Academic literature on the topic 'Environmental responsibility Victoria Anglesea'

Globally there has been an increasing trend in urban growth with cities expanding rapidly, indicating a requirement for more sustainable development of cities to minimize human impacts on the environment. In Australia, urban development continues to target areas adjacent to the coastal capital and regional cities such as the Greater Geelong region in Victoria, experiencing the fastest rates of growth in the country in the last decade. This project demonstrates the ability of modelling techniques to model current and future directions in urban development across two adjacent coastal towns, Anglesea and Torquay, in Victoria. The analysis utilized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the CommunityViz decision support tool using a variety of assets, environmental and climatic data. The models indicated an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, energy usage and population growth, and the area was found to be highly vulnerable to the impacts of environmental changes including the potential loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and sea level rise. The modelling approach described here can aid planners and decision makers in the future coastal urban development as well as to mitigate climate change impacts.

The Alma Ata 1978 Declaration on primary health care has conventionally been applied in developing countries, where medically trained personnel and other highly skilled health professionals and medical infrastructure are limited. Although such concepts have salience in relatively resource rich countries such as Australia, it is in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health policy that they have become pivotal. A growing national focus on the development of Aboriginal primary health care capacity followed the release of the National Aboriginal Health Strategy (NAHS) in 1989 (Anderson, 1997). This focus consolidated further, following the evaluation of the National Aboriginal Health Strategy implementation in 1994 which preceded the transfer of administrative responsibility for the Commonwealth Aboriginal health program from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) to the Commonwealth Health portfolio (DHFS, 1994). Within the strategic framework provided by federal state agreements, the development of primary health care services is a priority. In the current national policy framework domains of policy and strategy development have been identified as key developmental themes.

The growing recognition of recreational and amenity demands on water systems introduces a multitude of issues, many of them complex, to the established tasks of water quality management and water management generally. Victorian case studies are presented. They (1) illustrate the range and diversity of situations that can arise in managing competition and enhancing compatibility between traditional water supply objectives and recreational demands. (2) Fluctuation of storage levels, essential to storage operations, detract from recreational value. Recreational and tourism demands upon Lake Hume have grown to threaten traditional operating flexibility. (3) Mokoan is another such instance, but with its supply function in a state of flux, Lake Mokoan provides more scope for a shift in the balance. (4) Salinity management has become an issue in the management of lakes and wetlands when water supply interests and environmental/recreation interests respectively have different perspectives on salt disposal. (5) Recreational use of town supply sources has long been a vexed issue, although marked shifts in the attitudues of many supply authorities have occurred in recent years. (6) Eutrophication of lakes and estuaries raises difficult issues of responsibility and scientific uncertainty, and the water management connection may be tenuous but will attract public attention. (7) The water body attributes valued by specialised recreational interests require definition in terms that water managers can deal with using routine techniques of systems analysis and evaluation. (8) The demands of the fish population and anglers introduce a new perspective in river management and perceptions of instream values are changing markedly. (9) Direct costs of recreational services supplied by water authorities are not fully accounted: allocation choices and fiscal incidence will emerge as issues of significance. (10) These case studies raise only a fraction of the total range of matters that will, in the years to come, tax the technology and political skills of governments and management.

Relational, multi-modal conversations between the authors’ experiences of a damaged environmental site occur through different knowledge systems including life sciences, art, agriculture and environmental science. The authors respond to the risks of the dramatic impact of the loss of water flow in the Barwon River, Victoria, Australia. This is a river that flows through the Indigenous lands of Wathaurong, Gulidjan, and Gadubanud country from the Otway Ranges and near to one of Deakin University’s campuses. Early in this century, groundwater extraction dried a swamp wetland, generating toxic levels of acid and heavy metals which generated a major fish kill in 2016. Loss of water led to the aquifer site at Yeodene Swamp revealing great depths of peat that, when burning, follows underground peat layers (an unknown river path) and emerges to ignite new above-ground fires. These issues and experience of dwelling in this part of Victoria inspire our embodied thinking, conversations, and art. They have prompted us to be ambitious in our actions—even provoking us to develop campaigns. Our value and respect for this place in the most holistic sense—geographic, experiential, spiritual, historical and biophilic—inspires us to come together to contextualise and apply responsibility, accountability, ethics, morality, justice and integrity. We respond to the question: What does embodiment of values look like in this context? Having brought this story into the 2019 Body of Knowledge Conference through walks and conversations by Gardiners Creek at Deakin University’s campus in Burwood, we have explored it further in this co-authored article.

This formative study aimed to identify health professionals’ perspectives on vaccination issues among children in statutory out-of-home care in Victoria. Eight health professionals, drawn from a purposive Victorian sample known to be proactive in addressing the vaccination needs of children in out-of-home care, took part in semi-structured interviews. Questions addressed participants’ views about roles and responsibilities, barriers and enabling factors affecting vaccination, and ideas about systems improvements. Interview transcripts were analysed thematically. The main themes that emerged were health professionals’ observations about vaccine hesitancy among significant adults in the out-of-home care sector, the paucity of child medical history information available and diffuse responsibility for the provision of legal consent to vaccination. More accurate immunisation status monitoring appears warranted for children in out-of-home care. Unless the collection and maintenance of child medical records improves and vaccination consent processes are streamlined, health professionals will be limited in their capacity to provide efficient vaccination services to these children. Research on vaccine hesitancy among staff and carers in the statutory care sector may be of value. This study supports other Australian research that indicates these children may require more targeted, inter-sectoral immunisation approaches.

In 2002, qualitative methods in the form of in-depth interviews and focus groups were used to gather data from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) population residents, service providers and key stakeholders across rural Victoria, to identify and describe barriers to the effective delivery of home services to people from CALD populations in rural Australia. Barriers to the provision of Home and Community Care (HACC) services to CALD populations in rural areas were not specific to HACC programs. For CALD residents, barriers included lack of information about the range of available services, cultural factors, and negative past and recent experiences in dealing with both the broader community and service providers. Service providers indicated lack of information about the profile of the local CALD population and lack of experience in working with these groups to be barriers. Communication was also an issue both for CALD residents and service providers, in terms of cultural factors and specific communication strategies such as inadequate printed material and under-utilisation of existing resources such as interpreter services. As one of the world?s most ethno-culturally diverse nations, Australia has a responsibility to provide health services that are culturally responsive and acceptable. Greater attention needs to be given to the needs of rural CALD population groups in accessing home services.

ObjectiveIdentify the views of healthcare leaders towards public healthcare’s carbon footprint; the importance or not of healthcare energy supply and sources and; the perceived key barriers for Victorian health care to show leadership on renewable energy sources and supply. MethodsSelf-administered questionnaire (10 Likert scale, two open-ended questions) among 24 Victorian Health Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). Responses were anonymous. Descriptive analysis was conducted. ResultsOverall, 13/24 (54%) of CEOs responded. A majority (11/13) agreed that climate change is causing real and accelerating harm to health and the environment, with impacts on patients, staff and services a current issue. One hundred percent (13/13) saw leadership by the public healthcare sector on environmental sustainability as an important responsibility (strongly agreed, 9/13 (69%); agreed, 4/13 (31%)), with most CEOs supporting their institution increasing the amount of renewable electricity supply over-and-above grid levels (strongly agreed, 3/13 (23%); agreed, 9/13 (69%)). However, support for renewable electricity was, for the most part, aspirational and not perceived as a current priority. The key perceived barriers to increasing renewable electricity supply were Health Purchasing Victoria contract and financial constraints. ConclusionsHealth care itself has a carbon footprint. Public healthcare CEOs are supportive of their institutions increasing use of renewable electricity supply, yet perceived barriers regarding inflexible and poorly transparent purchasing contracts and financial cost exist. What is known about the topic?Australian health care contributes ~7 percent to Australia’s total carbon emissions, with hospital energy consumption (coal-generated electricity and natural/fossil gas) a large majority. An executive level champion is a consistent factor across health services that are taking the lead on environmental sustainability. What does this paper add?Our research is original in understanding the views of Victorian public healthcare CEOs on climate change, renewable energy supply and key barriers to increasing uptake. A majority of public healthcare CEOs see energy choices as an important issue for their patients, staff and institution, and that greater leadership should be shown by health care in light of the urgency required to address greenhouse gas emissions. However, support for renewable electricity was, for the most part, aspirational, with specific barriers identified across the healthcare network. What are the implications for practitioners?This research provides information that can inform a pathway to healthcare decarbonisation via sector-wide action.

This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Since the state-wide Black Saturday fires of 2009, we contend, first, the State’s decreasing ability to protect its citizens has shifted the responsibility for adapting to uncertainty to individuals, and second, this responsibility has been translated into compliance approaches to disaster risk management. We develop the concept of two distinct imaginaries at play: the reactive and the relational life. Policy discourse invokes a reactive life, a normative resilience maintaining the status quo, rather than a potentially transformative relational process enabling citizens to be ‘response-able’. Facing uncertainties, government legitimacy hinges on increasing citizen safety, with decentralised community resilience programs intended to manage and reduce disaster risk by emphasising shared responsibility. For citizens, however, ‘shared responsibility’ reveals an increasing tension in relation to the risk and uncertainty associated with life on the newly designated ‘fire-prone’ periphery, and within expectations of government. We conclude that the emphasis on responsibility as the work to be done in community-based resilience programs demands a more nuanced set of expectations that reflect citizens’ relational life as a starting place for rethinking safety and security.

The central event in this thesis is the Little Desert dispute, a 1969 controversy about whether land in western Victoria should be developed for agriculture or retained as natural bushland. The Little Desert dispute has lived on in the minds of protagonists and later environmentalists as a cultural icon and a ‘win’ for conservation. This pivotal event provides a framework within which the politics of nature conservation, ecology and land management can be examined. The thesis explores the role of ‘public science’ – science in government, bureaucracy and the community – in this context, as well as tracing the history of the science of ecology in post-war Australia.
The second focus of this thesis is ‘the rise of ecological consciousness’ – the rise of the political relevance of the natural world and emerging concerns about the place of people in nature. This is a multifaceted concept, and includes ‘ecological’ in both its scientific and philosophical guises. ‘Consciousness’ is studied I the individual, collective and political senses.
The Little Desert dispute occurred just as ecological consciousness was beginning to rise in Australia and throughout the western world. The resolution of the dispute through the establishment of the Conservation Council of Victoria and the Land Conservation Council, in 1969 and 1970 respectively, was played out against a backdrop of changing environmental values and systems. The dispute had antecedents in diverse utilitarian, scientific, aesthetic and romantic conservation traditions. It was these values that motivated the leading protagonists, who were conservationists but not environmentalists. However, many environmentalists today look back on the Little Desert dispute as the beginning of the new ‘ecologically conscious’ era. The contribution of earlier conservationists to the environmental movement is often overlooked in environmentalist literature. Through examining closely the role of science and scientists in land management, this thesis explores some of the continuities as well as the discontinuities of the ‘environmental revolution’ in Australia.