Month: July 1993

His helicopter landed on the beach. He brought two other white men with him. Another two aircraft landed at the strip a kilometre away, bringing more white men and some white women with large television cameras, still cameras and notebooks.

They rode along a pot-holed, dusty track and walked inside on the of few brick buildings on the island _ a low building painted inside and out in Third World colours: yellow, turquoise, bright blue and red, but dirty.

The colour choice is to brighten economically deprived lives. You see them in many Pacific islands, El Salavador and any number of African countries. But this is Australia. It is Murray island, head of the Great Barrier Reef and subject of the Mabo decision.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_hewmag”

Bob Hawke may have 2020 vision, but he does not have 2020 hindsight. It is extraordinary that we listen to former politicians, especially ones that got the top job (I hesitate to call them leaders), who upon retirement suddenly find the vision that they lacked in office.

Anyone with the vaguest political memory would have blushed with embarrassment at Hawke’s inaugural speech to the 2020 Vision forum on Monday.

He called for a return to full employment. Yet this was the Prime Minister who allowed his Treasurer to put the fight against inflation ahead of full employment and who presided over the highest level of unemployment since World War II.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_hawke”

Canberrans would have to lower their expectations of government services, the chairman of the Commonwealth Grants Commission, Dick Rye, said yesterday.

Mr Rye also warned the ACT Government against using borrowings for current spending.

His warning comes as the ACT Cabinet prepares its 1993-94 Budget facing an extra financing requirement of $110 million unless its changes policies or borrows.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_grants”

The Minister for Environment, Land and Planning is happy to attend a public meeting about development in North Duffy-Holder, he said yesterday.

He was responding to a North-Duffy-Holder Residents Action Group letter which said no-one from the ACT Government had attended several public meetings on the issue in the past, unlike Liberal, Independent and Abolish Self-Government representatives.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_duffy”

I imagined a typical public meeting on matters of legal reform. Twenty or so earnest, well-informed people with a commitment to community matters would be dwarfed by a large lecture theatre hired by the impossibly optimistic organisers.

And thus I prepared a brief talk on Crown reserve powers in the ACT and how they might apply nationally _ fairly esoteric but suitably informative stuff for my imagined audience.

Little did I know. The Nicholls Theatre at the National Convention Centre was packed to overflowing.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_column26”

NOT MUCH can be usefully added to the abortion debate. The stir over the funding of a clinic in Canberra is a case in point. Several times in the past 20 years an abortion clinic has been proposed. Each time the letter writers and commentators on each side round up the usual arguments.

Politicians generally hate the abortion debate. Politically, it is like the gun issue. People are prepared to change their vote on that issue alone. Take away my gun and you lose my vote. Legalise/prohibit abortion you lose my vote.

Last week, Professor Geoffrey Walker, of Queensland University, suggested a way to take such issues “”out of the hands of extremists”. He repeated his call for citizens’ veto and citizens’ initiative.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_column16”

AFTER spending a week on a tropical island in the Torres Strait, you see some very primitive cultural habits. Some of them are really dumb and very costly.

It’s no good saying you have to respect culture no matter what. These things have to be questioned.

I’m not talking about the cultural habits I saw on the island, of course. No; I refer to the ones I saw among white fellas with a fresh eye on my return.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_column12”

IT WAS an unusual conveyance. Usually conveyances of land are done in land-titles offices by lawyers and their clerks dressed in business clothes. Usually conveyances require long-winded documents expressed in legalese in an attempt to prevent subsequent disputes. The land is described with great precision. The rights of those involved are defined clearly. Not on Friday. I witnessed what could loosely be described as a conveyance on Murray Island in the Torres Strait.

Murray Island, you will recall, was the island that was subject to the now-famous Mabo case in the High Court. Their Honours would be pleased to know that Mabo Case T-shirts are regularly worn by Islanders. The Islanders would prefer the case to be known, however, as the Murray Island case, or the Mer case, Mer being the traditional name. Eddie Mabo, you see, lived much of his life on the mainland. He was, however, a political stirrer and propelled the case.

Only 400 of perhaps 3000 Murray Islander people inhabit the island. Many of the others come back from time to time, some to live, especially after their children have grown up and been educated in Cairns or Townsville. And Thus it was that a Murray Islander with the improbably name of called Elsie Smith came back to Murray Island earlier this year with her son, Carl, to ask for possession of her family lands on the island.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_column5”

THE centenary celebrations of the Corowa constitutional convention recently a couple of speakers bemoaned that Australia did not get a Bill of Rights in its early nationhood, like the US.

They rejected, of course, the one aberration of the US Bill of Rights the right to bear arms. Its other elements are: freedom of speech, assembly, religion, trial by jury, no deprivation of liberty or property without due process of law and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

The Australian Founding Fathers smugly thought that there was no need to state the obvious in our Constitution. The common law respected all those things and it was unimaginable that the legislature would take them away. Ho-hum. By and large, the basic common-law freedoms have been upheld in Australia, especially compared with other countries, but there is always room for improvement. The important one is freedom of speech.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_column1”

Ron Bell acknowledges that good design results in easier sales, better value for buyers, and therefore more profit.

His company is developing the Belconnen Golf Club project. Like renewals and in-fill generally it has come in for flak over whether the ACT Government should be charging more betterment tax, but it has not drawn the community and neighbourhood fury that other developments have over design _ to the contrary.

The site is in the centre of the golf course and has approval for 340 blocks, though Bell has knocked that back to 318. He would prefer 318 blocks with good streetscape and vista than jamming on 340.
Continue reading “1993_07_july_bell”