Month: January 1994

1994_01_january_leaderjan3

Continuing fall in the annual road toll is a pleasing development. Last year the ACT had its lowest toll for 25 years. Other states and territories, too, have had record lows, or at least a general trend downward.

But before we bask in self-congratulation, the reasons for the trend need closer examination. True, the population and car use have risen since the horror tolls of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when typically around 3000 people died and 30,000 people were injured on Australian roads each year, compared to about two-thirds of that now. However, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that the fall has come about through any great enlightenment or self-restraint among drivers. There is no cause for self-congratulation because the reduced road toll has come about almost solely through heavy law-enforcement measures and to a lesser extent better roads and safer cars.

The law-enforcement measures have been most significant. In the past 20 years compulsory seat-belts and child restraints, radar, red-light and speed cameras, on-the-spot fines, random breath-testing and demerit points have been introduced throughout Australia and instantaneous licence suspension in some states. It has been a stealthy but significant intrusion into civil liberties. If all the measures had been proposed in one legislative package in, say, 1969 they would have been rejected amid public outcry.
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1994_01_january_leader09jan

Medical science continues to leap ahead of public opinion and the legal system. In-vitro fertilisation developments in the past month has astonished and revolted many people.

In Britain a 59-year-old woman gave birth to twins after being given in-vitro fertilisation treatment in Italy and a 62-year-old woman is three months pregnant after similarly receiving an embryo implant. Then it was announced that it was possible for a couple to chose the colour of a child. A black woman chose an egg from a white woman. Initially it was thought she did this to ensure a mixed-race looking child because her husband was mixed race, but later it was revealed she did this because of a shortage of donor eggs. None the less, the case showed that a choice was possible. And it is not limited to skin colour. Height, morphism, hair colour, IQ and other characteristics of the donor can also be selected. Apparently, we are in the age of designer babies.

These developments were followed by something more bizarre. A British researcher, Dr Roger Gosden, announced that eggs could be taken from aborted fetuses, fertilised and implanted into a carrier mother. The resultant child’s mother, in these circumstances would never have been born. Dr Gosden said the technique had been successful in mice and was technically only about three years away with humans. At present there is a shortage of donor eggs. Dr Gosden thought that eggs from fetuses could be used for thousands of young women who had premature menopause, who had lost fertility through radiation treatment for cancer or who were otherwise infertile. Fetal ovaries are laid down from about 10 to 12 weeks and reach a maximum of five million eggs by five months, declining to a million at birth.
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1994_01_january_leader08jan

THE share market hits post-1987-crash highs, the inevitable question is: how long can it last? All investment carries some risk. Even keeping money under the bed has risk (witness this week’s bushfires). The important thing for Australia is to ensure that investment risks are reasonable and not made unnecessarily high through speculators. Somehow, Australia has to ensure the greed-is-good mentality of the 1980s does not return. It led to the crash and five years of justifiable wariness on the part of investors.

As the market moves up it is worth recalling some of the lessons of 1987. Among the biggest losers were those who invested in companies founded on the sand of paper profits and borrowings. Those who invested in companies with lower borrowings and real assets had far lower losses. The paper-profit companies are either now non-existent or have share prices a tiny fraction of their pre-1987 high.

There is widespread optimism around at the beginning of 1994. If enough investors reject companies that try to create paper castles out of this optimism, there will be no paper castles, or at least fewer of them than in 1987.
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1994_01_january_leader07jan

Forces of nature combined with the carelessness of humans this week to cause tragic loss of life and property in more than 100 fires in south-east Australia. It was not, however, an unusual event. Every five years or so significant bushfires hit the nation. The causes are manifold: spring rain causing heavy undergrowth; failure to keep grass trimmed and undergrowth burned back in spring; careless smokers throwing away butts; lightning; careless campers and barbecuers; children playing with matches; car exhausts; and worst of all arson.

This year calls have been made to increase penalties for arson. It may make everyone feel good but it will not help much. Few arsonists get caught. Moreover, those cases where the arsonist is caught sometimes reveal peculiar mental elements to the crime: the desire for a revenge on society or just getting kicks. An increased penalty will not necessarily deter the crime. In any event, in cases where death occurs it is likely that present laws would enable murder or at least manslaughter charges to be brought where the prosecution can show the arsonist acted with reckless indifference to human life. Even if the arsonist is caught and a higher penalty applied, it will not help the families of victims or those who have lost property.

Preventative measures are of greater import. Clearly there is a price for Canberra’s green belts and native gardens in the suburbs. That does not mean that the green belts and the native gardens should go. Rather, Canberrans must acknowledge the danger and do something about it in the spring and early summer. It is not solely up to the ACT Government. It has a responsibility to keep excessive grass growth under control, but that does not mean residents should sit a whinge about “”why don’t they keep the grass cut”. Residents, especially those adjacent to the open space, can engage in a little self help — mowing and clearing where they can and keeping nature strips green and keeping dead leaves and bark away from houses and gutterings.
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1994_01_january_leader07jaa

Australian Institute of Criminology’s Australian Prison Trends is a depressing publication. It shows an increasing imprisonment rate in Australia over the past two decades, and an even more pronounced increase in the early 1990s. Even more depressing is the fact that more than half of imprisonments were because people failed to pay fines, many of them traffic fines. It shows there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

In 1976 the imprisonment rate was 90.9 people per 100,000. By 1992 it had risen to 108.8 per 100,000. And the rate of female imprisonment has gone up, too.

Precisely what these figures show is open to interpretation. It could be simplistically argued that there is more crime, therefore more imprisonment is needed. It could be equally argued that the recession means fewer people can pay fines therefore more imprisonment is needed.
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1994_01_january_leader06jan

Treasurer, Ralph Willis, faces a difficult half year. He will have to balance some strongly competing interests to ensure the Australian economy remains on the recovery path. His essential dilemma arises out of the very nature of the recovery.

Company profits and the share market are rising strongly (perhaps too strongly). Consumer and business confidence is improving as is business investment, though less vigorously. Meanwhile, unemployment remains static. Employment is always last to recover. So the Government’s high recession-driven social-welfare demands are not abating. In satisfying them, the Government has to spend. Yet high government spending can jeopardise the fragile recovery. With a high budgetary deficit the Government has to borrow. This in turn puts pressure on interest rates and inflation. To date the good interest and inflation environment has underpinned whatever recovery there has been. Take them away and the recovery is endangered.

The task for Mr Willis and his colleagues, therefore, is to meet the needs of unemployed and others affected by the recession without allowing the deficit to run at recession levels, indeed they must sure it is reined in. Further, they must resist the temptation to skim off any of the budgetary self-correction for pet programs. The budgetary self-correction is where receipts rise and spending of their own accord without any policy changes as the country comes out of recession. Increased business activity causes higher taxes and more employment meaning lower social security payments.

There is some evidence that the receipts side of self-correction is under way; they are much higher at this stage of the year than was forecast in the August Budget. The spending side of self-correction, however, is some way off. As the receipts come in, the temptation is for the Government to spend them with make-work schemes and the like, or to relax the pressure to control spending on general programs.

The May Budget presents a great opportunity for the Government so send an early confidence-boosting message that it will resist this temptation. However, the May Budget also presents a potential pitfall. The reason for bringing the Budget forward to May was to enable businesses to take Budget changes into account in their planning for the financial year beginning in June. Let us hope that was the real reason and not that the Government would get the advantage of a full year's revenue in any changes it made to tax.

At this fragile stage of the recovery, the Government needs to refrain from imposing extra costs on business, continue the drive for public-sector efficiency, seriously question the worth of some government programs and to look again at the tax mix. The last of these is politically the most difficult. Any attempt to reduce the taxes on jobs (payroll) and exports (wholesale tax) and increase the taxes on consumption will be snapped up by the Opposition as hypocrisy in the light of the Government's attack on the GST last election. None the less, the Government must seriously look at the tax mix as part of its Budgetary strategy.

As it works towards the May Budget (and departments are doing that right now) the Government should seize the opportunity which it correctly created by using it as an impetus to confidence, business investment and the growth that will create jobs and avoid the pitfall of increasing tax and spending which can only do the opposite. The fragile recovery has to be nurtured, not nipped in the bud.

1994_01_january_leader06jaa

Week saw two fatal shootings by police in Victoria. It will be some time before any definite conclusions can be drawn, whether police acted properly or whether some changes to police training and procedures are needed. Police made the point that the shootings were unrelated. Superficially, that may be the case. One was in Shepparton and one was in Melbourne. However, there were some similarities. Both victims were mentally unstable and beyond the control of those around them. Any inquiry should look at the extent to which mental-health policies contributed to the two situations. The policies over the past decade, notably in Victoria, of closing mental hospitals and putting the mentally unstable out into the community without at the same time providing accessible, professional help for times of crisis appear to have come seriously unstuck. The failure of these policies was well documented in the Burdekin report. It is too early to judge these cases, but it would in unwise to exclude that line of inquiry. It would also be worth inquiring into the extent to which the police are left to deal with the mentally ill in a crisis and whether that is appropriate. In the absence of other resources, however, it appears that relatives and others dealing with the mentally ill often have no other choice.

The other issue is police training in general in dealing with the potentially violent. Regrettable as the deaths are, it has to be recognised that any police officer facing a violent, dangerous person will be making decisions under considerable stress and virtually instantly. It is too easy for others to judge in hindsight with additional facts to available to the police at the time. Police officers are entitled to put the safety of the public and themselves before the safety of an armed person posing a threat to life and limb.
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1994_01_january_leader04jan

ONE OF the major goals of 1993 for the ACT Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, was the establishment of a separate ACT Public Service. It did not happen.

At present nearly all the employees who serve the ACT polity are in effect Federal Public servants. Given the wide, almost sovereign powers of the ACT legislature, executive and judiciary, a separate ACT Public Service makes sense. Employees in it will have their first loyalties to the ACT and will not constantly be viewing their careers in a Federal context.

The ACT can never be fully sovereign and never be completely like the states because the Federal Parliament, Government and Australians in general have obvious permanent interests in the ACT which transcend the local legislature and the people who elected it. None the less, given the broad legislative powers invested in the Legislative Assembly, a separate service to administer and execute the laws it makes would complete the self-government process.

It should give an opportunity to make much-needed improvements in public administration in the ACT. The evidence to date shows some severe problems with the present hybrid set-up. Significantly, these short-comings were found by one officer who is answerable directly to the ACT Assembly _ the Auditor-General. The short-comings should be profoundly embarrassing. The audited reports of the ACT Treasury, Attorney-General’s Department, Chief Minister’s, Urban Services , Housing and Community Services and ACTION were qualified. In other words, the financial reports of the bulk of the ACT public sector were unsatisfactory. The auditor found many other short-comings in various parts of the service.
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1994_01_january_lawyear

1993 was the year of the direct attack.

In previous years the typical “”yearender” on the law would look at reforms to reduce costs and delays and look through the main cases, especially those of the High Court.

This year the law itself and its administration has taken back seat to the practitioners themselves _ not only lawyers, but judges as well.

The attacks have come from many different quarters for several different reasons.

The most vehement have been, for want of a better epithet, the gender-based attacks. Judges who were seen to denigrate women, especially in violence cases, came under fire from politicians, community leaders and the legal profession itself.
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1994_01_january_column10jan

This letter is a bit of an effrontery because I am going to offer you a solution to the Northern Ireland problem when I don’t have any experience in foreign affairs or diplomacy. However, when one looks at what the people with experience in foreign affairs and diplomacy have done, I don’t think it is a disqualification.

The first thing is you must stop announcing policy with words that mean different things to each side.

Talking about “”self-determination, freely and concurrently given, north and south” is plain silly. Ian Paisley and intractable mob of Protestant Unionists think this means that there will be no governmental changes in Northern Ireland without consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland. As there are more Protestants than Catholics he thinks he is safe. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein (Ted Heath would call them the acceptable face of the IRA), on the other hand, think that “”self-determination” means a vote of the whole of Ireland, north and south, and thus there will be union.
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