Month: July 1999

The ruling yesterday by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to force Telstra to open its local exchanges and the copper-wire that connects them to households to competitors is a welcome one.

Telstra says it was not forced. Well, it took an ACCC ruling before anything happened, or was likely to happen. Telstra now says it welcomes the ruling and it will work in a competitive environment. That is good start, if belated.

The history of telecommunications in Australia in the past decade has been remarkable. It has been a decade of both technological and marketing innovation with huge benefits for consumers, both domestic and business. It is one of the success stories of privatisation and competition. Some activities are better suited to more public ownership, but not this one. It is an illustration of applying what works rather than ideology.
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Premiers and Chief Ministers will meet in Sydney tomorrow (Friday) to discuss health. The leaders must not allow the opportunity to be wasted.

The leaders would be mistaken to go into the meeting with a sense of crisis. Australia’s health system is in reasonably good shape by world standards and contains features that would be the envy of virtually every country on earth. Indeed, if you are an average citizen going to be ill, there are very few places better than Australia to be ill in.

But fine tuning is needed. So, too, is some anticipation and preventative measures. We must address the increasing costs of medical technology, the ageing population and the drift from private insurance with its attendant reduction in money going to health care.
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The Productivity Commission is quite wrong when it says that the gambling industry in Australia produces a benefit. It estimates the benefit at between $150 million and $5 billion a year. The fact that the upper and lower end of its estimated benefit are so far apart indicates a certain amount of woolliness. Gambling creates no wealth at all for anyone. It merely shifts wealth from some people to other people. There is no value adding in the gambling “”industry”.

The Productivity Commission’s report into gambling which was published on Monday, delivered some alarming statistics. It said that more than 330,000 Australians have serious gambling problems, losing an average of more than $12,000 each a year. It linked the growth in gambling addition to the spread of poker machines throughout the country. It said Australia had 180,000 poker machines — more than half in licensed clubs NSW – accounting for 21 per cent of the world’s electronic gaming machines. Australia was second only to the United States in the number of poker machines in use. Australians lost about $6 billion a year on poker machines, accounting for more than half of the $11 billion worth of gambling losses nationally each year. Gambling addicts represented only 2.3 per cent of gamblers, but they lost $3.8 billion a year, or almost 35 per cent of all gambling losses.
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Thirty years ago today Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon. He was the first human to do so. It was perhaps the greatest human achievement of the century. But the venture was marred by bad motives. And space exploration and research is only now slowly recovering as a scientific enterprise to improve the knowledge and condition of humankind.

The fact that Armstrong rarely came into the public limelight in the ensuing 30 years — like Albert Einstein or Edmund Hillary — is instructive. It indicates that the flight to the moon was not the achievement of one human, which often signals a determination to discover for its own sake. Rather it was a collective effort. Armstrong was the pilot. He was not critical to the mission. If it had not been him, it could equally have been another pilot. Indeed, one was ready at the time.

The moon voyage was the achievement of a nation driven by competition and fear. It began seven years previously when President John Kennedy declared that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Without the fear of the Soviet Union getting there first, it might never have happened. Or at least it might never have happened this century. There was no inevitably about the human voyage to the moon this century or indeed ever. After all, on this day 30 years ago most people watching Neil Armstrong’s first steps would have thought that the journey to Mars could not be far away, perhaps by 1979, certainly by 1989. But it has not happened. Sadly, that is probably because there has been no competition to do it and there has been no driving force of fear.
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It is difficult to see why the Federal Government has been so tardy and weak over changing the corporations law to ensure that employees’ rights to holiday pay, long-service pay and other entitlements take precedent over all other debts in a company winding up.

At present employees have to form a queue with other debtors when a company goes broke. It means that secured creditors – those with mortgages over property or floating charges over all company assets – will take before employees for all but their immediate pay cheque.

The situation is unjust. Companies cannot operate without employees. The employees have earned the entitlement, often long ago. It is unfair that large financial institutions can come in after employees have earned the entitlements and get security for their credit. Those institutions are in a position to ask a company about employee entitlements before they give credit.
Continue reading “1999_07_july_leader19jul workers’ rights”

It is difficult to see why the Federal Government has been so tardy and weak over changing the corporations law to ensure that employees’ rights to holiday pay, long-service pay and other entitlements take precedent over all other debts in a company winding up.

At present employees have to form a queue with other debtors when a company goes broke. It means that secured creditors – those with mortgages over property or floating charges over all company assets – will take before employees for all but their immediate pay cheque.

The situation is unjust. Companies cannot operate without employees. The employees have earned the entitlement, often long ago. It is unfair that large financial institutions can come in after employees have earned the entitlements and get security for their credit. Those institutions are in a position to ask a company about employee entitlements before they give credit.
Continue reading “1999_07_july_leader19jul workers’ rights”

Prime Minister John Howard and his Treasurer can be reasonably pleased that Australia has weathered the Asian economic crisis so well. On his return from a trip to the United States Mr Howard pointed out that Australia was being held in high regard in the US, and that this was one of the reasons.

Economists disagree on why Australia was not brought into the crisis, joining other nations in our region with spiralling interest rates and declining currency. However, several reasons come to mind. First, the Australian economy is much bigger than any other in the region. To the extent that currency speculators were hovering, Australia was too big as prey for them. Secondly, Australia’s currency has been openly traded and its financial system deregulated for more than a decade. The previous government can take the credit for that. Thirdly, the Howard Government has successfully dealt with government spending. That has kept inflation low. Fourthly, Australia has far better political and economic institutions. The separation of powers and a free and democratic system make corruption on a wide-spread official level virtually impossible.
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Ulster Unionist leader and David Trimble should have risked it. Instead he walked away from power-sharing with Sinn Fein. Mr Trimble is, at least notionally, Northern Ireland’s First Minister. Last year his party won the most seats in an election in Northern Ireland. Under a power-sharing arrangement set out in last year’s Good Friday peace agreement he was to head a four-party, 12-member Cabinet. Under that arrangement, Sinn Fein would have got two seats. Sinn Fein is the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, though Sinn Fein’s leader, Gerry Adams, denies he has any influence over the IRA. The denial lacks credibility, though it is true that Mr Adams cannot control extreme elements in the IRA.

Mr Trimble is happy to share power with the predominantly Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party, but he draws the line at being in a Cabinet with Sinn Fein until the IRA begins de-commissioning weapons and commits itself to fully disarm. He said he could not allow his party to join in government with an active and armed terrorist organisation.
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There are now hopeful signs in Papua New Guinea that order can be gained from chaos now the prime ministership and government of Bill Skate is at an end.

Skate attempted to cling to power to the end. He had already adjourned Parliament for six months in order to avoid a motion of no-confidence. He then tried to woo or perhaps bribe enough backers to stay in power either as Prime Minister or as a back-bencher with a titular Prime Minister in John Pundari. One of Skate’s advisers was caught with a bag of cash at Madang Airport. Madang was where MPs opposed to Skate were housed just before the confidence vote.
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The ACT Minister for Planning, Brendan Smyth, is right to say that the planning appeal process should not be used by rival businesses to prevent development. He was commenting after using his call-in powers to put an end to appeals against a cinema complex and licensed premises in Tuggeranong. The appeals had been lodged by rival businesses.

Despite Mr Smyth’s sensible sentiments, however, there are dangers with the call-in powers. If the Government had a better track record on planning retail space and a better track record on protecting residential amenity, the community might have more trust in a system which contains such sweeping power for a Minister to approve or block development at the stroke of a pen. Sometimes such power is needed to cut away appeals with no planning merit whatever, as was apparently the case here.
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