A tough fighting 6 pound rainbow trout from this morning’s fishing on the Tongariro, caught by your humble author and netted by our guide Rob Vaz. My boys James and Jack (shown here) also caught and released two trout each. What a team!
You couldn’t get a nicer picture on a chocolate box, folks. Here’s the adjoining villa at Tongariro Lodge this morning as we were starting to gear up for the day’s fishing. The mighty Tongariro River is about 20 metres away. Fly fishing awaits, for the first time here in 4 years, thanks to Covid lockdowns.
Great omen on the metal dividing fence at Auckland Airport. For the uninitiated, the Royal Wolf is a world famous dry fly for fly-fishing tragic, like your humble writer.
Phones off folks. We’re in the air, heading to Taupo for a week’s fly fishing on the famous Tongariro run. And Air New Zealand have been fantastic. Such a contrast to the nightmare of travelling with our former national carrier in recent years. We were travelling economy and the staff kept offering to help, the flights were all on time and even the customs helped out as we had a younger family. Loved it.
I can tell New Zealand Customs that, in all honesty, I definitely packed this bag myself. Not quite a triumph of three dimensional spatial optimisation.
The kids and I are getting our fair share of the pie before packing for our trip to NZ next week. Apparently, I’m fact finding, as well as fish finding, as my AFR editor is angling for a hook on a NZ election story. I’m in party mode already, as you can probably tell.
Education Geographics has won the prestigious InfoSol 2023 Award for the Most Valuable Dashboard, for its Australian School App which is now driving record enrolment growth for school leadership teams across 130 Australian Non-government schools.
Paul Grill, the CEO of Infosol personally congratulated EGS and its CEO and dashboard designer Reg Kernke on the achievement which has previously been won by major international marketing companies such as Salesforce. Paul said: “There was strong competition this year but your dashboard definitely impressed the judges the most.”
Reg said the new Squirrel dashboard app was a powerful analytics application built and delivered by our team of developers, including EGS Spatial Analyst Dr Jeanine McMullan and our award-winning team of statisticians.
“We have been able to accommodate all of our existing 130 users across all mainland Australian states to access individual reports with bespoke analysis and summaries, with almost unlimited growth potential in user numbers as our automation strategy continues to include AI.
“Over Christmas 2022, EGS was able to successfully decommission the previous dashboarding tool and replace it with Squirrel365 and InfoBurst without incurring additional operating costs.
“The schools love it and Australian non-Government school enrolments are growing at record levels.”
Education Geographics is a sister company of Health Geographics and the two retail companies provide Squirrel dashboards and Esri maps to private and public sector participants in education and health industries in Australia.
EGS and HGS were established, using the knowledge base developed by their parent company Australian Development Strategies over 50 years of profiling spatial data on political, demographic and economic trends across Australia.
Former Australian Senator and ADS Founder John Black congratulated Reg and the EGS team on the new interactive dashboard design and its associated online Esri map.
He said: “As our automation program continues to involve more AI solutions drawing on the dataset from our unique ADS school models, we would be looking to take Education Geographics into comparable overseas education markets in North American and Britain.
“Parents love their kids and they want to give them the best educational start in life that they can afford. These principles are universal and this means there’s a big international market for EGS”.
Above is a snip of our ADS/Esri online map showing in shades of red the larger estimated Two Party Preferred swings to Labor in the March 25 NSW election at the close of counting on election night. 🔗https://arcg.is/0rqGez
The analysis shows that the strongest swings to the ALP occurred in seats dominated by the better-paid Aspirational Left voters who also elected the Albanese Government and drove up private health insurance and private school enrolments during Covid lockdowns. 🔗 https://www.educationgeographics.net.au/new-face-of-politics/
Below is a chart from the preliminary analysis of the NSW results, showing the family income profiles of the seats you can see in the online map. Basically, the more high-income families in a state seat, shown to the right of the chart below, the bigger the 2PP swing to the ALP and the darker the red on the map, while more low to medium income families meant a smaller swing to Labor (below seven percent), or even a swing to Coalition, shown by darker shades of blue.
I should stress that only about half of the votes were counted on Saturday night, so the final results could vary to a sufficient degree to impact the results in a number of close seats.
I should also point out that that profile of both major parties in Australian politics are fading and, as they do, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe even a theoretical 2PP vote to the major parties in a quarter of the seats.
Big components of the Aspirational Left include Professional Women and Asian Migrants. Professional women are now the fastest growing occupational group among Australian workers and Migrants now make up more than 50 percent of Australian Population increases since 2001.
These groups are therefore likely to increase in numbers and influence in Australia in the coming decade and exert a strong and growing influence over future state and federal elections and the uptake of private education and private health insurance.
At ADS/EGS and HGS we will be including this new group in all our future modelling.