Tasmanian Government Research Articles

Free bus fares, bus use and physical activity: An exploratory cross-sectional study.

Public transport (PT) users often accumulate more physical activity (PA) than private motor vehicle users and financial incentives may increase PT use. Responding to rising petrol prices, from 28 March to 1 May 2022, the Tasmanian government made public bus use fare-free. This exploratory study examined the perceived impact of fare-free buses on bus use and PA. Tasmanian adults who had used the fare-free buses (N = 548) completed an online survey (4 May-14 June 2022). Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential methods and responses to open-ended questions categorised. Over the fare-free period, 46% of participants reported more bus use-average weekly bus trips increased from 3.0 to 4.0 (p < 0.001). Most (81%) participants, including 36% (n = 33/93) who were not previous bus users, planned continued bus use despite financial cost. Total PA was reported higher (36%), the same (60%) and lower (4%) than usual during the fare-free period. Higher total PA was more common amongst those reporting increased bus use (n = 186/240; 78%). Responses to open-ended questions revealed: bus use-related PA gain was through walking to/from bus stops, more frequently attending PA settings (e.g., the gym) and unexpected walking due to bus service limitations; household-level cost savings, improved travel opportunities and better social/mental health were additional fare-free benefits. Fare-free buses were commonly perceived to increase bus use and PA. Intervention studies would determine if PA and financially incentivised PT have a causal relationship. Individual- and societal-level health economic analysis of free PT is warranted.

Tasmanian Dairy Farmers’ Attitudes towards Using E-Extension Methods; Strengthening the Dairy Extension System for a Sustainable Dairy Industry in Tasmania, Australia

The Tasmanian dairy industry is one of the major contributors to the Tasmanian economy and Australia’s export portfolio. The Tasmanian Government funding plan (2018–2023) for RD&amp;E focuses on sustainable dairy farm production with an impact pathway incorporating provisions for extension services. Considering the need for an effective extension system, the continued adaptation of extension services is required to ensure that there is a collaborative and learning mechanism between extension experts and farmers that supports relationship building and innovation. E-extension methods can increase dairy farmers’ access to timely information while addressing time and cost challenges by reducing personal visits and establishing frequent communications between farmers and extension workers. This study uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to understand the attitudes of dairy farmers toward using E-extension methods. It was revealed that dairy farmers who are young, educated, and managing dairy farms with large herd sizes hold positive attitudes toward E-extension. These farmers regularly seek online dairy-related guidance as well as regularly participate in different extension activities. This study concludes that establishing a hybrid framework incorporating E-extension methods with complementary face-to-face extension activities will help maintain a profitable and sustainable dairy industry in Tasmania.

Airbnb and the Hidden Barriers to Effective Regulation: A Case Study of Short-Term Rentals in Tasmania

ABSTRACT The ubiquitous and rapid growth of Airbnb is shifting urban and policy landscapes across the globe, creating urgent need for new and effective regulation. Few studies map and analyse the evolution of regulatory regimes over time in order to identify the barriers to effective longer-term regulation. This is a case study of how the Tasmanian state government has responded to the rapid growth of short-term rentals (STRs) over four years, in the face of challenging housing market impacts. The identification of a range of hidden barriers to regulation demonstrates that even when governments appear to be pro-active, new legislation may fail to deliver desired outcomes and meaningful reform.

Making sense of school learning environments as infrastructures of care and spatial typologies

ABSTRACT The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership was established in 2010 to support teaching quality and leadership in schools and initial teacher education programs. Early on it produced seven Australian Professional Standards for Teachers affecting professional knowledge, professional practice, and professional engagement. Standard 4 is part of professional practice and requires teachers to create and maintain supportive and safe school learning environments. We propose that Standard 4 has implications geographers have yet to fully consider, and here our aim is to surface and examine its latent spatialities. We conceive of supportive and safe learning environments as crucial infrastructures of care that can be made more legible using established spatial typologies. To support this proposition, we draw on empirical evidence from a study of literacy teaching practice in Tasmanian government schools and of initial teacher education programs. Here, we focus on how participants described the importance of school learning environments for students' educational attainment and social and emotional wellbeing. We conclude that spatial lenses are important in thinking about these environments and could effectively support teachers to demonstrate career-long and increasingly sophisticated capacities to perceive, use, create, and help others make the most of such spaces for diverse learning outcomes.

“There are only two genders – male and female…” An Analysis of Online Responses to Tasmania Removing ‘Gender’ from Birth Certificates

&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This article details and analyses some of the public online response to the Tasmanian Government’s decision to make the recording of gender on birth certificates an opt-in process. Tasmania is the first jurisdiction in Australia to make such a change, which aims to simplify the legal processes involved in affirming a person’s gender identity (including agender and non-binary status). The data set is comprised of comments posted on Facebook in response to The Australian newspaper’s coverage of this event; The Australian is Australia’s only truly national daily broadsheet. This article argues that the effect of this overwhelmingly negative ciscentric response, as revealed by the aesthetic of this digital social space, is the generation of an impression of Australians as trans- (and intersex-) averse. This risks undermining the basic good of assurance that transgender and intersex people ought to have: an assurance that they can inhabit public spaces and be treated with dignity and respect (cf. Waldron). To prevent this kind of hostile response in the future, we must find a way to communicate and make resonant to the general public what queer and feminist theorists have been arguing for quite some time: that sex and gender are not synonymous and that both gender and sex are social constructs.&lt;/p&gt;

Tasmanian Data Linkage Unit: Supporting innovative research, planning and policy formulation in Australia through the provision of high-quality linked-data services.

As a member of the Population Health Research Network Australia, being an Australian collaboration established to support the use of linked data for research and other purposes, the Tasmanian Data Linkage Unit [TDLU) provides linked-data services in Australia’s smallest state, and as part of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the state’s only University, the University of Tasmania. The TDLU works in close collaboration with the Tasmanian Government Department of Health and other key stakeholders both in Tasmania and Australia representing government, education, research, and the community sector. The TDLU is one of the newest data linkage services in Australia, and the smallest node of the PHRN having operated for almost nine years by less than three full time equivalent staff. However, despite its size and relative maturity as a provider of linked-data services, the TDLU continues to grow the number of datasets linked on a routine and ad-hoc basis, the number of projects completed, the size of its Master Linkage Map and number of ‘keys’ stored in this Map. The TDLU places high-emphasis on security, privacy preservation, innovation, quality assurance, stakeholder engagement and providing responsive and exemplary services to users of linked-data.

Rethinking Tasmania’s Regionality from an Antarctic Perspective: Flipping the Map

Tasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an "Antarctic city", central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.

Metropolitan Collections: Reaching Out to Regional Australia

Metropolitan Collections: Reaching Out to Regional Australia

Boots on the Ground: Site-Based Regionality and Creative Practice in the Tasmanian Midlands

Regional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.

‘Reset the relationship’: decolonising government to increase Indigenous benefit

Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples have been characterised by extinction myths as an outcome of colonialism. The subsequent dispossession and exile from lands and seas for surviving communities have increased trauma. This article analyses the recent efforts of Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples to reframe relationships with the Tasmanian Government and create conditions for our emancipation away from colonial harms. To decolonise political negotiating environments and inject Indigenous-led strategies of ‘love-bombing’ that reflect cultural processes of kinship and reciprocity, we reset the relationship for good governance. Two case studies of Tasmanian land and sea management illustrate how an Indigenous politic has been created for reclaiming identity among shared futures.

Regulating, then deregulating Airbnb: The unique case of Tasmania (Australia)

In responding to increased tourist visitation and significant accommodation shortages (especially in the capital city Hobart), the Tasmanian government has been grappling with the opportunities and challenges presented by the visitor economy, and Airbnb in particular. Over the last decade Tasmania's tourism industry has grown significantly, contributing $2.8 billion per annum to the economy; accounting for 10.7% of Gross State Product (Deloitte Access Economics, 2017b). Tasmania is a southern island state off the coast of mainland Australia with a population of just over half a million people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). For an island with a relatively small population compared with other Australian states, Tasmania attracted 1.27 million visitors in the year 2016/ 2017 who stayed a total of 10.83 million nights (an average of 8.5 nights per trip); a 5.8% increase on the previous year (State of Tasmania, 2017).

A preliminary spatial quantification of the soil security dimensions for Tasmania

Soil Security is a holistic soil assessment approach that cogitates soil as a multi-dimensional medium. Rather than traditional single dimensional assessment approaches such as land capability mapping that largely considers only soil and landscape biophysical attributes, the Soil Security concept considers social aspects, education, policy, legislation, current land use, condition and the soils natural and economic value to society. It can identify discrete soils that are currently being used within their capacity, and areas where a use might be unsustainable, i.e. not secure. It would therefore make sense to map this concept, which aligns well with the aspirational and marketing policies of the Tasmanian Government, where increased agricultural expansion through new irrigation schemes and multiple-use State managed production forests co-exists beside pristine World Heritage conservation land, a major drawcard of the economically important tourism industry. The spatial quantification of soil security is seen as an emerging tool to effectively protect the soil resource in terms of food and water security, biodiversity maintenance and safeguarding fragile ecosystems. The recent development and application of Digital Soil Mapping and Assessment capacities in Tasmania to stimulate agricultural production and better target appropriate soil resource use has formed the foundational system that can enable the first efforts in quantifying and mapping Soil Security, in particular the five Soil Security dimensions (Capability, Condition, Capital, Codification and Connectivity). This forms a preliminary mapping product that demonstrates the feasibility of mapping the Soil Security concept. To provide a measure of overall soil security, it was necessary to separately assess the State’s three major soil uses; Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. These outputs provide an indication of where different activities are sustainable or at risk, where more soil data is needed, and develops a tool to better plan for a State requiring optimal food and fibre production, without depleting its natural soil resources and impacting the fragile ecosystems providing environmental benefits and supporting the tourism industry. The following paper demonstrates why and how we might map Soil Security, describing a preliminary approach to mapping the separate dimensions; this approach could be adapted and applied elsewhere as an evaluation tool to identify soil threats relevant to current land use, biophysical properties, policy and management, and stimulate further research and debate into developing a global Soil Security mapping methodology.

Immunization Strategies Producing a Humoral IgG Immune Response against Devil Facial Tumor Disease in the Majority of Tasmanian Devils Destined for Wild Release.

Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) is renowned for its successful evasion of the host immune system. Down regulation of the major histocompatabilty complex class I molecule (MHC-I) on the DFTD cells is a primary mechanism of immune escape. Immunization trials on captive Tasmanian devils have previously demonstrated that an immune response against DFTD can be induced, and that immune-mediated tumor regression can occur. However, these trials were limited by their small sample sizes. Here, we describe the results of two DFTD immunization trials on cohorts of devils prior to their wild release as part of the Tasmanian Government’s Wild Devil Recovery project. 95% of the devils developed anti-DFTD antibody responses. Given the relatively large sample sizes of the trials (N = 19 and N = 33), these responses are likely to reflect those of the general devil population. DFTD cells manipulated to express MHC-I were used as the antigenic basis of the immunizations in both trials. Although the adjuvant composition and number of immunizations differed between trials, similar anti-DFTD antibody levels were obtained. The first trial comprised DFTD cells and the adjuvant combination of ISCOMATRIX™, polyIC, and CpG with up to four immunizations given at monthly intervals. This compared to the second trial whereby two immunizations comprising DFTD cells and the adjuvant combination ISCOMATRIX™, polyICLC (Hiltonol®) and imiquimod were given a month apart, providing a shorter and, therefore, more practical protocol. Both trials incorporated a booster immunization given up to 5 months after the primary course. A key finding was that devils in the second trial responded more quickly and maintained their antibody levels for longer compared to devils in the first trial. The different adjuvant combination incorporating the RNAase resistant polyICLC and imiquimod used in the second trial is likely to be responsible. The seroconversion in the majority of devils in these anti-DFTD immunization trials was remarkable, especially as DFTD is hallmarked by its immune evasion mechanisms. Microsatellite analyzes of MHC revealed that some MHC-I microsatellites correlated to stronger immune responses. These trials signify the first step in the long-term objective of releasing devils with immunity to DFTD into the wild.

Business Action Learning Tasmania (BALT) – an account of practice

ABSTRACTBusiness Action Learning Tasmania’s (BALT) mission is self-reliant industry development, with diverse companies co-operating to improve their profitability, develop their people and grow the local economy. This is achieved through collaborative action learning, with companies working together on projects of vital importance and sharing the learnings. The Tasmanian economy has been in decline for several years due to relative isolation, rising costs of freight, labour, energy and capital, skills shortages, and a high Australian dollar. BALT demonstrates the potential for self-directed action learning between organisations in a regional area to grow the local economy. BALT evolved from an initial Lean Action Learning program conducted in Tasmania in 2010. Since then 5 programs involving 13 companies have been completed, with a further 2 programs and 7 projects underway at time of writing. Representatives from participating companies have played a leading role, with support from the Tasmanian Government. This Account of Practice describes outcomes achieved, evaluation methods, lessons learnt and future aspirations for BALT.

Modelling the Government/Cultural Tourism Marketing Interface

ABSTRACTThe arts and cultural sector is recognised as an important driver of urban and regional development, with empirical evidence linking it to economic growth, social inclusion and increased social capital. Despite best efforts, however, government-sponsored cultural tourism policy development has been met with mixed results; researchers and practitioners alike agreeing that there are fundamental issues regarding government policy conceptualisation and implementation in this regard. In order to explore the policy development decisions that underpinned a successful cultural tourism-based economic and social development, this paper examines the relationship between a regional government and the globally renowned Museum of Old and New Art located in Tasmania, Australia. The quasi-longitudinal data revealed four critical interactions underpinning the regional government’s cultural tourism policy development: cooperation between the Tasmanian government and (a) the cultural organisation and (b) related industries; the provision of supportive infrastructure, and; the ability of the cultural organisation to provide immersive experiences.

Black Country, White Wilderness: Conservation, Colonialism, and Conflict in Tasmania

In 2015, Tasmania’s land management plan for the expansive Wilderness World Heritage Area, covering around a fifth of the entire island of south and central Tasmania, was dramatically revised. The new plan expanded dual management of the area with Aboriginal Tasmanians and the Tasmanian state through the creation of an Aboriginal Cultural Business Unit that would generate financial management opportunities for Aboriginals. However, Aboriginal perspectives on the meaning of land often conflicted with white conservationists’ wilderness values of remoteness and isolation. In this article, I argue that the reactions from white conservationists to the new plan are illustrative of a wilderness ideology that attempts to limit interactions with nature and consequently marginalizes Aboriginals. Reflexivity is an important aspect of this paper as these critiques of conservation are also critiques of my own beliefs and identity, and my reactions to what I encountered in this research add a layer that would have been absent otherwise. Through reflexive analysis of interviews and participant observation with individuals from environmental organizations, the Tasmanian government, the timber industry, tourism, and an Aboriginal corporation, along with printed materials and websites connected to the Wilderness World Heritage Area, I show that conservationists in Tasmania perpetuate colonial desires and white privilege at the expense of Tasmanian Aboriginals through the racialized ideology of wilderness.

Recent housing transfer experience in Australia: implications for affordable housing industry development

Recent housing transfer experience in Australia: implications for affordable housing industry development

Chaplains' perspectives on their work in Tasmanian government schools

School chaplaincy services aim to promote student and school community well-being. Given the community interest in chaplaincy services in government schools, it is important that research inform future developments to maximize the potential benefits of chaplaincy services to schools. In this study, 68 chaplains in the Australian state of Tasmania described and shared views on their work through the completion of an anonymous online survey. The findings present a picture of the nature, strengths and challenges of chaplaincy in Tasmanian government schools from the perspective of chaplains themselves. The results are summarized, several implications are identified, and directions for future research are explored.

Time to raise the minimum purchasing age for tobacco in Australia.

In 2014, a member of the Tasmanian Parliament introduced the Public Health Amendment (Tobacco-Free Generation) Bill 2014, which would have created an offence for selling tobacco to a member of the Tobacco-Free Generation, defined as a person born after 1 January 2000. The idea that today’s children should have no expectation that they will be able to lawfully purchase tobacco as adults is one of a number of “end-game” scenarios promoted by some tobacco control advocates. The Tasmanian government has indicated that it does not support the Tobacco-Free Generation Bill, but has recently released a five year strategic health plan that includes raising the minimum legal smoking age to 21 or 25 years as an option for consideration. This paper briefly reviews the Tobacco-Free Generation Bill and argues that the time has come for Australian state governments to seriously consider raising the minimum purchasing age for tobacco. A higher minimum purchasing age in Tasmania could reinforce efforts to reduce smoking initiation and help to address the significant health inequalities that Tasmanians experience relative to the mainland States. Something more clearly needs to be done when, for example, more than 33% of pregnant Tasmanian teenage women remain smokers.

One-Stop Shopping for Government Services: Strengths and Weaknesses of the Service Tasmania Experience

ABSTRACTGovernment service delivery in Tasmania has undergone a customer-orientated shift, changing the nature of the relationship between the Government and the community. A Tasmanian State Government initiative named Service Tasmania utilizing information technologies and private sector style business administration values offers new possibilities in service delivery through its integrated whole-of-government approach. This initiative facilitates cross-agency customer-centered service delivery within the overall government framework. This article introduces an empirically based qualitative investigation into the implementation of Service Tasmania’s One-Stop-Shops. Particular interest is placed on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of implementing the Service Tasmania service delivery model. Data were analyzed by using a grounded theory approach comprising open, axial, and selective coding. Findings indicate that whilst some weaknesses in the approach have been uncovered the numerous strengths outweigh them. Some practical implications are identified for policy-makers and practitioners engaged in service delivery reform projects.