ROULETTE FLYING DISPLAY (VIC)
The Air Force aerobatic team, the Roulettes, will provide a display over Melbourne with up to six Pilatus PC-21 aircraft from the Central Flying School at RAAF Base East Sale.to commemorate their 100th Anniversary.
VEGEMITE EATING COMPETITION (SA)
Salisbury hosts a morning of free celebrations from 8am including a hot breakfast, fruit and yoghurt. To keep you entertained, there will be live music from The Crosstown Ramblers plus a range of other exciting activities including:
- Meet and greet opportunities with footy legends Darren Jarman and Alipate Carlile
- Novelty games including a Vegemite eating competition
- Mini golf
- Animal farm
- Balloon artists
- Badge making
- Military and defence vehicle display
TINNIES ULTRA LOW ALCOHOL – HAPPY ALE
MOONLIGHT CINEMA KINGS PARK (WA)
With pop ups all over the country and Perth’s Kings Park installation celebrates the day with Eric Bana’s murder mystery, The Dry.
MEET THE ORDER OF AUSTRALIA HONOUREE
90-year-old Geoffrey Jochelson from Kensington, Sydney, has been awarded an Order of Australia Medal for introducing The Security of Payment Act – a legislation that now allows contractors to recover disputed payments without having to go to court.
Geoffrey is not the kind of guy that comes to mind when you think about construction payment disputes. He’s softly spoken, even tempered, and not a baseball bat in sight.
His passion and motivation was fuelled by memories of his father, an electrical contractor in Johannesburg, being bluntly told that he wouldn’t get paid for his work. And not once, but many times.
He lobbied the NSW state government for nine years through the 1990’s, and persisted under three different premiers. Then in his 70’s, he worked through endless proposals, meetings, government assessments, and all the difficulties that go with trying to bring into existence entirely new law. At the same time, he had his full-time role as commercial manager at the National Electrical Contractors Association to keep him busy.
Finally, at the end of 1999 it all paid off.
In that year, the New South Wales Government made the Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Act into law/ It is a statutory process where payment disputes get decided by an adjudicator in a rapid compulsory adjudication scheme. A payment dispute can go from a claim to a decision in only six weeks. The Security of Payment system allows parties to bypass the lengthy and costly litigation route that forced many contractors to abandon the payments due to them, and to go into liquidation. It was so successful in NSW that it was adopted by Victoria in 2002, Queensland in 2004, and by 2009 every Australian State and Territory. It also spread to New Zealand, Thailand, and Singapore.
Over the last 20 years, over a billion dollars of payments have been recovered using the Security of Payment process.
In the last year alone, Anthony Igra, managing director of Contractors Debt Recovery recovered more than $8 million in unpaid money and over $70 million in the last 14 years thanks to the Security of Payment Act, putting money back in hardworking contractors’ pockets.
“Geoffrey Jochelson’s work has effectively blasted a hole through the age-old roadblock facing unpaid contractors – no time and no money. Recovering disputed payments used to take months or years and cost a fortune in court proceedings. Geoffrey changed all that.
Now a payment dispute can be decided in about five weeks at a tiny fraction of the cost. It’s not an overstatement to say that he single-handedly changed the face of construction cashflow around the entire country,” said Anthony.
Who says one old man can’t change the world?
Cover Image: Private (P) Michael Currie / Australian Defence Force – Commander of the 2nd Division, Major General Kathryn Campbell, AO, CSC speaks to the assembled soldiers and officers of the 8th/7th Battalion, Royal Victoria Regiment at the conclusion of the battalion’s military skills competition at Puckapunyal Military Training Area
These are just some of the things that were on for people to celebrate on the pubic holiday after long periods in lockdown, which is what this site is about. We prefer to leave the political debate to other platforms, while we focus on independent work of creatives and innovators by all Australians (like Yellamundie Festival, Flickerfest, Listen Up Songwriters Competition for example) which can often get overlooked or drowned out in mainstream media.
No mention at all of the controversy around that day? What it means for the original people who lived there 30,000 years before everyone else arrived?