Understanding the NDIS: how does the scheme view music therapy?

It is challenging to work out how the new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) works. As an an allied health professional who is also the Head of Music Therapy, I attempt to anticipate and influence policy changes, conduct research that challenges and tests new directions and teach how music therapy practice needs to evolve in response.

Music therapy is different from music entertainment. It is a research-based practice and profession where music is used to actively support people to improve their health and overall well-being. Music therapists are musicians trained at university to understand how music can affect behaviours and how people feel and think.

Theoretically, music therapy is a support funded under the NDIS, that includes funding for “therapeutic supports including behaviour support”. A spokesman from the National Disability Insurance Agency – the organisation implementing and overseeing the scheme – told us:

Under the scheme, music therapy

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In making a preliminary decision on the sale of S. Kidman & Co to a Chinese consortium, the Treasurer Scott Morrison has shed some light on what the government defines as being in the “national interest”.

He describes the Chinese bid as being contrary to Australia’s national interest, because:

“the form in which the Kidman portfolio has been offered as a single aggregated asset, has rendered it difficult for Australian bidders to be able to make a competitive bid.”

The decision was rationalised not on any of the pre-existing national interest test provisions, but rather the fact that Australian companies had struggled to make a competitive bid.

By doing this, the Treasurer has articulated a new policy objective, not previously part of the national interest test: that an Australian firm should have a substantial stake in the bidding process.

How is national interest defined?

The consortium bid for Kidman, the largest...

Blue bottles have been washing up on Sydney beaches by the bucketload recently. With their annual arrival, many questions and myths about these creatures seem to be drifting around as well.

What exactly are blue bottles? Are you really supposed to pee on their stings? How do you keep a day at the beach from turning into a real pain? Let’s take a closer look at these mysterious sea dwellers.

What are blue bottles?

Blue bottles are siphonophores, a weird group of colonial jellyfish. Rather than being a single organism like the jellyfish we commonly recognise, siphonophores are actually made up of several colony members called persons (sometimes also known as “zooids”). These members typically include feeding persons, reproductive persons, and stinging persons, among others.

Some siphonophores, such as the blue bottle, also have a gas-filled bladder (another person), while others instead have swimming bells similar to jellyfish; a few...

Just try not to get annoyed.

Almost half the population of the planet now has access to the internet, with about one in three of those people regularly active on social media.

But this increased opportunity to socialise and communicate in a virtual environment has offered new avenues for antisocial behaviour.

The problem of cyberbullying has received considerable research attention. However, other online antisocial behaviours with similarly harmful outcomes have received far less consideration – one example being anonymous online trolling.

Trolling behaviours typically include deliberately posting inflammatory comments and argumentative messages in an attempt to provoke, disrupt and upset others. “Trolls” may pretend to be part of the group, but their real intent is to create conflict for their own amusement. Shockingly, more than a quarter of Americans have admitted to engaging in trolling behaviour at some point.

Most...

"With seven gold & platinum recordings, this four member vocal group is a true international success story." (singers.com)

"it is the original quartet of Claude Morrison, Arnold Robinson, Paul Cooper, and Mark Connors that created their most beloved recordings. One Size Fits All" (allmusic.com)



Album Cover

This is album number one hundred and six in the series of retro-reviews of both vinyl and Cd albums in my collection.

The series is called "Cream of The Crate " and each review represents an album that I believe is of significant musical value, either because of it's rarity, because it represents the best of a style or styles of music or because there is something unique about the group or the music. The first fifty reviews were vinyl only, and the second fifty reviews were CD's only. Link...

It is generally thought that science helps good ideas triumph over bad. The weight of evidence eventually pushes false claims aside.

But some ideas march onward despite the evidence against them. The discredited link between vaccines and autism continues to cause mischief and climate change sceptics continue to resurrect dead science.

Why, then, are some bad ideas so hard to kill?

A striking example of such a “zombie theory” comes from personality psychology. Personality psychologists study human individuality – how and why individuals differ in their patterns of behaviour and experience, and how those differences influence our lives.

For almost 50 years, an idea with a vexing immunity to evidence has needled this field. This idea is called situationism.

Is personality an illusion?

Introduced in the 1960s by American psychologist Walter Mischel, situationism is the idea is that human behaviour results only...

"We were the epitome of the hard-working. hard livin' rock & roll band."(Pat Simmons - Doobie Brothers)
"The Doobie Brothers are a mainstream rock band with a few crucial limitations and a knack of making good records despite their flaws." (Bud Scoppa, Rolling Stone, May 1973)
"If you want the hits and only the hits, then this is the Doobie Brothers album for you."(This review)



This is album review number One Hundred and Eighty Four in the series of retro-reviews of both vinyl and CD albums from my collection.

The series is called Cream of The Crate and each review represents an album that I believe represents significant musical value, either because of its rarity, because it represents the best of a style or styles of a music or because there is something unique about the music, the group or the particular production. The first fifty reviews were based on vinyl albums from my collection, with the following fifty on CD albums from my...

Lost Bloke’s Home
Still a Place For Ageing White Men


Melbourne’s Inner City is the domain of IT Professionals, upwardly mobile sorts of all persuasions, and that ubiquitous Lifestyle Loitering Lot. Laurie Davis isn't one of them. He was born and grew up in a Carlton light years from its present Lifestyle Hotspot. His formative years were a time long before Sushi Bars replaced Milk Bars. Holdens ruled the roads and John Nicholls was biffing blokes behind play at Carlton home games. Four n twenty pies and Saturday afternoon crowds flocking to Princes Park are distant memories. Today it’s SUV drivers and Eco Warrior cyclists jostling for right of way in search of rare parking spaces in front of the latest ‘urban spoon darling’. Like a tourist lost in a Moroccan Medina, Laurie feels like a lost bloke. He‘s out at sea in amongst this lot . But he still has one sanctuary . Princes Park Bowls Club is one of the last bastions of a Carlton he can still relate to, an oasis f...

We all have a poster we remember. Mine was taped to a bookshop window in the Melbourne suburb of Prahran. A stark black and white image of a boy as young as I was then, about 13, stared out at me. He was naked from the chest up. He looked at me with sad eyes. The skin on the lower part of his face and neck had flowed into his chest. The scarring was horrific. The poster had two words on it. Above the boy, “Vietnam”, and below, “Napalm”.

Modern posters were invented at the end of the 19th Century. New lithographic printing technologies had just enabled the mass-production of colourful images on vast sheets of paper. These posters immediately became startling confrontations for the spectator and the flaneur and, eventually, commodities in their own right.

From advertising to propaganda, the best posters have a capacity to arrest attention, to disrupt, surprise and seduce. Even in an age dominated by social media, they still have the power to shock.
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"The reality of Plastic Ono Band is that it contains eleven of Lennon’s most accessible and gorgeous melodies and riffs." (Gerry Mullholand - BBC review 2010)
"An album that will be as much analysed as Sgt. Pepper over the years." (Billboard - 1971)
"It remains one of the most audacious, iconoclastic albums in all of rock and roll." (Guitar World 2016)
"The album certainly shows that he had yet to work through many unresolved matters, and that he still had much anger in him. However he was a brilliant man and knew how to channel these elements in such a way to create some brilliant, memorable and haunting tracks." (This review)




This is album review number One Hundred and Ninety Eight in the series of retro-reviews of both vinyl and CD albums from my collection.

The series is called Cream of The Crate and each review represents an album that I believe represents significant musical value, either because of its...

Over the last two decades we have seen the unprecedented politicisation of immigration. Many Australians remember the wave of immigration after World War II when our rapidly developing industrialised economy addressed its labour shortage. Yet, like many Western countries, since the end of the Cold War we have worked to prevent refugees from seeking asylum by making our borders impenetrable.

Today, we distinguish between migrants, who arrive via our Migration Program (currently up to 190,000 places per year), and refugees, admitted through our Humanitarian Program, (providing 13,750 places in 2016-2017). Migrants make a conscious choice to seek a better life elsewhere. Refugees are forced to leave their country because of persecution.

Photography has mapped a distinctively Australian version of this global story. Once migrants were represented as complex, vulnerable, diverse people, as in David Moore’s iconic 1966 photograph, Migrants arriving in Sydney. This...