:

Well that’s pretty exciting because I know that’s pretty much all of Gungahlin. So thanks for being here. I know it’ll be an interesting meeting. Hopefully we’ll get a great turn out and the interest in Canberra just keeps growing with the rollout of the NBN, so thanks.

Dan Fleming:

You’re very welcome.

Date: Tuesday 13th December 2011

Time: 7:00pm-9:00pm

Where: Gungahlin Library, downstairs meeting room

The meeting will be attended by NBN Co’s Head of Construction Dan Fleming and will include:

• An overview of the constructions’ timing and processes
• An update on the status of the 12 month building program
• Details on Retail Service Provider (RSP) pricing and
• An update on planned local community notification and engagement

This will be a good opportunity to find out more about the details of the update and ask questions.

In October NBN Co announced that the rollout has been extended in Gungahlin to 20,800 premises over the next 12 months.

NBN Co also announced a detailed map for the rollout in Gungahlin will be released in January 2012.

The NBN will provide access to high-speed broadband to all Australian premises. Under Labor, every home, school, hospital and business will receive high-speed broadband via the NBN – no one will miss out.

Further information on the NBN is available at www.nbn.gov.au and www.nbnco.com.au

I hope to see you there.

Kate.

The announcement follows the review of a pilot initiative undertaken in 2009-10 which extended free telephone interpreting services to selected real estate agents around Australia. The review showed the service has been successful in helping non-English speaking residents to communicate with real estate agents.

“Declining affordability and vacancy rates in recent years have led to an increasingly competitive private rental market, which poses particular challenges for new humanitarian settlers with little or no English,” Senator Lundy said.

“As part of this successful pilot, selected real estate agents were offered access to free telephone interpreting, through the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s translating and interpreting service, TIS National.”

Participating real estate agents reported that the service helped them to communicate more easily with their non-English speaking clients on tenancy issues including contract signings, rental payments and inspections.
The pilot was linked to a small number of housing-related projects being delivered under DIAC’s settlement grants program in locations of high migrant and humanitarian settlement.

Senator Lundy said the pilot has now been expanded, providing three times as many real estate agents with access to the free telephone interpreting service.

The expanded pilot will capture other major areas of high settlement need acrossAustraliaand in addition to wider metropolitan coverage, will include more regional centres.

“Last year, the Australian Government provided settlement support to about 13 750 refugees and humanitarian entrants,” Senator Lundy said.

“Strategies for embracing new arrivals as part of Australian society are a critical element of this commitment, but it is also important for them to build self-reliance and foster connections with mainstream services as soon as possible after arrival, to assist them in becoming participating members of the Australian community.”

The extended pilot will run from October 2011 for 12 months.