WHEN will we see the first chink in John Hewson’s determination to keep Fightback intact? Most eyes are on the GST and the industrial-relations package, but it may come elsewhere.
Emotion aside, Hewson and his shadow Treasurer are right when then refuse to exempt the basics of life: clothing and food, but the explanation requires more than the average nine-second live grab that television networks give politicians. The nine-second figure, incidentally, comes from research done during the recent US election; American sociologists take a profound view of the trivial.
So if you have more than nine seconds to spare, the reason for not exempting food and clothing is as follows: everyone knows what food and clothing is, right? Not so. Australian customs law is littered with cases about what category and therefore what duty applies to certain items. Is a Superman outfit clothing or a toy, for example? Is a diving or surfing wet-suit clothing or sporting gear? What of ski-boots? Is caviar food? Are non-prescription cough lollies food? Certainly some of the substances sold by some franchised outlets might have difficulty qualifying as food.
Fur coats and silk ties are hardly clothing. They are certainly not basic clothing. And so it goes on. The disputes will enrich lawyers and clog courts. Far better to tax everything, fur coats and Bond Y-fronts, caviar and Tip Top, and dish out social welfare for the indigent as compensation. Exempting Y-fronts means exempting minks. Exempting Tip Top means exempting caviar.
Hewson and Reith over-estimated the intelligence of the voter. It will take ages for them to make dim Australian voters to realise that tax avoidance has been a national past-time since the Rum Rebellion and that an exemption on food and clothing will arm the avoiders with yet another device. Further, Hewson and Reith have over-estimated their own intelligence. They wrongly assumed that media commentators and voters meant it when they said after the 1990 election that they wanted their politicians to be consistent and to provide details of policies and to be up-front. Having done all those things, the media commentators and talk-back radio chatter-boxes are calling for “”flexibility” (that is, politicians who change their mind and who provide vagueries for policies).
But now the Coalition is locked in. There is only one graver sin that inflexibility _ that is backing down. Backing down is out of the question, especially when they are right.
But I can predict a minor change in Fightback. It is in an area not cobbled together by the Big Three in the coalition: Hewson, Reith and Howard.
No; this bit was thrown in by Andrew Peacock. It is the abolition of the Australian Institute of Criminology. After the 1990 election, every shadow minister, and Andrew Peacock is a shadow minister of some substance, was asked to come up with cuts in their portfolio area. Peacock, you will no doubt recall, was shadow Attorney-General at the time. The Australian Institute of Criminology was under that portfolio. The Coalition had vowed to cut public spending. What an easy target the institute made: a whole lot of academics in an ivory tower talking about crime when we all know that the system is too soft on crims and they should all be locked up longer.
So the institute was a quick $40 million saving. And their work was being done by the states anyway, according to Fightback.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The Liberal Attorney-General, Tom Hughes, introducing the Bill that set up the institute in 1971, said, “”The Commonwealth believes, and the states agree, that the Commonwealth has an Australia-wide co-ordinating role so that the problems can be tackled on a national basis.”
Before the institute was set up, no authorities in Australia were collecting national crime statistics. The institute’s work is not being done by the states.
Before we say rising crime rate equals cliche and who cares, there is another way of looking at it. Crime equals violence, equals concern by women, equals votes.
Paul Keating has been smart enough to recognise this. Women, especially, are sick of being threatened by violence and are sick of violence on television during hours their children are watching.
Who studies violence? Who can do research into violence on television? The Institute of Criminology. Crime is costing Australia at least $27 billion a year. But the political treatment of the issue is changing. The dry economic argument has, so to speak, dried up. The issue is quite rightly broadening. Aside from the red faces caused by using in its advertisements research from the very institute it wants to abolish, the Coalition faces a more fundament embarrassment: it can be seen to be not caring about violence and the mainly women voters it affects _ an issue Paul Keating has cleverly exploited.
My guess is that the Australian Institute of Criminology will come off the Fightback hit-list long before the GST will come of clothing and food.