Month: January 2000

Few countries in the world treat their national day with such ambivalence as Australia. National days in the United States, France, India, for example, are celebrated with universal acclaim.

In Australia, though, we continue to argue over the appropriateness of the day. Many indigenous Australians say that January 26 marks invasion day when Europeans came to Australia and dispossessed them. That argument has emotional appeal, but no logic. There are very few full-blood indigenous people living today. Nearly all owe some of themselves to the gene pool that arrived after 1788. Still, logic is not the issue. The question of a National Day is an emotional and spiritual one. If a significant portion of the population reject the day, then either the day must change or at least the marking of it must change.

Aside from indigenous objections, January 26 marked the founding of the colony of NSW, so the other states, particularly Western Australia which was never part of NSW, might felt left out.

And then January 26 might be seen more as an Anglo-Australian celebration in that it marks an extension of the British Empire. The convicts, particularly the Irish convicts, who resented authority leave a legacy that does not actively celebrate January 26.
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Opposition Leader Kim Beazley must have spent too much time on the beach during his summer holidays. He has been seeing too much empty Australian coastline. On his return from holidays on Monday he announced that Labor would set up a coast guard, “a maritime cop on the beat” to fight illegal immigration, drugs and other border problems. It was good populist stuff. It played on people’s fears of being swamped by illegal immigrants. It conjured up images from American television programs of speeding boats protecting freedom and justice against evil.

A coast guard might make good sense for the US and some other countries, but not Australia. There is little if any evidence that the Australian Defence Force, Coastwatch (a branch of the Customs Service) Australian Search and Rescue (a branch of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority) are not doing an adequate job. There is little or no evidence to suggest that any better job would be done with a coast guard.

Australia’s large unpopulated coastline might seem like a liability when it comes to coastal surveillance. In fact it is more an asset. People and drug smugglers are more noticeable in sparsely populated places. They stick out more. Moreover, the people being smuggled find it hard to blend in. Chinese people smugglers tried to get closer to the main population bases for this very reason. In the north-west the people simply do not make it to major population centres and illegal work.
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The Institution of Engineers has pointed to the dangers of de-skilling the public-sector in a study issued last week. The institution is a professional body and not exactly a hot-bed of big-government thought.

It suggests that down-sizing and out-sourcing in the public sector might have led to such disasters as the fire on HMAS Westralia, the explosion at the Esso Longford gas plant and the Royal Canberra Hospital implosion.

The report could not have been more timely. Presumably while it was being printed another catastrophe unfolds with the Mobil aviation fuel contamination. It has been suggested that regulators had stopped fuel inspections several years ago. They might have avoided the problem.

Each of these cases has resulted much human misery and the loss of millions of dollars in costs to industry and costs of inquiries and compensation.
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Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has had an interesting change of thinking over defence. Formerly an ardent supporter of the American alliance, he now sees it as dangerous. He warns that it might get Australia into a dangerous war with China that it would not win.

Mr Fraser’s change of mind comes about through a change in the position of the US in the past decade rather than a change in his own core belief which presumably the best defence of Australia.

The reason for Mr Fraser’s rethink is that with the end of the Cold War, the strategic position has changed radically. We now have one super-power not two. And that super-power, the US, according to Mr Fraser is playing its hand in Asia in a way that could be contrary to Australia’s best interest.

That argument has some difficulty. True, the Cold War is over, but Russia is still a nuclear power. Moreover, its new president Vladimir Putin has recently issued a new policy on Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He says it must be kept in good shape. It is too easy to dismiss this as domestic grand-standing of no consequence. The trouble is that domestic grand-standing is most often the prime reason for leaders taking their nation to war. That is precisely what is happening in Chechnya now.
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The lesson is clear for the government school system. Perform to parents’ expectations and the money will be available. Don’t perform and parents will vote with their feet and take their children to private schools. And under the Federal Governments enrolment benchmark adjustment scheme money will be taken from state governments and handed directly to private schools.

This was made clear by Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on schooling issued this week.

The benchmark scheme has a certain amount of raw attractiveness. However, it has several flaws. The major flaw is that it does not allow for economies of scale. Education cannot be costed on a strict per-capita basis. For a school to educate an extra child costs virtually nothing. But to educate the first child requires huge capital and labour investment. Taking money away on a per-capita basis is wrong. It has the potential to cripple the government sector. And as the government sector suffers from less money, parents are more likely to take their children away from it. The Federal Government’s scheme will become a self-fulfilling prophesy that private schools will take a larger slice of the cake. This is unless the teachers and administrators at government schools see the urgency of the situation and retain parental confidence in the government system.

The second difficulty with the benchmark scheme is that it is not predicated on any objective test on the standard of education offered. Rather is is based on parental judgment based on what parents do with their children.
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The new President of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, has taken a commendable stand on former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr Lagos, who was forced into exile during Pinochet’s rule, says it is up to the courts to decide what is to be done.

Pinochet led a military coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. In his 17-year rule his regime was responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of at least 3000 Chileans. Pinochet has stated that he is not guilty even if those under him committed crimes. He was made a senator for life which granted him immunity from prosecution when Chile moved to democratic rule.

The questions now are whether a Chilean court can remove that immunity and if it can whether Pinochet is medically fit to be tried and if he can be linked to kidnap, death and torture that was committed by people in authority under his regime.

The extent of the human suffering inflicted by the Pinochet regime would make it understandable if the new Lagos Government acted with vengeance. But it would not be excusable. Mr Lagos’s position that it is a matter for the courts without any interference from the Government. He is determined to show that the rule of law must triumph over the arbitrary exercise of power.
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The decolonisation period in the Indonesian archipelago is not over with the independence of the former Portuguese enclave of East Timor.

True that enclave had an existence as a Portuguese territory for 30 years after Indonesia became an independent nation after centuries of Dutch rule, so it was ripe for a separate existence because it had developed its own culture after 400 years of Portuguese rule. However, the people of the rest of the Indonesian archipelago did not necessarily get cohesion and unity merely by having the common background of being under Dutch colonial rule for a long time. The archipelago contains hundreds of different ethnic, religious and linguistic throughout its thousands of islands. Until President Suharto resigned two years ago, the archipelago was held together under the Indonesian Republic by a combination of the threat of force and gradual economic improvement. As the economy faltered people began to question corruption and the lack of democracy. Suharto’s days were numbered. The election 1ate last year gave the new President Addurrahman Wahid democratic legitimacy, even if the electoral process was somewhat flawed. However, his government did not inherit a legacy of the rule of law and smooth running institutions. More significantly it did not inherit a military that was used to following orders from a democratically elected government. To the contrary, the military had a long history of taking a central role in politics and government.

This has made Wahid’s task immensely difficult. As a democrat his mere presence in the presidency has been a catalyst to local movements for democracy in Indonesia’s regions. Fuelled by the independence vote in East Timor, separatist movements have flourished. Most of them have had a religious elements. Most have involved acts of sustained violence.
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The draft ACT Budget brought down this week marks a significant achievement by the ACT Government over the past five years. The surplus Budget (in fact the surplus is so small we should talk of a balanced Budget) indicates that the ACT is paying its way for the first time since self-government. And the projected surpluses over the following three years indicate that the ACT can start reducing debt incurred in previous years.

The fiscal frugality has come at some cost. Canberrans have noticed a falling in standards of maintenance of streets, parks and waterways in the past five years and some cuts in health and education service delivery. The essential difficulty was that the ACT got self-government right at the time the Federal Government was tightening spending on the ACT anyway.

The Carnell Government can be questioned over some spending priorities, but it has done well on fiscal fundamentals. It means the community will be better off in the long run because it will not be paying taxes to fund debt, rather the taxes will go to fund things that government should fund: education, health and transport.
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One might well wonder who was left holding the baby over the past week. Was it Sports and Tourism Minister Jackie Kelly who became the first Federal Minister to have a baby while in office? Or was Joe Hockey, it the Minister acting in her portfolio and a couple of other portfolios at the same time while various Ministers took leave during the “”quiet” summer period. Mr Hockey is Minister for Financial Services.

On Friday last week he said that business could round up GST charges to the nearest dollar as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had declared rounding off legal. But when Qantas rounded up the $1.50 GST levy on frequent-flyer memberships to $2, there was an outcry. The next day Mr Hockey reversed his decision, saying that the Government would not tolerate any price rises about 10 per cent.

It looked like the Government did not know what is was doing. And in some respects it didn’t. Mr Hockey’s initial stand gave a poor impression to consumers. This was because it arose from looing at things from a business perspective, not a consumer perspective. Business wants rounding because they say it makes for easier accounting. Business says that overall, rounding would not make any difference because each business GST on total takings at exactly 10 per cent. Some prices might go up by more than 10 per cent but other prices would come down an equivalent amount.
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As the ACT Legislative Assembly enters an election year, the Liberal Party will miss the dynamism of Kate Carnell. Even if some of her electoral appeal has worn off. Mrs Carnell’s replacement in the Assembly was decided this week on a count-back of Mrs Carnell’s 1998 vote. The winner was Liberal Jacqui Burke. The lack of depth in the Liberal line-up was made clear when Chief Minister Gary Humphries preferred to have a four-member ministry rather than risk giving back-bencher Harold Hird or the newcomer Mrs Burke a ministry, however junior, and increasing it to five, as it was when Mrs Carnell was in the Assembly.

Mr Hird at least will get some relief from his load of committee work. The Assembly has prohibited ministers from serving on committees. Hitherto if the Liberals wanted representation on a committee only Mr Hird or Speaker Greg Cornwell were available.

Now Mrs Burke will be able to sit on committees.

Committee work is the unsung success of the Legislative Assembly, and indeed of self-government generally. Committee enable members of the community a great say in the government of the territory. They expose MLAs to a range of views and help MLAs understand issues. It is unfortunate that whichever party is in government will find it difficult to furnish both a ministry and committee representation. It is no solution to suggest that Ministers could also serve on committees. In a small jurisdiction like the ACT, they have their work cut out as it is, frequently having to deal with several portfolio areas. Moreover, it is not good practice to blur the lines between the Executive and the Legislature. Committee work is inherently a legislative function and forms a critical part of the questioning of the Executive, particularly the Estimates and Public Accounts Committees.
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