Community Capacity Building on Norfolk Island

One of the major points to come out of the recent review of the Norfolk Island Public Service was the need to build the capacity of the Public Service to better serve both government and the community.
In so many areas the service was found wanting but most particularly in the areas of policy development, policy advice, and strategic planning. In addition, the Administration does not have a good reputation for client service, a weakness it shares with many in the business community on Norfolk.
Business owners are also patchy when it comes to business planning and in the timeliness of their responses to changing demands for goods and services, so there is some work to be done there also.
While it is understood that the Public Service review was specifically aimed at lifting the performance of public service the whole community, not just the public service, needs an investment in capacity building. It also needs to be understood that many of the skills not found in the public sector already exist in the private sector and vice versa, so there is an opportunity for some cross fertilisation.
There is cause for concern that in the next tranche of funding from the Commonwealth, resources will be focused predominantly on public sector improvement, with the rest of the community left to fend for themselves.
There also reason to believe that the Norfolk Island Government will accede to this push because of the continuing symbiotic relationship between government and the public sector and the government's poor track record in supporting the productive sector of the community, small business.

With every likelihood that the submission to the Australian Cabinet for 2012/2013 funding is close to finality, and with the strong likelihood that Canberra bureaucrats will implement what they understand, it's likely that the private sector will be forgotten again.
Lets not kid ourselves, the Norfolk Island Government and its Administration are in the scheme of things, small potatoes. The team that conducted the Public Service review is accustomed to reviewing organisations which are significantly more advanced in the sophistication of their public administration than the Norfolk Island Administration.

If the solution to filling the skills gap is to task a team of Canberra oriented bureaucrats who will arrive with an entirely new lexicon of pubic service jargon and acronyms, and courses delivered by slick corporate consultants. Then the first encounters for the Norfolk Island Administration staff will be eye-glazing experiences.......with free mints!  It's important therefore that any capacity building exercises are accessible and relevant. There is some serious catch up needed to be sure, but what we don't want is a jump from where we are to the APS's next best thing.
It's a given in all this that Norfolk needs to reconstruct the private/public sector activity mix. In our new paradigm the only sustainable approach is a contracting public sector and an expanding private sector.

It follows then that capacity building needs to occur widely throughout the community with less emphasis of the development of skills that are more aligned to the demands of a less relevant public sector and more aligned to the needs of a tourism focussed service economy.

To date the funding from the Commonwealth has done little to improve the lot of the private sector and it would be a serious mistake for the Commonwealth to support a strategy that perpetuates the public private, them and us feelings that exist in the Norfolk Island community right now.

A strategy that delivers community capacity building regardless of employer, that deals with career aspirations for locals both on and off Norfolk and that enables people to move from public to private sector and vice versa,  is what is called for.

Norfolk out of gas

The Norfolk Island Government took on the delivery of air services, "in
the national interest" and history shows what that did to our financial
position. Then they took on fuel supplies with the establishment of
Norfolk Energy and we have had a continuing upward trend in fuel prices
despite lower crude oil prices. They took over fuel supply and
distribution once again "in the national interest" and have used and
abused this role as a taxing mechanism. Now we have run out of fuel the
day after Minister Nobbs announces rationing on the radio. How can this
happen? No doubt we will hear a flurry of excuses and no one held to
account for a blunder that will cost the island dearly. Given the
importance of petrol to so many aspects of our lives, where was the risk
management strategy that should have guided those responsible for ensuring
continuity of supply.
Barring some sort of natural disaster, there  is no way the island should
be in this position. Anywhere else, the Minister would fall on his sword,
but don't hold your breath waiting for that, or even for the Chief
Minister to sack the Minister for the economic damage and the damage to
our reputation as a tourist destination, a reputation which we spend
substantial amounts of time an money building. Who will count the cost of
this blunder?

Norfolk Island Air Services - out of the frying pan !

No doubt we are all happy that the community of Norfolk Island is no longer burdened with the responsibility of running air services into Norfolk. Air New Zealand has served us well on the NZ/NLK run. It was, and remains, everyones hope that Air New Zealand on the Aussie run with the Aust. government support would give certainty and confidence and grow volume on the route. Growing volume can best be achieved by competitive fares.
My personal experience last week suggests we have a little way to go. My wife needed to go to Aust. for a visit to a medical specialist having recently had a knee replacement. The best fare she could get from Air NZ was $910 and if she wanted a choice of seat, another $30 each way. Eventually she got a seat on one of the few remaining Norfolk Air services for $700+. It is cheaper to go to Auckland than Sydney?. And this week Malaysian Airlines is offering seats to mainland China for a bit over $1000.
If this is the best we are going to get from Air NZ and the Aust. gov. economic recovery is a long way off.

IT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES ON NORFOLK ISLAND GET A BOOST

With the announcement by NBN Co. that they would purchase two satellites to service remote and regional Australia, Norfolk Island is set to go in the e-commerce world. The following is an edited version of a story on the Delimiter website;
NBN Co’s brand new satellites will be able to deliver something like 90GHz of dedicated capacity to Australia.
Much of the commercial satellite capacity in Australia is targeted over metropolitan areas, where the greatest return will be made for commercial operators, due to a heavier concentration of targets. In comparison, NBN Co will explicitly target users in remote areas, where normal satellite operators would find it hard to operate a commercially successful service.
The impact this rollout will have on the nation’s rural broadband problem is dramatic. For starters, speeds will be boosted immediately, from the currently available 6MBps (or even less in many areas) to 12Mbps. Coverage will also be boosted — from something like 48,000 people to several hundred thousand, including Australia’s external territories such as Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Macquarie Island and the Cocos Islands. And the monthly quota problem will also be resolved, due to the excess capacity available through the infrastructure.
But why launch two satellites? Couldn’t one do? No, NBN Co is launching two satellites for redundancy, and to spread the load.
Building satellite broadband infrastructure isn’t like building terrestrial broadband infrastructure. If something goes wrong in space, NBN Co won’t be able to visit its satellite installations to fix the problem. “Anyone designing any telecommunications networks, must design in diversity into the solution,” In the case of one satellite partially or totally failing, the several hundred Australians being served by the infrastructure won’t lose signal.
Instead NBN Co will be able to migrate all the users off one satellite and onto the other. Under normal circumstances both will be used, with each taking some of the load of Australia’s telecommunications needs.
It is clear that NBN Co has just completed an exhaustive process of several years’ effort investigating Australia’s current satellite capacity and how NBN Co should best meet its government policy demands. NBN Co has taken two years to go through this every which way, [seeing] what’s available, what’s becoming available, where the bandwidth is laid down. Is it C-band, is it I-band, is it KA-band.”
While NBN Co has been criticised for its procurement process for the satellite process NBN Co's Project Director, Matt Dawson noted that the two process had been “very competitive”. “We know we’ve got very good prices for these sort of satellites,” he said. “We really do try to do the best that we possibly can. We have to be fiscally responsible, with taxpayers’ dollars,” he adds.