Month: June 1993

A full review of all land and planning legislation would be completed by March, the chair of the Infrastructure, Development and Planning committee, David Lamont, said yesterday.

The review by his committee would take place after criticisms of planning law made by the Todd inquiry. That inquiry was charged by the ACT Legislative Assembly to inquire into difficulties over the redevelopment proposal at Section 22 Braddon. It criticised elements of ACT planning law, especially the consultation process with neighbouring residents.
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New Zealand must end imports of high-quality second-hand cars from Japan if it is to get better access to Australia’s market, Australia has warned.

New Zealand imports between 30,000 and 40,000 quality second-hand Japanese cars a year. The imports are permitted under New Zealand’s zero-tariff policy.

The Minister for Industry, Alan Griffiths, says Australia is not prepared to loosen vehicle trade between the countries under the Closer Economic Relations agreement unless New Zealand is prepared to do something about the imports.
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It would be a lost opportunity if a space for the courts could not be found near City Hill, the chief executive of the National Capital Planning Authority, Lyndsay Neilson, said yesterday.

The space between London Circuit and Vernon Circle should be the home of civic and community functions.

“”They are the land uses for that area, rather than solely commercial ones,” he said.
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A Canberra couple seeking a child have plenty of offers of surrogate mothers, but have drawn a blank from in-vitro fertilisation clinics in the ACT and Melbourne. The husband says he is thinking about doing it the natural way with a surrogate and his wife would agree if that were the only way to get a child.

The plight of Peter and Wendy Voelker, of Gordon, was first made public in The Canberra Times on Monday.

Mrs Voelker is on medication to control epilepsy and has had three miscarriages. The couple sought adoption, but were told there was a 10-year waiting list.
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USUALLY you get Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Or Beethoven’s Fur Elise. But not when you phone the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.

There, the on-hold tune is Greensleeves, widely reputed, but perhaps wrongly, to have been composed by Henry VIII. Now there’s a man who knew something about constitutional change Henry VIII.

But he is also a prime illustration of a point the constitutional monarchists are trying to make: the republican-monarchy debate is not about the personalities of the Royal family, but about the what they call the integrity of the Australian Constitution, the apex of which is the Australian Crown.
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A YEAR is not long, even in the short 92-year history of the Australian nation, but it is perhaps enough to say that Mabo must rank with the 1920 Engineers Case the two most important High Court cases since the court’s founding.

These two cases stand out because they changed fundamentals. Before the Engineers Case, Australia was a collection of six almost independent states with very broad powers bound together only by the need to have a common defence force and a common market allowing the free flow of goods and people between the states. The national Parliament exercised a few incidental powers over currency and lighthouses, and not much else.Any attempt by the Parliament to enact laws for the general welfare of Australians was struck down as interfering with states’ rights.
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THE Governor-General, Bill Hayden, in a speech to a national conference on violence, pointed to the dilemma. He said his liberal conscience was troubled by television and other media violence. The anti-censorship view of liberals two or three decades ago is now under severe challenge. Then it was easy to scoff at the idiocy of censors who wanted to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Little Red Schoolbook. Then it was a simple battle between art and censors, or harmless idiocy and the censors. The censors did not seem to have much of a case. It was a question of adults being entitled to read, listen to and watch what they want.

Some believe that society is now bearing the fruit of that liberalisation, that violence and demeaning of women is a direct result of the ready availability of material that expresses explicit violence and sexual exploitation. That material now comes in a greater variety of forms. It is not only written material. It now includes videos material and high-resolution sound on CDs. The correlation between the availability of this material and violence in society is not yet proven. It is obviously a subject worthy of much more research and debate.
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IT MUST be a profound nuisance for planners, administrators and developers to have all those NIMBYs, conservationists and do-gooders out there trying to wreck the best laid plans of mice and men.

When will they learn what is good for them?

This week the Todd report came down. Robert Todd, a former member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, conducted an inquiry into a redevelopment project in Braddon. He found some major faults with the planning process and made some fairly pertinent observations.
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An anomaly in the land-tax legislation will result in people being hit for a whole year’s land tax even if they hold a rental property for a few days in the new financial year.

The president of the Landlords’ Association, Peter Jansen, said yesterday that he knew of a case of a woman who had sold her property, but as settlement was scheduled for July 3, she would be hit for the whole year’s tax of $1000.

The legislation assessed tax for the whole year on the basis of ownership on July 1. Mr Jansen called for quarterly assessment.
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PAUL KEATING was being dismissive. “”I think a lot of this stuff just slips into … history,” he said. He was being interviewed on Four Corners about the coming series Labor In Power, a five-part documentary over the near-decade-long leadership contest between him and Bob Hawke.

His dismissive comment could not have been a higher compliment. History is what it’s all about. And the story of political history is the story of power.

The writer-creator of Labor in Power, Philip Chubb, said this week, “”I wanted to prise the lid off how power works, who exercised power, how they exercised it and why.”
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