Australian Council

• Only 3% of organizations believe they are ready to manage their environmental, health and safety (EHS) risks.
• The research included more than 1,000 EHS professionals across 20 industries worldwide and was undertaken by independent analyst firm Focus Networks.
• The leadership team needs to change the narrative on health and safety, so it becomes part of the vision," Milroy said.
• Contemporary and emerging technologies will improve EHS readiness but, so far, only the most mature organizations understand this potential and have acted on it.

• So far, the Universities Accord’s interim report has identified compulsory, unpaid work placements as a significant barrier.
• Students often must take time out of paid work for these placements which can take place over multi-week blocks away from home.

What are work placements?

• Many professional courses, such as nursing, teaching, social work, psychology and the allied health professions, have significant work placement requirements.
• For example, social work students need to complete 1,000 hours (nearly half a year) of full-time, unpaid work experience to graduate.
• These placements are hugely important for student learning, but the time commitment means students often have to give up paid work.

1. Change the Fair Work Act

• A further 43% of educators said organisations refused to host a student if they didn’t perform well during a pre-placement interview.
• This means organisations are routinely screening students to ensure they can perform unpaid work while on placement.
• To fix this, we recommend the federal parliament changes the Fair Work Act, so vocational placements must be paid.

2. Pay students a minimum wage

• Despite the importance of paying students at least a minimum wage, it is clear the organisations they work for cannot pay.
• There is no country in the world where universities pay students to do placements.
• Calculated at the minimum wage rate (before the recent minimum wage increase), Unions NSW estimated students should earn around A$21,000 for a placement.
• Read more:
  Fair Work Commission gives a 5.2% – $40 a week – increase in the minimum wage

3. Change how learning is measured

• As one educator told us:
  [These] showed that students could achieve success in their placement and learning with less time and more flexibility.
• One practitioner said:
  More focus on demonstrating learning as opposed to just ‘ticking off hours’ could lead to shorter placements with a higher focus on the quality of learning.
• More focus on demonstrating learning as opposed to just ‘ticking off hours’ could lead to shorter placements with a higher focus on the quality of learning.

What about learning?

• While current standards are often presumed to produce competent and ethical practitioners, our research shows students are being financially stretched and stressed.
• Reflecting on their student experience, one practitioner told us:
  For me it became just getting the hours done, rather than learning.
• In addition to payment, research shows that reducing hours, and introducing more flexible work-based placements and ways to measure learning, would help.

• Simon Crean, a former Labor opposition leader, has died suddenly while in Germany, aged 74.
• Crean, who served in parliament from 1990 to 2013, was a minister in the Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard governments.
• Under his leadership, Labor opposed Australia’s involvement in the Iraq War, although it supported the Australian troops who served in that operation.
• I always admired Simon for his decency and intellect and only just saw him recently in Melbourne,” Dutton said.

• In April, The Australian published the results of a four-month investigation into white staff “interference” at Tjala Arts, a member of the APY Arts Centre Collective of Indigenous art centres across South Australia.
• One question it raises is what do art managers and studio assistants actually do in remote Indigenous community art centres?

50 years of arts centres

• Papunya Tula marked the transition from the paternalism of the mission era to Indigenous self-determination, supported by the establishment of the Aboriginal Arts Board.
• Aboriginals have been given full responsibility for developing their own programs in the arts under a new Government policy to revitalise cultural activities through the Australian Council for the Arts.
• Today, this workforce are mostly young women with degrees in visual art or arts management.

A cross-cultural thing

• Rather, Aboriginal art is “a cross-cultural thing”, bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous creative workers together.
• Despite the shared goal and triumphs of the cultural industries in celebrating Indigenous art, the shadow of Australia’s colonisation is never far away.
• The conditions in remote art centres have evolved since the 1970s, but the practicalities are essentially the same.
• Read more:
  Aboriginal art: is it a white thing?

A collaborative space?

• Some aesthetic influence on the final product is only natural, but painting directly on the canvas is never part of the job description.
• The studios of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are extreme examples of art making being undertaken by studio assistants.
• So too, Aboriginal artists enjoy workshops with specialists in fields as varied as printmaking, bronze casting, animation or glassmaking.
• It’s up to the artists first, and the institutions, curators, the market and art critics next, to evaluate such collaborations and exchanges case by case.

Cultural narratives and daily realities

• This is where art centre staff document the artist’s painting with a photo and the related Tjukurrpa or Country.
• These “certificates of authenticity” documenting culturally important stories guarantee the works as genuine Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander works.
• It’s the disconnect between these purist cultural narratives and the realities of the busy cross-cultural studios that puts the artists, their staff and the entire industry in such a paradoxical position.