Month: January 1996

What exactly does Bill Clinton stand for, if anything? Well, we know that he is standing for re-election, but beyond that he does not seem to have a clear direction or solid view on anything. His State of the Union message this week revealed an indecisive, ambivalent man. The only clarity in the speech was in the style of the delivery. The voice was strong, at times dramatic. The words, taken one by one, were uttered clearly. But taken together, it was difficult to work out what Mr Clinton was saying or where he wanted America to go. The two most critical policy elements for American government are the size of the role of government in society and the extent to which America engages in the world. What did we get from Mr Clinton?

He said, “”The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

He gave a long-term commitment to balancing the Budget and then said, “”I challenge Congress to preserve the full faith and credit of the United States, to honour our obligations as we have for 220 years, to rise above partisanship and pass a straightforward extension of the debt limit.”
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In strict terms, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, found for union in the dispute over employment contracts made by CRA at its Weipa mine in North Queensland. But it was a pyrrhic victory.

The commission ruled that CRA must pay equal pay for equal work. That means it must pay members of the union the same pay as non-members for equal work. Two things flow from that. One is that workers are entitled to be members of a union, to be represented by a union and not to be discriminated against because they are a member of a union. The second is that workers need not be members of a union, need not have union representatives negotiate on their behalf, and can negotiate contracts with their employer as individuals.

This is the very position that most mainstream employers have been seeking for decades. It is an end to the closed shop. It is voluntary unionism and yet preserves a fundamental right of workers in liberal democracies to join unions if they want and to have a union represent them in negotiations.
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The parliamentary secretary in charge of road safety, Neil O’Keefe, said this week that there were two ways to achieve lower speeds in the suburbs: reduce the speed limit to 50km/h or enforce the existing limits. He thought the former was the way to go. He acknowledged that the police allow a 10km/h margin of error before booking people.

Mr O’Keefe has it only partly right. The speed limit should be reduce (ital) and (end ital) it should be enforced. Obviously, a little leeway should be allowed before police book motorists to account for small speedo errors and to discourage motorists gluing their eyes to the speedo instead of the road. But it would be better if the police viewed the leeway as a percentage (say 10 per cent), rather than an absolute 10km/h. Thus motorists could expect to be booked at 55km/h in suburban streets.
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It has been nearly 80 years since the major European Allies notionally carved up the non-Turkish lands off the Ottoman Empire pending its collapse. It has been nearly 80 years since Britain, in a typical divide-and-rule strategy ambiguously promised the same part of that land … Palestine … to two different groups: to Arabs to help fight the Ottoman Empire and to Jews to help get the Zionists behind the war effort.

Now, after much bloodshed, those two groups have agreed to co-exist on that same land. It is by no means the end of the matter and the arrangements are fragile and will require further development. But now Palestinians have a degree of autonomy over their affairs in Gaza and the West Bank and they have elected their own president, Yasser Arafat, at an election at the weekend.

Mr Arafat received about 85 per cent of the vote. Overall the turnout was about 60 per cent, in an election which was boycotted by fundamental Islamist groups. The election has also been marred by allegations of fraud made against Mr Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but international observers, including former US President Jimmy Carter, have called the elections essentially fair despite the
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The Federal Opposition has made much of the fact that over the past five or six years the Public Service has become, in its words, top heavy. It cites figures to show that the service lost 23,000 ASO1s and ASO2s but an extra 4559 senior officers were hired. ASO4s rose 69 per cent and ASO5s and ASO6s rose 33 per cent, while the 1s and 2s dropped 43,000.

The Opposition Wastewatch committee member Senator Ian Campbell said young people were missing out and “”that’s despite the fact that the Public Service is the one employer that the Labor Government has direct responsibility for.”

It may be that the changes show de-facto pay rises through promotion, so that the present ASO4 is doing the job of an ASO2 five years ago but getting paid more for it. More likely, though, is the fact that in the Public Service, as in industry, many lower-end clerical jobs are disappearing with computerisation. The figures reveal, most likely, that the Public Service is getting more efficient.
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It is so easy. Out comes the credit card. A quick slash across the electronic reader and the purchases are taken away for consumption. Last month Australia put another $2 billion on the international credit card, according to figures issued yesterday. Next month interest will have to be paid on it, and the rest of the $180 billion we owe overseas.

Gradually the value of our currency is eroded against other currencies. Gradually our comparative standard of living slips away. The J-curve was a mirage. Assertions that Australia has been importing capital items to make more export and import-replacing items has proved nonsense.
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The move by ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries to install security cameras appears to be a knee-jerk populist reaction to problems in Civic that have quite complex causes. Wormald Security has made Mr Humphries an offer of a free trial, so Mr Humphries has accepted it without taking sufficient time to consider fully a range of issues such as privacy and cost-effectiveness. Even if the cameras are free, the labour-intensive work of monitoring them and following up what they reveal is not.

The move comes immediately after the stabbing of a 17-year-old boy in Civic at the weekend. Apparently Mr Humphries feels something must be seen to be done.

While it is true that installing the cameras might be an administrative matter not requiring legislative action, it would have been better if the Assembly had had a chance to express its view. While many people in Canberra may well feel all steps should be taken to prevent and punish crime, others would feel uneasy at the prospect that law-abiding people going about their business can be videotaped from secret vantage points in the city.
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The decision by the NSW Government to change the role of Governor is a welcome one. Indeed, one could well ask why any state needs a Governor at all. The ACT system is a good example of how that level of government can do without the role. The Chief Justice swears in the MLAs after an election, who in turn elects a Speaker who presides over the election of a Chief Minister or Premier. The Chief Minister then formally sign Bills into law when they are passed by Parliament.

At the national level there may be some argument for an office that somehow symbolises the nation, carrying with it some social and community function in addition to the formal watching-eye functions of dissolving Parliament, calling on someone to form a Government and signing Bills into law. But at the state level, the paraphernalia and trappings inherited from colonial times are unnecessary.
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People in developed countries for several decades after World War II became complacent about infectious disease. AIDS has to some extent dented that complacency. But, having conquered major killers like smallpox, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis and poliomyelitis through vaccinations and antibiotics we still remain too complacent. That complacency reveals itself in too little vigilance with childhood vaccinations and the abuse of antibiotics.

Dr Peter Collignon of Woden Valley Hospital and the Australian Group on Antimicrobial Resistance have warned in an article in the Medical Journal of Australia that several serious diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics, leaving patients with only natural resistance which might not be enough to hold off long-term damage or death. These warnings must be taken very seriously. Fortunately, Australia does a reasonable job of policing drug prescription. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the world does not, allowing antibiotics to be sold over the counter, and the prevalence of travel makes the spread of resistant bugs more likely.

Australia must to more to curtail the use of antibiotics where they are not really needed (in curbing minor infection) or are useless (in curbing viruses).
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