1998_03_march_trusts for forum

And just what is a trust — the vehicle with which Senator Warwick Parer has distanced himself (as Minister for Resources) and the ownership of shares which otherwise would be an obvious conflict of interest.

Trusts have been used in Anglo-Saxon law for centuries for a wide range of purposes, but always to avoid something nasty, like taxes, duties, the folly of youth, nosiness and costly administrative and legal farnarkling.

A trust is a legal arrangement, usually set down in a deed or a will. It comprises property, a trustee, beneficiaries and a duty on the part of the trustee to act for the benefit of the beneficiaries not himself.

The trustee (which may be a person or a company) appears for all intents and purposes to legal own the property. His name is on the share certificates, on the title deeds and on the registration papers.

So the property, for legal purposes, is sitting in the trustee’s name, and only the trustee has the legal power to collect the income or transfer the property. But if the trustee fails to do so for the benefit of the beneficiaries the beneficiaries can get the courts to dissolve the trust and order the trust to account for the property.
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1998_03_march_telstra double dissolution

Prime Minister John Howard has proposed that the legislation for the sale of the remaining two-thirds of Telstra have an operation date after the next election. He argues, quite reasonably, that the people will get a chance to judge the legislation and if his government is returned he will have a clear mandate for it. He could quite reasonably argue this, irrespective of whether the Senate passes the legislation now or rejects it.

If the legislation is on the table, it is hard for anyone to argue that an in-coming government has no mandate. It must, even in John Howard’s vocabulary, amount to a core promise.

This is all very well in practice, but in theory it runs in to a snag.

What if Howard wins the election and, as is very likely, does not get a majority in the Senate and the Senate continues to block the Bill? It would mean that despite the people’s imprimatur on the legislation (by re-electing the Government with that legislation in detail as a core promise), the legislation does not get enacted. It is a major flaw in our democracy.

It was suffered by Labor in the early 1970s and was the root cause of the 1975 supply crisis.

Howard’s Telstra tactic is politically sound. Indeed, he should apply it to tax reform (as suggested in this paper several weeks ago). But still it could be blocked by a recalcitrant Senate and the only way out of the deadlock that our Constitution provides is a double dissolution.
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1998_03_march_speech recognition

Typists can sleep easy for now.

The price of speech-recognition is certainly coming down, but the time and effort to make it work efficiently will bring most back to the keyboard.

Several years ago a senior executive I know who cannot type and will not learn to type got one of the first speech-recognition software packages. It cost several thousand dollars. He still calls for shorthand secretaries.

I have been trying IMSI’s latest offer of Dragon speech-recognition software. I retails for an astonishingly low $89.95, compared to prices a few years ago.

I found it too slow to be of practical use. Maybe because the software starts on the premise of an American accent which requires laborious re-education.

My “”Choose one” came up as Tucson (Arizona, that is). Text IMSI-Dragon typed from my speech contained an unacceptable error rate. Sure, the software provides easy correction which the software remembers so that the same utterance produces the new corrected word next time, but I found myself at first correcting virtually every word.
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1998_03_march_molonglo

The break-down of the Labor vote was as in Table Two.

The primary vote of the Labor candidates does not tell the full picture.

A likely scenario is:

Flaherty out. When he appears first on the Robson rotated ballot paper, Quinlan appears second, so Quinlan will get most of the preferences.

O’Keefe goes out next with the major preference flow to Garth on the same principle. Garth is now ahead of McMurtry who goes out next with the major preference flow to Quinlan. The Reilly goes out with the preference flow to Garth. Corbell then goes out.
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1998_03_march_molonglo result

The result in Molonglo was largely determined by the party-linear vote and the women’s vote.

The party linear vote is where voters mark one to seven down the Labor ticket, irrespective of the order the candidates might be on their ballot paper. Under the Robson rotation of the ballot paper each of Labor’s seven candidates got an equal chance at the top of the column with seven different batches of ballot papers being printed.

The order of candidates in each batch is important. The two smaller tables shows how they are printed.

It appears that about a third or 6500 of Labor’s 19,500 voters voted this way.

The women’s vote was about 4 per cent, but it was critical in keeping Marion Reilly ahead, causing Steve Garth to be excluded.

The women’s vote is where the voting favours a female candidate beyond what would ordinarily be expected.

The main reason that these two factors influenced the result so profoundly was that the seven Labor candidates were so close in the first place.
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1998_03_march_molonglo count 05mar

A cliff-hanger has developed for the second Labor seat in Molonglo.

A mere three votes separated sitting MLA Marion Reilly from Steve Garth at the end of the day’s counting yesterday.

The result is so close that Electoral Commissioner Phil Green ordered a recount of Ms Reilly’s and Dr Garth’s votes before moving to the next stage of the count which would be to exclude Ms Reilly who trails Dr Garth 5212 to 5209, after the distribution of other Labor candidates’ preferences.

The Greens’ Kerrie Tucker was officially elected third in Molonglo yesterday, behind the Liberals’ Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries.

Labor’s Ted Quinlan, Independent Michael Moore and Liberal Greg Cornwell are now assured of the remaining seats.

If errors are found in the recount, Mr Green will order a full recount of all the Labor vote before moving to the next stage.

Ms Reilly’s resurgence into contention appears to have come from a vote-for-women effect.
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1998_03_march_leader28mar carnell govt

The naming and reshaping of the ACT Government by Chief Minister Kate Carnell has some good elements and some disturbing ones. The timing, of course, was out of her control, but it is unfortunate that she has proposed a change to fundamentals of government before the Pettit inquiry into self-government has had a chance to report. However, the Self-Government Act sets down the election date, and the timing of setting in place a new government has been governed by that.

The fundamental change on offer is to change the relationship between the cross-benches and the executive. Mrs Carnell proposes several powerful executive committees each chaired by a member of the cross-bench. When the recommendations from the committee come to Cabinet, the chair of the committee gets a vote on it. Each committee chair will get some extra pay and extra staff. The offer has put Independent Michael Moore on the spot. He wanted a full ministry, but with the right to dissociate himself from Cabinet decisions outside his portfolio — real power without lots of independence and little over all responsibility. The new offer is almost the reverse — his independence will be compromised for very little power. Getting an occasional vote in Cabinet is a far cry from ministerial power which gives the holder discretion under many statutes to appoint people of choice to positions, to grant money to organisations of choice, to permit or refuse applicants to do certain things.

If Mr Moore, or Paul Osborne or Dave Rugendyke, take up the job, can they still call themselves “”Independent”. The other cross-bencher, Kerrie Tucker, as a Greens Party MLA is in a slightly different position. She was not elected on a platform of “”independence” but on one to pursue a quite detailed list of Green objectives. To keep faith with her electors, she is obliged to pursue those objectives in the way she sees as best. That may be on the cross-bench voting issue by issue or in loose coalition with the governing party. The latter is roughly what is on offer here.
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1998_03_march_leader26mar digital tv

The Government had a very difficult task in working out how to deal with digital television. There were many competing interests. Fortunately, the Government did not abdicate the whole matter to market forces. The market alone would be a fine regulator if there were unlimited space, no question of looking after viewers outside the big markets of Sydney and Melbourne, no issue of cultural identity or the general public interest in ensuring quality and diversity in the media.

The broadcast spectrum for television, radio and other signals is public property and should be rationed in the public interest. That does not mean it should all be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Essentially, the new digital technology allows much more to be transmitted on an existing seven megahertz channel. At present one analogue transmission takes up the whole channel. Moreover, it is not a very good signal. It comes with ghosting and other interference. A digital channel, on the other hand, could send various combinations of high-definition, enhanced-definition and standard-definition television and/or data transmission.

High-definition takes up 80 per cent of a 7MHz channel, enhanced takes about a third of a channel, standard about a fifth and data at the rate of 20 megabits per second would take a full channel. High- and enhanced-definition television can make use of wide-format sets with more detailed definition than present sets. Standard digital uses present format and definition but without ghosting. Existing TV sets would require a converter to receive digital signals.
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1998_03_march_leader23mar fiscal imbalance

The action by the state and territory premiers and chief ministers to walk out of the council of leaders conference on Friday and not talk about gun control was childish. If it was born of frustration at the fiscal inquality between the state and the federal level of politics, it as been as much of the states’ making as the Commonwealth’s. Ultimately the second-tier leaders will have to return to the table.

The central concern of the second-tier leaders has been health funding. The five-year Medicare agreement is up for renewal, and only the ACT has signed up. Very simply, the states want more money. They will not raise it themselves because they fear political backlash. They want the Commonwealth do carry the burden of raising the money while they seek the glory of spending it.

At present, there is a gross vertical fiscal imbalance. The Commonwealth raises about 70 per cent of public revenue, but spends only 50 percentage points of it. The rest it passes on to the states to spend, particularly in health and education. It means the states have no electoral responsibility for raising much of their revenue.
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1998_03_march_leader16mar fire bans

It has been a long, hot summer. This summer has seen quite a few days of total fire ban and for some reason it has also revealed quite a few absurd situations. Before Christmas, the bans snuffed out the candles at Candles by Candlelight and the flocks of participants watched by torchlight instead. As the season wore on, we found that not only could one not cook the proverbial egg on the asphalt in the heat, but that those charged with the task of up-grading white lines could not use burners to melt the old ones off first. More hot air arose on the issue with concern over the propane burners in Canberra’s scenic balloons. The thing reached the level of a diplomatic incident when complaints were made that fires were burning at the Aboriginal Embassy outside old Parliament House, despite the ban. The eternal argument continued yet further last week with a suggestion that the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier might be in breach of the total fire ban.

One can only hope that the weather change that came over the region at the weekend brings a cooler approach. One can only speculate as to why this summer brought on testiness. Perhaps there is a growing legalism in society which puts strict adherence to the rules above common sense. Perhaps there was a concern among politicians and administrators of repercussions if they put common sense over the strict letter of the law.

It shows, however, that the law should make greater use of broad discretions rather than attempt to foresee every situation or impose total rigid bans, provided, of course, that the discretion can be exercised, in matters as trivial as an exemption from a fire ban, without expensive appeals to courts

Sometime before next summer, a flexible administrative arrangement should be put in place so the chief fire office can exempt some activities in some places. That may allow candles and ceremonial fires on the lush lawns of the inner city, but not allow flame on roads near tinder-box grasslands.