Month: June 1996

TThird-party insurance for private cars in the ACT will go up $17 on July 1, a rise of 7 per cent. It is ominously above the CPI, but compared to NSW is good result. Private cars will now insure for $269, compared with NSW rates of between $370 and $400.

The difference can be put down to several factors.

NSW claims have ballooned because of aggressive lawyer advertising for small claims taken on spec. ACT lawyers do it, too, but not as aggressively. Spec cases are valuable in serious cases where injured people might have no other recourse. And some law firms shoulder the costs for a long time. This is fine provided the firm does not turn around and take unjustified extra costs.

But the trouble starts, as in NSW, when firms actively advertise and scratches-and-bruises cases are taken up on spec in the hope of easy money for “”pain and suffering”.

For example, QBE Insurance’s managing director, John Cloney, blames lawyers’ advertising and small claims in NSW for increased TPI costs and therefor higher premiums. In the ACT minor claims make up about 75 per cent of total claim costs.
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Mark: please get library to check the date of the defacto and de jure recognition of incorporation of East Timor; and the spelling of golkar the Indonesian political party…(marked with ???? below). ta.

I am on: 62 21 5707440 room 1401 leave message.

Indonesian President Soeharto firmly ruled out yesterday any special political status for East Timor.

And he also ruled out for the time being a visit to Australia. He had been invited by the previous government and the invitation was renewed by the Howard Government.

At a meeting with major Australian newspaper editors or their representatives at the presidential palace in Jakarta, President Soeharto said through an interpreter, “”Autonomy for East Timor is already there.”

Indonesia was a unitary state under the 1945 Constitution, he said. It had 27 provinces and East Timor was one of them. It had been approved by members of parliament and the People’s Consultative Council, so it was not a decision of the President.

President Soeharto’s comments come after hopes among human rights groups and others that the Indonesian Government might recognise that East Timor was unique in that it was not part of the Dutch East Indies like the rest of the country and had been under Portuguese rule for 400 years until the Indonesia invasion in 1975 and that its separate history might warrant separate political status.

It seems that fear of other parts of Indonesia also claiming separate status has overcome that possibility.
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There are three necessary requirements for a President of Indonesia. He (invariably he) must be Javanese; he must be a Muslim; and he must be a general. That rules out many.

There is also a fourth requirement, according to a joke going around Jakarta. He must have previous experience as president. And that rules out all but President Soeharto when the position is up for election in 1998.

He will be 76 then, so the question of succession is rife anyway. There appears to be great pressure for change in Indonesian society with little or no institutional means of carrying it out. Students are getting more volatile and troops have shot at demonstrators in several incidents in the past few months; workers are agitating for better conditions with increasing use of strikes; there are regional demands for greater autonomy, particularly in northern Sumatra, Timor and Irian Jaya; and a growing business class is seeking a more level competitive playing field rather than an economic and legal system in which favouritism and cronyism plays such a large part.

Balanced against that is an army of 500,000 (including the police force) which plays a dominant role in political life.
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The ACT’s health budget is suffering through no fault of the ACT. The decline in private health cover and the refusal of many who have the cover to admit themselves as private patients in the public-hospital system is causing the ACT Government to pay an increasingly higher percentage of hospital costs. Indeed, the percentage has risen from about 60 per cent a decade ago to 93.1 per cent now.

The trouble is that privately insured patients find that after visiting a public hospital they get a higher bill for the same service than public patients on Medicare only for exactly the same service. Moreover, they do not fare much better than public patients when it comes to cue jumping or getting private rooms. There is no incentive to nominate as a private patient. The result is the ACT picks up the full tab, rather than the insurance company.

It is one of the many anomalies caused by cost shifting between the state level, the federal level and the private sector. It does not make for efficient allocation of health resources.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leaderjun26 health costs”

Speed and red light cameras have been recommended for the ACT. They come after a four-month $160,000 study was sponsored by the NRMA … ACT Road Safety Trust and involved scientists and specialist engineers from Sydney-based traffic engineering firm Jamieson, Foley and Associates Pty Ltd who attended most of the accidents sites in the ACT during much of last year’s winter. However, the ACT Minister for Emergency Services, Gary Humphries, is yet to be convinced, largely on cost grounds.

Sadly, much more of the improvement in the road toll over the past two decades can be put down to harsher policing measures than to education, better roads or safer cars. It seems we have to be brow beaten into better behaviour on the roads. Or more accurately, drivers have to be made to realise that there is an additional risk to speeding, reckless or drunken driving … the risk of a fine or licence loss. It is fairly evident that some people respond more readily to that risk than to the more serious risk of death or injury because the latter is treated with the attitude that “”it cannot happen to me.”
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leaderjun13 speed cameras”

The ACT Assembly has at last come into line with other states and territories by making “”stalking” a criminal offence. Until now the police could do very little to help people, almost invariably women, who were victims of stalking. Stalkers would say they were not breaking any law; they were committing no physical violence or no trespass to property; they were just using the public streets or walking up to front doors or workplaces like any other door-to-door canvasser. That defence never had any efficacy in the context of ordinary human relations. Now, at last, it has no legal efficacy.

Stalking causes terrible fear in the victim and in our society people should not have to live in fear. They should be able to call upon help from the police, the courts and the law. The definitions of stalking are fairly straightforward. A key element to it is repetition of contact. One incidental contact may arouse slight alarm, but it is the second and subsequent unwelcome contacts that arouse fear. Following, approaches, loitering, repeated visits to home or work, repeated telephoning or mailing all constitute loitering. And all are capable of arousing fear.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader28jun stalk”

Several members of the Federal Coalition have some understandable reservations about the Northern Territory’s euthanasia law which comes into effect on Monday. The question is what should they do about it. The law is the first law in Australia and one of the first in the world that permits active euthanasia … that is, where a doctor takes some active step to end a patient’s life, after suitable arrangements for consent and a cooling off period.

Without intervention, the first death under the law could take place on Monday week. Various medical and legal forces in the Northern Territory have begun a court challenge to the law. That challenge will question the power of the Northern Territory legislature to make such a law, and it is the right of any Northern Territory resident to take such an action.

However, the position of federal MPs is slightly different. Liberal backbencher Kevin Andrews asked Prime Minister John Howard whether the Coalition would use the Federal Parliament’s powers to overturn the Northern Territory ACT.
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The ACT Opposition and cross-benchers have joined forces to put a 12-month sunset on the Carnell Government’s rates arrangements which has applied a uniform 3 per cent annual increase to rates. In the circumstances it was a justified tactic. The 3 per cent arrangement was based on unimproved property values as at January 1, 1994. To have continued much longer with rates based upon 1994 values would have been absurd. It was right to force the Government’s hand to come up with a better system.

The Government made a commitment before the 1995 election that rates would not go up for any individual by more than the CPI pending a major review. Since then, property values in Canberra have moved quite disparately. In some places they fell sharply; in others they rose. It meant that the Government could not possibly fulfil its commitment if it permitted rates to be based on new valuations. It either had to revolutionise the system or apply a fixed percentage increase to all existing rates. It rightly chose the latter, largely because the consultant’s review suggested a system that would have increased rates substantially in less affluent suburbs and lowered them in wealthy areas. But its correct choice at the time cannot go on indefinitely. It must revamp the way rates are set. In doing so, though, it must not go back to the ways of the Follett Government where erratic changes in property values resulted in erratic changes in rates. People in inner suburbs were faced with very large increases while elsewhere rates remained static or fell.

The essential questions remain the same. Should rates be based on unimproved property? Should the revenue from rates be quarantined into a municipal account for municipal-type functions only.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader27jun rates”

Last week’s Commission of Audit report was not very aptly named. An audit is usually a check over what has been, not a blueprint for what is to come. A report is usually a reckoning of the present state of affairs, not a reckoning of things to come. The Commission of Audit did check the existing state of play, incidentally exaggerating government debt and downplaying government assets. But then it went on to describe what the government should do in the future about cutting expenditure (especially to the less well-off) and increasing revenue (especially from the less well off).

Ordinarily audits are checks of accounts for legitimacy and effectiveness of spending. In a private company that is predicated upon contribution to profit, which is the raison d’etre of a private-enterprise venture. Government, however, has other reasons for existence, but the recommendations of the Commission of Audit scarcely recognise it.

It listed a range of spending cuts which were essentially policy in nature, not auditory. It was a wish-list from the Finance and Treasury dries. Their airing, just before the Budget when every group is on high alert, virtually required the Treasurer, Peter Costello, to disown them; which he did. The timing and the blunt method of explaining its recommendations will ensure that most of them never come to fruition … replacing present university funding with fees, loans and scholarships; handing all pre-tertiary education and all health-care to the states; baring ATSIC from delivering services; cutting social security; and a Medicare co-payment.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader25jun”

The obsession with structure in the ACT health system continues. Last week the Government announced it would establish a new statutory authority overseen by a board. Legislation to come into effect on July would establish a Health and Community Care Service separate from the department and a Health and Community Care Board to oversee the management and operations of the service.

It may well be slightly different from past structures, but it is still based on earlier models to separate the provider of services from the department. But the formal separation fools no-one. The health system is still the health system and the government and minister are responsible for it and accountable to the people of the ACT for it through the Assembly. If, under the “”new” model, the provider is not up to scratch, does the government and department get a new provider? No; it must still deal with why it is not up to scratch and in that respect a board and a service-provider model may be more a nuisance than a help.
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