Month: April 1999

Flights to Cairns daily by major airlines.

Nimrod III (20m x 8m) leaves Cairns Tuesday afternoons arriving Lizard Island Saturday. Then depart Lizard for one-hour low flight over reef back to Cairns. (Or the trip can be done in reverse starting with the flight to Lizard on Saturday.) Four nights aboard (air con cabins). All meals. 10 or 11 dives with divemaster above or below. Diving gear $50 extra. Snorkellers and sight-seers welcome.

Property values and rates excite the interest of Canberrans more than any other news story.

Rates raise about $100 million, about a fifth of local revenue.

In the past five years there has been a debate about fairness of rating systems. One argument suggests that every household uses similar municipal services — two bins per house whether in Isaacs or Isabella Plains. The other argument is that those people who live in places where property values are high should pay more because they can afford it. That, in turn is countered by the argument that as people wishing to stay in the inner areas grow old, their income drops while their property values rise. High rates might force them out.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_rates analysis”

Ithink the world would be a better place without McDonald’s or Microsoft.

According to views put to courts on either side of the Atlantic, one sells food that is bad for you by youth who are exploited and the other abuses its monopoly position to force you to buy or use inferior computer software.

The court cases have the same genesis – an objection to excessive corporate power. They also have a similar cause – the law giving the large corporation far too much power in the first place. And in both cases this week the corporations had incremental losses.

But there are fundamental differences between the cases. In the McDonald’s case, the large corporation is suing two unemployed people who had the temerity to hand out leaflets outside a McDonald’s outlet. (I hesitate to use the word restaurant.) The leaflet contained a range of allegations, some of which were extravagant, such as that McDonald’s poisons people, and some of which were true of fair comment such as that McDonald’s food will contribute to heart disease and that it exploits children with its advertising.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_mclibel and microsoft”

The cry has gone out for minimum sentences in the ACT.

It comes after Justice Terence Higgins gave bonds to two heroin users who threatened a 73-year-old woman with a blood-filled syringe. They had been convicted of aggravated burglary.

But it is too easy to take an isolated case and make judgments without having the full facts as the judge does. And it is too easy to bay for blood.

So rather than use this one case, as MLA Paul Osborne did, to call for a crackdown and minimum sentences, I thought I would look at a range of cases to see if Justice Higgins is as lenient as this sentence exemplifies.

Guess what? He is.

The past two years of The Canberra Times has been electronically searchable. We report nearly all sentences in the Supreme Court. I have got the most recent 15 or so sentences we reported by Justice Higgins and Justice John Gallop.
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Aconference in Canberra last week was told of a “”crisis” in legal aid.

Don’t be fooled. There is no crisis in legal aid, but there is a more worrying trend which is only made worse by more legal aid.

Fortunately, the Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams has kept his head while all around bay for more money which, if past experience is any guide, will just go into a bottomless pit. The legal profession will absorb whatever funds are available and still call for more.

The “”crisis” is being viewed from the wrong angle. There is no crisis in legal aid. Rather there is a crisis in dispute resolution.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more expensive, time-consuming method of dispute resolution than the British system of justice. And the same can be said about determining guilt.

At the time of the conference a fraud trial in the ACT Supreme Court was stayed indefinitely because the accused could not get legal aid. This was cited as a symptom of the legal-aid crisis. Nonsense. You need to look at it the other way. It is because our system of trials is so long and complicated that they are too expensive for legal aid to fund.

Let us not increase legal aid. Let us reduce the complexity of criminal trials and let us use better systems than the adversary system to resolve disputes.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader30apr preamble”

In May 1977, an advisory referendum was held to determine Australia’s National Song. That referendum offered four choices; God Save the Queen, Advance Australia Fair, the Song of Australia and Waltzing Matilda. At the time there was no argument about the range of choice. What a pity a similar thing could not take place with this year’s republic and preamble referendums. The choice could be constitutional monarchy, elected president or indirectly president on the republic and on the preamble there could be a choice between Prime Minister’s Howard’s preamble and the model put up this week by Labor, the Democrats and the Greens (the LDG preamble), or no change.

Unfortunately, the Constitution does not permit a choice of results when putting a question for a change to the Constitution. It demands a simple Yes or No to a single proposition.

So we have an argument over what sort of preamble and what sort of republic with the result that we might get no change at all, even though opinion polls suggest that change on both counts is desired by a majority of people.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader30apr capital flows”

Treasurer Peter Costello made a timely warning about international flows of private capital at International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington this week. Mr Costello warned about money flowing “”across optic fibres in milliseconds in volumes that dwarf official flows, where the private sector is pumping much more capital into the economy that the government sector”. He argued for mechanisms that can seal with such a flow.

However, he did not give any details about what controls he would like to see. The major concern has been the speed with which capital can be withdrawn from economies that show evidence of falling performance. The concern is that the flight of capital makes the situation worse for the target economy. That was illustrated sharply in the past year in several Asian economies, particularly Indonesia. Indeed, a comparison can be made between the Asian economic crisis and that of the developed world in 1929 which was precipitated by the same mania for fear and greed which caused the Wall Street crash. Since 1929, developed nations have been able to institute some regulation and other mechanisms to prevent or at least ameliorate downward spirals of confidence.

It requires the exercise of sovereignty by governments. In the case of preventing another crisis like that which hit Asia a year ago, it might have to be a global exercise.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader29apr media ownership”

The chairman of John Fairfax Holdings Ltd, Professor Fred Hilmer, this week called the media ownership rules obsolete. Well, if he is not right now, he soon will be.

Converging technologies will make a mockery of the rules which prevent one person controlling a newspaper as well as a radio or television station in one market. There are also rules that prevent foreign control of television stations and a requirement for government approval of foreign investment generally which takes in investment in media. The reason for the rules is to ensure diversity of opinion and content and to ensure Australian culture does not get swamped. Another reason is to promote competition, but there is no reason why the promotions of competition in the media cannot be achieved in the same way as any other industry – via the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and independent statutory body that can act of its own volition irrespective of the view of the government of the day.

Professor Hilmer said a convergence of technologies was changing the face of the media industry and any reform needed to reflect the broader picture. “”IT is converging, telecommunications is converging, media is converging and in a proper model of competition policy it can’t look narrowly at one part of the market — media — but you’ve got to look at other markets and deregulation in all of the areas that may be affected, not just one piece.”
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader28apr bruce”

ACT taxpayers are entitled to a little more clarity on the question of funding the upgrade of Bruce Stadium. Questions arise on several fronts: legal, financial and political.

The Government argues as follows: It wanted to see an upgrade of the stadium so it could host Olympic soccer and other rugby and league games. This, it thought, would be beneficial to the territory, attracting visitors, money and jobs. It would cost, it estimated, $27 million. It thought that the public should put $12.3 million to the cost. It sought and obtained appropriation from the Legislative Assembly for that amount. The rest of the $27 million should come from the private sector. Rather than obtain the $15 million from the private sector upfront, the Government thought it would build first and get the private-sector commitment later.

Financially, that made some sense. There was no point raising money from the private sector and paying interest on it while construction went ahead. However, there was probably nothing to stop the Government organising private finance on a pay-as-you-build basis.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader28apr bruce”

Australians spent record amounts on gambling last year. They wagered $94.5 billion, or $6,835 per adult. They lost $11.3 billion, or an average of $818 an adult. This was up from $736 per adult the previous year.

Total government gambling revenue was more than $3.8 billion, a rise of more than $400 million.

It is a sad state of affairs. The real risk is that state and territory Governments will become hooked on the gambling revenue. Rather than imposing taxes as a means of discouraging gambling, the taxes have raised so much money that the states and territory governments cannot seem to do without it. So they encourage gambling and allow more forms of it.

The tragedy is that the burden falls on people with low income, those who can least afford it. Moreover, problem gamblers cause other social families which cost society.
Continue reading “1999_04_april_leader26apr gambling”