Month: July 1999

Journalists, particulary print journalists, are not a well-loved lot. A Morgan Gallup poll asked people to rate the professions for honesty and integrity. Print journalists were just above car salespeople and equal with advertising people, but below real-estate agents, television journalists, politicians and even lawyers. As usual, nurses, doctors, pharmacists and even dentists were at the top.

There were astonishing differences in ratings. Print journalists were given a very high or high rating for honesty and ethical conduct by just nine per cent of the population, as against 70s and 80s for the medical people.

Yet we know from our common experience that human nature has some fairly universal properties, and it is likely that people in the medical profession, nurses and dentists would have roughly the same number of fraudsters, liars, adulterers, bribers and bribe recipients as journalists or car salespeople.
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In the United States – where else – a company has invented a new security device. It is a can of yellow paint. Like mace or capsicum, you spray it at your attacker.

But this is a paint with a difference. The paint gets on the skin and in the hair and is so irritating that the attacker attempts to brush it off as he flees.

When he brushes it off he leaves hair and skin entangled in the paint. From these, a DNA fingerprint can be taken. And each can of paint is unique, so attacker and victim are linked.
Continue reading “1999_07_july_addendum24”

“”Psst! What are you doing?”

It was Graeme (Bluey) Thomson. He was jerking his head, signalling me to come over to him.

I was a new cadet and had just scored the Sunday shift and we had set off with a list of six picture stories. Bluey had been in the game 15 years. He started as a cadet at 15. I was BA, Day 1.

“”I’ve got to wait for the resolutions of this meeting,” I replied. It was in someone’s house in Aranda and I think it was about aid to Papua New Guinea.
Continue reading “1999_07_july_addendum10jul”

One of the great press barons, Beaverbrook of Northcliffe, I think, said, “”News is what someone somewhere wants suppressed all else is advertising.”

That quote no longer applies.

I want John Laws suppressed. He’s not news; he’s advertising.

Then again, I wanted all that nauseating drivel about John Kennedy suppressed, and it, bizarrely, became news.
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People in the ACT sneeze the most, and have the highest employment participation rate in Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics told us this week.

Canberrans also have the highest computer ownership and the highest internet connection in Australia. So it is here that we will see the first signs of any trends. Just as it was here, in the early 1970s, that we saw the pilot trials of credit cards in the form of Bankcard.

Doomsayers in the newspaper industry have been saying that the internet will take over the lot before very long and that newspapers will be no more. The Panglosses (chk spell), on the other hand, have been saying that the internet is just a fad that will pass. (you know, like telephones and fax machines.) The Panglosses have been saying that people will always want their paper. They want to take it to the dunny and the beach. You cannot do that with a computer.
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The Woolshed Falls near the Victorian town of Beechworth carry a torrent of water after rain.

The water tumbles down a fairly steep drop. Adjacent is a sheer cliff, some 20 to 30 metres high. At its base is the pool into which the water from the falls pounds.

I was reminded of the falls this week when hearing of the death of a mother and her five children near Perth. The mother drove her car into an isolated sport, ran a hose from the exhaust and sealed the doors.

Her children, aged two, four, eight and five-year-old twins, died with her. The murder suicide was done with horrible premeditation.

I heard comment through the week that the Perth deaths showed modern society was going haywire. Television was promoting violent solutions. Government polices were causing economic woe and social isolation. And there was the inevitable talk of the “”good old days”.
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ABOUT 14 million blood transfusions have been carried out in Australia since screening for HIV began in 1985. Last week, a Victorian girl became the first known person in all those years to contract the virus from a transfusion.

What makes the case all the more heart-breaking is that the girl’s doctor father, aware that no blood bank could be 100 per cent safe, had tried to make a directed donation — to give his own blood for use during his daughter’s surgery — only to be strenuously discouraged by the blood bank.

Unthinkably awful as this family’s experience has been, the experts insist that directed donations such as that contemplated by the girl’s parents are, overall, twice as risky as transfusion using blood from an “”altruistic” blood supply.
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The proposal to run a high-performance car race in the Parliamentary Triangle should be greeted with enthusiasm. It should not be shunned or sneered at, which has been the reaction of many Canberrans in the past to the thought of car racing in the city. Objections by some Canberrans residents in the mid-1970s to a proposal by then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser for a high-performance track resulted in the proposal being dropped, to the economic detriment of the city. Mr Fraser proposal came in the wake of savage public-sector cuts. Canberrans were foolish to reject it.

A car race in the triangle would make a lot of noise and cause a bit of traffic inconvenience for a few days a year. It is a sacrifice well worth making. Different people get their pleasure from different things. We should rejoice in the diversity. The car race would help diversify the image of Canberra in the eyes of many Australians. The city would not be just the city of the politicians and the War Memorial. To some extent the automotive industry has helped in that regard with the Summernats event. The excesses of the early years of that event are now a thing of the past. Now it brings economic benefits, colour and difference to the city once a year. So too with the proposed new event.
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Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has committed the ALP to a 5 per cent or better unemployment target. In one of his pathway speeches, Mr Beazley said Australia could do better on employment. He said the ALP would revamp its tax credits plan and employment incentives, and would focus on economic growth and better education to drive down unemployment.

Mr Beazley is right to focus on education and economic growth and the policy he took to the last election on tax credits had much merit. But employment-incentive schemes have dubious benefits. Labor and the Coalition have fundamentally different approaches on employment and have had for some time. The first difference is that Labor thinks government action on employment program can affect the employment rate. The Coalition is more sceptical. Its view has been that if you get the economic fundamentals right – inflation, interest rates and government spending — the employment rate will fall of itself. Experience over the past 10 years indicates that the Coalition’s position has more merit. Labor’s Working Nation program did not help much. The Coalition’s concentration on economic fundamentals has arrested increases in unemployment and turned it down slightly. Unemployment is running at 7.2 per cent — the lowest level since 1990. Moreover, Treasury now says that unemployment rate could fall well below 7 per cent without igniting inflationary pressure. Those figures are good evidence for the Coalition’s view on employment.

That said, Mr Beazley is right to concentrate on education. It is a fundamental of employment, just like economic conditions are. But it would be a mistake to channel too much effort into vocational-specific education, other than of a short-term nature. It is likely that many young people in school today will go into a job that has not been invented today. It is more important to concentrate of good general education. Skills from that are more adaptable to new forms of employment. There is no substitute for on-the-job training and the experience of employment.
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Chief Minister Kate Carnell is determined to have her town council. Last week she said the Government would depart from the standard Westminster way of dealing with the Budget. Instead, Government would issue a draft budget for consultation in January. Members of the Legislative Assembly would be able to comment on the draft through Assembly committees. Committees generally shadow the various portfolios. The Government would then consider anything brought up in the consultation process which could be included in the final Budget Appropriation Bill.

Mrs Carnell said she wanted a more bipartisan approach, for Members to exercise responsibility on behalf of the people who voted for them and to create ownership by all Members.

Presumably the Budget would be passed unanimously. The upshot would be that any Members of the Opposition or crossbench who later criticised spending priorities or indeed any element of government activity involving money would be rebuffed with the assertion you joined in the Budget.

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