Month: July 1994

Dieter Fink and Ken Stevens (sitting) of the ANU’s Department of Commerce, who have been awarded a research grant by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia to look at unsatisfactory features in financial management software and their resulting bad practices. With them (both standing) are ICAA executive director Stephen Harrison and president Peter Jollie.

The award of $4000 will help the researchers look at the most common financial and management accounting software used in Australia to be followed by a survey of major accounting firms.

The new hand-held Telxon hand-held wireless pen computer, that can send information back to a host computer by modem, cellular radio or wide-area network.
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Residents of Lanyon Park in Banks expressed their anger yesterday at the spread of dual-occupancy dwellings in their suburb.

They say that in-fill and dual occupancy is wrong in a suburb 30 kilometres from the centre of town and with few facilities of its own.

Ros Thomas, of West Place, said she had bought a block in the suburb thinking it would a traditional single-residence area and she now found second houses being built in the yards of many nearby houses, degrading the area.

Dual occupancies were being built on virtually every corner block on Smeaton Circuit and on many other blocks and some were being sold off the plan by real-estate agents before approvals were granted, she said.
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ACT Labor Senator Bob McMullan called yesterday for the new ACT third Federal seat to be set aside for a woman candidate.

He suggested that the ALP national executive designate the seat for a woman, given that the ACT branch did not have the power under its rules to do so.

Senator McMullan said he was not getting into the quota argument, but said this was a vacant seat, so no sitting member would be disadvantaged and it was a safe seat, so there was no question of putting a marginal seat at risk. It would be recognising an historic anomaly and taking active steps to overcome it.
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The ACT might be the mouse that roared in the Great Australian Centenary Constitutional Debate _ but it will only be by accidental political circumstance.

During the week we saw the stock headline New Coalition Split Looms in the same way that New Labor Split Looms was used as a stock headline in the 1960s.

This week it was citizens’ initiated referendums. National Party leader Tim Fischer and Liberal leader Alexander Downer are against them and said so bluntly in public. Liberal defence spokesman Peter Reith is in favour and has been saying so for six years. Former Queensland National Party Leader, Russell Cooper, is also in favour and so is ACT Liberal Opposition Leader, Kate Carnell.
Continue reading “1994_07_july_actpol31”

One of the arguments against fixed-term parliaments is that with the election date known so far in advance, politicians would be electioneering for longer periods of time than with the system of the Prime Minister determining the election date and the length of the official campaign.

The two year extravaganza leading up to the first Tuesday in November for the US presidential election is cited as evidence of this.

It is a poor example for Australia. Events in the ACT are proving this argument against fixed terms to be nonsense.

Americans go through a primary (or pre-selection) process which involves a large number of ordinary voters. Here pre-selections are done in back rooms that used to be smoke-filled.
Continue reading “1994_07_july_actpol23”