Month: April 1999

Decision time for the GST is drawing dear. No doubt there will be a number of unforeseen consequences which will require fixing after the event. All the modelling and Senate inquiries in the world will not be able to fully predict human behaviour and the introduction of a new tax will inevitably affect economic behaviour which will in turn affect the impact of the tax. The Government has made the obligatory promise that no-one will be worse off. The promise is obligatory because in modern politics every interest group is capable of squealing disproportionately to any inconvenience change might bring. The promise is silly because inevitably such a major change cannot be beneficial to everyone. So the promise must be taken with a grain of salt.

Of more importance is the question of whether the tax changes overall will on balance be beneficial. The answer to that question is almost certainly yes. Australia must change its tax mix. It must broaden it to include services and it must tax the act or consumption more and the acts of wealth generation, like income and employment, less.

The last days of Senate hearings were taken up with the question of compensation for pensioners. As the Government had made a separate promise that the pension would reach 25 per cent of average weekly earnings, any compensation would get absorbed in that and they would be no better off under the GST. Indeed they would be worse off because their pension would not buy as much if food were taxed. This may be so. The answer would be to increase the pension promise a few percentage points to account for the GST, so that the pension would be 27 or 18 per cent of weekly earnings.

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The offer by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to take 4000 refugees from Kosovo on its face was a better response than the initial response that that decision reversed made by the Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock who had said Australia would take no refugees.

Australia should have responded with more generosity than what Mr Ruddock’s original announcement contained.

Nonetheless, later events have revealed that, in at least one respect, Mr Ruddock had a better feel for the situation than his Prime Minister. Mr Howard put a strong caveat on the Australian offer. The refugees were to be given visas for just three months and that there would be special legislation to ensure that the refugees could not get permanent residence. Apparently, there was some fear that there might be a repeat of events after Tienanmen (CHECK SPELLING) Square when 20,000 Chinese refugees in Australia got extension to visas which ultimately resulted in permanent settlement.
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The image of the rusty, 40m, red-and-white fishing aground on a northern NSW beach is a symbol of embarrassment, even incompetence, for the authorities that are supposed to be responsible for the security of Australia’s coastline. It is one thing for the odd boatload of illegal immigrants to land on the remote north coast, or even for one to land in the less remote coast just north of Cairns as one did a couple of weeks ago. It is quite another matter for one to land, as this one did, in northern NSW. How did it slip through?

As the Opposition immigration spokesman on immigration, Con Sciacca, said, it is incomprehensible that a boat with more than 100 people on board could travel more than 2000km down the Australian east coast without detection.

But before the Opposition works itself into too much of a lather about the matter, it must remember that it has been an disciple, if not a major architect, in Australian naval defence strategy that is seeing us spend millions of dollars on new long-range submarines that will form part of the policy of forward defence and integration with US defence strategies while a rust bucket with illegal immigrants aboard can motor with immunity on to a tourist beach right next to a coastal township.
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The hopes for a peaceful political settlement in East Timor after 24 years turmoil are now in jeopardy. Everything will now depend on the actions of at least nine key interests: five external and four internal.

The Indonesian Government, has at last recognised that the province is a huge economic burden. In 1975, faced with the possibility of a radical communist enclave in its midst was determined to annexe the province as its own. With the demise of the Cold War that threat evaporated. With the departure of President Suharto the last emotional and face-facing reasons for keeping the province fell away. President Jusuf Habibe prudently decided to allow the province to go its own way.

However, it is not as simple as that from the Indonesian point of view. The Indonesian Army does not necessarily think on all fours with the Indonesian Government. It is generally in favour of territorial integration. Ultimately it will go along with the Habibe Government, but it will be reluctant and wherever possible will push its own integrationist agenda. It is a worrying force.
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The Victoria Premier Jeff Kennett has asserted that the Federal Government is guilty of a bias in favour of Sydney, and NSW in general.

Notice he did not say “”Canberra” is showing a bias towards Sydney and NSW, for it would have been absurd. On this isolated occasion when a state Premier is blaming the Federal Government for something, the metonymy “”Canberra” was not used. Australians can only hope the bias is a passing fad caused by the Olympics and the fact the Prime Minister is from Sydney and still resides there. But the Games will come and go and the next Prime Minister is most like to come from either Perth or Melbourne and the blessing of distance will require him to live in Canberra.

The popular view of history is that Canberra was created to resolve the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, so that neither would dominate the new federation. However, there is another element to this. The people of Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland wanted neither Sydney nor Melbourne to be capital. They wanted a neutral capital that could dispense national priorities without bias to any state.
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The response by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock to the Kosovo crisis was quite inadequate and lacked the generosity that has marked Australia’s response to earlier crises in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

At the time he made the announcement it seemed a little out of character for Mr Ruddock who has usually taken a small-l liberal position in the Howard Government — a position that has become far too rare in the Liberal Party since the demise of the Fraser Government.

Fortunately, the Prime Minister himself has stepped in to change Mr Ruddock’s position that Australia would adopt a wait-and-see position and in the meantime not offer to take any refugees from the Balkans.
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The potato cods are gentle giants. And inquisitive. Some weigh more than 50 kilograms, which almost as much as some of the scuba divers diving among them.

They were more fascinating than unnerving. Creatures under the sea have far more to fear from humans than humans have from them. (More of that anon.) The only reason to move away is because we might hurt the cod rather than they hurt us. The poor cod can develop ulcers if humans touch them because touching can strip away their protective mucus cover and leave them exposed to infection and ulcers.

The potato cod is not common on the reef, except at one or two places, notably the Cod Hole, out from Lizard Island, north of Cooktown. The Cod Hole is one of the best diving places on the reef.

The cod are more than inquisitive. They know that divers mean food. The diving tours are allowed to feed them under strict guidelines so that they don’t become dependent. As soon as we enter the water the cod gather around and follow us like silent sheep following a farmer with feed.

The silence of the reef is only broken by breath and bubbles. Stop breathing and there is no sound, a least at first. Then as the quiet makes your hearing more acute you can hear parrot fish using their hard (beak-like) front teeth crunching into the reef. For them it is food. The silence makes sight more acute, too. Yellow, orange, red and green. The best is at night. Then the parrot fish find crevices in the reef in which to sleep, covering the entrance with white fibrous mucus to protect themselves from predators without.
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