Month: October 1996

The Senate Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills and its Committee on Regulations and Ordinances have correctly pointed out the dangers of ministerial councils overriding the function of Parliament. There are about 30 ministerial councils made up of state, territory and federal (and sometimes New Zealand) ministers responsible for particular areas. They frequently make very detailed agreements about uniform laws on their subject matters. Often they involve political compromises and are difficult to achieve. Moreover they provide convenience for businesses and residents who only to have to know and abide by one set of laws.

But whatever the merits of uniformity, the matters have to be legislated, which means being passed by state, territory and federal parliaments. Legislatures often take different views on things to the executive arms of government, even when the executive party has a majority control of parliament.

Ministers often believe they can be trusted with wide regulation-making power and that the bureaucracy can be relied upon to administer laws fairly without the need for safeguards built into the legislation. The consequence is that when agreements go from ministerial councils to parliaments, many MPs are placed in a dilemma: should they allow the desire for uniformity, which is difficult to achieve and has benefits of convenience and business efficiency, to override legislative standards on fairness and potential abuse of ministerial power? The ministers will need to engage their legislatures more to achieve both the merits of uniformity and reasonable restraint on abuse of power.

Many domestic consumers of water will be screaming at Actew’s projections of water charges to 2000. Actew has adopted user-pays. This means that cross-subsidies from business to domestic users will end and all users will have to pay for what they use.

At first blush it is a mean policy. There will be no social cross-subsidisation.

For a long time governments have controlled delivery of utility services like water and electricity. They have often pursued their social policies through the pricing of utilities. It was acceptable in the popular imagination. Aged pensioners, it was thought, should not have to pay the same price as everyone else for electricity to heat their houses. Widows and single mums should not have to pay the same price for water. The trouble with this policy, though, was that if water and electricity are cheap, the users do not consume them carefully. The financial incentive to conserve water and power is much less. The result is we all pay far more in the long run as new dams and power stations have to be constructed for what is an artificially inflated demand.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader28oct water”

The clocks go forward tonight for daylight saving in three states and the ACT. Tasmania began daylight saving several weeks ago.

Large numbers of Australians are unhappy, particularly in south-east Queensland and Perth where they would like daylight saving and do not have it and in large parts of western NSW where it is not wanted. Australian Governments have still got it right. They are attempting to defy the laws of nature with their lines on a map that mark state boundaries. But time stands still for no state premier.

The essential troubles are size and politics. Australia straddles 40 degrees of longitude. With a 24 hour day, that represents 2 hours and 40 minutes. Western Australian and Queensland each are more than 15 degrees of longitude wide at their widest, which represents one 24th of the globe or one hour. It means that the sun rises and sets and hour earlier (or later) in one part of the state than it does in another if the state has a uniform time zone. Vertically, too, Australia’s great distance defies uniformity of time. In the tropical north sunrise and sunset are about 12 hours apart all year; in Tasmania sunrise and sunset are about eight hours apart in winter and 16 hours apart in summer.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader26oct daylight saving”

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been given a necessary but difficult task, if not impossible, task. It was set up by the new Government under President Mandela to both expose the crime of the apartheid era and act as a process for reconciliation and forgiveness. It was specifically not given the task of punishment.

One cannot have reconcilitation and forgiveness without truth and acknowledgement of crime by the perpetrators. Until this week the commission had uncovered some perpetrators but had received much more information about crime from victims. There was a mismatch … too many crimes and too few uncovered perpetrators.

But now five senior security policemen have confessed to 40 murders and sought amnesty on the grounds that they had been committed in a political context. Of more importance, though, they will point up the line to others who ordered or conspired in murder and other crimes.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader24oct safrica”

The fact Telstra might have to abandon underground cabling in favour of above-the-ground cabling to compete with Optus for pay TV and telephony shows that Australia should not be a slave to competition and market forces, but should use it where it is beneficial and use sme regulation where that is in the long-term interests of the nation.

A meeting of local government leaders in Melbourne this week called for a national summit on the issue of cabling. It rightly called for a single agency to take control of telecommunications infrastructure.

Competition in telecommunications has brought many benefits, particularly lower phone costs and a quicker and more reliable serice for connecting phones. Competition for services that go over the phone lines and to provide equipment in households has been productive. However, it is patently absurd to have more than one set of cables to deliver the services. It is needless duplication of valuable infrastructure. Having Optus and Telstra both rolling out their own fibre-optic and co-axial cable is a waste. Further, the competition has led to Optus using the cheapest and easiest method … slinging it along existing power poles … irrespective of aethetics and environmental factors or local plannig laws which federal telecommunications law apparently overrides. Now Telstra feels it must do the same.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader24oct cables”

The National Museum of Australia saga continues. The latest is that the museum should go on the Kingston lake shore. It was suggestion by the ACT Government as one of several options to be considered for the museum, but not necessarily the preferred site. Four other options are being considered by the federal government site study: the original large Yarramundi Reach site; Acton Peninsula; Kings Park on the Parkes Way side of the lake and on the lake shore between the National Science and Technology Centre and the High Court.

The ACT Government would like the museum to go ahead as quickly as possible to generate jobs during construction and permanent jobs and a boost to tourism when it is completed. Its view seems to be that it is willing to make compromises on the site just to get the project moving. That is not a wise approach, especially in a planned city like Canberra where the long view whould be taken.

It is an appalling shame that artifacts are being kept in warehouses and not put on optimum public display while politicians, bureaucrats and others argue about the site, wasting time, money and opportunity in doing so.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader23oct museum”

The ACT Attorney-General, Gary Humphries, has sensibly used shaming to induce diplomats and diplomatic missions in Canberra to pay their parking fines. People driving diplomatic cars have incurred $32,292 in unpaid parking fines. The missions should ensure they are paid and warn their staff to obey ACT law. A DC plate is not a licence to park anywhere. It is not only a question of obeying the law, but also a question of good manners to the citizens of Canberra. Parking rules are made to ration the use of precious space and enable the orderly use of vehicles in the city for the benefit of all. If some members of the diplomatic corps hog precious space by overstaying or cause obstruction the rest of the community is inconvenienced.

Mr Humphries knows that the fines cannot be enforced through the courts because of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity. Nor can the ACT Government threaten to withdraw governmental services such as garbage removal or water, because the convention requires that missions get reasonable access to them and the Federal Government would step in if they were denied.

So Mr Humphries has used the one sensible legitimate weapon he can: shame. So shame on Iran, Russia, Germany, Peru Chile, Bosnia, Spain, Pakistan, China and Greece, for running up fines of more than $1000 each. Praise to those missions who insist their staff do the right thing.

Mr Humphries is to prepare an annual list of non-paying missions. The Canberra Times will happily publish it and congratulate the missions who do the right thing.

Much could be read into the result of the by-election in the NSW seat of Lindsay at the weekend. But it would be foolish to read too much into most of the messages because of one over-riding factor. The by-election was caused by the exploitation of a constitutional technicality by the Labor Party. Voters had already decided in March that they wanted the Liberals’ Jackie Kelly to represent them. This overturned because she offended the Constitution by being an officer in the RAAF (holding an office of profit under the Crown) and had not technically renounced her New Zealand citizenship at the time of nomination. Most Australians would probably reject the bar on those who hold an office of profit under Crown as an out-dated irrelevancy and provided a candidate is an Australian at swearing in time, it should not matter.

The voters of Lindsay, by increasing Ms Kelly’s vote, in the face of Australia-wide opinion polls suggesting the Howard Government has not increased its popularity, have resounding rejected the technical rules and demanded Ms Kelly be given a fair go. Those rules should be changed. That is the clearest message from this by-election.

The other messages are less clear. It is apparent from the result that voters will not waste their time with the Shooters’ Party. On Saturday, freed of the burden of deciding the fate of government, the voters of Lindsay rejected the opportunity to register a protest against specific policies.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader21oct by-election”

For about 40 years the ACT had a separate police force. Then, in 1979, the Australian Federal Police was created, partly as a response to growing fears of terrorism and drugs and partly because a need was seen to have a force to deal with breaches of federal law, rather than leaving it to the state forces. As a result of the creation of the AFP the former Commonwealth Police, which was largely a protective-security force for Commonwealth property, the ACT force and the narcotics bureau were absorbed.

The ACT lost its separate police force. But there were many benefits for both officers and the ACT community. Officers were exposed to a far wider range of duties than just ACT crime and the ACT community got officers with broader experience and a force that could drawn upon the greater resources and the economies of scale offered by the larger force.

The arrangement has worked well, despite the occasional nostalgic yearning for the good old days, which had more to do with a sadness at the passing of the crimeless city than about police administration.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader19oct act cop forse”

There was a certain amount of grandstanding by ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries in his get-tough approach to Canberra’s graffitists. Mr Humphries wants to make those who deface signs and walls to clean up the mess they make. That approach will gain a fair degree of support in the community, judging by the anger graffiti generates in the letters columns and talk-back radio.

Some people might go further and call for parents to be held responsible for their children’s misdemeanours, as in some states of the United States.

Earlier, there were concerns that the caustic cleaning materials might harms the mainly young, unskilled graffitists, but now it seems they can learn to deal with the chemicals without harming themselves.

Of course, it has always been open to magistrates to make a wide variety of activities a condition of good-behaviour bonds, including clean-up orders.
Continue reading “1996_10_october_leader18oct graffiti”