Month: January 1993

The map accompanying the ACT Territory Plan looks a bit like the map presented at the Geneva peace talks on Bosnia-Hertzogovena.

The shaded areas show the parts administered by the Serbs or National Capital Planning Authority. The green bits are no-man’s land. The pink bits have been ethnically cleansed. The yellow is for Croat or community facilities and the orange is Muslim or residential.

It might sound like yet another lapse in journalist taste, but the comparison has some merit. Both maps express pious and worthy hopes, but people often refuse to fit colours on maps or intentions expressed in the documents that go with them.
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The Brown and Hatton Piggery group has paid $250,000 in workers’ compensation premiums and costs in settlement of claims made by New Zealand Insurance.

The group is half owned by the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and his family.

The premiums were owed under the NSW Workers’ Compensation Act. NZI sued as an agent for the NSW Work Cover Authority. They go back to 1989-90, though most were incurred after Mr Keating and his family obtained a half interest in the group for $430,100 in May last year when he was Treasurer.
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Pensioners face a cut in their pensions based upon means testing of “”deemed income” which they might never receive, according to Democrat Senator Meg Lees.

Senator Lees said yesterday that under a Social Security Bill passed in the last sitting of last year, the increase in the value of any listed shares held by pensioners will be deemed to be income for means testing even though no shares are sold and the increase in value realised.

Until the Bill was passed, only actual dividends or the increased value of sold shares counted as income. Unrealised increases in value were counted only in the assets test.
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Half of Australia’s business is taxation. Most wage slaves rarely consider that once you hit about $38,000, 47c in every dollar goes in income tax. Passed on sales taxes, petrol, booze and tobacco taxes and wholesale taxes make up the rest.

Companies pay similar amounts. People on $50,000 or more pay slightly more (48{ per cent after the Medicare tax). In theory. A recent survey of people earning more than $1 million a year, however, showed they paid an average of 26 per cent of the their income in tax. Huh? With a marginal rate of 48{ per cent, shouldn’t they be paying a little more? No. They use tricks to minimise their tax. These tricks can legitimately be used by non-millionaires, like you an me. The main one is negative gearing, usually on real estate. This is how and why it works.

It is based on the assumption that governments will behave stupidly. If governments behaved intelligently, negative gearing on real estate would go out the window in Australia and savings and investment would be chanelled to better things.
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Australians going overseas cannot claim Medicare benefits, yet must pay the Medicare levy, and if they go for work purposes cannot claim any private insurance as a tax deduction, according to official advice to a Canberra academic.

Professor Hans Kuhn, emeritus professor of Germanic languages at ANU, has been trying to get an answer to his Medicare query for several months. He got a reply last week.

Professor Kuhn was away in Europe in 1991 and again last year for six months. He was advised to take private medical insurance, because Medicare no longer automatically paid the equivalent of Australian benefits for overseas medical costs (except in a limited number of countries where there is an exchange agreement).
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The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Leo McLeay, has had mixed fortune since his bicycle accident at Parliament House on April 25, 1990.

The events that followed certainly caused a lot of public comment, some of it quite misguided. It is an interesting case because it highlights the lottery of seeking damages for personal injuries in Australia.

At first sight the case was bound to cause outrage. It had an essential ingredient that gets up the nose of the ordinary Australian: the appearance of one rule for those in positions of power and another for the ordinary citizen. But that is appearance; the reality is different.
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An ominous comparison can be made between the Keating Government facing the 1993 election and the Fraser Government facing defeat in 1983.

It comes down to the number of marginal seats.

Labor has a majority of nine seats (assuming Wills is Labor and North Shore anti-Labor). An even swing of 0.9 per cent will tip five seats to the Coalition, giving it a majority.
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There is something seriously wrong when core crime-fighting police services are being cut in preference to other things. It is a matter for the Government to look for cuts in aras outside the police budget and for police to look at less harmful cuts within the police budget. There is no reason why the ACT cannot have police services of the same or better standard than those of other states for the same cost per head.

As the minister responsible, Terry Connolly, has said, Canberra is a safe city. True. Therefore our costs should be lower. Canberra does not have the difficulties of inner city areas of lawlessness to the same degree as Sydney’s Redfern or Melbourne’s inner area. It does not have the tyranny of distance like Western Australia or Queensland. It has a lower crime rate than other states. It is a more middle-class, law-abiding territory than many other places in Australia. Policing should be easier. Moreover, Canberra should have specialist in bureaucratic skills that should enable us to administer things more efficiently.

Apparently not. As soon as the ACT has police budget has problems, the first response is to cut operational areas. It is not good enough.
Continue reading “1993_01_january_leader30”

The founding fathers, in their jealousy and wisdom, thought that the national capital should be at least 100 miles from Sydney. It was a question of influence. Melbourne was to house the national parliament until the new capital was founded. In return it was agreed that the new capital territory would be within the state of NSW, but sufficiently far from Sydney that it would not be a de-facto part of Sydney. Little did they think that the power of telecommunications 90 years later might mean that 100 miles (160 kilometres) would not be enough. Little did they think that the quaint words giving the Federal Parliament power to make laws with respect to “”postal, telegraphic, telephonic and other like services” would result in the creation of a publicly owned service that could project images into the homes of every Australian. Little did they think that the citizens of the new capital would one day be subsumed electronically by this service into the ambit of Sydney.

Well, it has happened. In August, 1991, the ABC decided to discontinue its separate television news service into Canberra. Instead the Sydney service would be beamed into Canberra homes. At the time we were assured that local Canberra news would still be covered with one reporter and a crew. And this week we find that this reporter has been moved to Parliament House. We have been assured that ABC resources at Parliament House would cover Canberra until a replacement is found.

Every other capital has its own ABC television news service, even Darwin and Hobart with lower populations. Excellent as the ABC’s international and national coverage are, the people of Canberra do not want their main television news bulletin determined on the imperatives of Sydney news values. A fire in Balmain, a car prang in Manly and the election of the Sydney City Council are no substitutes for stories about cuts in the AFP budget, flooding in Tuggeranong and the election of the ACT Legislative Assembly.
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The agreement between the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and the Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, to have two debates during the election campaign is most welcome. It should become a regular pattern for all Federal elections. In recent Australian history, head-to-head television debates during the campaign have been the exception rather than the rule. A notable exception was the debate during the 1984 campaign between the then Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Peacock, and the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. Mr Hawke was riding on a wave of popularity. Mr Peacock was the underdog. The debate, which consisted of questions from a panel of journalists, transformed the Peacock campaign and image. It was widely thought Mr Peacock had performed better than expected in that campaign and the debate played an important part in that. The sad upshot was that Mr Hawke shied away from debates where he would be grilled by a panel. In the 1990 campaign there was one tedious debate where each leader made a statement and replied to other.

There are some pleasing aspects to the proposal for this campaign: there will be more than one debate; they are likely to involve a panel of questioners; they will be 90 minutes long; they will be on the ABC and offered to the commercials; they will not have a studio audience; they will be live; they will be spaced one at the beginning and one at the end of the campaign and they are restricted to the two potential prime ministers. The debates need to be fairly long. One of the most galling things about television coverage of political events is the quick grab. During the last US presidential campaign, for example, grabs averaged under nine seconds on the commercial news. No-one has been patient enough to do the research in Australia, but no doubt the position is similar. Politicians play to this environment; they have to. Given the sad fact that a large proportion of the electorate gets news only from the box, the result is mass ignorance of issues and political judgments being formed around image rather than substance. It may well be, of course, that many will not bother with two 90-minute debates, none the less the opportunity will be there and at least some will take it. The absence of commercials and a booing or cheering audience is welcome because it will enable people to judge the protagonists’ handling of the issues free from distraction. The live debate is important, too. The electors will see the leaders as they are; not after important elements of what they say is left on the cutting-room floor.

These debates could be a turning point in the evolution of the way election campaigns take place in Australia. Up to, say, 1975, the public meeting was the key campaigning tool. Since then, alas, demonstrators and wreckers have made public meetings impossible. The launch before hand-picked audiences and the National Press Club address by each leader became the critical elements. How much better to have head-to-head debates as the main campaign element! Debates provide a direct and immediate comparison, enabling the audience to make a better judgment.
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