Month: November 1996

There has been much wringing of journalists’ hands since Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams announced the Government would argue before the High Court that the court should overturn its 1994 freedom-of-speech ruling.

The 1994 ruling came in the Theophanous case which dealt with a letter to the editor of a Melbourne paper from a very plain-speaking Bruce Ruxton who accused Andrew Theophanous, a member of a parliamentary immigration committee, of favouring non-English speakers.

It is worth setting out what the High Court ruled because it is crucial to Williams’s position, which has been demonised through over-simplification.

The court ruled:

BB The Constitution provides for representative democracy.

BB That can only work if people have an informed vote.

BB This implies a right to freedom of political communication.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_williams theophanous”

Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams said yesterday that the Commonwealth would take a more active in defamation law reform if the states did not act.

Mr Williams said. “”Defamation has traditionally been an area of State responsibility.

“”However, the laws of defamation set the parameters for public discussion and determine how debate in the Australian community is conducted. Defamation laws are an issue of national significance. Australian [state] Governments have attempted unsuccessfully to achieve uniform defamation laws for decades. While the Coalition believes it is undesirable to intrude into areas that are traditionally the responsibility of the States, the Commonwealth must take a firm leadership role. Where issues of national significance are at stake, and consensus appears impossible to achieve, more may be required. I have asked my department to consider the Commonwealth’s constitutional power in this area and intend to consult further with my State colleagues.”

Mr Williams was responding to assertions that the Commonwealth was anti-free speech because it intended to ask the High Court to overturn the Theophanous case which found freedom of political communication to be implied in the constitution. Mr Williams said he objected to the constitutional foundation of the case, but not its practical effect.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_williams on defo”

When the NSW Government issued a list of the state’s top 25 primary and high schools this week, the NSW Teachers Federation and the Federation of Parents’ and Citizens’ Associations objected, saying the criteria were too narrow. An ACT Legislative Assembly reference group has also rejected the idea of publishing tables. Teachers’ unions have objected to any form of league tables of schools for the past quarter century. They make all sorts of objections, principally that schools that perform poorly will lose students and get even worse and that assessments fail to take account different socio-economic conditions of the schools’ pool of enrolment. NSW addressed the second excuse by using a “”value-added” approach that took account of different socio-economic conditions and concentrated in improvement of school performance over time.

It is surprising that the Parents’ and Citizens’ Association took the view they did. Apparently they do not represent overall parent opinion. It is a constant concern of parents to ensure their children go to the best possible school.

The real objection to school league tables is that teachers hate any form of objective assessment of their own performance and they do not like the thought of the pressure that a poor outcome will put upon them.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader30nov school tables”

The Member for Canberra, Bob McMullan, has come up with an ingenious plan to add to the official number of people in the ACT so that the ACT can retain three seats in the Federal Parliament. He wants the people of Norfolk Island counted in the ACT total for the purposes of determining how many seats in the House of Representatives should be allocated to each state and territory.

Under present law seats are allocated as follows. A quota is struck by dividing the total population of the six states by twice the number of Senators. Most recent figures put that quota at 123,275 people. The quota is divided into the population of each state and territory to give the number of seats. A remainder over a half is rounded up and a remainder under half is rounded down.

On the most recent figures, the ACT has an entitlement of 2.49 quotas which would be rounded down to two seats. Just before the last election the figures entitled the ACT to a third seat, but only just. Since then the ACT’s population has not kept pace with that of other states, but if the 2000 or so inhabitants of Norfolk Island are added, the ACT stays over 2.5 and retains the third seat.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader29nov third seat”

The plan to permit commercial driving instructors to award driving licences has no merit. Under the present scheme must satisfy a reasonably objective test conducted by someone in government pay, supervised under standard public-service conditions. Even under these conditions, and without the obvious conflict of interest in an examiner passing or failing his or her own student, there is room for corruption, as the recent NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry revealed. There was widespread evidence of driving students paying the government inspectors bribes to pass licences. How much easier that would be if the examiner actually had the final say.

There is no good economic or administrative reason for privatising licence testing. If licence testing is costing the Government money, it should just increase the fee. In matters of safety and competence, there is a need for objective government standards and testing. There are no benefits to be gained from competition or privatisation that are not grossly outweighed by the detriment of slipping standards and the potential for corruption. Audits are not enough. If people who take money from the students for lessons also determine whether the student gets a licence, they could be tempted to, on some occasions, demand extra payment for success or, in other circumstances, pass unfit students in order to portray themselves as successful testers.

Australia has achieved many benefits from competition and privatisation in the commercial arena, but it should not be an ideology to be applied in all instances. There are some activities which should remain in the public-sector. Licence testing is one of them.

The proposals by ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries and Urban Services Minister Tony De Domenico to lift penalties for drink-driving are out of proportion to the problem. It is another example of knee-jerk reaction and the need to be seen to do something. That said, there are one or two elements of his package that have merit.

Under present arrangements, people between 0.05 and 0.08 usually get an on the spot fine of $500. Above that, the penalty is a minimum three-month licence suspension and a fine up to $1000, but usually in $300 to $750 range depending on reading and antecedents. Suspensions vary up to 12 months, once again depending on reading and antecedents. Provisional licensees have special offences coming in at 0.02. Generally, drivers could get special licences to drive for work.

The current system has heavier penalties for second offences within five years with a mandatory cancellation of licence with a requirement that the driver reapply to the court to get the licence back at some indeterminate time and show that he or she had overcome his or her alcohol problem. There was no provision for a special licence.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader27nov drink drive”

Opposition Industrial Relations spokesman Bob McMullan has rightly drawn attention to the poor distribution of work in Australia. While more than a million Australians are out of work or desperately seeking more work, others have far to much work to do and would probably like less. He calls it a paradox.

He pointed to figures showing that in 1989 full-time employees worked an average of 39.9 hours a week; that has now risen to 42.2 hours. About a third of respondents to a survey were working between 50 and 59 hours a week. Mr McMullan suggested 26 million hours a week of work could be created (enough for about 700,000 full time jobs) if those people in full-time work reduced their hours to the earlier average. “”It is an absurd situation to have some many people wanting more work while many others with jobs want less work,” he said.

The trouble is that it is neither a paradox nor absurd. Rather it can be explained as a the result of thousands of quite rational responses to the economic, governmental and union environment.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader26nov work”

Federal Attorney-general Daryl’s Williams’s further explanation and fortification of the Federal Government’s position on free speech and its intervention in the Theophanous case is most welcome. Mr Williams has been branded anti-free-speech for saying he rejects the constitutional basis for the Theophanous position, namely that the Constitution carries an implication that there must be freedom of political communication and that state defamation laws must be read down accordingly.

Mr Williams said defamation laws should be made by elected parliaments and said he would urge the states to reform their laws and make them uniform. Media commentators rightly scoffed that the states had been trying to do this for 20 years without success.

Mr Williams, in a response to this criticism published in The Canberra Times on Saturday, has now given strong hints that unless the states do something, he will look at Commonwealth legislation, within the limits of Commonwealth power, to ensure there is greater freedom of political discussion.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader26nov williams”

The suggestion by ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries that there should be a minimum sentence for armed robbery may have some merit. However, the way he made the suggestion is regrettable. Mr Humphries made his statement after four robberies in Canberra in six days. It smacked of a knee-jerk reaction in a similar vein to statements made by NSW Premier Bob Carr every time there is a perceived, as distinct from real, rise in the rate of a particular crime.

The trouble with these sorts of responses is that they do little to prevent crime and nothing to catch criminals. They are financially cheap “”non-solutions”.

That said, Mr Humphries is entitled to express some exasperation at some of the sentencing practices for serious crime in the ACT Supreme Court. In a context in which the legislature has laid down a maximum penalty for armed robbery of 25 years’ imprisonment, the community would expect imprisonment of some kind even in the most mitigated circumstances. As it is a considerable number of people convicted of armed robbery get bonds.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader25nov robbers”

Pay television cables may not seem such a big issue, but it is certainly a symbolic one. They symbolise the ugly and stupid side of economic rationalism, the pursuit of competition for competition’s sake and the reduction of everything to dollar values.

Last week the Coalition backbench showed better sense than the leadership in dealing with the issue by defying Prime Minister John Howard and Communications Minister Richard Alston and continuing with a plan to levy phone calls to fund the placing of the cables underground.

That plan looks doomed following a compromise put by Senator Alston that will force Telstra and Optus to obey local planning laws, which will usually mean that they must go underground.

Over the past year or so the roll-out became vigorously competitive in the central areas of Sydney and Melbourne as both corporations saw the importance of grabbing market share early. It turned into a manic rush when Optus realised that it could deliver local phone services over these cables and erode Telstra’s monopoly in that area.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader25nov cables”