Month: September 1995

I thought of writing to you when the woman in Grace Bros made her third attempt at getting the right box for the champagne glasses. Instead of taking the glasses to the room where the keep the empty boxes, she scurried back and forth selecting a box, unsuccessfully trying to pack the glasses in it, and going back for another try. Fred Hilmer, the oracle of efficiency would be interested in this, I thought. And as the glasses were for a prize for the squash raffle, I thought the IC might as well get a earful, too.

It was my turn to do the raffle … buy the prizes, sell the tickets on squash night, reimburse myself and hand over the profit to the treasurer.

Now you lot think you have turned over every stone in Australian society … culling inefficiency out of state government electricity generation; blowing the chill wind of competition through idle port authorities; rounding up slackness in government hospitals; sticking the needle into cosy lawyers’ and real-estate-agents’ monopolies; scything through unnecessarily detailed regulation … but you ain’t seen nothing as inefficient as raising 50 bucks in a raffle at ACT Masters Squash.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_column25sep”

ABOUT 10 pages in the middle of the S volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in our school library were well-worn from much reading. When you closed the volume the tattered edges of those pages formed a thin brown line. The pages were, of course, the entries on sex. Teenagers will be teenagers. The librarian could hardly dismember (literally) the S volume after ruling that damaging books was a capital crime. Nor could he remove the whole volume, lest someone had an assignment on Scotland.

And that was before photocopiers would have made censorship attempts even more hopeless. Nowadays we not only have copiers, but the Net. There has been a fair amount of fear and loathing recently that teenagers will use the Net to get all sorts of smut. And the usual range of vote-trawling, knee-jerking politicians have demanded it stop.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_column19sep”

A gathering in Melbourne at the weekend gave tribute to Sir Anthony Mason’s eight years as Chief Justice of the High Court.

Mason and the majority of judges who have sided with him have come under a lot of public criticism, mainly from conservatives. They have accused the court of “”radical”, “”dangerously activist” things … like imply into the Constitution rights to freedom of speech; extract a principle of native title seemingly from thin air; require a right to legal representation; abolish centuries-old principles of property law; wipe out nine decade of Australian jurisprudence on free trade; and allow foreign treaties to govern Australian life. Tut, tut.

The detail may be new, but the broad approach is not. It is what much of the judiciary has done for a lot of the time. The approach has a long pedigree.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_column12sep”

I rather enjoyed Paul Keating’s speech in Parliament last week getting stuck into the Marks royal commission.

Before his speech it was not possible to write in this paper certain things without being cited for contempt. (The Canberra Times has a slight circulation in Western Australia.)

Now, as part of a commentary and reportage of parliamentary proceedings … which are protected … I can write that I agree with Keating’s summary that the commission is just a political witchhunt devised by a politician to destroy the career of another politician. But last week I could not write what Keating had said off my own bat. Silly isn’t it. It gets sillier.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_column04sep”

The commission also published its estimate of the two-party-preferred vote in the three ACT seats following the redistribution, based on the 1993 result, not the by-election vote, which the commission ignores for redistribution assessments.

Namadgi is 60.79 per cent ALP and 39.21 per cent Liberal; Fraser is 62.06-37.94 and Canberra is 60.81-39.19. In 1993 the figures were: Fraser 62.81-37.19 and Canberra 59.56-40.44. The ACT total in both cases is 61.19-38.81.
Continue reading “1995_09_september_addelect”