1995_11_november_ukpapers

The Isle of Dogs is sleeping a little easier. They naively imagine that, with the closure this week of the down-market leftish tabloid (ital) Today (end ital), the newspaper war is over.

(Incidentally, the watchdogs of democracy in Britain were formerly known by the collective noun “”Fleet Street”, but now many have moved both editorial and presses to the eastern docklands, in and near the Isle of Dogs, that is perhaps a better collective noun to describe them, though they have not put it into print themselves.)

The war began about a year ago when Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times began to cut cover prices. And it has resulted in the man who started it closing one of his own newspapers, Today, which he bought from founder Eddy Shah in 1987. But save the tears. (Ital) Today (end ital) was no loss, either to Murdoch, or indeed to journalism. It was a tabloid with nominally centre-left views, articulated in the crass way of British tabloids. It had collected about $280 million in losses.
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1995_11_november_uk

In London last night, Britain and Australia launched a major “”New Images” campaign to change the stereotypical images the people of each nation have of each other.

New Images will be a series of about 150 cultural, business and sporting projects, mostly in Australia, in 1997, the 50th anniversary of the presence of the British Council in Australia. It will be the largest event of its kind ever mounted by Britain.

The British Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, said at a function at Australia House, “”People do not understand the extent of the deep economic and cultural links between the two nations.”
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1995_11_november_nzcan

They are a delicate balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces. The central government keeps wanting more control and the parts keep wanting more autonomy.

Some parts are forced into a federation. Some of the parts join the federation to get security and economies of scale. Some feel regional differences are too great and prefer to keep full sovereignty or having joined a federation want to break away. It is often a balance between feeling and thinking.

Quebec is not a lone example. This week’s vote changes nothing. It is still more captive of centrifugal rather than centripetal forces. What can be done to get these forces back into balance?
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1995_11_november_ntitle

Native title is a fragile thing. It was made that much more fragile by a ruling by the Full Federal Court yesterday. The ruling will make native title claims on vast areas of Australia … those which have been or are under pastoral leases … much more difficult.

But miners and pastoralists should not start cheering immediately. The court painted a restrictive, administrative role for the Native Title Tribunal. If Aboriginal claimants do not like its processes at any time, they can still go to court to seek declarations of their title.

This was the very spectre of expensive, delay-causing court actions done parcel-by-parcel that dismayed pastoralists and miners after the original Mabo decision came down. It led at least some of them to support Paul Keating’s Native Title Bill in the hope that endless litigation could be avoided. Yesterday’s decision, on that count, will give them no joy.
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1995_11_november_leader30nov

Few would have seriously expected the Chinese appeal court to do anything other than confirm both the conviction and sentence of Australian businessman James Peng. The only hope now is that Chinese authorities will have a change of heart and deport him, rather than make him serve the 18 year sentence, as they did earlier this year in the case of Harry Wu, the American human-rights campaigner.

Unfortunately, for Mr Peng his case is very different. Mr Peng appears to have incurred the personal ire of some people close to the Chinese leadership for out-smarting them in business matters. Mr Wu, on the other hand, was an idealist who upset the leadership in a general political way, not in a personal business way. Further, Mr Wu could draw on much greater clout from his home country.
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1995_11_november_leader29nov

Health centres have provided good service to the people of Canberra since the first such centres in Australia were set up 20 years ago. There is great merit in having a range of health services under one roof: GP, counselling, nutrition, immunisations and so on. However, health centres cannot succeed without the presence of at least one GP. If the GPs disappear, the health centres will inevitably follow.

The question arises, though, who is to pay for the presence of a GP? The ACT Government made a decision earlier this year that it was not a good use of ACT taxpayers money to provide salaries for doctors at health centres when there were other ways of providing a similar service, principally by cost-shifting to the Commonwealth. The ACT decided that it would cease paying salaries and negotiate with doctors to take over the health-centre practices as private practitioners. All pensioners and other benefit recipients would still pay nothing because they would come under the Commonwealth’s Medicare bulk-billing arrangements. Some other disadvantaged patients would also pay nothing if the doctor saw fit. Others would pay at least something per visit, unless the doctors decided to totally bulk-bill, but that would be unlikely as the trend is against this in Canberra.
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1995_11_november_leader28nov

The two major parties are in a policy gridlock. And they have each allowed the other to put them in that position. The gridlock arises out of silly scare tactics each party plays with the slightest policy utterance from any member of the other party. Any utterance is pounced upon, spun into a fearsome exaggeration and pushed before voters in the hope of electoral advantage.

To date both parties have backed each other into corners on aged pensions, tax, Medicare and industrial relations, to name a few. It seems as if neither party is able to offer anything in the way of policies that will rein in public spending that would be for the general public good, for fear of upsetting a pressure group that might result in loss of votes.
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1995_11_november_leader15nov

The secretary of the ACTU, Bill Kelty, is quite right to assert that the battle at Comalco’s Weipa bauxite mine is a fundamental one. But the battle is not one between unionism in general and capital, but one between a particular form of unionism, as practised and preached by the ACTU.

That form of unionism is one of the closed shop and one of equal pay for equal categories of work across whole industries. It is not the form of unionism where those people who want to join a union can do so and where a union negotiates pay and conditions with individual employers.

At Comalco 600 individuals have forsaken the union and taken up individual contracts which have given workers substantial pay increases that the union could not get them. About 50 workers stayed with the union and are on much lower pay.
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1995_11_november_leader14nov

The decision of the Commonwealth to suspend Nigeria for two years with a threat of expulsion unless it returns to democratic rule and good governance within two years sends a clear message to the world that breaches of human rights are matters of international concern. The assertion by Nigerian leaders that the execution of nine political dissenters, including noted writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, was an internal matter is a shallow one.

The Commonwealth’s lead should result in other countries expressing their outrage and also to put economic and other pressure on the Nigerian military to hand over to civilian rule. It should also put paid to arguments that the Commonwealth’s earlier concern for human rights in South Africa was monochromatic … that if whites engaged in racism and breaches of human rights, the Commonwealth would bristle with moral indignation, but similar acts by black rulers would be ignored.
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1995_11_november_leader13nov

The proposal by Independent MLA Paul Osborne for majority jury verdicts should not be taken on lightly. Mr Osborne says he is not seeking more convictions, but only wants to overcome situations where one or two “”obstreperous” individuals can result in no verdict being reached and millions of dollars spent on trials being wasted.

Mr Osborne offered alternatives of an 11:1 verdict or a 10:2 verdict. Whatever logic there is in countering the obstreperous juror, it can surely only run to one, not two. Mr Osborne cited the Bjelke-Petersen case in which a staunch political ally of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen somehow found himself on the jury and refused to convict, no matter what the evidence. It indicates that there may be a case for an 11:1 verdict to counteract a lone juror who will not convict no matter what the evidence. However, this justification is based n the presumption that there is one juror behaving beyond the ordinary bounds of reason. That may happen in some isolated cases. But the chance that there are two rogue jurors on the same jury is so remote as to be discounted. It is more likely that if two jurors are holding out against the other 10, at least one of them is doing so for good reason. In these cases, the defendant should have the benefit of the doubt. There is no logic or sense in permitting 10:2 verdicts.
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