Month: June 1999

The ACT Government plans to overhaul workers’ compensation in the private sector. It says that it will cut costs by between 10 and 17 per cent, which would be passed on in the form of lower premiums to employers.

The Minsiter for Urban Services, Brendan Smyth, has issued a discussion paper on his plans. Some of the proposals have great merit. Others are merely cost-shifting. Others take away existing rights without much justification. Overall, the proposals are driven more by saving costs in the short-term than anything else.

At present, compensation claims against employers take two forms. The first are common-law claims. These require proof of negligence on the part of the employer. Upon that proof, the worker gets full damages for loss earnings, loss of earning capacity, loss of the amenities of life and pain and suffering. Employers are also generally liable for the negligence of other employees.
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Northern Ireland is getting closer to peace. That statement sounds odd in the face of the weekend’s events, with an impasse over the peace process and confrontation between Catholics and Protestants at Dumcree. But in the past five years a European influence in Ireland, both north and south, is having a slow but profound effect. That European influence, through the European Union, has been delivering a message of peaceful co-existence and co-operation between people of different religions and languages. The other message has been to highlight the price of failure to engage in dialogue and co-operation: the Somme, the Holocaust and more recently Kosovo.

The new European message is one of multi-party dialogue and importance of engaging many community leaders, rather than allow events to be shaped by one or two individuals.

In Ireland the days of the dominance of political events by one or two individuals is over. So, too, are the days of bombing and widespread religious intolerance. The main reason for these developments has not been solely due to Anglo-Irish peace programs. Rather the people of Ireland have seen peaceful co-existence of different racial, religious, national, political and linguistic groups in Europe in places where hitherto there has been blood. They have also seen the barriers between Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom and the Republic or Ireland come down as a requirement of their respective membership of the European Union.
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The strife the ACT Government is in over the Bruce Stadium is more political than legal. And the consequences are more likely to be political rather than legal. However, the political and legal issues have become intertwined. Moreover, questions of public perception will be ultimately more important than legal niceties.

The public perception is probably as follows: the Government set out to upgrade Bruce stadium in late 1996 at a cost of $27 million. The Government would put in $12.3 million and the private sector would put in the rest. The public probably presumed that the public and private money would go in concurrently as the stadium was constructed and that after construction the private-sector partners would get reasonable profits.

The stadium would be suitable for Raiders and Brumbies games and Olympic soccer which would be great for the territory.
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Where is the threat? At present the Department of Defence has several big procurements of quesitonable value in sight. It has got one fiasco in the making in hand. And it has several under its belt which can only be decribed as monumental wastes of money. Meanwhile, refugee boats arrive on our shore undetected.

The fiasco in the making is the six new Collins class submarines that will replace the Australian Navy’s long-serving Oberons. The Collins has major problems — an incomplete combat system and excessive noise. These will cost more than $1 billion to fix, perhaps as much at $2.5 billion. That would bring the total cost to $7.5 billion. For that we could have bought twice the number of the British Upholder-class submarines. The British submarines have the same theoretical capability as the Collins with none of the practical problems.

Some questions must be answered about the original order which was made in 1987, during the Hawke Government while the present Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, was Minister for Defence.
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“”The media will get you in the end, comrade.”

The words of the Great Gough.

Kate Carnell is probably thinking along similar lines now, though she is probably slightly more optimistic.

Nothing excites political journalists more than the prospect of a ministerial (or prime ministerial or chief ministerial) scalp. A leadership challenge comes a very close second (or even equal first) and an early election comes a third.

It is as true on the big house on the hill as the little house in London Circuit as it is in the shire council in Pearl Bay. It cannot be put down to the Australian cut-down-the-tall-poppy syndrome. It happens in the UK and the US, too. And it goes back a long way. Witness the Prufumo (chk sp) scandal in Britain in 1963.

More recently, witness the pursuit of ministers in the Howard Government.
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The High Court has been flexing its judicial muscle recently, most recently this week.

So what’s new? Courts are supposed to flex judicial muscle.

The newness in the approach of the late 1990s is an insistence on constitutional purity, almost to hell with the consequences, and a more rigorous view of the separation of powers with a more powerful role for the High Court.

On constitutional purity we have had the recent cross-vesting case and the states’ excise cases. On judicial power we have had this week’s case on One Nation’s Senate seat and we are about to get a ruling on David Eastman’s challenge to the appointment of the judge who tried his case. Earlier we had some immigration cases.
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In the High Court in 1980 an “”arid jurisdictional dispute” was unfolding. Those were the words of Justice Anthony Mason, later Chief Justice.

It was not an arid dispute for me, reporting. To the contrary, it was quite a juicy little number.

It was a family-law custody matter. A husband, wife and a child. The husband was determined to keep the matter in the Family Court. The wife wanted it removed to the state Supreme Court of NSW.
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Warren Entsch and the Government will not like yesterday’s High Court ruling.

On June 10, the Attorney-General Daryl Williams moved in the House of Representatives that “”The House determines that the member for Leichhardt [Entsch] does not have any direct or indirect pecuniary interest with the Public Service of the Commonwealth within the meaning of Section 44(v) of the Constitution by reason of any contract entered into by Cape York Concrete Pty Ltd since 3 October 1998, and the member for Leichhardt is therefore not incapable of sitting as a member of this House.”

It was an attempt to oust the possibility of a Labor High Court challenge to Mr Entsch’s continued sitting in the House.

Mr Williams was relying on Section 47 of the Constitution. It says that “”until the Parliament otherwise provides” the House can determine any question about the qualification or disputed return of a member of the House.
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The word embargo came into the language in the late 16th century. It meant a ban on foreign ships coming into port or a ban on English ships going to the ports of certain foreign countries. Usually embargoes were imposed just before wars. There was an embargo on Spanish ships for some time after the war with Spain.

Nowadays the word applies to prohibitions of virtually any sort, but it has a special meaning for newspapers. Newspapers get material under embargo all the time.

The embargo is a co-operative arrangement between the supplier of the information and the newspaper. It enables the newspaper to get the material early to prepare it for publication so it can be published at the same time as the official announcement, but to the broad public.
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It started a couple of weeks ago with Ian Warden saying the Letters column should be abandoned. He argued that the scribblings of the readership were often ill-informed, not witty, poorly argued, show little insight and so on.

He then added a provocative bit that the Letters column was taking precious space from paid journalists whose work was of far better quality.

John Cleland of Latham responded in his inimitable way. He “”agreed” with Warden. Tongue firmly in cheek he denounced the ramblings of the letter writers. In these days of information overload, why couldn’t the editor run a quick summary of the opinions? The column should be abolished, said the inveterate veteran of the column.
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