Sat 25/4 Open from 8am (ACT stores) 1pm (NSW) Sun 26/4 Open from 9am Mon 27/4 Open from 9am (ACT stores) 7am (NSW stores) Belconnen 49 Lathlain St Phillip 249 Hindmarsh Dr Gungahlin Cnr Crinigan & Gundaroo Dr Queanbeyan 1 Aurora Rd, NSW Open this weekend! JACK WATERFORD: WHY PEOPLE SMUGGLERS DO MORE GOOD THAN SOME PUBLIC SERVANTS – TIMES2 LIFT-OUT Price $1.30 REPORT – PAGE 16 PLANET DISCOVERY COULD IT BE A WATER WORLD SPORT – BACK PAGE INJURY WOES BRUMBIES PAIN GAME Thursday, April 23, 2009 PLUS: FILMS, GIGS, REVIEWS FLY LIFT-OUT ATTACK OF THE DRONES WEATHER CANBERRA: Fine, mostly sunny, 20 Chance of rain: 10 per cent Wind: E-NE, 10-15km/h UV index: 4 (moderate) Outlook: Rain developing SYDNEY: Becoming fine, 22 MELBOURNE: Becoming cloudy, 25 Details: Page 14 Vol 81 No 27,019 52 Pages 2020 vision sees bionic eyes, children’s ABC By David McLennan ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ● Continued Page 4 Public talkfests not just hot air – Page 21 Australia is a step closer to developing a bionic eye and will soon send civilians to help soldiers in war-torn and disaster-struck nations, but it will have to wait a bit longer to become a republic. A year after the 2020 Summit, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued his response to the 962 ideas generated at Parliament House. He singled out nine big ideas: ■ A deployable civilian capacity to respond in addition to the military to emergencies in our region. ■ Taking the first steps towards an Indigenous Cultural Education and Knowledge Centre. ■ A mentoring in the workplace program to help pass knowledge between skilled older Australians, dubbed ‘‘Golden Gurus’’ and busi- ness and the community. ■ $50 million of government funding for research towards the development of a bionic eye. ■ A Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Endeavour Awards Scheme to sup- port scholarships for students in Australia and Asia and deepen cultural understanding. ■ A dedicated ABC children’s tele- vision channel. ■ A Business and School Connections Roundtable to enhance opportunities for business and schools to partner together to improve educational outcomes. Navy stops another boatload of refugees By David McLennan and Emma Macdonald ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ● Continued Page 8 NEW WAVE: The boat intercepted yesterday carrying 32 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers. Another 32 Sri Lankan suspected asylum-seekers are on their way to Christmas Island after Australian authorities intercepted their boat off the West Australian coast yesterday. The Government had warned recently of thousands of potential asylum-seekers waiting in Indonesia to come to Australia, but it is the first boat to arrive since last week’s explosion killed five people and injured many more. Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus said Armidale-class patrol boat HMAS Wollongong intercepted the vessel about 47 nautical miles south- west of Barrow Island in an oper- ation coordinated by Border Protec- tion Command about 12.30pm Canberra time. ‘‘The vessel had just entered our migration zone, that is to say the vessel had just entered the zone that extends 23 nautical miles off our shore,’’ he said. ‘‘The people on board will be transported to Christmas Island and as I speak to you now I am told that the boat is secure and the operation is proceeding very successfully.’’ The men were believed to have travelled directly from Sri Lanka, but Mr Debus did not know how long they had been at sea. Officials had spotted the boat from the air about 24 hours earlier, after intelligence had indicated it was on its way. Border Protection Command personnel had to wait until the boat reached Australia’s migration zone before it could be intercepted. Mr Debus would not say whether this was the same boat the Govern- ment had reportedly been tracking since the weekend. It is the seventh boat of asylum- seekers to arrive in Australian waters this year and the fifth in the past fortnight, and comes after a vessel carrying 49 people sank following an explosion off the West Australian coast last week. ABS in court for ‘illegal’ sackings By Markus Mannheim Public Service Reporter ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ● Continued Page 8 The public servants’ union will begin legal action against the Australian Bureau of Statistics for allegedly illegally dismissing staff. The bureau handed letters to 31 senior employees last week saying they were not needed because they were either incapable of their jobs or excess to agency needs. The staff were asked to decide within two weeks to retire, accept a demotion or be sacked, and several were told to leave the building within minutes of receiv- ing their letters. The bureau said it needed to remove about 180 staff – of whom half would be mid-level managers – over the next 18 months to fund a pay rise. But the Community and Public Sector Union said the bureau breached workplace laws and the staff wage agreement by failing to consult about the dismissals. The law requires employers who plan to sack 15 or more staff to first discuss ways to avoid the job cuts with the affected employees’ union, while the agreement says the bureau must consult with staff about dismissals before taking any decisions. The union’s deputy national secretary, Nadine Flood, said yes- terday the staff had been denied natural justice. ‘‘Sacking people based on a secret assessment of them, where they have no input, is entirely against accepted public service practice,’’ she said. ‘‘Everything about the way they’re doing this suggests it’s being done to cause the maximum damage to these people’s career and self-esteem, especially making them pack up their desk and leave immediately.’’ She said the job cuts were not caused by a future pay rise, but were tied to the Government’s 3.25 per cent cut to agencies’ operating budgets last financial year. Six of the 31 managers are band 1 senior executives, while the rest are executive level 2. The bureau will decide this week which of its 500 executive level 1 officers will go. Outlook for Aust grimmer, IMF says By David McLennan ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●● ● Continued Page 4 The Government is warning Aus- tralia’s economic growth, unem- ployment and budget deficit will be ‘‘substantially worse’’ than pre- viously thought after a new report said the world was experiencing its deepest post-war recession by far. The International Monetary Fund downgraded its forecasts for world growth for the fifth time in about six months, in a report published over- night. It predicted advanced economies would contract 3.8 per cent this year, because of ‘‘a severe recession inflicted by a massive financial crisis and acute loss of confidence’’, and warned its predictions could still be revised down further. ‘‘While the rate of contraction should moderate from the second quarter onward, world output is projected to decline by 1.3 per cent in 2009 as a whole and to recover only gradually in 2010, growing by 1.9 per cent,’’ it said. ‘‘Achieving this turnaround will depend on stepping up efforts to heal the financial sector, while continuing to support demand with monetary and fiscal easing.’’ The Australian economy would shrink 1.4 per cent this year, before a recovery to 0.6 per cent growth next year, when unemployment would rise to 7.8 per cent. This would put another 240,000 out of work, making a jobless total of 890,000. Treasurer Wayne Swan pointed out Australia had one of the best- performing economies, but described it as a bleak assessment. ‘‘The deepening global recession will have severe consequences for the budget’s forecasts for economic growth, unemployment and rev- enue, which will be substantially worse than reported in the Updated Economic and Fiscal Outlook in February this year,’’ he said. The now-outdated outlook predicted the global recession would strip $115 billion from gov- ernment revenue in the next four years, leaving annual deficits of $22-55 billion, and said unemploy- ment would peak at 7 per cent. Mr Swan said Treasury’s next update would be in the May 12 budget. The fund’s World Economic Out- look said Australia’s previously con- servative fiscal and monetary policy put it in a better place than others to deal with the crisis, and it recommended the Reserve Bank could ‘‘cut still further’’. However, it said Australia was largely reliant on the world econ- omy recovering. ‘‘Owing to relatively high depen- dence on demand from the United States and Asia and on external financing, there are limits to what domestic policy measures can achieve,’’ it said. The fund is calling on countries with room to spend more on stimu- lus measures to do so, and Mr Swan has indicated his May budget would do that. There had ‘‘probably never been a time where putting together a budget is more difficult’’. ‘‘We’ll have to do more, and we’ll have to do it with less money, and of course that certainly means tough choices,’’ Mr Swan said. The budget is expected to focus on infrastructure spending. ANU thrusts back into space race INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE: ANU physicist Christine Charles with the thruster prototype. Photo: KATE LEITH By Emily Sherlock A revolutionary ‘‘plasma thruster’’ engine designed by an Australian National University researcher will be launched into space in the next four years to power a prototype satellite. It will be the first time in seven years that a piece of Australian hardware has been sent into space and the first time a satellite with a plasma engine will be tested. The satellite will incorporate ANU researcher Christine Charles’s Helicon Double Layer Thruster, an electrode-less plasma engine using technology first developed at the ANU. It is also the first plasma engine of its kind to be applied to satellite station-keeping and – potentially – interplanetary space travel. The satellite will test the thruster’s capacity for orbital maneuvering. Dr Charles said news of the engine going into space was ‘‘fantastic’’. ‘‘It is really exciting, we didn’t even hope this would happen,’’ she said. The thruster uses an electric double layer which accelerates the ions that are formed in plasma, before they are ejected into space. ‘‘What comes out of the rocket is a large-area energetic ion beam, which is the source of thrust,’’ she said. Dr Charles said she would like to see the thruster developed as a product for general use in space exploration. It would also be suited to deep- space missions as ‘‘it is very safe, has no moving parts and works with a variety of propellants’’. The discovery of the double layer initially occurred at the ANU in 1999. Dr Charles said it took time to convince people of their find. ‘‘We tried to convince the community that this was real, the measures were correct, it took a little while,’’ she said. But in comparison to other technological advances, she said the path had been relatively quick. ‘‘If you look at how long it took for the other types of thrusters to develop that occurred over decades so it is going quite fast, which is great,’’ she said. The prototype will be built in a collaboration between the ANU’s Space Plasma Power and Propulsion group, European aerospace company EADS-Astrium and the University of Surrey. ANU Plasma Research Laboratory department head Professor Rod Boswell said external funding was essential to get the prototype produced, as Australia did not have a space program. ‘‘It’s a coup for the Australian space community . . . someone else is going to do the hard work of getting the spacecraft integration going which is seriously difficult to do in Australia.’’