Month: July 1995

Let me tell you about the Indian Step Ladder. It is a bit like the Indian Rope Trick.It comes to mind because the newly appointed Air Services Australia board has come under immediate fire because none of its members know anything about electronics. Electronics is the key to air traffic control, which is the board’s main concern.

It is not new for government board appointments to come under fire for knowing little or nothing about the things they are supposed to be supervising. It happened for a long time and happens at the state and territory level, too.

I am not picking on the ASA. The new board members probably have all sorts of other skills that make each appointment respectable, worthwhile and defendable, but the most of the Acts of Parliament that create boards and authorities and give Ministers the power to make appointments to them are very short on qualifications and process to ensure appointments are good ones.
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One of the great esoteric philosophic debates of the millennium … almost on par with the mind-body distinction … rudely intruded into the modern world of realpolitik last week. The debate is between natural law and what is called legal positivism.

Despite its name, legal positivism is not some trendy New Age drivel. Rather, it is the philosophy that says law is a human-made thing and law is only that which is generally enforceable or consented to. The natural lawyers, on the other hand, say there is a higher law, some innate principles of human conduct that can transcend the immediate human-made rules. New Age drivel, if you like, but with a longer pedigree.

Natural law waned a bit with the onset of the scientific age, rationalism and the decline of religion. But it made a bit of a comeback immediately after World War II. This was because you could not have a lot of legal positivist ex-Nazis wandering about saying that the law of Germany at the time said they could kill and torture so they were not answerable to some higher law.
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Despite the hype of the March Federal by-election, Labor has to be favoured to win all three ACT seats.It is not only because of Bob McMullan’s announcement this week. There are other factors.Let’s take the Liberals’ candidate for Namadgi, Brendan Smyth.

The trouble for Brendan Smyth is that he was pre-selected by the Liberal Party for the by-election because he was very electable.

The Liberals did a lot of profile polling _ finding out what sort of person the good voters of Tuggeranong would elect. Someone like us, they replied. Between 30 and 40, married with kids, a PAYE taxpayer and living in Tuggeranong.
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