Month: February 1997

After every by-election, political leaders and winning and losing candidates spin the result to extract the best interpretation of it for themselves. The result of the by-election in the Federal seat of Fraser on Saturday was no different. The comments of all must be taken with many grains of salt.

Defeated krypto-Liberal Cheryl Hill blames Labor dirty tricks over the distribution of out-dated pamphlets depicting her as still a member of the Liberal Party. However, very few people read these pamphlets and even fewer take the slightest notice of them.

Victorious Labor candidate Steve Dargavel has claimed an eight per cent swing to Labor on a two-party preferred basis. This is twaddle. For a start, there was no Liberal candidate, so the phrase “”two-party preferred” is more a psephologist’s artifice than an expression of voter opinion. Secondly, Mr Dargavel’s joy that the two-party-preferred litmus paper turned red on the night ignores the fact that many voters had a far more vinegary view of Labor when the first-preference litmus paper is viewed. Half the electorate gave their first preference to non-Labor candidates. And this came after the Government’s honeymoon was over and after the Government had targeted Canberra with extensive public-service cuts that affected the economic well-being and general security of virtually every elector in the seat.

The Liberals’ Andrew Robb made more of Labor failings rather than what the result indicates about the Howard Government or maintaining a decent silence given his party did not field a candidate. The Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, attempted very poorly to extrapolate the Fraser result to feelings about the Howard Government in regional Australia generally. In fact, in so far as the return of the two-party preferred vote to Labor means anything, John Howard could quite reasonably put it down to an isolated regional response based on a single issue _ public service cuts _ which might has far less relevance Australia-wide. Mr Robb was probably exaggerating the picture to suggest the people of Canberra had accepted the need for the cuts imposed by the Government, and the Liberals would be naïve to think that any group of people in Australia relying on the public sector will be forgiving.

The political question for the Liberals is whether applause for large public-sector cuts will out-weigh any protest that sounds in the ballot box. The wider, and more important question, is for the Government to understand the needs of Australians and acknowledge that many of these can only be met in the public sector, even if when it came to office there was room for greater efficiencies in the public sector and there was no need for the public-sector to be as large as it was. The voters probably acknowledge that, but they will also tells governments, including this one, what the limits are, and governments that fail to listen do so at their peril.

An interesting aspect of the by-election was how the hostility to the major parties expressed itself. The Greens could be pleased with their result. The various right-wing, Christian and anti-multi-cultural minor parties were given short shrift by the voters. However, a pro-multi-cultural independent, Alice Chu, has done exceptionally well with 8 per cent of the vote. That should make both major parties fearful about the next ACT Assembly vote. On that vote, Ms Chu would have a good chance of getting a seat under the Hare-Clark system, in addition to the Green.

The message from Saturday’s poll is that voters want the major parties to present better candidates (indeed, a candidate at all) and policies in tune with their needs, and if they do not, they will turn to independents and minor parties.

Voters in the seat of Fraser go to the polls today in what might be described as one of the most superfluous by-elections in the history of the Australian federation. Fraser is one of the safest Labor seats in the country. It has returned a Labor member at every election since it was created in the mid-1970s. The proverbial white rabbit would win the seat for Labor. And once won, the successful member will only hold the seat for the two years to the next election when it will be almost inevitably be abolished because the ACT’s population growth is lower than other parts of Australia making the population fall below the quota needed to keep three seats.

At the last election, Cheryl Hill, the then endorsed Liberal managed to cut Labor’s margin from 12 per cent to 7 per cent in the swing that brought John Howard to power in what must have been the most favourable environments for Liberal success. Seven per cent is a significant margin. But since the March election the Liberals have continued Labor’s policy of cutting public service numbers at an even faster pace and so are less popular than they were 10 months ago.

The Liberals have seen the writing on the wall and are not even running a candidate. Instead, Mrs Hill, who resigned from the Liberal Party in protest at public-service cuts, is standing as an independent. In the absence of an endorsed Liberal she is trying to put herself forward as the acceptable face of conservatism in Canberra. Even if she picks up the traditional Liberal vote, it is difficult to see her winning the seat.

Despite the inevitability of a Labor win, the by-election has attracted 11 candidates. It has also attracted the interest of the federal Labor leadership which wants the electorate to send a clear message to John Howard. Mrs Hill, too, wants the electorate to send a clear message to Mr Howard and to Labor.

It is unlikely that either wish will be granted. Rather the message voters send to the leaders of the major parties will be confused. The confused message will arise because of the impossibility of determining why people vote in a certain way. A vote for Labor might be more easily read as a protest against public-service cuts and government policy in general rather than an endorsement of the way Kim Beazley is running the Opposition or an endorsement of the qualifications and ability of Labor’s candidate. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for the argument that the Democrats have presented a much more forceful and coherent Opposition to the Howard Government than Labor has. A vote for Mrs Hill might more easily be read as a plague on both your houses, rather than an endorsement of Mrs Hill’s capacity to represent Canberrans as an independent. It might also be read as a protest that John Langmore, elected for a three-year term, left for a UN job after one. There again, any reduction in the Labor vote could be read merely as the drift of Mr Langmore’s personal vote, which must be significant for a long-serving member.

All that said, voters should take their responsibility seriously. There is a danger that a significant swing back to Labor will cause the Government to be even more convinced that Canberra is not worth any sympathy. On the other hand it might also serve as a warning that that sentiment is not confined to Canberra.

The Kickstart scheme is a tiny drop in the great scheme of government, but it is a great example of confusion and inconsistency in government objectives.

We often wonder whether the left hand of the government knows what the right hand is doing. But it seems the complexity of government is such that it is more a question of whether the seventh tentacle knows what the eighth tentacle is doing.

Last Budget, the ACT Government changed the Kickstart scheme and those changes have come under fire in the past week.
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The tussle between executive and judicial power, normally fought on the high plain of human rights, is now being tested by the apparently trivial issue of judges’ superannuation.

But Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams is rightly treading very gingerly on the question of the way the 15 per cent tax on the superannuation of high income earners will apply to judges.

The trouble is that the Constitution says: “”The Justices of the High Court and of the other courts created by the Parliament shall receive such remuneration as the Parliament may fix; but the remuneration shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.”
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Queensland Premier Rob Borbidge, outraged at the Wik decision, launched a curate’s egg attack on the High Court last week. It was good in parts, and bad in parts. More importantly, like the curate’s egg simile, the points he made were not very new. But in general it was a muddled attack that grasped at any point to discredit Mabo and Wik or anything that curtailed state power, however contradictory those points were.

Borbidge’s attack was that High Court judges are appointed in secret by the Federal Government; that they virtually are unaccountable for their judgments; that they imply things in the Constitution that are not there; that recently the court has gone on a jaunt making up law rather than stating it; that this follows a line of centralist judgments favouring federal power over states rights; and that these trends have undermined the rule of law.

Oddly, enough one of the first and most tellingly accurate accusations that High Court judges imply things in the Constitution that are not there was an attack on those judges between 1903 and 1920 who mysteriously implied states rights in the Constitution that were not stated in the words.
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PRIVATE health insurers came in for a pasting last week. In a submission to the Productivity Commission they recommended something called “”managed care”.

The doctors, nurses, community groups and virtually everyone else denounced the idea. They said it was a horrible US intrusion that would prevent patients from getting the best care. That may be true of some managed care, but it should not be dismissed out of hand.

Managed care is where the private fund takes over the control of a patient’s care for what the health boffins call an episode. The patient pays nothing, but the fund can determine who will be the health providers and, up to a point, what sort of treatment.
Continue reading “1997_02_february_health forum”