Month: August 1997

Yesterday, I strolled around The Canberra Times office asking people if they had any $100 notes.

I was greeted with good-humoured derision.

“”Try the managing director and other executives,” some said.
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The Commonwealth Government and the High Court came very close this week to accepting the Nuremberg defence over the stolen generation.

The Nuremberg defence was broadly that “”we were following orders and what we did was at the time lawful under the laws of Germany”.

Comparisons with Nazi Germany are usually hyperbole and nearly always odious. I am making a comparison in legal thinking, not in the enormity of the offence. In dry jurisprudential terms it is a debate between legal positivism and natural law.
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This week Senator Brian Harradine drew attention to Section 128 of the Constitution _ the one that sets out the way the Constitution can be amended.

Senator Harradine is a stickler for reading the words of documents quite precisely. And he is politically very astute. That is why he keeps getting elected as an Independent senator for Tasmania.

The general, woolly perception is that the section goes something like this. “”Federal Parliament passes a law describing how the Constitution is to be changed, laying out the precise words. The proposal then goes to the people for a referendum and must be approved by a majority of people in a majority of states.”
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It may be worth contrasting what has happened in the media that the Government has regulated: broadcast, pay TV and print (via foereign ownership and cross-ownership rules) with the two media that it has not regulated or not been able to regulate: video and the internet.

Video can be likened to a pay-TV movie channel. It has not been touched by government regulation. Result. Hundreds of highly competitive outlets offering abundant choice to consumers at highly competitive prices.

The Intenet. On the content side there are hundreds of Australian sites and thousands of foreign ones. On the carrier side, there are hundreds of Internet service provides. Once again they offer large choice at very competitive prices.
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Microsoft Office tells me it has an Australian dictionary. It doesn’t. It has an American dictionary that it calls Australian English. When you do a spellcheck it highlights -our and -ise words as errors and offers -or and -ize as suggested corrections. You are better off using the British English dictionary.

A solution is on the way; but not here yet.

The Macquarie dictionary (which has been out of CD for some time) now comes in a compact form for hard disk (5mb) and integrates with existing word processors, especially MS Word. It creates a button on the toolbar which accesses the meaning of the word the cursor is on.
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It was the weekend after the over-turning of the world’s first voluntary euthanasia law. Twynam is Australia’s third-highest mountain, near Kosciusko, but that is of no moment to this story. And I am afraid that this is a story of great pain and despair, though tempered by times of great hope and happiness. My wife, Lynne, and I first climbed Twynam on cross-country skis in October 1992 after being driven back by blizzard or rain on two earlier occasions. It was a brave triumph for Lynne.

Four years earlier she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In 1988 Lynne had the lump cut out and then every work day for a month she went to the hospital for radiation treatment — lying on a bench being zapped from several directions, getting up, getting dressed and going to work as if nothing happened. It was followed by a week’s intensive radiation treatment. Four tubes were sewn through her breast and in each tube were granules of radioactive iridium. Her hospital bed was behind a lead shield behind which I talked to her when I visited.

Then, for Lynne, it was gone. But I had voraciously read the medical journals at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. Later it was to be the Internet. Volumes of information pointing in one inevitable direction, better left unspoken or communicated selectively — painfully so, for my working life at least was dedicated to the principle that information brought knowledge and knowledge brought wisdom and a more fulfilling life. Not so.
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Those pariahs of the mainstream, Green Senator Bob Brown and Independent Senator Brian Harradine have behaved with much more maturity and principle on the republic than the establishment politicians of the Liberal, Labor and Democrat Parties.

At first the Liberals seemed content to hand the issue to Senator Nick Minchin to run as a private plaything to give his pet hobby horse of voluntary voting a trial gallop. Alternatively, it hoped that the side-effect of insisting on this off-beat voting system would be that the convention would not get off the ground so the issue could be abandoned.

Labor and the Democrats, on the other hand, seemed determined to stymie the Government’s republican convention, supposedly on the ground of their high-principled objection to voluntary voting, but more likely to ensure that they could go into the next election with the republican issue running hot and them the only parties to deliver on it.
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Health Minister Michael Wooldridge was naively optimistic when he said last week that the exodus from private health cover was over. The Private Health Insurance Administration Council announced that 91,000 people dropped their private cover in the three months to June, on top of the 100,000 who left health funds between January and March. The level is now 31.9 per cent of the population compared to 62.8 per cent in 1983.

Dr Wooldridge’s response was, “”So effectively what’s happened today draws a line under the sand of 10 to 15 years of inactivity in private health care,” he said. “”It’s all on from here.”

This is political doublespeak of the kind heard so frequently in the Keating years when bad economic and other news was spun into yarn of completely opposite meaning.
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A three-month trial of a 50km/h speed limit will begin in Queanbeyan and some other NSW centres soon. The ACT has said it will watch the trial carefully.

It is a pity we have to wait for a trial when the case for a reduction is so clear. Alas, it seems necessary to prove that the laws of physics apply in each and every country, state, province and territory. That proof has to be demonstrated mainly to politicians — who fear the vote-changing wrath of the minority who vigorously oppose speed reductions — rather than the broad mass of people who generally approve speed-limit cuts.

Sixty-two per cent of Australians agree that the limit should be lowered, according to a Federal Office of Road Safety survey. The people most in favour of the same or a higher limit are those aged 15 to 24 — the very people involved in the highest proportion of accidents.
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