Month: August 1993

Gary Humphries picked his audience well this week when he said that “”Son of Mabo” could threaten titles in Canberra. Canberrans are notoriously property-conscious.

Humphries was jumping on the Goss woomera that said existing leasehold and other less-than-freehold titles could be subject to Aboriginal claims. This theory is being posed by lawyers for the Wik people in Cape York. It is called “”Son of Mabo” because it takes the Mabo case a bit further.

Mabo essentially restricted indigenous claims to areas where no-one else had any title _ what was called Crown land. The judges said that freehold and long leasehold extinguished indigenous title.
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A report into the handling of a redundancy payment in the ACT Chief Minister’s Department revealed no fraud or criminal conduct, the head of the department, Bill Harris, has announced.

The case involved an officer who had allegedly helped arrange a large redundancy payment for a sick workmate. The workmate died for months later and the officer inherited the money.

Mr Harris said last week that the report recommended the officer should be counselled about the need to declare possible conflicts of interest. This had been done. The documents had been examined by the Director of Public Prosecutions who had come to the same conclusion.
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The Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, hopes get the Japanese more interested in ACT high-tech, tourism and education products when she visits in October-November, according to ACT Government officials yesterday.

She will lead a mainly private-sector delegation of about 10 people from October 23 to November 5. Projects she hopes to help are the sale of ACT-developed software for teaching English as a second-language; educational and industry exchanges related to the Fujitsu super-computer at ANU; the Anutech SHRIMP which looks at rock strata; and a dozen or so other private-sector projects.

She will also have talks with five major tourism wholesalers with the aim of convincing the Japanese that Sydney is not the capital of Australia, but Canberra is and should be on the tourist map.
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The ACT Opposition has discovered what journalists have known for some years: that the Freedom of Information Act should be renamed the Freedom FROM Information Act.

The Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, said in the Assembly yesterday that a Government with a siege mentality could prevent information being disclosed through using high fees. She did not complain about an upfront flat fee of $20 or $30 to stop frivolous fees. By she did object to fees charged on a per-page or per-hour basis _ the processing fee.

ACT law permits an exemption on public interest grounds or grounds that the applicant cannot afford it.
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The ACT Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, said yesterday that he would withdraw the reference on euthanasia from the Community Law Reform Committee because the Legislative Assembly had since set up a wider inquiry.

His action follows the committee writing to him seeking wider terms of reference than it had been given. Some people on the committee thought the reference was restricted to passive euthanasia _ withdrawing or withholding medical treatment, and gave little or no scope for an inquiry on active euthanasia.

Mr Connolly said a parliamentary inquiry should take precedence over an executive inquiry. The committee was an executive advisory body. He thought it would silly to duplicate efforts and be unfortunate if the two inquiries came to different conclusions.
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Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of pieces of paper have been delivered to the Copyright Agency Limited in the past year notifying it of each recorded instance of photocopying of copyright work in government departments.

The “”mind-blowing” amount of paper was due to an out-of-date provision in the Copyright Act, the chief executive of the agency, Michael Fraser, said yesterday,

He said his offices in Sydney were stacked to the ceiling with boxes full of the notifications which the Federal Government was required to provide to copyright owners under the Copyright Act for the approximately 20 million pages it copies each year.
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EFFICIENCY drives have been on for the past decade. Queues have been transferred from harassed bank tellers inside to machines outside. Tourist offices in Canberra can book you on a coach in Los Angeles. Leanness, customer service, delivery and efficiency are everywhere. Even Telecom smiles and connects phones in hours not months.

Super-markets have changed less noticeably, because visits are more frequent. Consider the cash register. No more keying in each amount and working out the change. Bar codes do the lot _ more efficiently and more accurately.

But down at the Magistrates’ Court, nothing much has changed. I had the displeasure to observed the court’s civil jurisdiction at “”work” one day last week.
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THE response to the Budget should put an end to the minimalist approach to the Republic. By minimalist, Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating meant only changing enough of the Constitution to replace the hereditary Head of State and her delegate with an Australian. By whatever way that is done (and minimalism embraces them all), it will surely mean that the Prime Minister will lose the power to sack the Head of State as he effectively sack the Governor-General now by a call to the palace.

Once John Kerr sacked Gough Whitlam, the element of surprise in future constitutional crises was gone. We now have the unseemly situation of whether the PM can get to the Palace to sack the GG before the GG can sack the PM. Take away the palace, though, and the equation changes in unpredictable ways.
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ANY win by a defendant in a defamation action is usually only a pyrrhic one. Three years ago a former public servant turned consultant, Paul Thistlewaite, threatened to sue The Canberra Times over what seemed like a straightforward report arising out of proceedings by the Senate Estimates Committee. He wanted an apology and reserved his rights for damages.

He asserted the article contained the imputation that he had taken advantage of his position of specialist knowledge in the Public Service to obtain a consultancy doing the same work for more money _ what is now known as the revolving-door syndrome. The Canberra Times said if the imputation arose it was out of parliamentary proceedings.

(Those readers wanting to further information can look at the Hansard of Senate Estimates Committee A from late August to November of 1989 and articles in the computers section of The Canberra Times articles on September 4, October 2 and November 30 of 1989 available in the National Library.)
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HECTOR Kinloch died last week. Hector was a great teacher because he stirred the conscience of his students. He did not have the intellectual depth of a Manning Clark, nor his literary style. He was not a performer in the P. S. Atiyah style. He did not nag his students like Leslie Zines. Nor did he lecture with the Victorian certainty of John Ritchie. He had a peculiar human style: his human weakness was manifest. And that was his strength.

The troubled ex-gambler suddenly game into the public eye in Canberra when he opposed the casino, just before ACT self-government in 1989. Suddenly he found himself drafted into the Residents’ Rally and elected a Member of the Legislative Assembly. The man who had taught generations of students about the great period of American independence suddenly found himself elected in the nascent Assembly of this tiny polity.
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