Month: March 1994

The Deputy Leader of the ACT Opposition, Tony de Domenico, called yesterday for the ACT Government to outline what procedures the Vanuatu-based VITAB had to ensure that no large Australian punters would use VITAB to bet on Australian races.

Mr de Domenico said there were many unanswered questions about contract between VITAB and the ACTTAB, including the role played by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, a shareholder in VITAB.

Under the contract ACTTAB has provided to VITAB computer services and access to the TAB super pool of money bet from the ACT, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory in return for a commission of between 1 and 2 per cent of turnover. VITAB will return 85 per cent of takings to the punter as with Australian TABs and a further 1 to 2 per cent to the Vanuatu Government. However, it keeps the balance of 11 to 13 per cent for operating and marketing costs. Australian TABs return the 15 per cent balance to government, the racing industry and operating costs.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_dipper”

The Washington Post is delivered in Canberra before most Washingtonians get it. It is dumped about two metres from the edge of my the front lawn. That’s where my computer terminal is _ on a desk next to the front window. It arrives about five or six hours before it hits the front lawn of suburban Washington houses because the Washingtonians have to wait for it to be printed on paper a delivered by petrol engine.

I call it up on a local telephone number, scroll through the headlines, get a paragraph summary of any item that looks interesting and if the summary is tasty enough, I can order the whole item. And there’s some pretty good stuff in there. Or I can download the whole lot unseen and take the notebook and read in peace anywhere in whatever typeface I want.

There was no Foreign Investment Review Board inquiry into why another American should own what is in effect another newspaper circulating in Australia. It just happened.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_communic”

Cross the South Australian-NSW border near Broken Hill something remarkable does not happen.

You do not change time zones. If you drive into Broken Hill, about 50km inside NSW, the clocks are all on South Australian time. Business opens and shuts at the same time as Adelaide.

If you leave Broken Hill and drive towards Canberra, after about 20km in dead flat country with virtually no habitation, you come to a sign telling you to wind your clock forward half and hour to NSW time.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column28mar”

Stuart Littlemore sound like an opinionated, pompous git? I think it is a shame he has to sound like that, but I can understand why. It has nothing to do with his character. For all I know he might be a meek, self-effacing man in real life. But on television he cannot be like that.

(For the uninitiated, Littlemore presents Mediawatch, 15 minutes of ABC television that has journalists throughout Australia at the edge of their seats with delight at the pasting of disliked colleagues or fear of a pasting of themselves.)

In an age of concentrated media ownership where Packer Murdoch and three TV networks own virtually the lot, we need Littlemore and we could do with a few more of him. He is at his best when he highlights what he sees are journalists’ conflicts of interest: journalists’ whose writings co-incide with their employers’ interest or, worse, journalists who have direct interest in things they are plugging.

Last Monday, he got stuck into three writers on the Australian: Greg Sheridan, over a piece saying Indonesia is okay; Bryan Frith over a piece saying super-share schemes are okay and Paddy McGuinness over a piece saying smoking is okay. He then said Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Australian, has a business interest in all three things, the last because he is a director of Philip Morris.

Then (and this is when he sounds and looks most like the opinionated pompous git we have all come to love to hate) he concluded that in his opinion, it showed these three journalists were not behaving with independence but blowing their owners’ business trumpet.

Now, Littlemore is a Queen’s Counsel with an extensive knowledge of libel law. He well knows that to assert as fact that the three journalists had surrendered their independence to their master would be defamatory and could sound heavily in damages.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column21mar”

Are seldom seen to be responsible — the in literal sense. Whenever a news editor quietly refuses to run a story, or cut some bits from it, or downplay it because it is violent, obscene, racist, likely to stir up violence, induce people to commit suicide or whatever, the public does not see this act of “”responsible behaviour”. It only sees the “”irresponsible”. The media are always being portrayed as “”irresponsible” for running this or that story.

But there is a danger here. At least when the “”irresponsible” story is run, people get a chance to make judgments about it. If the media were to become “”more responsible” as it is forever urged to be, the result could be quite dangerous. People in readerland would never know what the media are being “”responsible” about.

Take suicides for example. Most media rarely cover suicides because journalists know of the copycat syndrome. So for years we have “”responsibly” put suicide on the spike. The result has been a major social ill has not been given the attention in should get. There are dangers with a “”responsible” media.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column14mar”

Paul Keating wants to get rid of the turbulent minorities in the Senate. Just as Henry hated his executive power being interfered with the turbulent priest Archbishop Thomas a’Becket in the 12th century, Keating hates the exercise of his executive power being questioned by the Senate. Just as Henry sent a few knightly thugs to murder a’Becket, Keating is musing with changing the Senate election system to rid himself of the turbulent Kernot.

His scheme, however, has some very high constitutional and practical hurdles.

At present the Senate is elected by proportional representation with each state as one electorate. In a half-Senate election for six senators, a candidate needs 14.3 per cent of the vote to get a seat, or a lot less if it is the last seat and preferences are counted. If it is a double-dissolution election for 12 senators a candidate needs only 7.7 per cent. It means minor parties are able to get seats.

Keating and the Government leader in the Senate, Gareth Evans, have mused about electing the Senate like the House of Representatives, on a single-member electorate basis. Essentially, only major parties win single-member seats. An alternative is to keep each state as a single electorate but change the voting system from preferential to first-past the post. Under that plan voters would mark six crosses and the six candidates with the most crosses would get seats, instead of marking them 1, 2, 3, etc as now. Once again only major party candidates would win seats.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_column06mar”

Chelmsford is Australia’s worst case of the deadly combination of lawyerisation and the culture of silence.

What I call lawyerisation is where people shovel money into lawyers at one end of the system to ensure there is no result at the other.

The culture of silence is the law that puts all the onus on person exercising the so-called right to speak freely. That onus is to prove the truth of every word uttered and to prove the truth of the an imputation that a lawyer might be able to extract from your words.

There is no onus on the silencers. There is no onus for them to prove they suffered damage.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_chelms”

On February 28, 1973, Barry Hart, then aged 37, walked into Chelmsford Private Hospital.

Two weeks later he woke up with double pnuemonia, pleuresy, deep vein thombosis and anoxic brain damage. He had been subjected to deep-sleep therapy and electric-shock treatment _ all against his will.

Most people think that the Chelmsford episode is closed, that a Royal Commission exposed the malpractice, that procedures were fixed, that victims compensated and that it could never happen again. Wrong.

Twenty-one years later Hart’s case is still in the courts. It took seven years to get it to court and it has been there for a further 14 years, with no end in sight.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_barry”

Developers are spending too much on promotion and not enough on design, according to the Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood.

The result has been some poor quality medium-density housing.

“”The design quality of some of our new homes is still not good enough,” he said yesterday (saty).

Developers and builders should recognise that good design is their best selling point, he said.

Canberra led Australia in its urban environment, but some medium-density housing had not been well done.
Continue reading “1994_03_march_archit”