1997_12_december_yangtze

Along the Yangtze River every few kilometres upstream from Wuhan you can see ominous white squares with red Chinese characters high on the river bank.

They mark the future water level after the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

The Chinese leadership sees it as an engineering triumph to tame nature, stop floods that have killed 300,000 people this century and to generate 18,200 megawatts of electricity, equal to about 10 big coal-fired power stations or 50 million tonnes of coal a year. The 1.6km-long concrete wall and resulting 600-kilometre-long dam will be completed in 2009 and cost $30 billion.
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1997_12_december_vitab for forum

The various Australian TABs may not be out of the woods yet, despite the clearing of the air by this week’s VITAB inquiry. The TAB structure that enabled the VITAB scam is still in place and though one hole has been patched others might well appear.

If you go back to the 1960s there was a huge amount of illegal SP bookmaking. Under SP, the bookie set the odds at the time of the bet and if your horse won you got those odds. The skill of the bookmaker was to ensure that the totality of the odds he set combined with the likelihood of each horse winning gave him a return over time, perhaps as much as 15 per cent, but it was a competitive business.

Politicians tried to eradicate SP book-making by setting up state-based TABs. TABs worked differently. People put their bets on horses, but the odds or pay-out was not determined until after the race was won. All the bets on a race were added up (totalised) and paid to the winners, less a cut for administration, tax and to help the racing industry. That cut, typically, is 15 per cent with the remaining 85 per cent being paid in winnings.
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1997_12_december_vitab at a glance

The key elements of the VITAB scam were published in The Canberra Times in March 1994 within the limits of our restrictive defamation laws.

The article led to squeals of innocence from the then ACT Government and then ACT TAB board.

With the privilege of the Burbidge inquiry, and $5.5 million of taxpayers’ later, the scam can be outlined more bluntly. Here it is.
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1997_12_december_sly

Law firm Sly and Weigall has responded to the Burbidge inquiry saying that no one giving evidence to the inquiry criticised the handling of the matter by the firm and that Mr Burbidge had found that the firm had acted with integrity and propriety in acting for ACTTAB.

Mr Burbidge found, “”I find that the legal advice tendered by that firm did not lack any integrity of propriety.”

Mr Burbidge was critical of the firm for not providing material relating to a change of shareholding in VITAB without ACTTAB approval to senior counsel briefed to advise on what ACTTAB should do. However, Sly and Weigall said it did not accept this criticism as valid. It points out that Mr Burbidge himself found that the issue had been canvassed with senior counsel on July 15, 1994, before termination of the VITAB contract.

In any event, Mr Burbidge found that the failure did not cause any damage; that it was appropriate advice; and that ACTTAB, as advised by Sly and Weigall, had no choice but to settle and that a better result could not have been obtained.

In reporting on Mr Burbidge’s findings The Canberra Times suggested yesterday that Mr Burbidge had found that Mr Miller’s advice to ACTTAB fell short of what a competent solicitor would have provided and that his advice had been defective. Mr Burbidge did not make those findings.

Mr Burbidge found that from the perspective of four of VITAB principals, Kolomanski, McMahon, Bartholomew and Tripp, that the compensation payment should not have been received. But he did not find that the legal advice to pay VITAB as a company was defective. Rather, he found that ACTTAB had no choice but to settle.

The Canberra Times apologies to Mr Miller and Sly &Weigall for any embarrassment caused.

1997_12_december_media monitoring for forum

The symbiosis between politicians and journalists continues.

Government politicians spent more than $500,000 last financial year and departments spent more than $2 million in media clipping services. Some of that money will find its way into journalists’ pockets in the form of copyright fees because most of it was spent on photocopies and most journalists in Australia retain copyright for paper copies.

Politicians want to monitor what is being said about them in the media in the areas they administer so they can respond if necessary.
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1997_12_december_leader29dec year 2000

The Australian National Audit Office issued a timely warning last week that many Commonwealth agencies are not ready to deal with the Year 2000 problem that is likely top beset many computers around the world when the century ticks over.

The trouble is that computer programmers in the early days of computing in the 1950s used only a two-digit field for the year. They did this because computing memory space in those days was at a premium. They new it would cause a problem at the end of the century, but assumed that it would be fixed well before then. The trouble is that the two-digit programs have been used for source code for thousands of other programs. When the century ends and people put 00 in the date field, all sorts of unforeseen consequences could ensue. An example is the humble traffic light. Many lights are geared differently at weekends for different traffic flows. The first day of 1900 (year 00 in two-digit speak) was a weekday. The first day of 2000 is a Saturday, but a two-digit computer will treat it as a weekday.

Of course, security systems that work differently at weekends could also pose a problem. A computer that subtracts a birth year from the present year to get an age that will generate pension or other social security entitlements will go haywire with negative ages unless its year field is converted to four digits. Aircraft navigation systems could be affected. Indeed, there are few areas not affected in some way or other.
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1997_12_december_leader27dec road toll

Twenty months ago 35 people were shot dead by a gunman at Port Arthur in Tasmania. The nation was shocked. The state and federal governments swung into action. A new tax of 0.2 per cent was levied. And figures in this week reveal that more than 640,000 guns were handed in and destroyed. It cost $315 million, leaving $170 million over from the tax. Australia is a safer place. It is not immune from firearms violence, but the chances of multiple murders using automatic or semi-automatic weapons have been considerably lessened.

Despite the protests of the gun lobby, the buy back has been a great success and has changed the nation’s attitude to guns.

Compare the reaction to the Port Arthur massacre to the reaction to a greater carnage in Australia. This holiday more than 35 people have been killed and more than 10 times that injured on Australia’s roads. Each year more than 2000 Australians die and 20,000 are injured on the roads. Families grieve. The loss is immense, emotionally and economically.
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1997_12_december_leader20dec medicare

The renewal of the Commonwealth-State Medicare and hospitals agreement has degenerated into a fairly typical and predictable spat. The Commonwealth says it has increased hospital funding to the states in a fair and reasonable way and that any financial pressure is due to state incompetence and parsimony in running their hospitals. “”Mucked up,” were the words of Federal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge.

The states, on the other hand, say the Commonwealth has not maintained funds in the light of increased burdens flowing from past years’ drift in privately insured patients. “”Dudded,” was the word of Victorian Health Minister Rob Knowles. Nor has the Commonwealth, the states argue, increased funding in light of the aging population and increased medical technology. “”An insult to the health of Australian people,” were the words of the South Australian minister, Dean Brown.

The colourful language flying between members of at least nominally the same political flavour highlights the fundamental flaw in the Australian health-funding system. The Commonwealth politicians who raise the money have little say in how it is spent and the politicians who spend the money have little control on how much money should be allocated. It provides each side with an easy cop out. The states blame the Feds for not providing enough money and the Feds blame the states for misspending what they get.
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1997_12_december_leader13dec greenhouse

The upshot of the Kyoto climate-change conference puts Australia out on a limb. Australia is the only industrialised nation other than Iceland and Norway which is permitted to increase its greenhouse gas emissions (on a base of 1990). All other nations have undertaken to reduce theirs.

At first blush that is very disquieting. Australia is seen as the spoilt brat of the industrialised world. It seems as if every other country has given in to Australian demands just to get a unanimous agreement, so everyone can leave Kyoto feelings they have achieved something.

However, if the truth be known, it is not just Australia behaving in a selfish way. It is too simplistic to put each nation in a table of greenhouse-emission reductions on the 1990 base and assume that environmental effort is directly related to the percentage of reduction (or increase).
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1997_12_december_leader11dec vitab hawke

The ACT taxpayer has not come out of the VITAB affair very well. The report by Richard Burbidge QC into the payment of $3.3 million to the principals of VITAB by ACTTAB and the subsequent underwriting of that payment by the ACT Government makes sorry reading. The further $2 million or more lost in subsequent inquiries adds to the loss.

Essentially ACTTAB and the then Minister for Sport, Wayne Berry, and his Government were deceived into allowing the Vanuatu-based VITAB access to large pools of Australian gambling money on the basis that Asian punters would be gambling through Vanuatu. In fact, the scheme was really for Australian punters to bet through Vanuatu in a way that would yield them higher winnings that Australian punters because a cut of their winnings would not be paid to Australian racing clubs or state and territory treasuries, as happens with all bets that go through normal Australian TABs.

At the time ACTTAB bets were pooled through Victoria. The Victorian TAB very quickly saw the possibility of Australian punters betting through Vanuatu and threatened to sever its link with ACTTAB unless ACTTAB withdrew from the Vanuatu arrangement.
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