This gallery contains 21 photos.
Last week I was in Perth for the 24th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
You can download the paper and presentation I presented from my uni homepage.
Below are photos from around Perth that were taken on the day I arrived and during the evenings.
Overall, Perth is a nice city to visit. Fremantle, in particular, is particularly beautiful. The city feels like a cross between Wanganui and Christchurch, and it was a lot quieter than Sydney.
This gallery contains 16 photos.
These are photos from around the track at the V8 Supercars Sydney event last weekend.
This gallery contains 28 photos.
Yesterday I went to the V8 Supercars at Olympic Park. It was a great day out, with over 10 hours of racing amongst a variety of classes, and to top things off Holden one in the main game.
Below are the best of my photos of the various racing classes. I will do a second post with photos from the motorshow and other general shots.
To all who will listen,
Voting: simple and easy, even from overseas.
Next Saturday, each eligible New Zealander will be given the opportunity to vote for who they wish to represent them in government for the next three years.
Unfortunately a large number of young people won’t use this opportunity and as a result their opinion won’t be expressed.
The sad reality is that many people will happily answer online polls, express frustration via status updates and in general complain (often quite rightly) about how crap it is to be young won’t leave the house to pop down to their local school or community hall to vote and make a difference where they actually can.
However, this is the true reality: there is more power in casting a vote than three years of online polls, status updates, and complaining combined.
In New Zealand, under the MMP voting system, every vote is equal, and every vote matters.
But, when you don’t vote you are giving up that equality, you are letting someone else decide, and they will surely decide what is best for themselves, not for you.
For young people this election is particularly relevant for two key reasons: minimum wage/employment and education.
Currently the minimum wage in New Zealand is $12.75/hour and in Australia it is $15.51 AUD/hour which converted to NZ dollars is $20.52/hour – almost double.
If National is re-elected to government their policy is to set a youth minimum wage of 80% of the full minimum wage. That would lower the NZ minimum wage to $10.20/hour – less than half that of Australia’s. In other words young people get screwed.
National have also spent the last three years in government making it harder and more expensive to access education. Entry to university and polytechs are now capped, fees have continued to rise, and it is much harder to get student loans and if National get re-elected expect this to get worse.
Put simply, youth unemployment is over 17%, there are few jobs, people who currently have jobs can expect to be paid less for the same work, and upskilling is a tough gig. Young people are being screwed.
However, most other parties have policy to set the minimum wage to $15/hour and increase access to education.
But while young people continue to moan on Facebook, and fail to vote, they will continue to be screwed by a government that doesn’t care about them.
Next Saturday is an opportunity to change that and elect a government that does represent you.
About a third of people under the age of 25 are not enrolled to vote. If this is you then please enrol you must do so before Friday 25th November. You can enrol here: http://www.elections.org.nz/app/enrol/
Most importantly make sure you go out and vote on Saturday.
Chur,
Passionate young kiwi, living in Australia, wishing to call NZ home again someday.
This gallery contains 42 photos.
This morning I walked along the coast from Coogee to Bondi to check out Sculpture by the Sea. My idea was to do the walk early enough in the day to avoid the big crowds – as it turned out lots of other people had exactly the same idea!
However, as the photos attest, today was one of those moments when I love living in Sydney. The weather was perfect – not too hot, not too cold, and people were out and about smiling and enjoying the day.
These photos only represent a very small section of the artwork on display. In total there are over 100 exhibits and despite taking 250+ photos I still missed a lot of things.
An added bonus to my walk was seeing a Blue Tongue Lizard for the first time in the wild. I would have expected it to be hiding from all the noise but it seemed content enough to stick around and pose for me.
This gallery contains 36 photos.
I spent today hiking from Mt Ku-ring-gai to Berowra with friends from my university. The highlight of the walk was seeing five lace monitors (goanna lizards), a Gould’s monitor (sand goanna) and a water dragon. At one point I almost stepped onto the top of one of the goannas as I came over a small ridge.
Overall, the day was brilliant and I am absolutely spent now as the heat really sucked energy out of me.
Unfortunately, despite the beautiful weather this will probably be the last hike I do this year as it is getting too hot in Sydney which brings out the snakes and raises the fire danger.
This gallery contains 33 photos.
I have just got back from a half-day hike from Berowra to Mt Ku-ring-gai. The 9.5km track took three of us 3 hours 30 minutes to complete. During that time one of my mates got managed to fall into a stream we were crossing, and then attacked by a leach, while the other grazed his knee crossing another stream. However, I managed to survive with no damage.
More details on the track are available on the Wild Walks website.
This gallery contains 21 photos.
I’ve just got home from spending the day at the NRL Grand Final. What an awesome day despite the Warriors losing the NRL Grand Final. This was the biggest sporting event I had been to – 81,988 people in the crowd.
Act on Campus just posted the following image to their Facebook wall:
The image is of members of Young Act having dinner with Sir Roger Douglas before the continuing Voluntary Student Membership Bill debate.
The odd thing is (and maybe it was staged) is this photo is nearly identical to this very famous one from the 1980s:
Back to the future?
This gallery contains 16 photos.
I have just got back from spending the day hiking from Berowra to Cowan via Berowra Waters. Full details of the walk are on the wildwalks.com website.
The 13km walk took five of us about seven hours to complete but that included a long lunch stop at the cafe at Berowra Waters. Overall, despite three steep climbs, the day was brilliant and the walk proved to be a good challenge without too much pain.
