Month: July 1994

The recession over, Canberra’s commercial property market is reshaping.

The outward sign is that three big buildings have changed hands in the past couple of months, but there are some more subtle currents ebbing and flowing that could result in some changes to the functioning of Civic.

But the prospect for new building remains bleak, partly because of government policy.

Canberra if often touted as recession-proof, or at least carrying greater immunity to recessions than other capitals, but that is not entirely true.
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The Windows version of Australia On Disc _ a directory of every residential and business phone in the country _ is being launched this week.

A Windows version of The Green Pages is also due out shortly.

While having obvious environmental benefits, there are equally obvious privacy implications.

The Green Pages are two CDs, one residential and one business. The residential one contains the 5 and a half million entries in the White Pages with some extra information. Suburb names are spelt out and postcodes added, so you can print address labels.
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Definition of a computer security: a system devised to keep legitimate users out while doing nothing to exclude hackers.

Why have passwords? To give network managers power over users who forget them and get locked out.

Why do most systems require at least two non-alpha characters like in every password? To ensure that people forget their password occasionally.
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Bob Menzies is credited with converting Canberra from a country town to a Bush Capital.

In the late 1950s he pushed the development of the city politically and administratively. He moved departments from Melbourne to give the city a population base. He set up the national Capital Development Commission. These things were very commendable.

But Menzies was responsible, indirectly, for a fundamental deviation from the Griffin plan and vision, which only now is being thought about being corrected.
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This is a pertinent question right now for the National Library of Australia on two levels.

The first is that it is one of the most frequently asked questions by non-research visitors to the National Library. They imagine a library full of books they can see, like the local library. But when they arrive they do not see shelves and shelves of books as they imagined. The vast bulk of the collection is hidden from public view.

The second is that more and more information is to be found electronically. Either the search is done electronically to find the information on paper, or both the search and the information are electronic.
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The proposal by the Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, for a social performance charter is well worth further consideration. Mr Howe put the idea forward this week that Australia have a charter of rights and responsibilities. It was not a Bill of Rights in the classic sense, nor even a set of enforceable legal rights. Those are separate issues. Rather Mr Howe was talking about all levels of government setting objectives endorsed by the people and measuring performance against them for things like the delivery of housing, health and education.

Mr Howe was putting his ideas quite tentatively. They deserve exploration and debate. He pointed out that there was strong public support for Medicare, public education and housing and social welfare benefits, but these values had never been formally articulated.

Perhaps more importantly the performance of the service providers has not been measured well.

In the private sector, competition and the profit motive have a strong self-regulatory influence to ensure organisations deliver efficiently or at least go some distance to satisfy public complains when that delivery breaks down.
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On Saturday an extraordinary event will occur that will illustrate the vulnerability of humankind and its fragile tenure on planet Earth.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 will crash in Jupiter. A similar collision into Earth would perhaps eliminate human life leaving the planet to another phase of evolution, much as what happened when the dinosaurs became extinct 60 million years ago.

The comet has already broken into 20 pieces and astronomers are calculating with increasing precision where and when the bits will strike. Imagine if it were heading for Earth.
Continue reading “1994_07_july_leader13jul”

The leading constitutional lawyer Colin Howard called for the opening up of the process of appointment of High Court judges at a conference at the weekend. Dr Howard, formerly professor of law at Melbourne University, told the Samuel Griffiths Society that nominees for the High Court should be examined publicly by a committee, with some non-politicians, and approved by each House of Parliament.

This is reminiscent of the system in the United States where presidential nominees for the Supreme Court must be approved by the Senate. A Senate committee then examines the nominee before making a recommendation to the Senate.

In America it has resulted in detailed raking over of the personal affairs of nominees, both financial and sexual. On some occasions it has caused accusations to fly so the hearings have taken more the form of a trial than a confirmation hearing. Before Dr Howard’s suggestion were taken up, a way of preventing that would have to be obtained.
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The Attorney-General’s Department has spent $700,000 in its bringing-law-to-the-people program on work already done by private enterprise, according to computer industry sources.

The department has confirmed spending the money on creating an electronic database of consolidated Commonwealth legislation which has just been completed.

A consolidation of the legislation, however, had already been done by Diskrom Australia and been available and constantly updated since last October.

There are 92,907 sections in just over 4300 Acts of Commonwealth Parliament.
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Brian Howe must have bitten his tongue as his leader weighed into urban planning during the week.

The Prime Minister’s prescriptive foray neatly illustrates some of the frictions in Australian urban planning and some of the frictions in Australian politics.

Keating has a list of about 10 points that make his vision for central Sydney. For our purposes the most important are: demolishing the Cahill expressway; relocating the casino project; and bringing affordable quality housing to the water’s edge.

Removing the expressway is visionary.
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