Month: September 1998

Gazumping is back in the ACT property market.

It is a pernicious and frustrating practice.

It happens like this. I tell a real estate agent I want to buy an advertised house for, say, $250,000. He contacts the sellers who verbally agree. I then go off and get building and surveying reports and line up my finance. This takes a lot of time and money. Meanwhile another buyer sees the advertisement and offers $260,000. The agent is required to tell the seller. He could be sued if he did not. The sellers then accepts this offer.

The agent might come back to me and we have a de-facto auction, or the new buyer might have cash and not care about survey and building reports. So I get gazumped.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_gazumping”

The flu, like the bubonic plague, can be a great leveller. We ALL fall down, as the gruesome nursery rhyme from the plague years recites. A few smug people in our office have not succumbed, but others have had their first sick day in decades. It is real flu, not cold snuffles that people call the flu. The worst is the aching joints and gruesome headaches.

Usually a bout of real flu in the town will bring on the soothsayers. One day the Spanish flu will return, they say. This was the pandemic (world wide) immediately after World War I that killed more people than the war itself. About 20 million people died, more than in any outbreak of disease before or since. Even the plague in the 14th century killed fewer, though it killed a much greater proportion of the population.

Maybe they are right.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_flu for forum”

The ACT is to go-it-alone with defamation law reform after two decades of failure of Australia-wide efforts.

ACT Attorney-General Gary Humphries is to make public an issues paper today.

Mr Humphries has deliberately shied away from a blanket approach, preferring to deal with pressing matters in stages. The paper argues that at present only the very rich can afford to use defamation law to get redress against publications that affect reputation and that large damage awards years after the publication is not the best remedy.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_defo reform”

Even now, 33 years later, members of my family still feel the effects.

We were travelling home from school from Albury to Beechworth. My

mother usually drove, but she allowed an 18-year-old lad who

occasionally travelled with us to drive.

It was a Y intersection. Nowadays it is laced with give-way signs and

traffic islands. Then it was unmarked.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_crashes for forum”

Sport and charity get of less than quarter of the money available to them from poker machine revenue, according to a report delivered to ACT MLAs last night.

The other three-quarters goes to club member benefits and political donations.

And the money available for donation is just 11 per cent of net poker machine revenue. So sport and charity are getting 2.7 per cent of net poker machine revenue, and just 0.23 per cent of money that gets put into the machines.

Sport and charity get just $2.2 million of the $950 million that go through the machines in a year. They get a further $540,000 in kind from the clubs.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_club money”

Casino has applied for a licenced club licence. Will not be separated from casino just an imaginery line with pokies on one side, rest of casino on the other.

Qbn Leagues club have approved 100 machines for Gungahlin do not need them for a year… lend to casino as a joint venture.

Casinos Austria biggest donor to Liberal Party.

Continue reading “1998_09_september_casino”

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has trouble with language. And it could cost him the election.

It was more noticeable on Sunday night when we had prolonged exposure it. His good points got lost on me. And I am intently interested in political debate. Most of voters he is chasing are not.

On Sunday night Beazley was high on the fog index. He is usually that way. This is not because he uses big words. It is because he uses long sentences. These sentences require people to hold clauses in their brain while they wait for the rounding of the idea at the end of the sentence.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_beazley’s speaking habits”

Access to the Ayers Report review of the Australian Federal Police has been denied to The Canberra Times by the Federal Government.

The Canberra Times sought access to the report under the Freedom of Information Act.

A delegate of the secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department ruled that the report was exempt as a Cabinet document.

The report was commissioned by the Government in February. It came after the Government blocked the ACT heroin trial and said it would review the resources of the AFP to see if more were needed to fight drug crime.
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The Democrats are dreaming if they think they can get the second ACT Senate seat.

History and the system are against them.

The quota for a seat is 33.3 per cent plus one vote. (Because if two candidates get one third of the vote plus one each, there are not enough votes left for anyone else to get more than either of them.)

The Liberals have got the quota on first preferences in every election since ACT Senate positions were created in 1975 except in 1984 when they fell 1.4 per cent short. They very quickly got this on preferences. The ACT usually records the lowest Coaltion vote of any state or territory, but the second Senate seat is still almost guaranteed.
Continue reading “1998_09_september_act senate democrats”