Do large dogs have a place in the city?

Dog attacks have surged to more than 1,300 over just three months, latest figures reveal.  The figures show that 134 attacks required medical treatment and 31 led to hospitalisation.  Local councils have reported a 16 per cent increase in the number of attacks, with 1,306 attacks taking place between April and June this year.  An increase of 20,000 dog registrations happened in the same period.

NSW Local Government Minister Barbara Perry said in a statement:

It's not just people who are being attacked by dogs, there were also 1,235 animal victims including other dogs, cats and livestock that suffered from a dog attack during the last three months.  Unfortunately these attacks on animals resulted in 522 deaths.

The staffordshire bull terrier was the dog breed most commonly involved with 167 attacks over the three-month period.  Australian cattle dogs came second with 99, followed by 82 attacks by German shepherds. 

Open source council web sites

From August, a consortium of 46 rural and regional NSW councils has dumped its aging, proprietary content management system (CMS) for an open source Joomla solution.  Their websites are being migrated to the new CMS in a $300,000 upgrade to the NSW Local Government and Shire Associations' (LGSA) Local-e project.

Local-e was formed in 2001 to improve smaller councils' web publishing capabilities through shared services and joint purchasing arrangements.  Joomla vendor Jentla and its integrator, Energetica, won the Local-e contract following a competitive tender process involving both open source and proprietary bidders.  Jentla-N is also expected to satisfy Government 2.0 aims of making public sector information more readily available through tools like RSS feeds and improved transactional capabilities.

Pricing, minimal infrastructure changes and interoperability with LGSA's open source server environment led LGSA to select the Jentla-N CMS, which is expected to simplify content management for non-technical council staff.  Many site administration tools have been pushed to the front-end, allowing council staff to create users and content after logging in to the user-facing website.

According to Jentla, the deal was aligned with a public sector trend towards open source CMS. Joomla powered the websites of the United Nations Regional Information Centre and the US City of Boulder, Colorado.

There's a growing acknowledgement in government that open source is the right decision.  The days of paying really large amounts of money for a CMS is over; and particularly with government, they are very interested in the longevity of data, which may be maintained through open standards.

Taking your life in your hands, courtesy of your local council

Motorists will need to get used to bridges that are closed or can only bear reduced weight as the nation's bridges continue to decay, engineer Chris Champion,  the chief executive of the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia, has warned. 

Many councils were closing bridges or reducing their weight limits, leading to problems for vehicles forced to curtail trips or take significant detours.  'What local government tries to do before [bridges] get to the point of failing is they try to close them or restrict their weight.  'You can travel on a poor road but you can't travel on a poor or closed bridge, so it's the weak link.

Research into timber bridges by his group in 2008 found that 27 per cent were in a poor state and another 52 per cent were fair.  Traditionally, road bridges are funded by local councils, but many cash-strapped municipalities have struggled to find adequate resources.

Queensland is different

Reviewing the Queensland Local Government tender box site the other day I realised how different Queensland is.  Across Australia there’s a well-used industry-standard acronym known by all participants – RFT - “Request For Tender”.  In Queensland, however, flying directly in the face of a National Competition Policy whose aims include making it easier for national businesses to do business nationally, the Queensland Chief Procurement Office has introduced a new term – ITO - “Invitation To Offer”.  It’s not as if this new term adds any information or clarity to the one it replaces.  As well the Australian standard GITC - “Government Information Technology Contracting” – framework, also intended to support national competition policy, has been hijacked by the Queenslanders who have introduced an entire accreditation superstructure known as GITC-5.  Yes, Queensland really is different.