Month: August 1999

The owners of the 200 taxi plates in the ACT will be well pleased with the recommendations brought down last week (aug 9) by the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal.

The ACT industry is under-going a similar review.

Taxi-plate owners throughout Australia have been ever watchful as competition policy knocks over bastion after monopolistic bastion. Strangely, the taxi industry has been strangely immune while other industries — telecommunications, parcel-delivery, electricity, water and so on – have been subjected to competition with huge benefits to consumers and economic efficiency.
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“”After considering the report of a committee established and operating as the Parliament provides to invite and consider nominations for appointment as President, the Prime Minister may, in a joint sitting of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, move that a named Australian citizen be chosen as the President.

“” If the Prime Minister’s motion is seconded by the leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives, and affirmed by a two-thirds majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the named Australian citizen is chosen as the President.”

Thus will read Section 50 of the Constitution if the republic referendum is passed on November 6.
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Daily flights in and out of Christchurch and/or Queenstown can be arranged through Qantas, Air New Zealand and Ansett. Don’t fly during any NZ-Australian rugby contest.
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How could anyone get injured here?

There were only five skiers and five snowboarders on the whole mountain for heaven’s sake. How could anyone collide.

Yet here was the, presumably, innocent skier on a stretcher in a banana-sled and the presumably reckless snowboarder sitting on the snow with his arm in a sling.

Lake Ohau must be one of the most beautiful skiing resorts in the world, if one of the most rudimentally equipped. It has one main T-bar and a couple of smaller tows. But what a T bar. It goes for a kilometre with a vertical lift of 425 metres. At the top the views are adjectiveless. Rather than an horizon line of mountain, there are rows of them, like white spiked meringue on an uncooked pavlova. Sorry, I thought I said they were adjectiveless.
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Further evidence that the legal system is pricing itself out of the market.

The Justice research Centre reported this week into the legal funding of family law matters. It reveals that cases with legal aid are more likely to go to hearing than matters in which the parties are paying their own costs. The latter are more often settled. But once in court, the privately funded cases last longer. That indicates that legally aided cases tend to be run to the money allotted.

Parkinson’s law is alive and well. Professor C. Northcote Parkinson postulated that work will expand to fill the time allotted for it. That can be applied to the legal system. The legal complexity of a case and the time taken to resolve it will increase with the amount of money the parties and legal aid make available.
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According to a report last week put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it appears the ACT has the highest level of crimes against the person in Australia. The crime and safety report put the prevalence of assault in the ACT at 6.9 per cent, the highest in Australia. Next was the Northern Territory on 6.3 per cent and the lowest was Victoria on 3.8 per cent.

However, we should be careful about jumping to conclusions. It would be quite wrong to make broad conclusions from the figures that suggest people in the ACT are more likely to be criminal assaulters, or that the police are not doing as good a job as in Victoria or NSW. It is very likely that the ACT figure is not a true reflection of its overall criminal propensity compared to other jurisdictions. There are several reasons for this.

Crime is generally more prevalent in cities than in rural areas or small towns. The ACT has a far higher proportion of city dwellers than any other state or territory. It could well be that on a comparison between, say, Newcastle, Wollongong or Geelong against Canberra, that the prevalence of assault in Canberra was about the same or even lower.
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It is a pity John Howard did not, or could not, go that one step further — beyond “”regret” towards “”sorry”.

The motion in the House of Representatives this week was: “”The House expresses its deep and sincere regret that that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under practices of past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many indigenous people continue to feel as a consequence of those practices.”

The motion committed the Government to reconciliation and to address economic and social disadvantage.

It was fine as far as it went. It had the support of significant Aboriginal leaders. But, equally, it did not have the support of other significant Aboriginal leaders. Further, it did not go as far in meeting Aboriginal hopes as motions in every other Parliament in Australia bar that of the Northern Territory. The national Parliament should have been equally or more generous in its gesture to reconciliation as state and territory parliaments.
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Telstra’s decision to charge business and mobile phone users for directory assistance has caused outrage among some business groups and fear among consumers that the next step is to charge residential users for the service.

The outrage and fear about the end of the “”free” service are misplaced. At the end of the financial year nothing is “”free”. At best there is a bit of cross-subsidisation where one group of users pay for the services given to other groups of users. But worse than that, if something is notionally charged as “”free” consumers flock to it, over-use it and abuse it.
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Last week saw further confirmation that federal-state taxation is a mess with a ruling in the ACT Supreme Court that struck down the ACT’s stamp duty on used cars. The ruling is likely to be challenged with other states intervening. In total about $500 million a year is raised by state and territory governments in Australia. If those taxes can no longer be raised, some remedial steps must be taken if states and territories are to obtain the finances necessary to run health, education and other services.

To add to the worry, other taxes might also be subject to similar challenge. The tax on new cars is an example.

The essential difficulty is that the Constitution gives the Commonwealth Government the exclusive right to levy excise duties. The definition of excise duties has been the subject of much legal debate and court rulings in the past century. Broadly an excise is a tax on production. A simple test has been that if the tax goes up with the value or quantity of the goods, it will be an excise. In the past 25 years, the states have got around this by charging licence fees on trading in things like alcohol, petrol and tobacco, which went up according to the value or quantity of goods in the previous year. For a long time the High Court allowed this sophistry, but earlier this year it struck all these taxes out. The Commonwealth had to come to the rescue using its exclusive power to levy excise duties to levy the hitherto state and territory licence fees. It then remitted them to the states.
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On November 6 Australians will be asked whether they approve of a law “”to establish the Commonwealth as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General begin replaced by a president appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament”? And whether they approve of a preamble to the Constitution which includes key elements of “”hope in God”; rule of law; recognition of sacrifices of those “”who defended our country”; “”honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders for their deep kinship with their lands”; recognition of immigrants; and responsibility for the environment.

The preamble question is of far less moment than the republic question. It will not matter a great deal whether it is passed or not. It will not alter Australia” perception of itself or the world’s perception of Australia. In that regard, the republic question is critical.

It would have been better if it had been done a different way. The debate should have been in two stages. The first question should have been, “”Do you want a republic with an Australian head of state replacing the Queen and Governor-General”. If Yes, there could have been a second question on how the new head of state was to be chosen.
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