Month: March 1995

In the Molonglo table the elimination of the bottom eight candidates was done in one hit. They were (with first preference in brackets): Middleton 56, Weston 156, Dellit 191, De Luca 259, Slazenger, 329, Zamora (Lab) 436, Boland 244, and Dunstone (MI) 555. Where a candidate is shown as “”out” in the left column, the preferences are distributed along that row, with a new total in the next row down. Where a candidate is elected at a new row that is noted. About a score of votes in each electorate were lost through fractions when over-quota votes were distributed. Exhausted votes are those that show no live preferences at that count. The quotas for each electorate were Molonglo 8430, Brindabella 8317 and Ginninderra 7990. The quota is obtained by dividing the number of formal votes by one more than the number of seats and adding one. In Molonglo that is one-eighth of the vote plus one. (If seven candidates got exactly this many it would be impossible for an eighth candidate to get more than them.)

Pay television and entertainment have hijacked the debate about the information superhighway, against the national interest, according to media proprietor Kerry Stokes. The information side was running a poor second, he told an ABC Four Corners program devoted to the information highway last night. He said questions of national sovereignty needed to be asked about Australian corporations and defence bodies being dependent on software codes resident under lock and key in the US.

While he admired the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, “”I just think our nation is a sovereign nation and it shouldn’t be a subsidiary of Microsoft.” Mr Stokes, who is chairman of The Canberra Times, listed major concerns about the direction Australia is going with the information highway: DOT Unnecessary duplication of hardware and delivery platforms such as Optus and Telecom laying duplicate cable. DOT Concentration on delivery of services to high-profit centres to Sydney and Melbourne, to the detriment of regional Australia.
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Professor David Sless, executive director of the Canberra-based Communication Research Institute of Australia, has been appointed director of studies for 1995’s most important international meeting on information design for multimedia.

The world’s peak body for information design _ the International Institute of Information Design (IIID) _ will meet in Austria in July and August this year, under the auspices of UNESCO, to hold a symposium and advanced course in designing multimedia information. The Vision Plus: Designing for Electronic Communication Symposium and Course will attract the world’s leading information designers and post-graduate students.
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The attached table shows the final result of the referendum on the hare-Clark electoral system that was run in conjunction with the February 18 election. The Act Electoral Commissioner, Phil Green, gazetted yesterday the fact that the formal Yes vote was greater than 50 per cent of the people on the roll.

Under the Federal Act Self-Government Act a referendum has to get 50 per cent of those on the roll, not merely of the formal vote, to pass. In practice it means about 60 per cent of those who vote. The result entrenches the key elements of the Hare-Clark system so it can only be changed by a two-thirds majority of the Assembly (in effect, with support of both major parties) or by further referendum. It also entrenches compulsory voting.
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The ACT Labor Government may have gone, but they are still slugging it out in the suburbs over some of its planning policies. A case came up in Yarralumla last week in which both sides can perhaps claim to be victim, and there are probably more to come. It may sound like a boring little microcosm, but there are wider lessons. It may well be that a lot of people voted against Labor because they saw its planning policies wrecking their neighbourhoods, but the fall-out goes beyond the election result because decisions on the ground have to be made according to the law as it was at the time of the application. A new government can only act prospectively.

In Yarralumla, residents objected to the redevelopment of a block that contained one dwelling (a single-storey semi-detached) by adding two more dwellings. The development was proposed by the superannuation fund of Maureen Dwyer, her sister Patricia Scanlan and Roger Phillips. They made their application when planning laws were swayed in favour of urban in-fill. The policy was to increase densities and reduce urban sprawl. Part of it would enable people to build granny flats to keep families together _ the acceptable face of redevelopment. Certainty was a key part of the policy: if your proposal fitted the building “”footprint” it would be approved. The balance was in favour of developers and against amenity of existing residents and as developers took unforeseen advantage of it, residents kicked up an almighty fuss and the Government changed the rules and the application of the rules in favour of residents, several times. Each time arguably achieving a better balance. Ultimately it did not save the government, and there is probably still work to be done to get the balance right. None the less it leaves people who applied under the old rules in a pickle.
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Former Reserve Bank and Commonwealth Bank governor H. C. “”Nugget” Coombs has condemned Australian Government policy since 1986 for allowing Australian assets to be sold overseas to people who had no responsibility or care for Australia. He said the wisest thing Paul Keating had said was that unless Australia changed it would become a banana republic. But that was in 1986 and he had not put in place the policies that would stop it.

“”We are persuaded to go further into debt, to sell what we still own so we can go on and we don’t have to sacrifice anything,” he said. “”All we are doing is progressively selling the ownership of Australian assets to people overseas. We balance our payments by the sale of our assets and that’s the basic trouble and it is partly because we do not think it is necessary for us to save personally on the scale that is necessary to avoid having to sell things.”
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A tinge of red has touched the leaves of the pin oaks in Turner near the Australian National University so it is time for Nugget Coombs to go north. At 89, the Canberra winter is too hard. More importantly, in Darwin where he spends the winter, he is closer to Aboriginal people whose cause he has argued for decades. But there is something of greater moment on Nugget Coombs mind at the moment _ the loss of Australian assets to overseas control. He says it is of greater moment because he is optimistic that Aboriginal Australians will ultimately fix their own problems in their own way; whereas the solution for the loss of Australian assets, if any, is more elusive. In articulating warnings about the loss of Australian assets he has an unusual ally from his own generation in Billy Wentworth _ unusual because they have disagreed for so long and so fundamentally about Aboriginal affairs (see below). Wentworth, at 86, is standing as an Independent in the by-election for John Hewson’s seat of Wentworth next Saturday (april).

Went worth first stood in the seat named after his great grandfather explorer and publisher W. C. Wentworth in 1943. He was unsuccessful then but went on to win MacKellar for the Liberals in 1949, retiring from the House in 1972. The issues of foreign debt and foreign ownership are the main reasons for his Quixotic return to the fray. Both Wentworth and Coombs see a misallocation of economic theory. In Wentworth’s case the theory (especially the theory of trade) no longer fits the facts. In Coombs’s case the theory has been misapplied; the needs of people have been surrendered to theory. Economics no longer serves the people; the people have to serve it. Coombs says: “”Almost all Australians save to buy a house and for retirement. Neither of those are investments in the sense of adding to the productive capacity. . . . Every time we have a depression more and more mortgage the land and then they sell the land to pay off the mortgage.
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