Month: September 1994

The ACT should have compulsory bottle deposit legislation, the ACT Conservation Council said yesterday.

The call follows support for deposit legislation in NSW by the Waste Crisis Network which says the packaging and soft-drink industry is supporting the “”Do The Right Thing” campaign with $1 million a year on condition that compulsory deposits are not introduced.

The executive director of the ACT Conservation Council, Craig Darlington, said container deposits were common until the 1970s when manufacturers worked out they could make more profit from non-reusable containers.
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Coombs economics is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The 1980s saw economics rise as an end in itself. The remnants of that thinking are still with us. We report economic statistics in an “”end-in-itself” way. We say the national accounts figure this quarter is good or the current account deficit figure this month is bad. It is as if the economics statistics and indicators themselves are good or bad in a moral sense and therefore are capable of measuring the goodness of our society.

Nugget Coombs comes from a generation of economists who saw economics as merely a means to an end. Moreover, the end was stated, and stated in a social context, especially full employment.

Coombs is now 88. He spends half his year in Canberra and the other half in Darwin _ sensibly avoiding Canberra’s winter and Darwin’s Wet.
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Charlie started work at Murray Breweries in Beechworth three days before World War I ended when the school-leaving age was 13. I mention this because it was World Clean-up Day on Sunday.

I joined Murray Breweries on a school-holiday job in 1968. Then it had ceased to be a brewery and was, and still is a soft-drink factory. Charlie had only a couple of years to go until retirement. He had worked there for 50 years. He was, indeed, part of the machinery. Charlie stood at a circular machine putting empty bottles in one end with his right hand. They went around being filled by cordial, water and then gas and he took them out with his left hand.

My job was at the other end of the factory. We worked from 6am till 6pm with half an hour for lunch for $27.50 a week. Me and another bloke who had left school for the job sorted used bottles: screw tops, crown tops, labels, ceramic-embossed, large medium and small, putting each into separate reusable wooden crates hour after hour.
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No man is an island” came to mind as the ACT Government was forced twice recently to announce changes to tax regimes in the face of competitive pressure from NSW.The first was payroll tax and the second was registration and licence arrangements for tourist mini-bus operations. Businesses would move or set up elsewhere unless the tax reductions were made. Of course, it also required a little publicity before a looming election.

If the ACT did not cut the taxes it would take only a few deserters to eat away any revenue advantage of a higher tax, leaving aside the public odium of having a higher tax.

Competitive federalism’s most strident example came when the Bjelke-Petersen Government in Queensland abolished death duties in the 1970s and all other states were forced to follow.
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As Britain started to right its historic wrong in Ireland in the past week, the word “”Taoiseach” appeared fleetingly in the news.

It is the Gaelic name for prime minister and is used in the Irish Constitution. The great majority of Irish people speak and use English in their everyday lives and English predominates in the media, but they rarely if ever refer to the “”prime minister”. They refer to the Taoiseach and the word stands out as a title in its own right, distinctively Irish as the Dali Lama is Tibetan.

The use of the word is a cultural statement and one affirming national identity.
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Over the centre of this mighty continent there hangs a veil which the most enterprising might be proud to raise .[TH].[TH]. I shall envy that man who shall first plant the flag of his native country in the centre of our adopted one. [EP] Adelaide, 1840. The explorer Charles Sturt thus captured the mystery and challenge of Page1 Story continues … Enter N for more

npenetrating central Australia -and the honour of being the first European to do so.[EP] South-eastern Australia was then generally known, but what lay north of Adelaide was shrouded in mystery. Most colonists believed the interior was a region of barren deserts. But some, including Sturt, still hoped that ‘the centre’ hid a fertile pastures – and even an ‘inland sea’. Adelaide farewelled five pathfinding central Australian exploring expeditions in the two decades from 1840 62: Edward Eyre’s in 1840; Charles Sturt’s own party in 1844; and John McDouall Stuart’s three trans-continental expeditions in 1 860, 1 861 and 1 862 .[EP] Eyre’s, Sturt’s and Stuart’s explorations were historically and geographically related. All aimed to reach ‘the centre’, and to then continue to the north or north-west coast. And all crossed vast stretches of country hitherto totally unknown to European Australians: the traditional lands of numerous Aboriginal tribes.[EP] Their journeys transcended those of most other Australian inland explorers. Ten years ago – inspired by their discoveries, moved by their hardships, and provoked by some recent belittling accounts – I set out to research their expeditions.[EP] The work, leading to three books and AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC features, spanned six years. It led me into library archives in Australia and Britain, and took me three times across some of Australia’s most forbidding regions.[EP] Retracing their routes, and experiencing and photographing the country they crossed, were my keys to re-assessing the explorers’ journeys. Camped along their tracks, I came to recognise the challenges they faced – and to better understand both their achievements and Page2 Story continues … Enter N for more

nfailures.[EP] My own four-wheel-drive expeditions each lasted about two months. They were often grinding, but never burdensome. Indeed, the sheer exhilaration of being amidst the outback’s desert wilds – ‘the fearful joy’ that urged on the explorers themselves – was always enlivening. Dust, mud, flies, boggings, all were compensated for by the inland’s sweeping space and harsh grandeur.[EP] [EP] Edward Eyre was only 24 when he left Adelaide on 18 June 1840. Driven by ideals of ‘honour’ (Si Je Puis – If I can – was the family motto), and accompanied by seven men, Eyre planned tto reach central Australia by following the Flinders Range northwards.[EP] By early July, 400 kilometres north of Adelaide, they were surrounded by the Flinders Range’s peaks. Reconnaissances from the ranges were met in every direction by forbidding salt lakes. Blocked by these lakes, ‘brilliant and glittering beyond conception’, Eyre wrote, Our toils and labours had all been endured to no purpose .[TH].[TH]. and the only alternative left to us would be to return, disappointed and baffled.[EP] However, unwilling to return humiliated to Adelaide, Eyre decided to travel westwards along the south coast towards Western Australia. There, they found massive dunes fringing a desert coast. It was beautiful but utterly forbiding and, apart from some Aboriginal wells, there was no water. Yet Eyre still resolved to travel some 1500 kilometres westwards around the Great Australian Bight to AlbanPage3 Story continues … Enter N for more
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Six out of seven recent dual occupancy applications in Banks have been rejected permanently after residents’ appeals.

A spokesperson for the Banks Action Group, Ros Thomas, said yesterday that she had been told by the Minister for Planning, Bill Wood, that they had been rejected.

Mr Wood confirmed this. He said they had been rejected by the Chief Territory Planner on qualitative grounds, mainly loss of amenity of existing residents.

That meant the rejection was permanent, unlike rejection on quantitative grounds such as set back, window placements and the like when the applicant could resubmit.
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The Commonwealth Bank called on the Federal Government yesterday to trim its budget deficit.

The managing director of the bank, David Murray, said, “”We cannot afford to allow the fiscal position to deteriorate in the growth stage of the economy, I believe the Government should be using every opportunity to trim that fiscal position.”

On the other hand he thought it was too early for the Reserve Bank to be looking at a change in monetary policy.
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It was a dream come true. The other day a computer beat the world champion, Garry Kasparov, at chess. But hang on a moment. Computers don’t dream. Can they be made to dream? To be poetical? To think? The chess feat was not of enormous moment. It was of the same quality as getting a computer to always win or at least force a draw at draughts. It was just of different quantity. In both cases, the computer just crunches the millions of different chess combinations that all must ultimately end in a win, draw or lose, and only moves in a way that will result in a win or draw.

To date most of the research on artificial intelligence has centred around this high-end or high-focus logical thought. But we know that most human creativity comes not from high-focus logical thought, but from quirky links between unassociated things that come when our attention is distracted.

To date most attempts at replication of human thought by computers have worked with the analogy that the hardware is the brain and the mind is the software and that if the software and data are comprehensive enough, bingo, you have a brain, or at least a something which imitates it pretty well. The brain is a giant computer, the theory goes.
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ABOUT THE POLL – Federal Politicians

Method : Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI).

Date : Saturday 13 August 1994 to Tuesday 13 September 1994.

Sample : Simple random sample from the Canberra Telephone Directory 1994

The Questions
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