Month: June 1996

Indonesia needed only the slightest excuse to reject any nominee that Australia might make for its ambassador to Jakarta. If it had not been for the earlier forced withdrawal of Hermann Mantiri as Indonesia’s ambassador to Canberra, it is likely that Miles Kupa, Australia’s nominee for the Jakarta post would have gone ahead. As it was, Mr Kupa’s nomination fell foul.

There are some parallels. After Mr Mantiri’s nomination last year, some of Mr Mantiri’s comments downplaying the Dili massacre were uncovered. This set off a storm of protest in Australia among proponents of self-determination for East Timor. This led to the then Australian Government privately urging Indonesia to withdraw the nomination. This happened and a career diplomat was sent instead. After Mr Kupa’s nomination, the Indonesian press gave extensive coverage to earlier Australian media reports of a confidential paper Mr Kupa wrote in 1988 that condemned the business activities of the family of President Suharto. This resulted in political pressure in Indonesia for Mr Kupa’s nomination not to be accepted. The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, suggested that Australia should rethink the nomination.

This led to Mr Kupa writing to the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, withdrawing his name from nomination. In doing so, he said he regretted that Mr Downer had not been “”made aware of this earlier “leak” prior to the nomination”. One might well ask why Mr Downer had not be aware of the earlier leak, either in the ordinary course of being well-informed about press coverage of Indonesian matters, or through proper briefings from the Department of Foreign Affairs. Something is amiss here that Mr Kupa’s suitability for the nomination and possible reaction to it was not thoroughly vetted beforehand.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader23jun indon ambo”

This week the ACT Government introduced into the Assembly the Gungahlin Development Authority Bill. If the Assembly has any sense it will reject it. The concept of a separate development authority for Gungahlin is entirely flawed. So, incidentally, is the idea of a separate Kingston Foreshore Development Authority.

The motive behind the Gungahlin authority is hard to fathom. Perhaps it is an exercise in political feel-goodism or an attempt to pretend to the people of Gungahlin that something is happening in their township when it manifestly is not. Those sorts of political exercises might be excused, but in this case, the exercise goes to the core of planning the city.

We already have an ACT Planning Authority and a department charged with the task of lease administration. We already have a national planning authority charged with the task of ensuring decisions about land do not trespass on the national interest in Canberra as the nation’s capital. Why the need for a separate Gungahlin Authority?
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader21jun gungahlin”

The Government’s amendment to the Flags Act, before the Parliament this week, is pointless grandstanding. The amendment states that no changes can be made to the Australian flag without a referendum. At present the flag could be changed by a simple amendment to the Act.

The grandstanding is pointless on two grounds. First, there is nothing technically to stop a future Parliament first repealing the new amendment that requires a referendum and then enacting a simple change to the Flags Act to change the flag. Unless the Government’s referendum-first provision is somehow locked in, it carries no more force than any other repealable piece of legislation. There is a simple piece of constitutional theory that says Parliament is, subject to the Constitution, sovereign and no Parliament can bind future Parliaments. If the Government wants to ensure there must be a referendum before the flag is changed it would have to entrench the existing flag by referendum in the Constitution. It would be a complete waste of money. Besides, it might not pass.

Secondly, all political parties in the Parliament are committed to the principle that there should be a referendum before the flag is changed.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader21jun flag”

The Federal Government is almost certain to get itself into trouble with voters a representative groups of various kinds if stays on its present course. For the past couple of months Ministers in the Government have had a standard response to a lot of policy inquiries. That response has been: all will be revealed in the Budget. Recent examples have been the question of the Medicare rebate; higher-education funding (to both institutions and arrangements for new students under HECS); and specific-purpose grants to the states.

A certain amount of secrecy is needed with the Budget to prevent speculative trading to avoid new taxes. Moreover, there is an argument that the Government’s the overall fiscal projection needs to be kept secret until announcement on Budget night to prevent currency speculation. However, when a large amount of both spending and revenue measures are kept secret until Budget night, there is cause for concern.

The essential difficulty with this approach is that it becomes policy by surprise. Invariably, it leads to poor policy or leads to knee-jerk reaction and people locking in to adversary position that defeats what might be good policy. Labor’s wine tax was a good example. Treasurer Peter Costello’s sales-tax surprise was another.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader18jun wait till budget”

ACT teachers are perfectly entitled to withdraw their voluntary labour as part of their industrial campaign against the ACT Government. Indeed, the dispute has highlighted just how much voluntary work has been taken for granted. Whereas employers expect senior executives on high salaries to be on the job virtually 24 hours a day, employers … whether public or private … cannot expect long working weeks from those who are not so well paid. In drawing this to the Government’s and community’s attention, the teachers may extract pay concessions from the Government.

But withdrawal of services in the form of strikes and bans can have another effect. Those most affected will inevitably try to get their services through other means. In this case parents and students have sought the help of other volunteers, notably sporting associations to fill the gap.

Now the teachers have asked the sporting bodies to refuse requests to take school teams away or otherwise break the teachers’ bans.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader13jun school sport”

Next week a report on the Australian honours system will be tabled in Parliament. A review of the system was certainly needed. It seems silly to have two separate days on which honours are bestowed, both Australia Day and the Queen’s Birthday. It would be better to just have honours on Australia Day or perhaps just on Federation Day.

Over the years the honours system has become democratised to some extent. Any Australian can nominate any other Australian for an award and awards have been taken out of the hands of the government of the day. These two important principles must be maintained after the review. However, the awards are frequently attacked on the ground that the highest awards have an over-representation of politicians and public servants and have an over-representation of people who were just doing their jobs, albeit very successfully. Both of those categories are filled with people who are generally very well rewarded financially for their efforts. The awards also come under fire because the highest awards go to those mentioned above, while the lower awards seem to go to those who make the greater personal sacrifice with voluntary work for good causes outside their normal career or whose work is fairly poorly paid.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader11jun honours”

The warning from Metal Trades Industry Association against substantial government cuts to industry programs is a timely one. MTIA’s head, Bert Evans, said small business would be badly affected by changes to the tariff concession system, removal of the Development Import Finance Facility (DIFF), the proposed ending of the Export Market Development Grants Scheme (EMDGS) and the tightening of research and development tax concession guidelines.

These changes are further examples of a government determined to meet a certain Budget target without enough consideration of the fall-out of the individual decisions. The folly of some of these decisions is almost self-evident. Why, business might well ask, is the government reducing public spending? Because it wants to reduce the deficit without increasing taxes so that interest rates will not rise and the overall investment climate will improve. Those aims are quite worthy, but there is no point delivering that result if it comes with the price of cutting the sort of government spending that helps industry, in particular helps industry export.

The job of reversing the legacy of high government deficits is not easy. It certainly cannot be done with idiotic claims about the top 100 richest people being hit for avoided tax.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader11jun cuts”

At last some of the benefits of financial deregulation are dribbling down to ordinary Australians. Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics issued figures showing that mortgage managers have taken 10 per cent of the home-loan market, largely at the expense of the major banks and major banks announced interest-rate cuts for existing customers. In the past, nearly all of the interest-rate reductions given by major banks were to new customers in order to attract market share. With the onslaught of mortgage managers, like Aussie Home Loans, Australian Mortgages Securities and others, they now see their existing client base being seduced by companies who can offer lower rates because they do not have to carry the huge overheads burden of a network of expensive suburban branches.

About 40 per cent of the business done by the mortgage managers in the past three months has been refinancing. That has been a stern lesson to the major banks. They can no longer take their customers for granted.

Further, NSW has abolished the stamp duty fees it charged on mortgage refinancing.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader10jun loans”

The Minister for Communications, Richard Alston, has made a spirited attack on the board of the ABC, asserting that its budgeting is remiss and its programming inappropriate. He said, “”If you are going to run a corporation with a budget in excess of half a billion dollars you need to have quality people with proven commercial and business expertise and this board simply doesn’t have that. . . .It’s all very well to win award, but if no-one is watching then you’ve got to ask yourself, “should we be producing these programs.”

It seems that Mr Alston completely misunderstands the role of the ABC. Since television began in Australia, and before that, with radio, it has been recognised that broadcasting has a special role requiring special government involvement. As time goes on the need for that involvement increases. It is not merely a question of allocating frequencies. It is a question of ensuring that radio and television services in Australia present a proper range of programming. That means covering the nation geographically, culturally and intellectually. This cannot or will not be done by the commercial operators alone. The nature of broadcasting is such that commercial broadcasters will always go for the mass market; sometimes that may be satisfactory, but not always. There is only a finite amount of air time and broadcasting overhead costs are fairly constant. It means the main commercial networks will seek to maximise their audience share so they can charge more money per minute for the finite broadcast time.

If the whole spectrum were surrendered to commercial licensees mass taste would be catered for several times over and minority taste would be ignored. A market the size of Australia would not generate the income to support the overheads to make minority-taste broadcasting economic. Moreover, given that overseas programs can usually be bought more cheaply than producing Australian ones, a purely commercial market would result in less Australian production.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader10jun abc”

Michael Moore’s insistence that teachers be given a 10 per cent Budget-funded pay rise may have severe implications for the ACT that transcend the question of education funding.

Mr Moore says he is adamant that the Budget line containing money for teachers’ salaries be increased. Exactly how adamant he has not spelt out in exact detail, but bringing down the Government is not an unlikely possibility, even if it would be reckless and opportunist.

The trouble with Mr Moore’s stand is that it is all or nothing. Under the Self-Government Act a non-Minister may not introduce legislation that would have the effect of increasing government spending, but the precise meaning of that section is open to several legal opinions and how it can be enforced is also a matter of conjecture. None the less, it is very likely that one-line amendments to Budgets will be ruled out of order by the Speaker and if that ruling is challenged it is very likely that the Labor Party would support the Government. Labor would not want to be hindered by the possibility of one-line amendments to Budgets when it attains government. They make the place ungovernable, especially when minority governments are the norm.
Continue reading “1996_06_june_leader07jun moore”