Month: November 1992

This is the story of Fyodor (his real name). He was a gambler. His life was wrecked by it. Between his destructive bouts of gambling, he was a creative man. He wrote the finest description of the gambling affliction that has ever been written. No amount of new journalism in the vein of “”John (not his real name)”, can ever hope to capture better the euphoric agony of the compulsive gambler. It is best, therefore, that his words tell his story.

It started with watching his grandmother playing roulette.

“”Grandmother could barely sit still. He blazing eyes were simply devouring the little ball as it bounced along the notches of the spinning wheel. Grandmother was losing control, she couldn’t keep still in her seat.
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Television has insidious effects and viewers should be more active in understanding them and controlling their habit, according to a Canadian researcher.

The researcher is Gaston Gauthier. He argued at the National Family Summit at Parliament House yesterday that when television arrived “”the family and society as a whole at the time were seduced”.

“”They did not see that their family relations would give way to very different ones,” he said. “”They did not see that, in watching television, their family relations would give way to very different ones. They did not see that in watching television, their relations became distant relations with imaginary beings.”
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He was drunk at the time. Coming to his senses he swears off the grog for 20 years. It was England in the mid-nineteenth century. Thus opens Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.

Such things were not confined to fiction, according to a myth-debunking presentation at the National Family Summit this week.

While the brazen vote-enticing speeches given by Paul Keating and John Hewson snatched the front pages and lead television items, far more prescient and cerebral things were stated by other speakers. Ita Buttrose, the organiser of the conference, warned that political parties would ignore the family at their peril. A pity she could not warn the media that they would ignore her non-political speakers at their peril.
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Ita Buttrose, the organiser of this week’s national summit on the family, and the Australian Institute of Family Studies have been presented with a special award by the United Nations in recognition of their work in improving the social and emotional status of Australian families. The awards were presented in Canberra on Thursday night. Miss Buttrose was also made a patron of the International Year of the Family, which is to be held in 1994. The head of the institute, Dr Don Elgar, accepted the award on the institute’s behalf.

Miss Buttrose said the future of the family and Australia’s children was not a matter for governments to solve on their own.< pc Point to newsfeature on families plse

Michael Moore’s Education (Amendment) Bill went straight into the too-hard basket last week. There it will stay until the next case arises.

Moore put the Bill up because of the expulsion in March of eight boys from Canberra Grammar School. It provides for an independent board of review to look at expulsions and suspensions of longer than 10 days. A student or parent could appeal and the board could either affirm or overturn the decision. The board would have educationalists from government and independent sector, a lawyer, the Community Advocate and a representative of the Association of Independent Schools.

The Bill would have applied to private as well as independent schools. The Liberal and Labor Party will not support it, so Moore, an Independent, will let it lie on the table. Presumably, he wants to cry “”I told you so” when the next case comes up.
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Every year the Australian Bureau of Statistics puts out stats on birth and death. They issued a lot last week, but the coverage was small. We are more interested in the beginning and end of working life than the beginning and end of life itself. We are more interested in the balance of trade than in the balance of health.

For the first time since statistics began, you are more likely to die of cancer than any other cause. Tragically, women are smoking themselves to death. Conversely, men are slowly stopping themselves from smoking themselves to death.

The big-ticket items in media coverage _ AIDS, murder and suicide _ hardly rate on the death tables.
Last week’s statistics and a book put out earlier this year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s Health 1992, show the trends.
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Paul Keating senses the political danger of the loans affair. For a start its mere name has a haunting resemblance to the 1975 loans affairs which brought down the Whitlam Government.

Unlike Whitlam, Keating has engaged in decisive early damage control. First, he has taken the wind out of Jeff Kennett’s sails by giving him what he wants: lots of extra loan-raising capacity.

The essence of the Federal Opposition’s complaint is that the Treasurer, John Dawkins, hid from the Loan Council and its members (the Premiers of the States) the fact that Victoria had borrowed well beyond Loan Council authority, and further that he hid this from the public and misled the Parliament about it.
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Two judges of the High Court have extended the idea of implied rights in the Constitution, by saying the Constitution guaranteed a right to fair trial.

However, five judges shied away from implied rights and decided on other grounds.

Earlier this year six judges ruled that the Constitution carried with it a right to freedom of political discussion. Shortly after that, one judge, Justice Toohey, gave a speech to a conference in Darwin suggesting that a whole raft of human rights could be implied in the Constitution. His reasoning was that when the people approved the Constitution they could not imagine a Parliament taking away fundamental common-law rights, thus there was no need to express them as in America. They were implied.
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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.
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POOR old Chester Carlson. He spend nine years trying to flog off his useless invention. Then in 1944 an obscure company signed a royalties agreement with him.

That company is no longer obscure. Carlson’s useless invention was to replace the perfectly efficient practice of using carbon paper in type-writers with a machine that made copies. The company became Xerox.

Now five billion photocopies are made in the world each day. In Australia alone 500 million photocopies will be made this year.
Continue reading “1992_11_november_column23”