A NEW PROGRAM to encourage people into engineering careers has been welcomed by the Queensland Resources Council (QRC).

QRC chief executive Ian Macfarlane said the employment-based, pre-apprenticeship pathway is a great initiative by the Queensland Government at a time when our sector is experiencing skills shortages.

“Skills shortages are the number one concern of our member CEOs, according to a recent QRC report and engineering is one of those critical shortage areas,” Mr Macfarlane said.

“The Pre-Apprenticeship Support program is also designed to increase the completion rate of apprenticeships. I applaud the Premier on the initiative, which includes a new Certificate I in Engineering to help people transition into an apprenticeship."

The two-year $25 million Pre-Apprenticeship Support program aims to support people looking to start a trade career or want to advance in their current trade, according to Mr Macfarlane.

“With the halt on skilled migration because of Covid-19 restrictions, we are also experiencing a shortage of trades people, so we really welcome programs that encourage people to take up trade careers," he said

Mr Macfarlane said the program complemented the efforts of QRC’s education arm, the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy (QMEA), which is on a mission to encourage young people into professional and trade careers, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous and female participation.

“Our sector has kept the Queensland economy afloat during Covid and will also lead us through the post-Covid recovery, so attracting and retaining a skilled workforce is vital,"Mr Macfarlane said.

“Despite the uncertainty and upheaval in 2020, the resources sector remained the largest source of Queensland’s merchandise exports.

“Over the 12 months to July 2021, resources exports made up $46 billion of the state’s total merchandise exports of $60 billion.”

www.qrc.org.au

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THE House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics will hear from the multinational investment firm BlackRock, institutional investor proxy adviser Ownership Matters, industry peak body the Financial Services Council and the Australian Treasury, about common ownership and capital concentration at a public hearing on Monday, October 11 2021.

Acting Committee Chair Dr Andrew Leigh MP, said, "To date, the committee has heard evidence from academic experts and the ACCC that common ownership has the potential to threaten competition within the Australian market.

"My own research with Dr Adam Triggs shows that Vanguard and BlackRock are the largest shareholders in Australia, and that these two index funds are often the largest shareholders for competing companies. Our research reveals that among firms where we can identify at least one substantial owner, 31 percent share a substantial owner with a rival company. Across the Australian economy, common ownership increases effective market concentration by 21 percent.

"In the United States, common ownership has been shown to dampen competitive pressures, and produce worse outcomes for consumers in the airline and banking sectors. The committee is concerned to understand the extent of common ownership in Australia, the channels through which it may harm consumers, and how transparency reforms might help," Dr Leigh said.

"As well as investment firm BlackRock, the committee will hear from proxy advice service Ownership Matters and industry peak body the Financial Services Council to garner the views of industry insiders on this issue. We will also hear from Treasury about how the Australian Government sees this potential threat to vigorous competition between firms."

Later in the day, the committee will also hear from the Energy Industries Superannuation Scheme (EISS Super) as part of the committee’s review of the Four Major Banks and Other Financial Institutions. 

The full Terms of Reference for the inquiry into common ownership and capital concentration and the review of the four major banks and other financial institutions are available on the committee’s website.

Public hearing details

Date: Monday, 11 October 2021

9.30am to 12.45pm     Common ownership and capital concentration

2.00pm to 3.00pm       Superannuation sector review

A program for the hearing is available on the committee’s website.

Due to health and safety concerns relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, this hearing is not currently scheduled to be open for public attendance. Interested members of the public will be able to view proceedings via the live webcast at aph.gov.au/live.

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THE Joint Select Committee on Road Safety will hold further public hearings for its inquiry into Road Safety on October 12 and 14, 2021.

The hearing on October 12 will be an opportunity for the committee to hear from representative bodies and research institutions about road safety issues for specific cohorts of road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and members of the caravan industry, as well as about targeted measures that can be taken to reduce road trauma.

Committee Chair, Darren Chester MP said, "Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are at higher risk of death and serious injury when involved in a road traffic incident, and are overrepresented in road trauma statistics. Regrettably, these road users are often overlooked in road safety strategies in favour of improving safety for passenger vehicles.

"Further, road safety initiatives often group cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians together under the heading of 'vulnerable road users', notwithstanding that these groups of road users have very different wants and needs. Accordingly, the committee will hear about the particular concerns of road users other than passenger vehicles, and about targeted solutions to improve safety outcomes."

The hearing on October 14 will be an opportunity for the committee to hear from representative bodies and state and local governments about road safety in regional, rural, and remote areas. The committee will also consider road safety concerns facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and measures that can be taken at the state and local government level to address road trauma.

Mr Chester said, "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are overrepresented in road trauma statistics, highlighting the need for culturally appropriate countermeasures which prioritise self-determination and account for the social determinants of health. In addition, we continue to see higher rates of death and serious injury on regional, rural, and remote roads, with fatality rates associated with crashes on very remote roads more than 13 times higher than fatality rates in our major cities.

"Local governments, which are responsible for managing most of our road networks, will be critical to addressing road trauma outside of our major cities, and indeed at the national level. The work of state governments will also be crucial as we look to develop integrated, holistic, nationally consistent solutions. The committee looks forward to hearing from state and local government organisations about measures that can be taken to improve safety for all Australians."

Public hearing details

Date:               Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Time:              9.30am to 5pm

Witnesses:    

Amy Gillett Foundation
AusCycling
Streets Alive Yarra
Motorcycle Council of New South Wales
Australian Motorcycle Council
Riders Action Group Western Australia
WalkSydney
Pedestrian Council of Australia
Institute for Sensible Transport
Caravan Industry Association of Australia

Date:               Thursday, 14 October 2021
Time:              9.30am to 5pm

Witnesses:    

National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation
National Rural Health Alliance
Australian Capital Territory Government
Tasmanian Government
Western Roads Federation
Western Australian Local Government Association
Northern Territory Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Logistics
Municipal Association of Victoria

Programs for the hearings are available on the committee’s website.

Due to health and safety concerns relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, hearings will be held remotely via videoconference and will not be open for public attendance. However, interested members of the public will be able to view proceedings via the live webcast at aph.gov.au/live.

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TENCENT CLOUD, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, has utilised its participation in Melbourne International Games Week 2021 to highlight solutions and capabilities that address gamers' and game developers' demands and needs. The annual event.is Asia-Pacific's
largest digital games convention

Melbourne International Games Week (MIGW) is attended by practitioners from the game industry, games enthusiasts, the general public and educators.

Backed by Tencent's years of experience in the game industry, underlined by its publishing of some of the most popular video games worldwide, Tencent Cloud on October 8 put the spotlight on its commitment to providing game developers and publishers the much-needed tools to build and operate a high-quality, stable and secure game environment.

With the goal of addressing common gaming-related challenges, such as cheaters and gold farmers that ruin gamers' experience; lags, delays and poor sound quality, and high difficulty for global release and testing, Tencent Cloud showcased its high-quality, reliable and secure solutions that will benefit the gaming community in Australia, including:

Game Server Elastic-scaling (https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/product/gse) (GSE), a solution that provides dedicated game server hosting services for the deployment and scaling of stateful games. It supports service discovery, flexible server scaling, and optimal resource scheduling. GSE helps developers quickly build a stable and low-latency deployment environment for multiplayer games while reducing OPS costs, and is ideal for games that need to remember data such as battle servers and push notifications in FPS, MOBA, turn-based games, MMORPG, table games, and more.

Game Multimedia Engine (https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/product/gme) (GME), which allows for a one-stop gaming voice solution. It features in-depth optimization for different gaming scenarios and types such as casual, social, MOBA, MMORPG and FPS, and supports multi-player voice chat, 3D
location voice, voice messaging and speech-to-text conversion and can be easily accessed with a simple SDK, meeting game developers' various gaming voice needs.

Anti-Cheat Expert (https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/product/ace) (ACE) with 24/7 security protection capabilities, supporting comprehensive multi-dimensional protection and detection and helping mobile game providers quickly cope with game security issues such as cheating and tampering. It
also guards the game client from malicious tampering, debugging and injection, invalidates vicious modifiers and protects game memory data integrity.

Global Application Acceleration Platform (https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/product/gaap) (GAAP), which lets users access the origin server through a high-speed connection with the aid of the nearest node to use Tencent Cloud's backbone interconnection, helping eliminate the stutters and latency experienced by global users when accessing businesses. Equipped with a graphical configuration interface, GAAP allows game developers to create and use high-speed connections on their business' origin server within minutes and view connection operational conditions in the console.

TcaplusDB (https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/product/tcaplusdb), enabling games on global and regional servers to scale and merge with no downtime, making it suitable for sustaining rapid business growth and long-tail OPS. It also comes equipped with a comprehensive set of features including high availability, disaster recovery, backup and rollback, ensuring 24/7 data storage with 99.999 percent reliability.

Tencent Cloud senior vice president, Poshu Yeung said, "Tencent Cloud's game solutions are ready, available and capable to address all challenges faced by game developers in Australia. Thus, we ultimately aim for an improved and unparalleled experience for all gamers across the continent. We
hope that through our participation and by introducing our wealth of gaming ecosystem resources and capabilities, we can further our mission of making game development easier around the world."

Tencent Cloud is a secure, reliable and high-performance public cloud service provider that fuses Tencent's infrastructure-building capabilities with the advantages of its massive user platform and ecosystem. Tencent Cloud provides global access and a rich array of services to governments and organisations that need advanced infrastructure and a resilient environment, such as those in the online games, live broadcast and financial services sectors.

As a strong testimony to Tencent Cloud's top-notch security standard and competitive services in the global cloud computing industry, Tencent Cloud was recently named Frost & Sullivan's 2020 Best Practice Competitive Strategy Leadership Award in Global Cloud Industry. It has also earned more than 20 international certifications, including but not limited to ISO22301, ISO27001, ISO20000, ISO9001, Trusted Cloud Services, CSA STAR, the Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report (OSPAR) standard and the Multi-Tier Cloud Security Standard (MTCS SS).

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