Month: September 1997

CHRISTINE receives the blind pension. She was about to begin a tertiary degree course so she rang the Department of Social Security and asked about what help she could get. None, they said.

Christine struggles on with the blind pension and shoulders the extra burden herself while doing the first year.

She then discovers she would have been eligible for the pensioner education supplement which would have been worth $1290.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_travel rorts”

There are now three Canberras.

For two decades Canberrans have watched the employment needle edge towards a majority in the private sector rather than the public sector. That milestone was passed, but still people see the town as having two elements: a public sector and a private sector. A lot of stereotypes and assumptions about people were made on the basis of whether they worked in the private or public sector, or came from a household where the main earnings came from those sectors. It tended to brand them.

Public-sector employees were branded as clock-watching, tea-drinking socialists with no sense of reality in their secure jobs. Private-sector employees got branded as uncaring profit-chasers and tax avoiders.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_three canberras polling”

The call of “”let’s have a referendum” on self-government was made at this week’s National Capital Futures conference.

An initial reaction might be what a waste of money; it would prove nothing; the Feds would not change anything anyway; people would just vote no; democracy is a duty, like it or not; and so on.

On reflection, though, a referendum with the next election would be very helpful. A referendum creates an enormous stamp of legitimacy (and conversely, illegitimacy) on something. It is a legitimacy that far transcends what elected politicians do, even if the matter is specifically covered in their platform, as self-government was in federal Labor’s 1983 platform.
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Support for a republic is higher in the ACT, at around 60 per cent, than it is in the rest of the country, according to the latest Datacol-Canberra Times opinion poll.

The poll was part of a major survey of voting intentions and social opinions. Details of voting intention for next February’s ACT election will be published tomorrow.

National support is about 54 per cent, according to the latest Newspoll.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_republic poll”

We got another dose of John Howard followership this week.

The theory is that we elect representatives not only to implement what a majority of people might want but also because the business of government is too difficult or time-consuming for the masses to be up to speed on every issue.

And people are not up to speed on tariffs. A poll by the Australian Business Chamber said 85 per cent of people would happily pay higher prices to protect jobs and that they believed that higher tariffs protected jobs.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_referendums to resolve double dissolution”

No-one seems chastised in the slightest by the comprehensive shambles of Australian government pay television policy over the past decade.

Every other developed country has virtual saturation pay TV coverage. Australia’s pay TV is piecemeal except in some affluent pockets of capital cities where there are two services.

The appalling policy has resulted in huge losses to Optus and Telstra that one way or another will be paid for by the Australian community. Last week Telstra wrote down $800 million in pay TV losses and Optus wrote down $400 million. It brought Australia’s accumulated pay TV losses to $3 billion. Never mind, the losses can be off-set by milking the Australian public through higher-than-necessary telephone charges.
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Kate Carnell will not be Chief Minister after the February election, according to the latest Canberra Times-Datacol opinion poll, even though she herself is popular with the voters.zzz

The poll shows that the Liberal vote has collapsed in all three electorates since the last election, though is up to five percentage points higher in Molonglo than in the other seats, probably due to Mrs Carnell’s personal popularity.zzz

A large number of voters, about 25 per cent, are undecided. But that is less than at a similar time before the previous election.zzz
Continue reading “1997_09_september_opinion poll”

The only way the ACT could get majority government at the next election would be for Kate Carnell to lead the Labor Party.

That seems to be the message from the latest Canberra Times Datacol poll.

The Liberal Party will lose one seat in each electorate, according to the poll. But their leader is well-liked. On the 1 to 5 scale she is a 3.0, higher than any other MLA but Paul Osborne who is on 3.15. She is preferred as Chief Minister over Wayne Berry by 12 percentage points, and has an approval rating of 53 per cent against Berry’s 38.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_oped on poll”

Motorists should not get too excited by last week’s ruling by Justice Terence Higgins of the ACT Supreme Court that police evidence about speed using a laser device was no more valid than that from the driver’s speedometer.

The driver asserted that he was doing the 80km/h speed limit, not the 101km/h asserted by the police on the basis of the laser device. The driver’s passengers backed him up.

Justice Higgins ruled that the court was not entitled to take for granted the accuracy of the laser equipment in the face of the driver’s uncontested evidence from his speedometer. In addition the driver was with a group of cars which may had added an element of doubt about whether the right car was targeted.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_leader29sep speed laser checks”

Police officers hold a special position in our society. They exercise considerable power, both by dint of law and by mere presence with back-up. The public looks to its police force as protector and law enforcer for the benefit of all in society. They are indeed the thin blue line.

People who take up a career in policing usually enter the force with some very high ideals — of upholding the law and protecting law-abiding citizens against the lawless. Those ideals should be nurtured.

In order to nurture those ideals, those who head the police force must not only lay down the highest standards for those in the force, but also put in place the means of enforcing those standards. We have seen in the past in Queensland and NSW the corruption of those ideals, partly through a failure to enforce standards. Since then police forces have rightly required tigher scrutiny of police officers in order to ensure standards are met.
Continue reading “1997_09_september_leader26sep police urine”